Hammersmith Apollo, London
The tips for 2011 lists will be out any day now, conveniently coinciding with the current tour by the girl-most-likely-to of 2010 .With nearly 300,000 sales of her debut album, Lights, Ellie Goulding is the biggest new artist of the year, but she's a long way from the ubiquity of 2009's major breakthrough, Florence and the Machine. What she does share with Florence is a young female audience who go absolutely doolally when she arrives on stage. Normally, only pop stars with XY chromosomes are treated to this kind of hyperventilating reception, and for the first few songs, it's hard to believe all the emotion is being expended on this wispy blond woman.
Goulding's secret, it eventually emerges, is that she executes her feathery electropop concoctions with a contradictory mix of self-effacement ("I am so grateful," she says more than once in a short film shown during the set) and dippy-hippy theatricality, expressed by heatedly smacking a pair of drums next to the mic stand. She perfectly fills the niche labelled "slightly arty role model", and the show accordingly gambols along happily for the next hour, punctuated by sing-alongs and roars of "We love you!"
There's been a bit of money spent: a string quartet accompanies her on Wish I Stayed, and a grand piano is wheeled out for a version of Elton John's Your Song, brought to prominence by the current John Lewis television advert, and thus receives the most deafening reaction of the night. She and the band put some muscle into the twee hits Guns and Horses and Starry-Eyed, expunging most of the cuteness ? which instead gets ladled into an unexpected cover of Midlake's Roscoe, introduced as being "about living in the country in the 17th century or something". Somehow, it all induces fuzzy benevolence, and the idea that pop is a slightly better place for Goulding's presence.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/21/ellie-goulding-review
Sienna Miller Cindy Taylor Halle Berry Catherine Bell Tessie Santiago
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