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Nerina Pallot is a female singer/songwriter who flits between acoustic guitar and piano, singing tender love songs. With a sublime voice and heartfelt honesty, she plays tonight with a mixture of nervousness and intensity - a performer who after some early stage nerves, finds her feet and settles into a relaxed stage presence.
The songs hit with a mixture of gentle beauty and intense claustrophobia, pretty piano chords shielding a darker biting lyricism.

Maybe not songs to instantly convert you to her cause, Nerina Pallot is someone who intrigues you to delve further and go home aching to hear more.
A charming and intriguing performance tonight, Nerina Pallot is winning hearts wherever she goes.


Nerina Pallot is a phemonenon. Born in London to a half-French father and a
mother born in Allahabad, India, her classical music training belies both her background and her influences. The latter, though singularly uncontemporary, are writ large on her rather elegant sleeves and become obvious once you have listened to Fires. For Fires is a very good record indeed. And to be bold for a second, if Nerina (her surnames rhymes with “fallow”) had been born thirty or so years earlier, you might very well have called her a “sage”.

Nerina’s influences include Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Rickie Lee Jones and Carly Simon but you can probably add Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan and the Beatles to that list without fear of reprisal. In fact, as a teenager, Nerina loved Steely Dan so much she spent days learning the guitar solo for Reeling In The Years - whilst reciting lyrics verbatim from Joni Mitchell’s Blue album (though presumably not at the same time as that would be too much for any of us to handle). Her upbringing also featured formative years in Jersey (the island where her mother, who was touring as a cabaret singer at the time, first encountered her father), a spell in India as a child, and a scholarship to an English boarding school singing opera and playing violin, before enrolling in a London art college where “those old country records I reluctantly grew up listening to” finally persuaded her that she should concentrate on writing on guitar. Well, of course, she also still plays and writes on the piano but, as Fires demonstrates, we have a lot to thank those old country records for now.

Everbody's Gone To War
Halfway Home
Damascus
Idaho
All Good People
Mr King
Greek Love
Sophia
Learning To Breath
Heart Attack
Nickindia

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Nerina Pallot>

Headline show on the 28th November at the Bush Hall in Shepherds Bush
Hammersmith Apollo: London - w/Sheryl Crow 3rd November 05

Review date: October 2005