Bradford is the 2025 UK city of culture. And Bradford 2025 is a highly innovative, informative, and entertaining year-long programme celebrating the heritage and diversity of this West Yorkshire city, its people, and its culture. Throughout this year there will be more than 1,000 new performances and events including 365 artist commissions, a series of major arts festivals, as well as exciting national and international collaborations.
And one of these events is taking place tonight right here in the heart of Bradford’s city centre in the Grade II listed Victorian building, the historic St. George’s Hall, one of the UK’s oldest concert halls. Headlining this event is the musical force-of-nature, the Mercury Prize-nominated singer-songwriter, Nadine Shah.
Following a run of arena dates last year supporting Depeche Mode and then earlier this month featuring as a guest vocalist with The Pogues on their recent UK tour, the celebrated South Tyneside auteur arrives here with her band for this one-off show.
These profile live appearances reflect the high esteem and warm regard in which Nadine Shah is held within the music industry. They also affirm the better emotional space in which she now finds herself. In a series of often disarmingly frank yet refreshingly open interviews held with Shah early last year, she detailed the struggles she had been facing since 2018 when her mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Her mother was to die two years later, an event compounded by the isolating impact of the pandemic lockdown. Grief, PTSD, substance misuse, and addiction followed for Nadine Shah. As did time spent in rehab, experiences that all informed the writing and recording of her fifth studio album, Filthy Underneath.
Filthy Underneath was released in February of last year and is rightly regarded as being Nadine Shah’s most powerful and personal work to date. The songs capture much of her previous downward spiral, the experiences she had in rehab, whilst also pointing towards her subsequent recovery. The record is imbued with such great spirit and no little dark humour, evidenced again by the fact that Shah and her four-piece band come onto the stage tonight to the sound of Cypress Hill’s ‘I Wanna Get High.’
And it is to Filthy Underneath that Nadine Shah immediately goes tonight with a coruscating, life-affirming blast of ‘Keeping Score.’ “Look how I am trying,” she implores during the song’s chorus as if to emphasise the efforts she is making and the resolve it is taking to remain so together.
And together she is, not just in herself with but also with her band. They are undeniably tight. This is now the tenth time that I have seen Nadine Shah in concert – the first occasion being at Gateshead Old Town Hall in 2015 just after the release of her second album, Fast Food – and it quickly becomes apparent how far her live sound has developed since then. The music she and her band produce is now heavier in texture, undoubtedly darker in places, but far more robust, more vigorous, more confident. In many respects the music reflects the person into which Nadine Shah has evolved.
Songs from Filthy Underneath are rightly well represented tonight. The proto-rap, near spoken-word poetry of ‘Sad Lads Anonymous’ takes a wider perspective of both personal and societal disenchantment. Riddled with mordant humour, ‘Topless Mother’ – about a counsellor Nadine Shah had previously worked with, and with whom she did not get on – is a joyous celebration of her recovery. While the thunderous rhythm that accompanies the gothic ‘Twenty Things’ must shake the very foundations of this magnificent, beautifully refurbished building.
“This is the serious part of the set,” Nadine Shah suggests before tearing into ‘Stealing Cars.’ Taken from Fast Food, it is thrillingly recreated here. The Burundi-driven ‘Greatest Dancer’ from Filthy Underneath ties Shah’s present to her past before she reaffirms the political fire in her belly with a blistering take on the title track from her 2017 album Holiday Destination
With a badge of the flag of the State of Palestine proudly pinned to the left lapel of her jacket, Nadine Shah thanks the people of Bradford who recently turned out in a show of solidarity to protest what she angrily describes as the “genocide in Gaza.” She follows this with a terrifying ‘Out The Way,’ also taken from Holiday Destination and another damning indictment of anti-immigration policies and racism. It is so good to have Nadine Shah back, liberated and full of fire and fury.
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos of Nadine Shah at St. George’s Hall in Bradford
