Norwich Arts Centre 21 October 2025
“I’m going to play lots of disgusting songs about fucking…” announces Kathryn Joseph to a crowd of hardy mid-week electronic music enthusiasts on a chill autumn night in Norwich’s Arts Centre, a beautiful medieval church that has been converted into a beautiful 21st century venue. It’s just one of several startling between-song statements that flavour this performance of her beautiful music.
Kathryn sings and plays an electric piano, her songs wrought over the years since her ‘Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled’ debut in 2015. Sparse chords underpin her extraordinary voice, an instrument that is simultaneously fragile and terrifyingly full blooded, with a tremulous vibrato that at one point threatens to put the windows out. It’s quite an experience, as are the electronic interventions Lomond Campbell summons up to swirl around her compositions. When Kathryn went to record at Lomond’s remote studio in the Scottish highlands, he added his electronic battery to Kathryn’s gossamer songs. As she puts it tonight, “The last album was about people I knew in abusive relationships and it was very sad and angry, and this psychopath turns them into dance bangers.” The result of this peculiar alchemic reaction is a fusion of nakedly emotional torch songs of pain and anger of a 50 year old woman who clearly does not give a fuck, entwined sensuously with Lomond’s starburst electronics and melodic sensitivity. It puts you in mind of the The Knife, and Karin Dreijer’s post-Knife outings as Fever Ray.
Despite the torrents of rage that gush under the surface of the likes of ‘What Is Keeping You Alive Makes Me Want To Kill Them For’ and the deliciously foreboding ‘Wolf’ from her new album ‘We Were Made Prey’, their creative relationship is clearly rooted in good times. They’ve just completed a tour supporting fellow Scots and simpatico emotional noise mongers Mogwai, and you can see how this delicate but powerful music would complement Mogwai’s fierce physicality. It’s heavy, but proceedings are considerably lightened yet again when Kathryn addresses the audience, this time with a question: ‘Who stands up to wipe after you’ve had a shit?’ There’s just four or five prepared to confess via a show of hands. She’s disappointed to still find herself in a very small minority (she’s been posing this enquiry every night of the tour). Her performance goes down a storm, and they are tempted back to play an encore. “I don’t usually play encores, I don’t really understand them,” she says. “I know I’m a creepy old Scottish witch who shouldn’t be allowed in your churches, but thank you very much.”
