Amanda Marshall at The Lower Third, London

This one goes back thirty years for me. At a party in North Sydney, Australia, in 1995, someone put on a fresh new CD and a dark, strong voice hooked me before the first chorus. I searched for that record for a long time afterwards, and finally found it on a visit to London in the summer of 1996, exactly thirty years ago, my first Amanda Marshall album, the self titled debut with “Let It Rain” on it. I played it at full volume on a friend’s stereo that night, powerful guitars and all, and I’ve been buying every album since. The reckless little line in “Sunday Morning After” about waking up with a snake tattoo, tongue pierced too, still makes me smile thirty years on. So walking into The Lower Third tonight, past the awning on Denmark Street, where half of British rock once hung around, and into a room crowded with expectation, I have to admit I was moved. It closes a genuinely long, curvy loop, in the same city where I bought that first CD.

Amanda Marshall grew up in Toronto, singing and playing piano before she could really be called a teenager, and was discovered on the city’s Queen Street West bar scene by guitarist Jeff Healey, who took her on the road and effectively launched her career. Her self titled 1995 debut went Diamond in Canada and gave her a run of hits, “Birmingham,” “Dark Horse,” “Let It Rain,” pop rock in the vein of Sheryl Crow with a growl borrowed from Melissa Etheridge, earnest, eager to please, and already full of the character driven storytelling that would define her writing. Two more albums followed, “Tuesday’s Child” in 1999 and “Everybody’s Got a Story” in 2001, the latter pushed by producers Peter Asher and Billy Mann toward a noticeably 2000s R&B sound, the first record where the blues under her voice really started to show.

Then she disappeared. In 2002 she fired her manager, and what followed was, in her own words, “this contentious, acrimonious, ugly divorce,” a legal fight with both manager and label that swallowed her recording career for two decades. She’s since said the forced pause turned out to be the best thing that happened to her, she’d been in the business since she was fifteen, and stepping off the treadmill let her grow into herself on her own schedule. The songwriting never stopped, it just stopped being anyone’s business but hers, and that private stockpile became “Heavy Lifting,” released in 2023, twenty two years after her last record and a Juno winner within a year. It’s a bluesier, funkier, funnier record than anything she made in her twenties, southern rock harmonica, late ’70s Philadelphia soul, and lyrics that look straight at hard subjects instead of writing around them.

Tonight was billed as the small start of a much bigger thing, a warm up ahead of her “Dirty 30” anniversary tour back home in Canada this winter. Walking down Denmark Street beforehand, past shop window after shop window of guitars, I remembered why, this is the old Tin Pan Alley, the street where half of British rock once rehearsed, recorded or just hung around, Bowie among them. The Lower Third takes its name from his first backing band, and sits in a basement space that in an earlier life, as the 12 Bar Club, gave early stages to Adele and Jeff Buckley. It holds maybe two hundred people, and by the time I arrived there was already a queue out onto the street, people who’d claimed their spot at the front an hour before doors. These days Amanda Marshall is built for much bigger rooms, so a space this size, this ticketed, this quietly devoted, felt like something closer to a private session. More than a few Canadian accents in the crowd, evidence enough that she has a fanbase here that never left.

She played backed by Will Hebbes and Al Rowe, two guitarists from the Toronto-based backup band Agenda, joking that the rest of the group had stayed home. She opened with “Let It Rain,” her 1995 debut single, a slow plea to stop bottling up her feelings and let the rain wash them out, before moving into new single “Can’t Lose Me,” barely a month old, released 23 June and the first taste of a deluxe edition of “Heavy Lifting” that had itself come out just six days before the show. By the time she reached “If I Didn’t Have You,” she paused to tell the room this wasn’t her first time in London, she was last here in 1999, on tour with Whitney Houston through Europe. On the final night of that tour, she said, Houston herself walked out at the start of that same song, wrapped her in a hug, and whispered God damn, I love this song. Tonight she dedicated it to her mother, who lived in London for ten years before moving to Canada, and to her aunt Dory, ninety four, who still lives here.

A few songs later she introduced “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” the other newest thing in the set in every sense but the recording date, it only made it onto record in 2023, as a bonus track on the reissued debut, decades after she first cut it. She told the story of how that came to be, back in 1994, when she signed her first record deal and its first ask was a contribution to a Neil Young tribute album. She pulled together a band and cut the song herself, until Jeff Healey wandered into the studio at three in the morning, said he loved the song, and asked to sit in. He ended up producing the track too, she said, though since he was signed to another label at the time, he never got the credit. “Marry Me” followed, always my son’s mother’s favourite. Late in the set came “Dark Horse,” her own co-write about betting on an unlikely romance against the odds, and she couldn’t resist telling that story too, how Elton John heard it, called it a guaranteed hit on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, and tracked her down by phone at a hotel restaurant in Whistler, British Columbia, to ask if she’d written it herself and to warn her not to let the record company screw it up. They did anyway. She closed with “Birmingham,” her signature song about a woman driving away from an abusive marriage in the middle of the night, toward the hope of a better life. The encore was “Sunday Morning After,” the very song whose snake tattoo line opened this piece, thirty years after I first heard it in someone’s living room in North Sydney.