Amelia Coburn
Elgar Room, Royal Albert Hall, London
24 October 2025

Debut album Between the Moon and the Milkman established Amelia Coburn as a voice to listen out for in folk circles. With a new single and work on a second album underway, Steve Morgan finds a voice and live force to be reckoned with

Folk. It can be such a misleading, reductive four-letter word: a straitjacket into which performers are zipped fast, while audiences sagely nod appreciation over pints of cask ale.

Rising star of the genre Amelia Coburn may look bookish, but like the genre on which her musical foundations are solidly built, appearances can be not only deceptive, but totally misleading. Coburn’s ‘folk-goth’ world is one of dazzling and flickering lights, where much lurks unseen in the corners and shadows. You’d take her on at your peril. During the course of a bewitching hour and a quarter at the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room – Erykah Badu’s gig across the corridor in the main auditorium lends the air an extra nip of oddness – she delights her own sell-out audience with a winning stagecraft and self-deprecating manner that masks some proper musical chops.

It’s a talent serious enough to pique the respective interest of Paul Weller and Heaton – she lends the former her arresting vocal talents on a stripped-back version of Mountain’s One Last Cold Kiss, featured on his recent covers album, Find El Dorado. You can easily spot the fault line that leads to Heaton, too – Coburn’s incisive lyrics and acutely observed vignettes, particularly on the delightful Dublin Serenade, the tale of 24 hours spent in the fair city, Leprechaun Museum and all, are not all that far from Heaton’s musical postcode. Tonight’s show is, she says, probably her biggest yet. “I’m cacking myself, I’m not going to lie” – she laughs after opener When The Tide Rolls In, also the lead-off track from her album. It’s an instant icebreaker in plush surroundings, far more formal than your traditional circuit gig. That studio debut, the enigmatically titled Between the Moon and the Milkman – sympathetically produced by ex-Coral guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones – has gathered traction since its release in March last year: all but three of tonight’s 12 songs come from it.

Backed by a three-piece band of keys, bass and drums – special mention here for drummer Mike Kitching, enjoying his first outing in Coburn’s crew – the quartet mesh perfectly. Polite where required, they also break out with ease into the rockier moments, particularly on the excellent Sleepy Town. Though the song is a warm homage to Coburn’s Teesside roots, it also outlines her conflicting wanderlust, the desire to see the world energised by an infectious, rollicking cowpoke rhythm.

There’s excellent lyrical word play at work here – “thirsty for the thrills I seek, spirit willing but your flesh is weak, underline these words I speak, you can choose to be a beast or to stay meek.” She precedes this song – as she customarily does – with explanatory notes and charming digressions ranging from the comic to the cutting, outlining the darker side ahead of the first of two encore tracks, Wine to Your Funeral. It’s a fine balancing act, and she walks the tightrope with practised skill.

There are plenty of standout moments – Nodding Dog comes on like a sweet lullaby, but it transpires the song was inspired by ‘knobheads on Tinder’ with their ‘Etch-a-Sketch hearts’. See Saw – her self-confessed favourite off the album – is a real keeper. Here, an innocent musical-box opening morphs into a delicious, insidious fairground waltz that manages to bring both John Barry and Jake Thackray to mind. Over this, Coburn’s breathy vocal – with shades of Dubstar’s Sarah Blackwood – masks a dark and sly malevolence. It’s of a piece with her unabashed lifelong love of Grimm fairytales and the gothic-tinged literature of Edgar Allen Poe, Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter and “silent German surrealist horror – yeah I know, I’m cool” – she laughs.

There’s a touching dedication to a widowed fan who’d got in touch via email before Please Go Gently, which she plays alone; a moving, strangely upbeat exploration of love and letting go. Written in English and appearing on the album as Sandra, but reworked for a single release in French, Le Fabuleux Destin de Sandra is a delicious tale of revenge, with a twist inspired by the true-life revelations of Coburn’s elderly French landlady during her university placement year. “I spent £90,000 on my degree, it’s the first time I’ve used it,” she laughs. It looks like money well spent.

A Middlesbrough upbringing has given Coburn a finely tuned sense of self and identity as a proud ‘Smoggie’ – the ebb and flow of the area’s coastal tides clearly inform her musical rhythms. Latest single, Something Wild, another rousingly upbeat affair – with a video clearly influenced by Angela Carter’s novella Company of Wolves – whets the appetite for the forthcoming second long-playing effort. Tonight marks the song’s live debut. Under moody, blood-red lighting worthy, she and the band pull it off with ease. She’s also confident enough to throw in snippets of The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood and Tomorrow Never Knows on the excellent closing number, the joyous Perfect Storm, which put me in mind of The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler.

If there’s any justice, Coburn will find the mainstream and dive straight in.

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You can find Amelia Coburn online here and on Patreon here

New single Something Wild video can be seen here

All words by Steve Morgan. You can find Steve on Bluesky Social here

Photo credit – Emma Johnson