Over the past few years, English singer-songwriter Ellie Dixon has been steadily releasing singles and EPs, the latest of which is titled Tales of a Knight. The singer, who is known for her quirky lyrics and unique use of household objects as instruments, decided to bring her bedroom setup to several stages across Europe on her Knight Club Tour. On the 25th of September, Dixon made a stop in Amsterdam’s Tolhuistuin.
Doors to the venue opened at 19:00, and while the queue was quite short, fans slowly but surely started trickling in in the thirty minutes before support act Phoebe Hall would take to the stage. Hall was joined by their best friend and drummer, Tom Want. They opened their set with ‘Real With You’, and the crowd enthusiastically clapped along as requested. Hall continued with the as-yet-unreleased track ‘Everything’s Changed’, which they wrote about feeling like everybody is watching you. A few songs in, Hall spoke about how a year ago they came out as non-binary and how they love writing about their queerness. In the song they played next, ‘Like This’, they wanted to embody the feelings of joy and resistance they’ve embodied. Hall played a couple more songs, including the vulnerable, softer ‘Naked’ at the end, before leaving the stage.
At 8:30 PM on the dot, the introduction to Ellie Dixon’s own set started playing over the speakers. “Once upon a time, there was a knight,” it began. About thirty seconds in, Dixon walked onto the stage holding a fake sword, loudly cheered on by her fans. She opened with ‘Renaissance’, and near the end of the song, she used the sword to knight a fan at the front of the room. Afterwards, Dixon swapped the sword for her guitar to play ‘Loose Change’. As stated earlier, Dixon basically brought the setup with her that she normally uses to make music in her bedroom. Before playing ‘Space Out!’, she told the audience how she made it using her laptop and the sounds of milk being poured into a cup and a pen being clicked.
After the first three songs, Dixon’s drummer Harry Ariyoshe-Pope got his time to shine in a little drum-off between Dixon and him, which turned into the intro of ‘Knight Shift’. She continued with the weird little love song, ‘Sucker,’ before telling the audience they were “going to play a game called guess the song from the medieval intro.” Besides writing her own music, Dixon also loves covering other songs in her own style. The song in question turned out to be Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in Love’. Afterwards, Dixon toned the set down a little bit, playing her unreleased song ‘Uppercut’, followed by ‘Thirteen’. In between, she spoke about how Tales of a Knight is an independent release and how this entire tour in support of it has been self-funded. An admirable feat considering the costs of touring nowadays, and her fans surely appreciated her coming here tonight as all of them sang along to every word. For ‘Thirteen’, a ladder was brought onto the stage so that Dixon could sing it while sitting down. She wrote this about loving “the little awkward thirteen-year-old inside you [who] you carry with you always”.
As soon as the ladder was removed again, Dixon played a shortened cover of ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’, showing the audience how she layers her vocals using her “magic microphone”. She then moved on to ‘Green Grass’, the “very serious” ‘Big Lizard Energy’, and the funky ‘Swing!’. Dixon’s set left a lot of room for both unserious as well as actual serious moments. Before playing ‘Dopamine’ on the mandolin, Dixon asked the audience to do a breathing exercise together. “We’re here, we’re all together, we’re all safe,” a heartfelt statement that left the room in complete silence. Dixon continued with a few more covers, namely ‘So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings’ by Caroline Polacheck, which she sang together with Phoebe Hall, and a mash-up of ‘Feel Good Inc’ and ‘New Rules’, which worked better than one might have expected. In between, she played another song on the mandolin called ‘Vibe Like a Biscuit’, “a tale of [her] travels”. During the entire show, a cup filled with little Dutch cookies had been standing on the stage, and it was finally revealed why when she started throwing these pre-packaged wafers into the audience.
Dixon ended her show with a couple more songs. The first was ‘Miscalculations’, the first and only song she has ever written during a panic attack about how warped and strange the world seems when one is scared. Then, she went all out with the angry ‘Guts’. The encore consisted of ‘Bounce’, for which Dixon came back onto the stage riding a hobby horse. Dixon jumped down into the pit before the final chorus so that she could dance together with her fans, truly thanking them for coming out tonight.
