THE ANCHORESS
VENUE UNION CHAPEL, LONDON
DATE 15/11/2025
SUPPORT ROXANNE DE BASTION
It’s natural for an artist to be affected by their environment. Roxanne De Bastion is certainly receptive to her surroundings tonight, standing onstage in the stunning, serene Union Chapel with just her Rickenbacker guitar and laptop for company. Flashing excited, nervous smiles at the audience, her first song, Erase, doesn’t quite break the ice – it’s a sombre, personal plea, albeit with a powerful, folk-fuelled vocal. Things pick up when De Bastion encourages some shouty audience participation on the punkier Molecules and Red And White Blood Cells – “It’s church, but Friday night!” she jokes, gently. There’s a rawer edge to the Billy Bragg-like Wasteland – commenting on the vast changes undergone by her native Berlin in the last century – and who wouldn’t be moved by the ‘collaboration’ with her late grandfather, Stephen de Bastion, I Remember Everything? A Hungarian Jew, he was a composer and pianist until the 1930s when Nazi soldiers sent him and many others as labour to the Russian Front, then to concentration camps. Her vocal melody over his distant, blurry performance from archive recordings is touching and lovingly done.