EMA tour kicks off in Brighton – without fish or chips

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Erika M Anderson aka EMA arrived in Brighton with her three-piece band last night, on the first night of a 17-date European jaunt that willl soon have taken in Belgium, Switzerland, Holland and Germany as well as England.

Looking and sounding 100 times fresher than her decidedly ragged last time on the south coast – at the Great Escape festival in May – Erika exuded an Valley-Girl air between songs that sat incongruously with EMA’s intense and impressive set, which jumped off on album highlight ‘Marked’.

“I didn’t try the fish & chips on the pier this time,” she admitted, hinting laughingly at dire gastro-intestinal consequences on a previous occasion.

One non-album track, the Sonic Youth-aping ‘Hey, Can I Stay?’, stood out – along with a raucous cover of Violent Femmes’ ‘Add It Up’, which surprisingly none of the audience admitted to recognising when the singer asked if they’d heard it before.

EMA ended forcefully with an effective one-two of ‘Red Star’ and ‘California’, the latter channeling Patti Smith as much as the rest of the set added pleasing extra psych-fuzz to the narco-dynamics of the first Breeders album.

The remaining EMA tour dates in England are in London, Bristol and Manchester, but Erika confirmed after the show that EMA would be back in the UK in November.

Full set list:

Marked
The Grey Ship
Breakfast
Milkman
Add It Up
Butterfly Knife
Hey, Can I Sta?
Anteroom
Red Star
California