Live Review: Kara Jackson // Meltdown Festival // South Bank Centre, London 17/06/2025
Kara Jackson performs one of her last London shows in this current form by sending off a goodbye to one of the best albums of the decade with a powerfully intimate set as part of Little Simz’ Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre.
Kara Jackson had intended to cut down on international flying this year. She is an American native, responsible for the third US National Poet Laurette from 2019 and 2020 – and it shows in her craft; her writing and lyrics, and her ability to joke with a British crowd sweltering in the heat of a mid-June summer. When Little Simz calls you and asks you to come to London to perform as part of the expertly curated Meltdown festival – running across the entire week in and around London’s Southbank – with previous years having featured curated lineups by Christine and the Queens, Chaka Khan, Patti Smith, Massive Attack and Jarvis Cocker. It’s the oldest artist-curated festival in the UK – and who better to curate it than Little Simz? Enlisting artists like Ghetts and Lola Young, it’s a celebration of the best and brightest of currently working talent. Jackson is another one of those influential figureheads in the current music scene and Simz has caught her at a transitional period – the end of the old era and the beginning of the new. How *do* you follow up an album like Why Does The Earth Give Us People to Love? How *can* you? By giving us one of the best and most intimate shows of the year so far; of course.
First up is London born, Essex-raised R&B singer Konyikeh who takes centre stage with her track “Problem with Authority.” It’s politically charged – a response to all the authority figures in her life and a personal examination of her response to that display of power. “I got a problem with authority, That's what my daddy always said to me”, she says – “So who’s gonna save me? And who’s gonna raise me? I’m far from home with no place to call my own…” is a heavyweight of a song. Classically trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama she’s cropped up at a bunch of tastemaker festivals like the Great Escape in Brighton. Her heritage from Jamacia and Cameroon is evident in the music and she wears her love for afrobeats, dancehall and hip-hop on her sleeve. It’s easy to see why British Vogue credited her with ‘ushering in a new era of soul for Gen-Z’, and on this basis, it’d be hard to suggest otherwise.
Kara Jackson takes the stage to a muted, intimate presence. The set is only an hour, finishes at 10pm, and there will be no encore. But she makes the stage her own – it’s a wonderfully crafted showpiece. Her humour is excellent, she’s able to match word for word the British witticisms despite growing up in Illinois. At school, she claims she was told she was always bound to head to London one day, and here she is – again: at a transitional period. This is potentially the last time she will come to London for a while, and if she returns, it will be a new era. So she has enough time to dust off the hits from the album – No fun/party is a belter – “It's hard to have patience when you're waiting on luck like a postal truck,” Jackson says, saying that she’s “taken for granted, every person that I’ve dated tells me I’m intimidating,” and there’s time for much of the albums’ greatest tracks – pawnshop allows for a lengthy but rewarding segment about finding gold from other people’s trash. “What kind of miner does that make you? When I'm the gold and you're just a fool”, allows for more wonderful lyricism.
Jackson dedicates free to her mother as her favourite song – she was at an earlier show in the states, so it’s unlikely that she’s here too, she says – but what gets the most laughs from the audience in terms of the actual songs is her punctually charged therapy – “every man thinks I’m his fucking mother,” she tells a story of stand-ins and how men really want therapy when they want her. It’s storytelling at its finest across all the songs – not sweet but harsh and brutal – honest war wounds that feel delicate and gentle as they’re telling you hard-hitting truths. It takes a skill to master that and for Jackson it comes effortlessly.
Her taste is rich and varied – from hometown hero Amy Winehouse, who she credits on stage, to Pete Seeger, Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell – the blueprints are there. The structures for all these songs are boundary pushing and nontraditional in every sense of the word – and she makes these songs her own.
It's not just Why Does the Earth… songs on here. There’s also “I have a crush, keeping me up, I have a like…” for the aptly titled Crush, which she tells the audience not to judge her for writing for when she was younger, in her own words a far cry from her skill level as a wordsmith now yet it contains every bit the talent she was forming before our eyes. It still charts her evolving journey as a musical artist – especially talented and incredibly moving at every turn. If this is indeed, as she claims, the end of an era – then I eagerly can’t wait to see her next direction whatever that may be.
Words by Miles Milton-Jefferies
Photo Credit: Pete Woodhead
