It’s rare that a venue with all the cosiness of a 70s car park seems as intimate as a campfire gathering. Yet, when Camille and her three-piece sat round an oversized lightbulb performing an encore including Gospel With No Lord and an even more bare bones version of her/Nouvelle Vague’s take on Dead Kennedys’ Too Drunk To Fuck, the barn-like venue might as well have been a hut in the woods. But that’s Camille’s magic and, in just under two hours, she performed most of last year’s Ilo Veyou, inhabiting everything from dissatisfied customer in the rush to inhabit Mars (Mars Is No Fun), to spoof Piaf, goading audience members into a ridiculous dance as she pastiched her olde worlde homeland in La France.
Yet Camille is far too clever to overdo the clever-clever. Illuminated throughout the first half by one (normal-sized) atmospheric bulb, her show was as much emotional catharsis as witty showcase. A perfect mix of song, sentiment and shadowplay, She Was is – fittingly for such a shape-shifter – a meditation on reincarnation that stunned the Barbican into silence. At the end, audience members threw socks at the barefoot Camille so that she could moonwalk during a surprise Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. Piaf would’ve expected roses but a yellow woolly seemed more fitting.
