Cross the Tracks, review: the cream of Eighties disco brings Gen Z to their feet
“I could hear you guys from my house,” said Lianne La Havas in the middle of her set last night, beaming down at the crowd at her feet. She wasn’t joking. The 31-year-old British soul singer and guitarist was headlining Cross the Tracks, the fledgling soul, jazz and funk festival, in Brixton’s Brockwell Park, an artisan-lager can’s throw from the area in which La Havas grew up and to which she recently moved back from Los Angeles.
Given her demeanour, it might as well have been her front room. La Havas’s outfit choice – a slouchy white two-piece, thickly fringed in pink – may have screamed “pop star”, but La Havas has the kind of relaxed stage presence that draws you to her precisely because she doesn’t need you.
With a guitar slung across her hips – sometimes electric, sometimes old-school; she alternated – she crooned her way through a set list that mixed old favourites from her Mercury Prize-nominated 2012 debut album Is Your Love Big Enough? with new numbers from her third album, Lianne La Havas, which she released last summer after a five-year hiatus, to the joy of her fans – and then Brit nominations.
Last night, as the mellow Sunday-nighters roared her lyrics back to her – from the slow, lilting tenderness of Paper Thin to the belting, throw-your-head-back swing of Bittersweet – her pleasure in the moment was there for all to see. The local girl had done good.
At a different festival, La Havas’s chilled-out energies might have jarred with the buoyancy of what came before her. The 1980s disco legends Sister Sledge wooed the young crowd, most of whom weren’t born when their debut We Are Family went to number one in 1979, with a glorious blast through their greatest hits – songs we knew every word to, without knowing that we did.
As well as that title-track, the two remaining Sledge sisters, Debbie and Kim (Joni passed away in 2017) – decked out in black and white sequins, massive hooped earrings and age-defying enthusiasm – spun and twirled their way through a parade of dance-floor fillers (He’s the Greatest Dancer was a stand-out) and rhythmic head-boppers such as Thinking of You. And if they sometimes had to pull up a stool between songs, no-one minded.
Up the hill on the second stage, a succession of brilliant emerging artists had dialled up the atmosphere earlier in the day, including psychedelic RnB singer Greentea Peng, sporting a cowboy hat, and jazz drummer Yussef Dayes, who led his band through an extraordinary, improv-laden set from behind his kit with lightning wrists and a grin.
After all that Sledged-up funk, as the sun trailed blood-orange stains through the tree line and Monday morning loomed, La Havas’s more relaxing pleasures effortlessly matched the crowd’s mood. “Sorry for all the mistakes I’ve made tonight,” she said, in the middle of a lyric about mistakes, only half-jokingly. But nobody had noticed a thing.
Info: xthetracks.com
