Tonight, I saw Celeste. Accompanied by only four musicians, she scuttled on to the stage in something akin to a child’s knee-length princess gown, though stained by smoke and nicotine; symbolic of the loss of innocence and naivety that we all go through as we plunge into the darkness that we call being grown up. There was no pretence, no inhabiting any character. She bore her soul as though naked and vulnerable, yet the lighting often didn’t allow us to see her; the audience’s camera flashes illuminating her sporadically when in hiding. In between songs we were met with girlish giggles and anxious explanations of her melodic poetry; “I’m shy” she said; “I just want to make people feel good”.

Her presence distorted by the shadows of the spotlight’s periphery as she moved in and out of view, but her voice soaring, huge and cutting, rendering the microphone almost futile. The frail body of a girl giving birth to the battered yet defiant soul of a woman; like a songbird’s piercing cry exerted from its tiny little lungs in the obscurity of a blackened sky. And as the rain hammered itself on to the roof, it washed away all sense of spatial awareness, as though leaving the room as one man and one woman.

In that moment, the person who I’ve only seen on television and on record sleeves stood before us; made of flesh and bone with a heart and a soul just like you or I. Down from the pedestal she came, and yet she still stood tall in her delicacy and her strength, her quietness and her volume, her enormous power filling every corner of the room from one orifice to another. I saw a woman reckoning with herself and with the world, giving us the ripened fruit of her arresting talent and honest labour - a gift we call music; transcendent of space, time, and language. Energy transmitted from one human being to another. In her own words: this is who she is, she is a woman of all faces.