Monday 01/11/10 Lissie @ Heaven, London

When American political writer Jim Hightower made his now famous statement, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos”, he clearly hadn’t heard Lissie’s debut album, ‘Catching A Tiger’. Released a little over four months ago, she’s already sold out this, her first proper headline tour, thanks in no small part to the fact her single ‘Cuckoo’ was given top status on the playlist of the spiritual home of MOR, BBC Radio 2. As a result, the throng here tonight underneath Charing Cross Station looks more like a department store January sales scrum than a gig crowd.

Kicking off bang on the scheduled 9pm start time (the middle-aged middle class like to be home and curled up in time for ‘The Book at Bedtime’), she opens with non-album track ‘Wedding Bells’, a move that might usually be considered brave for a new artist, but one that Lissie pulls off without batting an eyelid. After ‘Worried About’ she is back in EP territory once more with ‘Here Before’, telling us how delighted she is that these extended (by which she means headline) slots give her the chance to dust down the back catalogue.

From there though, its debut album material all the way, every track receiving unbridled yelps of recognition from a crowd who have clearly taken her, and her record, to their hearts. And there’s no doubt that Lissie does them justice. Backed by three musicians as competent as you’re likely to find on the circuit, her voice is pretty much recording quality throughout, effortlessly oozing the ever-so-slightly husky, all-American girl next door quality that would have had Terry Wogan dribbling into his coffee mug, had he still been at the Radio 2 breakfast-time knobs.

As for her brand of Americana folk-rock, well, it’s nothing new, but then, what is? The likes of ‘When I’m Alone’ and later, ‘In Sleep’, get the feet stomping, while ‘Bully’ and ‘Everywhere I Go’ have the crowd swaying and sorely tempted to pull their lighters out. The fact that she tells us the Avril Lavigne-alike ‘Cuckoo’ is about that time in your life when nobody understands you, ought to have the more cynical among us raising our eyes and looking at our watches, but she manages to deliver it in such a way that you don’t feel like she is claiming to be the first person ever to feel like that; more that she knows it’s been done a million times before, but she’s here to remind the new generation about it, in as nicely tuneful a way as possible.
She rounds off with ‘A Little Lovin’’, which only a churl could deny is a good tune, and although a perfectly competent encore of Led Zep’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is about as cutting edge as a Radio 1 Live Lounge compilation, Heaven laps it up.