Delilah and Ms Dynamite, KOKO, London

 

Emily Wight
Wednesday 25 April 2012 15:40 BST
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What's the link between Ms Dynamite, Liam Bailey and Delilah, who all performed last night?

The dance production duo Chase and Status. Bailey and Delilah were thrown under the spotlight when their vocals featured on the album No More Idols by the duo - who, incidentally, were the first to play Ms Dynamite's song What You Talkin' About? at Glastonbury 2010.

Although her fame was at its peak in her A Little Deeper days of 2002, Ms Dynamite (aka Niomi Arleen MacLean-Daley) is very much still on the scene, only she's swapped her So Solid Crew-inspired garage for dubstep. If anything, she was ahead of her time, as we were reminded last night with her opening Dy-na-mi-tee: a track that is both so familiar it's almost comforting, and so slick that it had the KOKO crowd shimmying along.

But if we thought this was going to be a revival of Ms Dynamite's early years, we thought wrong. She has moulded herself so well to the new urban music scene, and the audience were calling out for her more recent tracks. So, she gave us her landmark number Fire, a collaboration with Magnetic Man, What You Talkin' About? and her track created with Labrinth, Neva Soft, among others. Each one shook the walls with its bass.

It's the first UK headline tour for 21-year-old north London pop singer Delilah - real name Paloma Stoecker - and a sell-out, and she fit into the venue perfectly. Wearing a sparkling gold dress, she sang a variety of tracks that showed off her versatile voice. Sometimes Delilah's voice filled the room like Florence Welch; sometimes she toned it down to the silkiness of Zero 7's Sia; sometimes there was even a hint of Amy Winehouse.

For someone who got her big break collaborating with Chase and Status and Plan B, Delilah has her own style of doing things. One minute she was singing her cover of Jean Jacques Smoothie's 2 People, the next, her love song Love You So. Midway through the set she sat down with her keyboard to showcase even further her musical prowess. In her encore she sang her new single, the heartfelt Breathe, which will be released next month. She then got the crowd going with the upbeat debut single Go, which samples Chaka Khan's Ain't Nobody. KOKO was brimming with appreciation for an exciting new artist. What will she do next?

SETLIST

So Irate

Only You

I Can Feel U

21

Insecure Little Man

Cinababy/Time/Come Home (acoustic)

Never Be Another

2 People

Shades of Grey

Love You So

Encore

Breathe

Go

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