It’s rammed in here tonight. We should have been here 45 minutes ago. Still, we’ve had a few drinks beforehand and cheekily slip, like letter through envelope, into the crowd to gain a (somewhat detached) view of the delectable Leslie Feist.

From the off it’s clear that we have come to a place where soulful melodies and genteel noodlings meet in matrimony. With giant red Guild Starfire hollow body strapped in low-slung fashion to her slight frame, she flirts with our imagination on the beautiful ‘Honey Honey’ gently brushing strokes of fairy dust over the dark canvas of the Scala. The picture she paints is one of magical tranquillity. A relaxed and abstract version of ‘So Sorry’ follows and her voice floats over our heads and hangs there rippling through the hairs that stand on the back of our necks. When music triggers such an emotion so effortlessly, it’s something to savour. Feist possesses the same magical tones and ability to flit with her voice as fellow Canadian folk-legend Joni Mitchell once did.

But what comes next snaps us from this dreamlike trance. Now fully plugged in and switched on, the electric rendition of ‘My Moon My Man’ gets the audience clapping and singing along through its familiar and soulful bassline and hook. But we are soon lost again under her artistic spell, as the beauty of ‘The Park’, followed by ‘The Limit To Your Love’, renders the venue silent. The lights on the mirror ball flick on and, as shards of white light are reflected around the room, you could hear a pin drop. Looking around, this crowd are your archetypal ‘culture section of the Sunday Times’ brigade. They lap up Feist’s eccentricity as she creates a wall of looping bird noises at the beginning of ‘The Park’. But when she later mentions her musical fraternity Broken Social Scene will be playing here in September, her call goes unanswered. It seems this crowd aren’t exactly familiar. “Oh well, someone must have heard of them as it’s sold out!” she retorts. Touché Leslie.

Feist has an intrinsic understanding of how to pack a song with funk and soul. She shows just a glimpse of her guitar talents on a solo cover of Tony Sherr’s country song ‘In My Hands’, and her backing band exhibit real craft accompanying throughout the evening, never cutting themselves too big a slice of the limelight. The accompanying horns on ‘The Limit To Your Love’ reverberate around the sold-out Scala and it all finishes in a crescendo of brass. In between songs her banter is witty and she jokes about her homeland in a way only a true patriot has license to. ‘Representing’ at every moment, she straps on her baby acoustic for an unaccompanied cover of Canadian songstress Sara Harmer’s ‘Open Window’ and talks genuinely about a childhood romanticism for the coastline and ocean of her province Nova Scotia (the inspiration for track ‘The Water’).

But the broadsheet brigade can’t control themselves any longer as ‘Mushaboom’ is followed by ‘1234’. There’s not a second of silence to be found during the pre-encore break, and when Feist returns she calms the atmosphere once again, with ‘Intuition’, while the Nina Simone cover ‘Sealion’, complete with audience hand claps, clearly exhibits that, damn, can this girl wail on guitar! What we have in Feist is someone who can really proliferate the mainstream and remain there. Her live show is enjoyable, exciting and something to really savour.

Photo: Steve Asenjo