Shania Twain at The Shacklewell Arms review: the biggest little gig in town

Every megastar should be legally required to do this at least once. Take the lights, the band, the glam, and cram it all into a back room that smells strongly of week-old lager and has toilets that could only be described as a war crime. (Madonna, if you’re reading this, my local Wetherspoons meets the above and does a very reasonably-priced carafe. Do get in touch.)

But Shania Twain got there first. One of the best-selling musicians who’s ever lived spent Saturday night (6 June) on the tiny stage of an East London boozer, close enough that you could’ve passed her a blue WKD and packet of scampi fries between songs.

She’s shifted over 100 million records and spent recent years working through arenas and a Las Vegas residency, and here she was, all five feet and three inches of her teetering above a sticky dance floor filled with 200 shoulder-to-shoulder people, in a pub better known for indie bands than country royalty (arriving 20 minutes later than scheduled, but she’s a superstar, after all). “Welcome to my very first time in a small bar,” she said, before catching herself with a grin. “Not ever, but since I was a child.”

The event was Virgin‘s doing, which ensured the entire thing was a full-on party, as is always the way. Cowboy hats at the door (nice ones – mine’s in my wardrobe now), Shania merch on sale, a drag show waiting for anyone with the legs left for it once she’d gone. The crowd was mostly competition winners with a little media folded in, which meant nobody was jaded, everyone faintly unable to believe their luck. Huns and gays out in force, and directly behind me an incredibly tall, rather terrifying straight man who scowled arms-folded through every bit of chat then came spectacularly undone the moment the songs kicked in.

Twain had dressed for an arena regardless, which only sharpened the absurdity: a sheer-sleeved black leather corset and high choker, hair past her waist, flanked by a band that was mostly women with a banjo player at her side.

The hook is her seventh album, Little Miss Twain, out 24 July, which she told us loops back to the bars she sang in around Timmins, Ontario from the age of eight. They used to announce her as “Little Miss Twain”, a kid with a handful of “little country songs” and no idea where they’d lead, she tells us, and the Shacklewell Arms simply handed that setting back.

The between-song talk had none of the rehearsed gloss these nights usually drown in (see: J-Lo and her teleprompter). Talking about how she was raised on her grandparents’ records, Eddy Arnold and Kitty Wells, before Glen Campbell and Dolly Parton loosened the genre up around her; the influences she claims are the storytellers, Dolly, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles. “I sort of consider myself a little bit more of all of those things with a country root,” she said. The Pat Benatar covers came later, paying the rent once the local country bars shut, and her own sound fell out of the crash, “almost like Pat Benatar learned a little bit about country music” over a country and western core. A few bars of ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot’ settled it. The set lived in the Come On Over years, and ‘Any Man of Mine’, ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’ and ‘Still the One’ landed far bigger than a room this size would usually be capable of.

The voice, for the record, is still immense, though you half had to take that on trust: 200 people screaming every word meant she spent much of the night pleasantly buried under her own crowd. ‘No One Needs to Know’, she shared, turned out to predate her record deal entirely, written with a guitar in her room at the golf resort where she worked. ‘I’m Gonna Getcha Good’, “quite a pop crossover turning point”, arrived with an aside about a present friend’s four-year-old who knows it only as “the robot song”. New single ‘Dirty Rosie’ held its own early on. When the floor opened for requests and most of the room roared for ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman!’, she gave us ‘You Win My Love’ instead, but just about got away with it.

‘The Gambler’ drew the longest run-up and the most warmth. Kenny Rogers was “one of my gods”, a heartthrob whose poster hung on her childhood wall, and she’d sung it at 10 without the faintest grasp of what it meant. “But I had to believe in it,” she said. “And I’m still doing it.” She closed on ‘Cotton Eye Joe’, which most would know as the 1994 Rednex techno-stomp but which is in fact a traditional folk song pushing 200 years old, built for exactly the evening’s banjo-and-fiddle hoedown vibe. The room went up, and then she was gone.

Deafening chants arrived for an encore that never came. No “Let’s go girls” – this girl had already gone. Then again, Shania Twain opens for Harry Styles at Wembley this Friday (12 June), the first of a 12-night run – perhaps she was saving the big guns for the bigger crowds.