Newcastle’s Beth Jeans Houghton is on everyone’s lips. She recently cooked up Your Truly, Cellophane Nose,
an absorbing fairytale folk album that unravels with gambolling
rhythms, sweeping vocals and savoury titbits of melody — “sonic
theatre”, as her band The Hooves Of Destiny mockingly describe it. Great
album though it is, she’s had tongues wagging for all sorts of other
reasons: because she’s dating cock-in-sock Chili Peppers singer Anthony
Kiedis; because she’s been snapped naked from the waist up for promo
pictures; and because she’s gagging to live in the US. All of which
gives you a fair idea of what Beth is really like: ambitious, brash and a
good-time lass.
Houghton’s appearance tonight justifies all the hype. While it’s easy
to draw comparisons to her sprite-like kinswomen — Florence, Laura
Marling, Alison Goldfrapp — she lays on thick her own distinctly
eccentric flavour. Houghton, however, has no time for the press’s female
singer-songwriter tags, and proclaims her music genderless. It’s a
strangely pertinent idea, as her voice restlessly swoops between the
husky, craving tenor and the angelic falsetto of Wild Beasts singers Tom
Fleming and Hayden Thorpe respectively. Visually, she’s not your
average chunky knitwear-clad thrummer, either. She’s more like a brazen
Guns N’ Roses groupie hoiked from Sunset Strip — bleached shock of
helmet hair, red light-district lipstick, tottering heels and fake
eyelashes. It’s entirely apt, since she’s hell-bent on shipping out to
LA.
Her set is blithely ramshackle, chock full of stately tempos and
vivid imagery. Opener ‘Atlas’ is a rambunctious jolly through snow-swept
pastures, and ‘Lilliput’ — “a song that has no destination, so I’m
gonna rename it ‘Bermuda Triangle’,” she says — is a bright, airy slice
of baroque pop sewn together with sparkly guitar figures and fiddle
filigrees. Indeed, Houghton’s voice itself is violin-like in the
lustrous way it soars and shrills.
For a considerably youthful starlet still feeling her way around the
industry, tonight’s set is mightily impressive, and fantasising about
how knock-out she’ll be in years to come is enough to alert our
goosebumps.
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Author: Jamie Skey
Photography: Rachel Lipsitz
Source: The Stool Pigeon
Date: February 9th, 2012
Original article: HERE
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