The first time I saw Laura Marling she was 16 years old. On a boiling hot summer's day in Brighton I found myself cramped in the basement of a venue called Sumo which no longer sits down one of the many seaside alleyways.
Jamie T was the headline act. It was a few months before his album came out. 'Back In The Game' and 'So Lonely Was The Ballad' were knocking about and the Eel Pie Island cartel were beginning their short lived rise to the top of the indie charts. It was definitely a time of diversity, a time where the odd bared their scars from under the leather-clad image of 'cool' and the left-field was welcomed. Records were gloriously under produced, dry wit was something of a welcomed counterpart to idealistic Bohemia painted by The Libs and the indie groups of this time drew the guts from pop music and added their own twist. It was the emergence of a new scene.
Yet while Good Shoes have struggled to record a second record, Larrikin disbursed for careers alongside Courtney Love and Burberry and Mystery Jets inhale from the dried up lungs of the 80s, Laura Marling, the pup of the revue, has blossomed into the most mature song writer in Britain.
Laura's third record is due out on 12th September. 'A Creature I Don't Know', as its title may hint towards, suggests that the elegant beauty is still trying to find her feet in the murky waters of folk, when in fact, this couldn't be further from the truth.
At 21 years old, Laura is certainly still growing as an artist but her records suggest that she's been an adult for some time now. The early bare folk of 'Failure' and 'New Romantic' solidified an aptitude for lyricism that drafted early comparisons to Joni and Joan Baez. Her hymnal and angelic tones, even when I first saw her, before she was legal to drink, accompanied the acoustic guitar like a brother in arms and something extremely potent was embedded in Laura's performance. Unlike the gaggle of countless other acoustic singer-songwriters, Laura has a knack for writing lyrically vibrant tales and it's like the words she sings were made just for her.
Her debut album 'Alas I Cannot Swim' showed that the young girl from Reading had a darker side to her than earlier songs like 'Mexico' led us to suggest. 'Night Terror' and 'Ghosts' portrayed a girl, wise way beyond the years that her age hints at, penning these absolutely divine musings that were both pensive and completely confessional. She had the ability to make each and every phoneme bleed with intensity and feeling, elongating that sense of unaffected and broken-hearted passion for just a snippet longer. Overall, this was a record about love and being in love. At a young age these sort of pensive ramblings can come off as entirely cliche and even sloppy in their construction - but this didn't. It was refined and paved the way for her sophomore effort.
'I Speak Because I Can' was one of the record's of 2010. While Laura's debut suggested womanhood was already upon her, 'I Speak...' dealt with it first hand. An affirmation of development, songs like 'Made By Maid', 'Rambling Man' and 'What He Wrote' were open-souled revelations to the world. The songs grew in depth and texture and Laura's style blossomed to emulate a bleaker side of folk that, when paired with her cracked words, could slice even hearts made of stone. 'I wouldn't want to lose something I couldn't save' she chirps on 'Darkness Descends'. These aren't the words of a twenty year old woman from England's forgiving lands, these are not the tentative teething steps of a young song writer, this is the sort of perfectly crafted, completely love-struct, open-wounded barrings of an individual whose life has been fraught with experience. How she conjures some of these lyrics is best left untold, but while pop music becomes sodomised by the ill-fated vampires who suck the originality from the world, Laura's words must not go unnoticed or unappreciated because, if we look to the bones of it, she is possibly the greatest female songsmith in the U.K, if not the world.
Earlier this month, the video for 'Sophia', Laura's forthcoming single, appeared online. Delicately, the song begins with melodious picking and soft hums as she states, 'Where I've been lately is no concern of yours' before gouging on tuneful conviction that builds into a slowly developing folk crescendo. As the drums begin to beat in the background, lyrics progress and build into wooing hooks with each instrument contributing wholly to the soothing tone. As the song grows in pace, the sonorous echoes mirror the advancement of the accomplished singer Laura has blossomed into. It's resplendent in its cleansed vision, sophisticated and beautifully primed, this marks the arrival of another incredible record for Britain's brightest hope.
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