Venus in the Town Hall:
Aldous Harding in Birmingham
The following review was written on the 28th of June 2026.
Aldous Harding's fifth studio album, Train on the Island, released just over a month ago, but by the time I went to watch her perform, these songs didn’t feel new. I’d had the album on repeat for weeks; while I untangled aprons at work;as I sat in front of my computer writing and rewriting my dissertation; it played out the pocket of my jeans while I pottered around my scorching hot flat. When I hadn’t been listening to it, the songs would rattle around my brain until I would give in and play them again. Myself and Concrete editor Jacob went to Harding's show at the Town Hall, arriving half an hour before the opener to find it almost bare. We joked that we might have been the youngest people there - most of the audience, to my surprise, were older. This wasn’t to say they were still. A man in his sixties watched in front of me and danced through the whole show to the opener; indie rock artist Vera Ellen. I hadn’t heard of her before but she was a welcome addition to the show, bubbly with an excitable stage presence and powerful voice. She felt friendly and welcoming, saying hello to her father mid-set. Stage presence-wise, as I would later find out, she was the antithesis to Harding.
Harding opened the show with Train on the Island, moving her hands slowly as she sang. Physically, her performance relied entirely on the nuances of her movement. From just listening to her music, the presence of her as a physical being was completely removed. I had no way of knowing anything about her as a person. This isn’t to say that I knew her by the end of the show. Her performance was intensely guarded, feeling neither loud nor open; charismatic but not friendly. I could imagine talking to her as she stared blankly at me or strained a small smile. For the first act of the show she hardly spoke mm uh huh between songs. I’ll loosen up eventually.
Harding opened the show with Train on the Island, moving her hands slowly as she sang. Physically, her performance relied entirely on the nuances of her movement. From just listening to her music, the presence of her as a physical being was completely removed. I had no way of knowing anything about her as a person. This isn’t to say that I knew her by the end of the show. Her performance was intensely guarded, feeling neither loud nor open; charismatic but not friendly. I could imagine talking to her as she stared blankly at me or strained a small smile. For the first act of the show she hardly spoke mm uh huh between songs. I’ll loosen up eventually.
Between every song she appeared to wake up. Her eyes would open, alert to the applause, as if she had forgotten for a brief moment that she was on stage. I wondered how much of this was an act. Her personality or rather, her movements were stiff, tense and calculated - which seemed even more wooden against her velvet voice. There was no doubt that it was theatrical, even in the smallest ways. A movement of a finger, a darting gaze across the room, a moment of relief at the end of the show where she lay down and let the instrumental of Coats spill over her.
At the end of the show my friend turned to me ‘she was looser than she was the last time I saw her’. ‘Looser?’ ‘She just sat on the chair last time.’ I was shocked but not much surprised, as tightness seemed to entrap Harding throughout the set. It was hard to see her as anything other than a marionette.
Where the intimacy lay in the performance was within the music. The album Train on the Island had taken the gothic folk style of her previous releases but played with lyrical confession in ways that are brighter and bouncier than in Warm Chris. The album isn’t slow but gives the listener plenty of space to think. It sounds like sitting by a pool on a hot summer day and wondering why you still feel like this. It doesn't tell a story in a traditional sense: it's more like fragments or fleeting thoughts of a narrative. In songs like San Francisco there's an almost-narrative about being drunk in the city which devolves into ‘why wouldn’t I wanna meet you, why wouldn’t I want to hold you’’ repeated over and over. The lyrics feel deeply personal but distant, more poetry than anything else.
Train on the Island feels aware of Harding's strangeness, and leans into it, without falling too heavily into the experimental, or the over-indulgence of sound that can often come with the pressure to be different. Instead the album, and Harding's performance of it, becomes tight, and careful. Where she can sometimes veer into the uncomfortable, the songs bring us back out into a warm safety which feels neither inaccessible or overly indulgent. The performance, while mesmerising, brought an entirely new dimension to her music. I Ate the Most, the album's opener, starts off with the lyrics ‘I’m not afraid like you’re not gay / I'm not old like you’re on the spectrum.’ and divulges into bulimic obsession.Watching the show, these confessions started to feel more whole paired with a lingering neurodivergence that now didn’t just exist in lyrics but physically as an all-too-familiar awkwardness. This is all to say that watching her perform the album, accompanied by harps and shakers, made the music feel all the more ripe.
Harding's performance is a must-see; for lovers of folk who want to feel entranced by some strange music and be seen in all their awkwardness.
Harding's stage presence manages to add unmissable layers of nuance to her music, creating an atmosphere that can only been experienced in person, and a memory I can keep in my pocket whenever I listen to Train on the Island in years to come.
As mentioned, Callie’s review was completed on the 28th June, with the photos used requiring a waiting period for approval. As a result, there may be slight discrepancies in dates mentioned within the article. Special thanks to This Is Tmrw’s Ted Spivey, who provided us with the tickets for Harding’s show and helped facilitate the creation of this article.
Want to hear more of Callie’s opinions on music in Birmingham? Check out Concrete’s first ever article, Callie’s review of The Beat at the Hare and Hounds in January 2025.