Friday 05/11/10 Imogen Heap @ Royal Albert Hall, London

Tonight isn’t your regular common or garden gig. For starters, a glance around at the surroundings will tell you you’re not in your average gig venue. Watching a show under the grand arches and ornate domed ceiling of The Royal Albert Hall is an opportunity that rarely comes around on the gig-going calendar.

Secondly, this is more than just a standard Imogen Heap set. Although tonight is the last on a list of regular UK tour dates, there is a special reason why it takes place here at the home of The Proms. Some months ago, Heap, a nature lover, came up with the idea of making a nature film made up of short clips sent in by fans and amateur film makers, and writing a musical score to go with it. The result is performed here tonight, the film shown on screens behind the stage in separate clips, with Heap conducting an orchestra through separate movements accompanying each clip. The images are stunningly colourful and evocative, and thanks to the rich acoustics of the Albert Hall, the music dramatic and moving. Considering the score was written by Heap in a matter of only a few weeks whilst out on tour performing her own material, the whole is a remarkable achievement.

Unique as it is, here at Gigwise an artist’s regular output is our bread and butter, and so after a break, orchestra cleared away, Heap is back out on stage to do her day job.

Imogen Heap has always been something of an enigma. A classically trained, endlessly resourceful and clever musician, for some reason she has never quite gained the wider recognition her talent ought to have brought, a prime-time TV airing of her most popular track aside. Yet fan or not, anyone who has caught her live is usually bowled over by what she does. The majority of her recorded output is entirely written, arranged and performed by herself, and she is usually as impressive performing it solo with a loop machine as she is backed up by a full band.

Tonight, as well as a band she has a sprinkling of classical musicians and a choir, but it’s still the little things she does herself which impress most. In the intro to ‘First Train Home’, for example, she runs her fingers around three water-filled wine glasses and samples the resulting gentle harmonic as the background to the song. The opening to ‘Little Bird’ is a field recording of birds flying from tree to tree in her local park, the song accompanied by visuals of electronic birds flying between the model trees surrounding her on stage.

From there, things go up a notch. For ‘Earth’, the choir perform all the music just using the sound of their voices while she sings over the top, an enthusiastic beat boxer holding the audience enrapt, while on ‘Just For Now’, the entire Albert Hall provides the backing track, as she divides us into three and gives us a vocal harmony each to sing, with again no instruments playing. ‘Spine-tingling’ is an over-used cliché in music reviews, but the sound of 5,000 people singing in harmony is a moment that ought to live long in the memory.

There is still plenty of the pop you hear on record, and the subject matter suggests she has known little hardship, with lyrics including a description of cooking of lunch for a vegan boyfriend; Gallagher brothers’ tales of growing up in Burnage, this ain’t.

It’s as if the multitude of complex parts that make up her material are too numerous to fit on record, like trying to re-enact enormous crowd scenes from ‘Spartacus’ on a tiny theatre stage.  The fact that tonight well over two hours have gone by and hardly anyone has noticed, is testament to her talent as a performer and musician. Filling the Albert Hall is no mean feat, but Imogen Heap manages it in more ways than one.

Imogen Heap - live