REVIEW: Nadine Shah—Live In London (2025)
A greatest hits album of sorts, but somewhat pricey for what you actually get.
In a live setting, Nadine Shah is a completely different animal. Whenever she plays a show nearby, I’m there. She commands the stage, and has such a captivating presence, and a truly great band behind her. It’s the complete performance, and every time I come away wondering why her popularity hasn’t gone stratospheric. Every album brings new classics to add to the show, and every time she plays, the sets end up being even better than the last. Giants like Depeche Mode picked her as tour support.
And yet despite seeming to improve with every passing record, her popularity appears to have plateaued in that steady, respectable ‘cult artist’ way, with just 80,000 Spotify monthly listeners, and record sales somewhere in the low thousands—mostly in the UK from what I can gather—largely as a result of committed support from BBC 6Music since the early days.
So why is someone so admired here made little impact elsewhere? For whatever reason, Nadine has barely toured outside of the UK & Ireland in her entire career, though last year saw a real push, with 55 shows in 2024—more than double the number of shows of any calendar year since she first appeared live, 11 of which were on the continent. That suggests wheels are in motion to get her in front of people. Finally.
Maybe that’s also where this live album comes in—a means of showcasing her live talents, as well as effectively putting a kind of ‘best-of’ set together. For the fans, it’s a lovely souvenir of a killer tour, and for the uninitiated, it could well be the gateway drug to go and deep dive elsewhere.
The setlist here, as I found out myself last year, a wonderful distillation of Nadine’s finest moments. Smooshing all those killer highlights into one set is a dizzying experience. No sooner have you digested Fast Food, she’s off doing the incredible Club Cougar, channelling a feral Shirley Bassey, fully realising the song’s drama on the stage.
There are so many other top class songs here—you sort of forget how many she has clocked up. Topless Mother, Ladies For Babies, Stealing Cars, Fool, Evil, Holiday Destination, and the mighty Greatest Dancer.
I’m a little gutted, though, that the awesome Kitchen Sink was left off, when I know she definitely had it in the set as recently as the superb King Tut’s set in 2023. Ya can’t have everything. In fact, the more I click back through the albums, the more I realise just how many great tracks could have made it onto here.
As for this actual product…I’m a little underwhelmed. I noticed on the rear sleeve it has been put out by Mute offshoot, Live Here Now, rather than EMI North/Universal. Now, they pitch themselves as “deliver(ing) the excitement of the show in beautifully packaged collector's editions,” and appear to cover a whole bunch of artists new and old.
Reader, I take some issues with these claims. Firstly, it’s a £50 set (though full disclosure, my copy was £37 due to Amazon’s eternally baffling pre-oder price shenanigans), which is about double the price of the actual gig ticket last time out. Secondly, the actual packaging is skimped upon quite drastically. Despite being a 3LP set, there’s no gatefold sleeve, just blank paper inners, and a 4 page insert with some (admittedly nice) photos. No liner notes, nothing.
And does it really deliver the excitement of the live show? Not really. Despite being spaced out over three records, there’s no evident need for that. The source recording is quite muddy, and strangely mixed (sorry Ben Hillier), with drums buried, and a curious lack of top end.
You can certainly hear the performances are not at fault here, and having physically seem Nadine twice in the past two years, it doesn’t adequately do the live sound justice. It lacks the heft and dynamism. It sounds muted and squashed, and it sounds identical on Apple Lossless vs. the vinyl on my setup, so it’s not a format issue.
Live recordings can be a nightmare to get right, and sometimes it’s just the sound in the venue, and I can ruefully attest Kentish Town Forum gigs can sound dreadful at times. Interestingly, an audience recording suggests this is what it sounded like on the night. In which case why choose this as the live album? I’m sure it sounded great elsewhere on the tour.
Alas, there’s further bad news. For reasons unknown, the vinyl version also drops one of the tracks—the awesome Out The Way—for no good reason. Given the full 17 song set is 90 minutes according to Spotify, there’s no reason whatsoever why a 3LP set couldn’t handle one extra song. It’s corner cutting nonsense, and for the price being asked, a daft thing to do.
So having bigged up the idea of this very welcome live album, and how strong the set actually is, it’s a bit of a disappointment overall. It’s pricey, it sounds utterly unremarkable, and the packaging/presentation is frankly half-arsed. Have a word, Nadine. You sound a whole lot better than this live, in my experience.
