Ljs: Jessie J; Jonny ? review

Scala, London; Water Rats, London

By her own admission, voluble Essex chanteuse Jessie J was "in the lungs and legs queue" when physical attributes were handed out. Standing 5ft 9in in her Vivienne Westwood basque tonight, J ? born Jessica Cornish ? has a voice so expansive it looks likely to annex great swaths of territory this year.

She has already won the double ? this year's Brits critics' choice award and the BBC's Sound of 2011 poll. Her unignorable debut single, the swaggering, sweary "Do it Like a Dude", became an instant YouTube hit and charted at No 2 last Sunday, lending some weight to the hype heralding Cornish as a British challenger to Lady Gaga, Rihanna and the rest of the transatlantic solo pop female hegemony.

The dancehall-rawk fusion of "Do it Like a Dude" was actually written with Rihanna in mind, J has revealed. But judging from this blustery set, rescheduled from December, Jessie J is playing for even bigger stakes. Under that basque lurks a diaphragm of steel, flexing in preparation for entry into the wind-farm A-list.

We're talking wannabe-Whitney. We're talking move-over-Mariah. There are no vowels, Jessie J believes, that cannot be improved by being stretched like chewing gum and injected with hot air. Melisma is the technical term for the affliction that increasingly plagues pop. Keen to demonstrate that they have "soul", singers now execute prolonged vocal runs while gurning, mostly at the expense of actual soul, which is something else altogether.

Tonight, J over-sings wildly on "Big White Room", which is being recorded live for inclusion on J's forthcoming debut (out late March, she hints). It was, she recounts, the first song she ever wrote, about a boy stuck in hospital, where ? thanks to an erratic heart and a minor stroke ? Cornish spent much of her childhood. But any ah-factor is quickly snuffed out by her Tarzan-like ululations and banal lyrics.

"Price Tag", though, is a hit-in-waiting with more fun to offer. Rihanna is, once again, J's reference point on a song that audaciously asserts that music, and indeed life, may not all be about the "chi-ching" and the "bli-bling". Hard to fathom, but this is news to some people.

It is, of course, quite disingenuous to sing "We don't need your money, money, money" when that is precisely what you need to sustain a career you have worked for since childhood. The young Jessie spent two years onstage in Whistle Down the Wind, followed by a stint at the Brit school. She cracked America as a songwriter, penning "Party in the USA", a hit for Miley Cyrus, before striding laterally into the limelight. Cornish is not short on steel, then. But she delivers her "Price Tag" with so much smiley ebullience that you are seduced.

The lungs and the legs are by the by. Jessie's most appealing quality is her lip. Thankfully, she spends just as much time talking during her nine-song set as she does singing. Fashion houses have started lending her outfits for longer than half an hour, she quips of the Westwood. It is hard not to warm to this gobby force of nature who tells shit jokes. She recounts a phone call with her dad about her chart placing. "That's funny," he replies, "Because I just did a number two." All Jessie J really needs, you imagine, is something for that bad case of the vocal runs.

Jonny might inhabit the same region of the pop alphabet as Jessie J, and their patter between songs is funnier. But that is all these two new(ish) acts have in common. The white-hot heat of incipient stardom that surrounds Jessie J mellows to a warm two-bar glow around Jonny, a self-effacing partnership of two indie veterans.

Norman Blake ? guitar and drum machine ? is possibly the soppiest songwriter in Britain, having co-piloted Scottish guitar heroes Teenage Fanclub through 20 years of lovelorn rock. Euros Childs ? keyboards and guitar ? headed the fragrantly psychedelic Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, a Welsh band whose forbidding name must surely have scared thousands off his charms (to whom we recommend 1997's Barafundle as a classic of British independent music).

You would expect lissom harmonies and dreamy-eyed songs about girls, of which there are plenty tonight ? not least "Candyfloss", their single. You can usually tell Blake's songs from Childs's, but sometimes, the two splice their melodics seamlessly, as on "I Want to Be Around You".

It doesn't all go swimmingly. Blake and Childs lurch through much of their debut album, miscuing the drum machine, and giving up on tuning guitars. But there is an instinctive certainty here that music is not all about the chi-ching and the bli-bling, but heart.

Kitty Empire

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