Birdy is both an overnight success story – breaking through at 15 with her cut-glass cover of Bon Iver’s Skinny Love – and a maker of slow-burn hits: her singles have been streamed by the truckload but barely graze the charts (see: the ubiquitous tearjerker Keeping Your Head Up, which nevertheless peaked at No 57).
As such, she can count herself a commercial star who exists at some remove from pop culture’s nucleus. For her fifth album, however, the 27-year-old – real name Jasmine van den Bogaerde (she is Dirk Bogarde’s great-niece) – edges towards the zeitgeist, trading her hooky, all-purpose sentimentality for songs that draw on the current vogue for 80s-flavoured pop.
