★★★★★
By Dylan B Jones
It’s 7pm on a Tuesday night, and a bald, bejewelled partier head to toe in millennial pink latex, wearing angel wings, feline contact lenses and stacked white trainers, is scoffing a packet of Fridge Raiders outside Shoreditch Tesco. Must be time for a Charli XCX gig!
In recent years, Charli’s proven to be a bit of a sonorous enigma. She bounces aloofly between bubblegum high school locker pop and deep, dirty techno/trance with startling ease, like a Bratz doll on ecstasy. Her last two feature appearances are a perfect example of her vicious versality; just in the last month, she’s appeared on both Rita Ora’s coy, mass-produced hit ‘Girls’ with Bebe Rexha and Cardi B, and Tove Lo’s gorgeously bolschy and defiantly sexual ‘Bitches’ with Icona Pop, Elliphant & ALMA. In terms of their sensibilities, messages and even titles, the songs are polar opposites of the pop spectrum, with entirely different listeners (except possibly gay men, with different factions loving both, but we need to get a life).
As a result of her defiant and seemingly unchecked polarity, Charli’s alienated some fans, and gained adulation from others. But her last two incredible, adventurous mixtapes – Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 – with their kaleidoscopic, capricious and queer roster of featured artists, have started a colourful and intriguing pop movement. The crowd is mainly under 25 and mainly LGBT, decked out in everything from aforementioned angel wings and latex, to orange camo trousers, chokers, wonderfully and deliberately tasteless halterneck tops, and generally anything else 90s and camp. Think Ally McBeal if she’d studied at Central St Martins and had a cocaine habit.
Her much anticipated show at Village Underground was dedicated to her most recent of these mixtape ventures, Pop 2. It’s a glistening hour or so of shiny, thrumming pop which flickers delightfully between homages to 90s house and techno, and the unmistakeable, plinky production of London-based and increasingly popular label, PC Music. As producer AG Cook plucked casually at buttons from behind a sort of Jeff Koons-looking DJ booth, an unseen Charli crooned one of her trademark soundbytes “Itzz Chaaarli” over a mic, and the crowd, to use a technical music term, lost their absolute shit.
She stormed onto the stage and leapt straight into euphoric Kim Petras collaboration, “Unlock It”, to ear-splitting screams from the audience. Intimate fan gigs like this always have an electric atmosphere, but this was another level and testament to just how important Charli is to her fans. The next highlight was a stonking rendition of cyber-feminist (good phrase right, we just made it up) banger, “Femmebot” with riot grrl realness from Dorian Elektra and show-stopping, wig-flicking dancing from London drag kids Caramelle and Tayce.
She got RAYE out for one of the few non-Pop 2 numbers, ‘Dreamer’ from her Number 1 Angel mixtape, and then Estonian rapper Tommy Cash, who’s got a whole cult fanbase of his own, for their collaboration ‘Delicious’. He bounced confidently around the stage with a huge rucksack and trainers, looking like a rebellious language exchange student who’d taken a wrong turn at Kings Cross St Pancras and found himself under a railway arch in Shoreditch.
This wasn’t a typical gig, in that Charli never had one of those “now let’s slow things down for a second” moments (and let’s face it, the only good thing about those is that you can go to the toilet and get a drink while the artist warbles begrudgingly through a couple of ballads).
No, it was wall-to-wall, sweat-dripping-from-the-ceiling, frenetic BANGERS. ‘Vroom Vroom’, ‘Taxi’, ‘Lipgloss’ and ‘Roll With Me’ were all cranked out one after the other, Charli pausing only to shed her iridescent mesh jacket, chucking it unceremoniously onto the stage then stomping on it. She was joined by acclaimed and mysterious producer SOPHIE, plus gave a shout-out to the more hardcore fans of PC Music with one of its biggest stars, Hannah Diamond, who joined her for ‘Paradise’ then dominated the stage herself with a gorgeous cover of ‘Fade Away’.
Everyone stormed back onto the stage at once, squad-style, for the big finish, a leaping, frantic and brilliantly messy performance of ‘Girls Night Out’ which in true Charli style, she’s only ever performed live. It’s seemingly not attached to any mixtape or album, and the jury’s out on whether she’s ever actually going to release it or not.
But that’s what’s so great about Charli. Her wildness, vagueness and aloofness is what makes her one of the most gripping artists in the game. She’s confrontational and unpredictable, keeps fans and music journalists constantly on their toes, and continues to churn out bizarre, mad and totally original material. She summed it up perfectly herself, as she yelled into the microphone, drag queens collapsing behind her and synth bumping madly in the background; “I may not be one of the biggest, BUT I’M CERTAINLY ONE OF THE BEST.”
Pop 2 is out now.
Read more:
