Following the all-acoustic Sugaring Season in 2012, Beth Orton took stock of her life, with two very young children in tow, staring at a future that may not include music after two decades of enchanting audiences with her mix of gentle folk-acoustica and folktronica.

Decamping to Los Angeles, she hooked up with Fuck Buttons' Andrew Hung, and together they explored musical pastures that didn't involve an acoustic, but instead Orton creating the foundation of songs with loops and keyboards. The resulting album, Kidsticks, harks back to her early days when she collaborated with the likes of William Orbit and Chemical Brothers in fusing her 'Sunday hangover' voice with electronic beats and effects, and some live instrumentation. It's a brave, often experimental work, that will probably divide her audiences, many pining for the simple, traditional songs such as ‘She Cries Your Name’.

Tonight, she's nervous. The second of two shows as part of the Brighton Festival, in the recently-refurbished Attenborough Center for the Creative Arts, she is very late on stage (as she was the previous night). So late in fact that the announcer says we might as well go the bar as she won't be on for another ten minutes.

Still, this is largely about appreciating and understanding Beth Orton the artist, one who has always displayed an open fragility on stage and on record, mixed with an often funny, if nervy, down-to-earth humour. The audience tonight, as befits a respectable Brighton Festival audience, is both forgiving and encouraging, as she finally makes it on to the stage, patently nervous, albeit excited too, at playing in front of an audience, many of whom won't be familiar with most, if not all of the album.

With just her and two cohorts on a mix of guitars, bass and drums, keys and samples, Orton plays almost all of the new album, from the opening track ‘Moon’ to the pop-friendly retro electro-funk of ‘1973’, interspersed with a few older, acoustic numbers, whereby she straps on her guitar, and visibly relaxes a little, more at home it seems with the six-string, rather than keys, buttons and clicks. "Expectations wear heavy on my heart," she appropriately sings, from the ‘Galaxy of Emptiness’ song that appeared on her 1996 breakthrough album Trailer Park. From her back catalogue she also pulls out ‘Pass In Time’, ‘Touch Me With Your Love’ (which shares a similarly electronic-based musicality with Kidsticks), and ‘Blood Red River’, where she performs just solo. And she eventually does perform the likes of ‘Central Reservation’, ‘Stolen Car’ and ‘She Cries Her Name’, at the end of the show, to much applause.

From Kidsticks there's also the deep and submerged bass groove that underpins ‘Petals’, the song swelling into a cacophonic soundscape as Orton repeatedly sings 'My tears well up and cry for you'. She also gets a little Grace Jones on ‘Wave’, and turns her hand to ambient electronica on tracks such as ‘Falling’ and the dreamy, talked-song ‘Corduroy Legs’.

Framed by three large orbs hanging for the ceiling and a vaguely old fashioned light-cum-slide show as a backdrop, there is a woozy and dense psychedelic feel to much of the new material, not always performed smoothly or with a deft touch. It's not surprising though; she is a little out of practice, and is obviously still getting to grips with this new style set-up. She also, naturally, wants us to like what she has done: "I'm a little bit nervous," she admits at one point tonight. "You know when you make something at home and then you bring it to people?” she asks. "It's fucking weird."

That may be so, but by bringing a little bit of herself to people such as us, Beth Orton once again wins most of us over, via her character and personality, if not necessarily through the new music, which may take a bit of time to bed down in people's minds.
Jeff Hemmings

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