Koko, NW1

Falling in step with the current vogue for big-name acts to play club venues, Joss Stone (album sales 7.5 million) reported for duty at Koko (capacity 1,500) on Tuesday night. She was an hour late, which might have added to the sense of occasion if it had been Madonna, but in the event it only contributed to the air of listlessness and irresolution with which this disappointing performance was beset.

Wearing a sparkling silver mini dress, her eyelids caked in silver glitter and with a shock of corkscrew red hair exploding around her head, she opened the set with Girl They Won’t Believe It, a cool, jazz-soul shuffle that is one of the standout tracks from her new album, Introducing Joss Stone, released on Monday.

The record finds Stone exploring the old-school funk and soul sounds with which she made her name at such a young age (she is still only 19), with a familiar sense of style and renewed purpose.

But her live performance lacked anything like the requisite punch. Backed by a five-man band and three-piece vocal section, she tiptoed through Put Your Hands on Me, one of many songs with an authentic 1960s soul sound. The effect turned out to be too authentic, in fact, with its weak drum sound way back in the mix. Overall it was simply too quiet. Even Stone’s voice seemed to get lost in the margins of the songs.

Although blessed with a magnificent tone and timbre, she still has a surprisingly poor microphone technique. During Arms of my Baby, a pleasing, Motown-influenced song, she wandered off the microphone for long stretches or else swallowed certain phrases whole instead of singing them out.

She seemed also to be in the throes of an identity crisis. She introduced Music with a long, impassioned monologue about the meaning of life and how important music is to her. It was certainly sincere, but these were not the words of a performer who is comfortable in her skin.

She may sound like a middle-aged black woman from the American South, and have surrounded herself with musicians who fit much the same profile, but she is nevertheless still a teenager from the South of England. And this was one of those nights when it seemed as if she felt more awkward than pleased about it.

The crowd had unfortunately thinned out dramatically by the time she came to the end of an incredibly elongated stretch of encores that got bogged down in endless introductions and improvised snatches of songs. Her current single Tell Me ’Bout It was buried in there somewhere, but by then it was hard to get excited about anything very much.

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