Laura Marling

The Academy

There is something very good and special about 20-year-old Hampshire-born singer-songwriter, Laura Marling. She has been associated with the latterday UK folk scene for several years now, but has managed to transcend the tepid, fey nature of teenage folk singers by being as steely a songwriter as rarely remembered 1970s UK tough-as-nails singer-songwriter Kevin Coyne, and by being as athletically melodic as Canada’s Joni Mitchell (with whom Marling is, perhaps too unreasonably, most often compared to).

In the short time she has been around, she has released two albums: 2008's Mercury Prize nominated Alas I Cannot Swim, and this year's I Speak Because I Can; each album is infused with the kind of lyrical and melodic dexterity that belies her youth, but what is surprising about Marling in a live context is how she usurps the perception of her as fragile for her own devious good.

This is not a gig from a young performer and songwriter who is only too willing to play the game. Marling’s rigid “no encores” rule is to be applauded –­ she plays a lean, pithy set that displays her skills as a highly efficient communicator of human emotions. Despite, or perhaps because of, her age, she is able to express such issues in a heightened, remarkably intense manner, yet she is smart enough never to browbeat the audience into submission. For a gig that is predominantly of a folkie persuasion, there is a casual, quite natural balance of good humour and very serious intent.

And her songs really are superb; from the likes of Devil's Spokeand Ghosts to Goodbye England (Covered In Snow), Alas I Cannot Swimand Rest In My Bed Of Bones,Marling channels a peculiar strain of utterly English folk music; it is by turns brazen, resolute and gracious, and marks her out as someone with a very long and praiseworthy future.