Arriving early for the Scott Fagan show tonight it comes as a most pleasant surprise to find that the support act is now Ellen Smith. The original support had been listed as Entrance, the solo project of Guy Blakeslee. But in what surely must have been a very last-minute change to the programme, Smith – perhaps best known as the singer and frontwoman of Ellen and the Escapades – will open this evening’s proceedings.
Ellen and the Escapades began life in Leeds in 2009 and the following year won Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Competition. They were hotly tipped for success, something their impressive debut album All The Crooked Scenes (released in 2012) seemed all set to confirm. But despite having built up a strong following and attracting plenty of national attention, rather inexplicably wider success eluded them and the band decided to eventually call it a day in February of last year.
Since that time Smith has remained actively involved in the local grassroots music scene both as a solo performer and fronting Weetwood Mac, a Fleetwood Mac tribute band (for those without the benefit of local knowledge, Weetwood is an area of north-west Leeds).
Tonight Ellen Smith enthralls us with a seven song set that is drawn from all points of her career. She opens with ‘This Ace I’ve Burned’. Taken from the Escapades album, she strips the original back to reveal the true sense of loss that lies at the song’s heart. ‘The Last Thing On Your Mind’ was destined for the band’s second full-length record and here it points to the strong country-folk direction in which Ellen and the Escapades may well have been heading.
Ellen Smith’s softly burnished voice draws certain comparisons with the American singer-songwriter Shaun Colvin, though it is perhaps Colvin’s fellow countrywoman Judee Sill who is a more accurate musical touchstone. Smith may not share any personal characteristics with that deeply troubled and ultimately doomed, self-described “country-cult-baroque” musician – Sill died of a drugs overdose in 1979 – but both women’s voices do possess an inherent sense of sadness and wounded vulnerability.
Yet for all of the undoubted melancholy that seeps through Smith’s songs, she is also more than capable of turning her hand, and voice, to a perfect, popular tune. This much is evidenced during a stunning cover of Stevie Nicks’ ‘Landslide’ and increases anticipation for Weetwood Mac’s pre-Christmas show here in the Brudenell.
Ellen Smith concludes her set with ‘Coming Back Home’, another song that illustrates her unerring ability to move effortlessly between the points that connect country with folk on the sonic spectrum. It also brings us back to what is still one of life’s great mysteries; why did Ellen and the Escapades never truly make it?
Photo credit: Simon Godley
More photos from this show can be found HERE
