When asked to explain why he used six different actors to portray Bob Dylan in his award-winning film I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes explained that “the minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he’s no longer where he was”. It’s an enigmatic quality the young English folk songwriter Laura Marling, who debuts here with a single that’s bleaker than reading Solzhenitsyn by candlelight in the Arctic, shares with her great idol. Just as there was much mythmaking early on in Bob’s career, there has been plenty so far in Marling’s who, so the story goes, arrived in London having travelled from a small village with nothing but a guitar.

(4¼/5)