Sparks Fly, Folkish Joy Follows: Ella Clayton Celebrates Her Second Album Could It Be You?

As one sweltering London day turned into a milder evening, I found myself descending into the legendary 100 Club for the first time.

The heatwave had mercifully begun to ease, and I was amongst music lovers from across the capital who had journeyed to the hallowed Soho venue for a special show launching Could It Be You? by East London singer-songwriter Ella Clayton, her sophomore record following 2022’s Murmurations.

Lining the basement’s reddish walls were framed pictures immortalising the part played by the venue in successive scene-defining eras across the past seven decades. Anybody that’s ever been anybody has played here, from blues and mod royalty in the 60s to hosting the first ever punk festival in 1976 and becoming a central hub of reggae, Northern Soul and the South African Jazz scenes through the 80s. Secret sets by the likes of Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Metallica, and Chuck Berry followed in this storied wake.

As Ella tells us midway through her performance, it’s actually the oldest independent music venue in the world, and remains family-run to this day. There’s a cosy atmosphere as supporting act Pearl Fish takes to the stage with an acoustic guitar and a shruti box, a harmonium-style drone operated using foot-cranked bellows. Across a setlist of her own material and old folk tunes, the utterly captivated audience hung on every soft half-spoken word, every mesmerising vocal run, each plucked chord and stirring drone swell. An ode to a friend in the audience led into the excellent ‘Go to Sleep’, inspired by late-night journeys through South London on the N171 bus. “Half the lines are from the drunk fuckers that were there with me,” she laughs.

Thoroughly warmed up, shortly after 9pm Ella took to the stage with her 5-piece band to perform her recently-released second album in its glorious entirety. Her bounding energy infectious, she grins through the swaying ‘Please Me’, smooth blues guitar licks punctuating her soaring vocals. Through the driving ‘Mouth Said Money’ and slow burning ‘Dolomites’ the band was tight, Ella’s voice a lightning rod through a heady storm that melded elements of R&B, folk, indie rock and jazz. It was a potent cocktail that we sipped slowly across the night, each concertgoer savouring every taste.

Her 5-part band expanded to 7 for ‘Ripples’, with cello and violin adding earthly warmth to the ethereal track. “Sometimes you find it much easier to put something into a song than say it out loud”, Ella tells us, and it’s in hushed tones that the heavy weight of emotion is unravelled. “I carried your baby for seven long weeks,” she sings as the song comes to a close. “And you couldn’t save me, no you didn’t speak / Now there are ripples in my bed sheets”. With her final admission “I can’t help but feeling incomplete,” the crowd erupted into hearty cheers, shattering the sombre silence in appreciation of its devastation.

“A lot of this album sits between craving connection and feeling it… between intimacy and fear”, an impassioned Ella told the crowd, detailing how it was almost entirely recorded across three days at George Ezra’s Hotel Quebec Studios, written over years prior. Her singalong title track was written about a terrible first date at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. “Could it be you? Nah!”, she laughs. And yet the entire audience were drawn together as we sang along to the cautiously optimistic hook, entranced by the hopefully romantic track.

Her band – comprising of Harry Whitty on keys, Will James on electric guitar, Josh Walker-Martin on drums, ben Manning on bass, Sloane Monroe on violin and G Lo on cello – remained excellent across the evening, yet it was the moments of stripped-back of acoustic charm that pulled hardest on the audience’s heartstrings. ‘Seagull Song’ began with Ella lone on guitar, joined only by the seagull imitations of G Lo’s bowed cello, drawing rampant applause from the crowd. Joined by beautifully arranged strings, the rousing track swelled into serenity before drifting away.

Later we were treated to a first performance of a new song, a love song in fact. “I believe in destiny” Ella hopefully murmurs midway through, the crowd hooked as she makes her way through the track with just her voice and acoustic guitar.

Her defiant final act was the friendship love song ‘As You Are’, closing off her second album with one last dose of earnest songwriting and folkish allure. Barely bothering with the performative pretence of stepping off stage, she jumps straight into an encore of ‘Murmurations’, the title track of her 2022 debut. It’s Ella at her wistfully vulnerable best, confessing “All the things I didn’t say, maybe it’s better that way” in the climactic grand finale, with drums, keys and strings entering together to make this last moment special.

Then her set was over – but in truth none of us wanted that special night of music in that special place to come to an end. Maybe in decades to come the photos we took that night could hang on those very walls, a memento to a legendary night that marked the rise of the most recent singular talent to descend those exalted steps.