Joanna Newsom's London comeback performance in photos

9 November 2015: Many moons ago, Joanna Newsom flippantly referred to her own voice as “untrainable.” It’s a term that’s doggedly haunted her since - an albatross around her neck to which critics, unable to fully coalesce in their own words her soaring, mutable vocals, constantly refer. It is, she says, “one of my least favourite things I’ve ever said.”

Perhaps a more accurate descriptor for Newsom’s extraordinary voice would have been “unteachable.” In the eleven years since she released her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, countless young musicians have attempted to do what she does - as is the case, of course, whenever a talent emerges marked enough to ripple the zeitgeist. And yet, no voice quite embodies that delicate balance of sweet and sinister, soft and brittle, like Newsom’s does. Tonight, in front of a sea of rapt fans, her vibrato envelops the room; it draws the air from it.