Regina Spektor review – all hail a songwriter of substance

The other night in Liverpool, says Regina Spektor, she forgot how to play the chorus to Sailor Song and someone in the audience helpfully shouted out the chord progression. That’s the calibre of fan Spektor attracts these days. In Lizzy Goodman’s book Meet Me in the Bathroom, an oral history of New York’s recent music scene, Spektor remembers being mercilessly heckled by rock dudes when she was opening for the Strokes and Kings of Leon in 2003. Now people are more likely to scream “I love you!”, “Marry me!” or, bizarrely, “How’s your fingernail?”, all of which she fields with modest good humour. The Russian-born New Yorker, a slight figure in red and black, has never had a hit – her best-known work is probably You’ve Got Time, the uncharacteristically heavy theme song to Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black – so she’s a cult artist, but it’s a cult big enough to fill the Apollo.

The last time I saw such intense and occasionally clammy reverence was when Joanna Newsom played the same venue. The two artists have much in common. They’re both formidable songwriters, too often dismissed as “kooky” and “quirky” because they like magic realist narratives, because their voices sometimes creak and squeak, and, frankly, because they’re women. Tori Amos, Björk and Kate Bush know that feeling too. Infantilisation is the abiding curse of ambitious female singer-songwriters with a taste for the theatrical.

To be fair, a couple of Spektor’s early songs give the doubters ammunition. When she straps on an aquamarine electric guitar to play That Time, she resembles an ingenue in an East Village coffee shop. The dark whimsy is too gauche, the delivery too cute. Bobbing for Apples has one very good line – “Someone next door’s fucking to one of my songs” – but she repeats it until the joke is dead. These aren’t the songs you’d choose if you wanted to convince someone that Spektor is a songwriter of substance.

At the piano, though, she’s something else. Unlike her 2003 tourmates, she has got better with age, crafting a distinct but versatile sound from strands of rock, jazz, folk, musical theatre, Russian classical music and, on Small Bill$, even hip-hop. Her trio of musicians – drums, keyboards, cello – do a fine job of replicating the grand scope of her albums, especially last year’s Remember Us to Life. Most of Spektor’s songs are ornate narratives or character studies, as dense as short stories and as vivid as movies. At different points I found myself thinking of The Grand Budapest Hotel and the last season of Fargo: stories that are visually stylised yet emotionally profound, superficially witty yet thematically grave. The hair-raising, multilingual Après Moi conjures up images of chateaux and dachas and snow-covered forests. Surely it’s only a matter of time before Spektor writes a stage musical or does for a movie what Aimee Mann did for Magnolia.

Spektor’s songwriting voice is both wise and wide-eyed. She approaches big issues from a position of curiosity and humility. Before the darkly comic protest song Ballad of a Politician, she relates being a refugee from antisemitism in the Soviet Union to the current climate of “nuclear threats and bans and walls” in her adopted country. The Trapper and the Furrier is a critique of capitalism in the form of a sinister folk tale. She howls the closing words “More! More! More!” like a final judgment, banging the keyboard like a gavel. It’s a new song but it sounds old, in the best possible way. Her finest compositions have an ageless heft. Joni Mitchell would be proud of Samson, a biblical break-up song; Leonard Cohen would have doffed his hat to the existentialist fable Sellers of Flowers: “No one lives long enough to see the outcome/ To know any answers, to know what the point is.”

In the wider world, it’s fair to say that Spektor is underrated. Inside the Apollo, however, she can do no wrong. She’s even acclaimed when she fixes a problem with her piano or wrestles with her “disobedient hair”. Someone cries out a compliment in Russian. “Oh man,” Spektor sighs, “London, you have my heart.” Someone else pushes his luck by calling out a request. “Guys,” she protests, “I made a setlist.” She may project self-effacing charm but Regina Spektor knows exactly what she wants to do.