New York, NY (Top40 Charts) British singer/songwriter/guitarist Lianne La Havas will play a one-off solo live show on Wednesday, July 15, at London's Roundhouse that will include new songs from her upcoming, self-titled album and across her catalog. This very special, multi-camera, one-night-only performance will be broadcast via YouTube and timed to specific regions: July 15 at 8pm BST / 9pm CEST (UK & Europe) and 9pm EST / 6pm PST (North America); July 16 at 8pm AEDT (Australia) / 7pm JST (Japan) and KST (Korea). Tickets for the concert will be available from 9am BST this Friday, June 26, here. La Havas will donate all of her proceeds to
Black Lives Matter-related organizations. She chose the venue because she was scheduled to play there before her 2020 tour plans were cancelled due to the pandemic.
La Havas has just released a cover of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes," the latest single from her forthcoming self-titled album, due July 17, 2020, on Nonesuch Records in the US. The song can be heard below and is available to download now with pre-orders of the album, along with the previously released tracks "Can't Fight," "Paper Thin," and "Bittersweet." "Glorious," Uncut exclaims of the new track. "La Havas's connection with the song is intense; her version, a slower, heavier groove with intent drums and thick, subaqueous keys, builds beautifully, fitting the album as if written for it." Mojo concurs: "A show-stopper: unabashedly off-kilter but still delivering sweet, soulful resonance."
La Havas's recording of "Weird Fishes" began by accident: returning from a glorious, sunny Glastonbury Festival performance in June 2019, La Havas and her core band decided to see if they could nail their lithe live version of Radiohead's In Rainbows song in the studio. "I had the most wonderful, nourishing experience recording that," La Havas says, "And that's where I decided: the rest of the album needs to be like this. It's got to be my band, and I've got to do it in London, whenever people have time."
"This song is very close to my heart, and in the story of the record the lyrics express perfectly where I was," she continues. "At the same time, it felt very appropriate to use it as a kind of test song to record with my live band, to see if we'd work as well in the studio as we do onstage—I'd always wanted to play live in the studio like in the '70s.
Everything felt right that day. I knew: This is my direction, this is my album, this is my story.
"Thom Yorke's lyrics suggest finding a way out, and he's used the imagery of the bottom of the sea and the unusual creatures that you might find there. For me, the deep means the unknown, when you get out of something so familiar. It can be scary, but he also says, 'I hit the bottom and escape.'"
The ten songs on Lianne La Havas - nine originals plus "Weird Fishes" - span the arc of a love affair, one that brought growth and newfound confidence. "This is my first completely self-produced album with my own band. I got my own way with everything—all the decisions that you hear on this album were mine," she says. "I'm a woman now, so I'm less shy and timid about saying certain things. And there's no right or wrong when it's your record, so I was very much embracing that fact, as well."
La Havas recently performed an NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, which has received more than 700,000 views on YouTube alone since premiering in May. She also performed "
Bittersweet" on the BBC's Live at Home on Later ... with Jools Holland. She and her band also played London's Barbican alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Jules Buckley in February; a video of their performance of "
Bittersweet" may be seen here. Early critical acclaim for Lianne La Havas includes the Sunday Times praising her "smoky, up-close vibrato and yearning lyrics of bracing directness," and the Guardian noting that the record hearkens "back to the warm, widescreen sounds of the hottest and most buttered soul."
