Zaho de Sagazan at the London Palladium
If you want a good, character-driven love song, look to the French. From Édith Piaf to Gainsbourg and Brel, the tradition of la chanson française has long offered melodies as beautiful as the words that carry them. Zaho de Sagazan, the 25-year-old singer from the windswept Atlantic city of Saint-Nazaire, stands firmly in that lineage, though she seems to reimagine it with every breath she takes.
On Tuesday night, she brought her new tour to the London Palladium, a performance that felt less like a concert than a collision of opera, theatre, pop spectacle and spoken poetry. Her signature repertoire – songs about the complications of love – has been recast in symphonic grandeur. With the Heritage Orchestra under the baton of Dylan Corlay, Zaho revisits tracks from her debut album, expanded by the lush sweep of strings, brass, piano and the eerie, wavering tones of the Ondes Martenot, that early electronic instrument known for its plaintive, ghostly sound. She calls the show a “voyage”, and that is precisely what it becomes: a lyrical journey through adolescence, with its crushes, its turmoil and its fragile sense of self.
De Sagazan steps onto the stage in a white coat and sneakers, wearing a wig styled into two upward coils. She begins with Aspiration, a song about the period when she smoked too many joints and realised she had to stop. As she repeats “ma dernière cigarette” (my last cigarette) over and over, she slips into a kind of trance, the refrain turning from confession into exorcism.
Her voice is the first thing that strikes you. It is dark, deep and metallic, every note weighted with intention. Her diction is flawless and sensual. She treats French as a sacred substance, each syllable held until it dissolves. One is reminded of Barbara, the great torch singer known for lingering on words. And then there is the way de Sagazan moves. She inhabits her songs completely, slipping between personas: a jester, a lover, a mourner. In Les Garçons (The Boys), she is coquettish and mischievous, declaring that she “loves all the boys” and cannot choose between them. In Tristesse (Sadness), she contorts and collapses, even grappling with the conductor in a burst of operatic despair. And in Les Dormantes (The Sleepers), written when she was 15, she mourns a friend trapped in a toxic relationship, her body pulled to the floor as if by the same invisible force.
The orchestra magnifies everything. It feels as though these songs had always been waiting for 50 musicians to lift them into their full dimension. Her words, paired with syrupy strings and a throbbing electronic pulse, sound both nostalgic and futuristic. There is something of Stromae in her too – the Belgian-Rwandan artist she cites as an influence – in the way she merges emotional intensity with mechanical rhythm. Melancholy, under her spell, becomes danceable.
She ends with her award-winning 2023 ballad La Symphonie des Éclairs (The Lightning Symphony), the song everyone has been waiting for (nearly 80 million Spotify streams). Then she returns for an encore, slipping a verse into English. When the final note fades, she disappears behind the orchestra. You leave feeling as if you have witnessed something rare and incandescent. Quelle artiste!
Constance Ayrton
Photos: Virginie Viche
For further information and future events, visit Zaho de Sagazan’s website here.
Watch the video for La symphonie des éclairs here:
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