We all have the same 24 hours. It is just that Katie Malco seems to pack much more into hers than most. She already has two further tours lined up for later this year. In September she will be supporting the American singer-songwriter Laura Stevenson. A couple of months after that she is back out on the road headlining in her own right with a full band behind her.
Katie Malco is currently in the process of drip-feeding us sublimated versions of individual songs that first appeared on her 2020 debut solo album, Failures. And she is now also knee-deep in a tour of the UK and Ireland opening for former Hüsker Dü helmsman and all-round musical living legend Bob Mould. Moreover, she still has time left to keep us all royally entertained on her established social media platforms with consistently candid, always authentic, and often deeply self-deprecating updates on her creative life.
In one of her recent press shots Katie Malco is captured on what looks like an old Pullman cinema seat sporting a really cool Royal Stewart tartan shirt, perhaps nodding towards her Scottish heritage and the fact that when she was a child her family relocated from the Kingdom of Fife to Northampton, the East Midlands market town where she still lives to this day. On a shelf behind her in that photo is a book about gardening, suggesting that Malco has green fingers. Regardless of their colour, though, they certainly know their way around the Fender guitars she wields tonight. She conjures a deep, spectral sound from those instruments, one that carries the weight of desolation lying at the heart of many of her songs.
Katie Malco quickly acknowledges that she is facing at least two major difficulties this evening. One is the perennial problem of all support acts, that of most everyone in the venue having only come to see the event headliner. The other is having to compete with the conflicting demands of a Bon Jovi tribute band from the Brudenell’s adjoining Community Room. She meets both challenges head-on with heart, humour, humility, and some bloody good songs.
Katie Malco’s set is simply stunning. Of the half dozen songs she performs, five are taken from her only album to date, Failures. ‘Fractures’, ‘TW’, ‘Animal’, ‘Creatures’, and the concluding ‘Brooklyn’ in which her voice truly soars, are shorn of their full studio production and presented here in the form in which they were originally created. They are stark, sombre and quite beautiful, reflecting all the pain and suffering surrounding their genesis. The other song that Malco plays is a stunning cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ in which she captures perfectly all the innocence, emotion, and sense of loss one often feels when waking from a dream.
During this exquisite performance Katie Malco tells an amusing story of how at one of the shows earlier on this tour a random chap had approached her and said, “So you’re Katie. I’m intrigued. I’ve never heard of you.” Those of us fortunate enough to be here tonight who may not have done so beforehand will most certainly know the name of Katie Malco now.
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos from Katie Malco live in Leeds can be found at:
