I feel bad for Laura Jean tonight. Not because she isn’t good (she’s actually much better than merely good) but because this is apparently a receptive crowd by her standards. “Thank you for being such a lovely audience,” she says, a picture of earnest gratitude, “I can really feel the energy coming from the crowd”. By the time the sets ends with the dreamily gorgeous ‘Valentine’, that energy is well and truly being spent elsewhere: I can barely hear her from the edge of my front-row seat. It’s the crowd’s loss – on tunes like ‘Eve’ and the melancholy ‘It’s Supposed To Be Summer’ her voice is lump-in-the-throat moving and mines a dark and lovely shade of autumnal folk. Think a less expansive Vashti Bunyan, or the mood of Watership Down bottled and turned into music. She could be anything.

Tonight’s headliner, meanwhile, has already established herself as a singer-songwriter of impeccable pedigree. Uber-hip Canuck Leslie Feist covered her ‘1-2-3-4’ and the Swedish wunderkind Jens Lekman made a guest appearance in her Laneway set last year, while the likes of Sarah Blasko, Holly Throsby and members of Bluebottle Kiss can all be spotted in this sold-out crowd. The good news for her admirers is that her new album, Somewhere, Anywhere, improves on its attention-grabbing predecessor, trading her idiosyncratic, sample-heavy and sometimes cluttered approach for a simpler brand of symphonic folk. Its opening track, ‘Cheer Me Up Thank You’, is typical of the live incarnation – a soaring mood-lifter which bears the influence of Wuthering Heights (both the book and the song). Existing on the less freaky margins of the freak-folk movement and contemplating traditional balladry from a pointedly modern standpoint, Sally Seltmann’s approach is increasingly producing something both unique and beautiful.

by Daniel Herborn