Village Underground, London
The Mercury prize-winner showcases her tender debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, whose devastating lyrics paired with bland music cry out for the full force of her nine-strong band
Outside, night has fallen; inside, it’s still a summer’s day. This intimate venue is festooned with strings of plastic flowers hanging from the ceiling and wrapped around the mixing desk.
Blooms are very much in order because last week, the 21-year-old poet and singer Arlo Parks won the Mercury prize for her debut album, the widely feted Collapsed in Sunbeams, beating off arguably the strongest field of competitors in years: Sault, Celeste and Black Country, New Road, to name but three. Notably, seven out of 12 of the shortlisted artists this year were black – eight, if you count jazz legend Pharoah Sanders’s heady incursions on the collaborative album made by Floating Points with the London Symphony Orchestra. At a guess, Parks’s feeling of validation this week must be second only to that of fellow young British overachiever Emma Raducanu.
