Blessed with a voice you might imagine perfectly suited to interpreting others’ material, Anohni has largely shied away from recording covers. A couple of songs by Dylan, Lennon and Yoko Ono, an amazing take on Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love – and that’s been about it over her 24-year career. But Lou Reed clearly occupies a special place in her heart: “He always had my back,” she tells the audience at this show devoted to his repertoire, going on to detail how Reed relentlessly lobbied record companies to release her work.
Indeed, the first time mainstream British audiences were exposed to her was on Reed’s 2003 album The Raven and the subsequent tour, where Anohni sang a haunting version of Candy Says. That said, striking as her performances were, they were easy to overlook, The Raven being an album that also featured Steve Buscemi and Willem Dafoe attempting to deafen each other by bellowing bad dialogue at the tops of their voices and David Bowie singing about being a frog, while the subsequent live shows also involved Reed appending a lengthy scat vocal solo to Sunday Morning, performing a funk version of All Tomorrow’s Parties and inviting a tai chi master onstage to do the splits while he sang Perfect Day: in both cases, there really was an awful lot to take in.
