"And I hope to God," announces Kathryn Williams, "you haven't got any tomatoes." Hardly. As a hot day slips into blessedly cool evening on a fairy-lit stage where the whispering leaves provide surreptitious backing to Williams' velvet-glove accompanists, you'd be excused for lying back and drifting through her dreamy Sunday-night noise.
As everyone who's heard her touchingly intimate records knows, dreamy it certainly is: a breathily clear voice slipping through deftly-plucked guitar and cello, trickling from a slippery 'Breath' to the waltzy lilt of 'Flicker' and the cool-water caress of 'Mirrorball'. So yes, give us a sweet girl songwriter, then, all drifting melodies flirting with Joao Gilberto melancholy and half-heard bossa nova, and give us a breeze and champagne by the glass.
That's all you'd need, really, for a lovely evening. However, the other thing everyone knows about Kathryn Williams is that along with the dreamy songs, you get that uncalculatedly charming party trick of hers: practically trademark-able Northern unpretentiousness. Chatty, nervy self-deprecation; stray leg-scratches; quick sniffs of her armpit. Tales of swallowing mosquitoes in soundcheck; of going along - "just to be polite" - with suppositions that Williams must be a lesbian when listeners didn't quite follow the "she" and "he" in 'No One To Blame'.
Instructions to the sound booth explained airily away with "I was talking to God, of course"; a running random commentary on diets, the M62, Paris, and waiting to take your shoes off "in order to feel the full benefit" later. And girlish protestations, before an encore of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' shuddering with big-voiced passion and that rare ability to give a brilliant song its due, that she's given us seventeen - "seventeen!" - songs already.
But the real magic in tonight lies beyond the pretty voice and the Northern wit, deep in words not merely sad or pretty but frank and unafraid. There's bitterly-won wisdom ('Daydream And Saunter'), and lust and threat ('Wolf'), and hope duelling with fatalism ('Sustain Pedal'). It's a world of liars and lost souls; the quick in all their hesitation ('No One Takes You Home') and the dead in all their flaws ('Fell Down Fast'). No one else tells it with quite this grace, or this pityingly a keen eye for human flaws.
Indeed, it's always tempting to fish up the loveliest of Kathryn Williams' lines to explain the lure behind the folkily pretty voice and the Scouse wisecracks. You might, in the end, be closest with 'Fade': "There's nothing more sexy than watching someone who doesn't know they're being watched", she sings. And there's nothing more astonishing than watching someone singing wide-eyed with the beauty and ugliness of the human mystery. While sniffing her armpits, even when she knows we're looking.
