HER SOUND IS ROOTSY AMERICANA: SOOTHing, conversational songs with lyrics about hope in hard times and the magic of self-belief. Lady Nade — AKA Nadine Gingell — is a vocalist with more than a flicker of Nina Simone to her style. Gingell has a solid fanbase in the UK and US, which she earned, like Simone, through regular live performances in modest-sized music venues. Some artists suit venues that offer comfort with a sense of warm encounter, rather than cavernous stadiums built for digitally enhanced extravaganzas, or dank basements with questionable acoustics.
“I’m so happy to be here,” Gingell (right) told the audience when she took to the stage in Bristol — her home city — late last year at the re-opening party for the Bristol Beacon concert hall (formerly the Colston Hall), after a £132 million, five-year restoration project by architects Levitt Bernstein.
The Beacon — with its concert hall that seats just over 1,800 people — is a significant, unusual and possibly riskymid-sized venues with architecture, interiors and technology that offer audiences an intimate sense of drama and occasion rather than a distant, digitally-enhanced spectacle or a crowded pub backroom, and a greater degree of comfort than a plastic bucket seat. But they have their work cut out to lure audiences, and they are hoping that architectural and design details will set them apart.
