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Ikenna Offor steps into a curious battleground of darkness and light, grief and groove, and a complex overlay of moods with Emma-Jean Thackray
Image by Victoria Wai
Tonight, the Sage Two stage is a curious battleground: darkness and light, grief and groove, a complex overlay of moods. Emma-Jean Thackray stands at its centre with the quiet confidence of someone mapping her own emotional terrain in public. Her latest album, Weirdo – a lustral meditation on loss, mental turbulence and renewal – underpins the set, yet live, it grows into something more unpredictable, more communal. Thackray treats the crowd less as spectators than witnesses, co-conspirators even, in her process of reckoning and release. And through it all, she remembers to make us move.
The London-born multihyphenate opens with a swelling instrumental build – synth washes, brass shards, subtle tension – before stepping forward to speak, to sing, to summon. The band, tight yet mercurial, expands and contracts around her, shifting seamlessly from meditative jazz to cosmic funk to heavy-lidded ambient drift. At times, her voice cracks with vulnerability (Save Me, Wanna Die), revealing the emotional fissures beneath the composure; at others, she commands distortion and punch (Black Hole) with punk vitality, channelling defiance through dissonance.
Midway through, Let Me Sleep arrives like a deep exhale. Thackray drops the bass, and the band breathes – sparseness opening a space where silence becomes part of the rhythm. Later, Golden Green unfolds as a slow-motion odyssey, a glowing current of synths and heartbeat percussion, its stillness charged and tender.
Even the lighting seems to breathe with the music, hues of violet and amber mirroring her shifting moods, drawing the audience deeper into her orbit. The crowd stays rapt – hushed when necessary, eruptive when the music demands. Thackray doesn’t pander to theatrics; her power lies in trust, in the belief that raw confession and musical risk are enough. On this night in Newcastle, Weirdo isn’t merely performed. It’s inhabited, tested and shared – bruising, beautiful and defiantly alive in equal measure.
