ABC, Glasgow
It is surely no coincidence that Eliza Doolittle's UK tour has kicked off just as the clocks have gone forward and the first mild breezes of spring have begun to blow. The 22-year-old Londoner's sound (twee, gently soulful picnic pop) and look (tonight: midriff-exposing pink top, yellow shorts, sparkly trainers, waist-length curly locks) are so sunshiny she might as well have just emerged from hibernation since last summer, when her platinum-selling self-titled debut album was released. To have prompted so many of her teenage-girl fans to totter into town in their high heels and hot pants during colder months would have just been irresponsible.
The stage is framed by two huge pairs of legs, clad in rollerblades, stretching skywards. Doolittle's backing band sport perma-smiles, buttoned-up baby-blue shirts and bow ties. Her light, chirping, mockney voice brings an instant hit of minty freshness, and she dispatches tonight's opener, Moneybox, with all the effortlessness of Lily Allen's even cockier little sister.
It is a shame, then, that her repertoire reveals itself to be so limited, and that Doolittle delivers it with such limited conviction. The sweetness overload of her music suggests a performer with all the bounce and sparkle of a kids' TV presenter, but she comes across more like a moody teen roped into helping out at a younger sibling's birthday party. You can practically feel her blushes as she participates in the cutesy shtick of reaching into a big red toybox to pull out a ukulele, on which her guitarist strums the skiffly opening chords of Skinny Genes. When it comes to the mandatory audience-split-down-the-middle singalong, Doolittle rattles it off without so much as a cursory, "I can't hear you!"
Her best song, an unreleased R&B acoustic number penned when she was only 17, provides an intriguingly angsty counterpoint ? "You said you wouldn't hurt me/ Now I just feel dirty" ? though its impact is promptly negated by a tedious lounge cover of Bruno Mars's Grenade.
Doolittle's biggest hit, Pack Up, gets a mostly inert crowd swaying gently with its Cuban rhythm and upbeat chorus (lifted from Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag), before a take on Kanye West's mildly sweary Runaway ? a curiously biting choice of closing song, however brightened and abridged her version is ? adds to the nagging suspicion that Doolittle might next prefer doing something she, let alone everyone else, can take a bit more seriously. If she is to enjoy a career that lasts beyond another summer, that is probably wise.
Gabrielle Union Alessandra Ambrosio Amanda Detmer Emma Stone Raquel Alessi
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