Brazil’s biggest star brought colour and glamour to the dreary brutalism of the South Bank
On Tuesday 6th August one of the biggest pop stars in the world descended on the South Bank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. The usual crowd milling in the foyer transformed from bookish Scandinavian tourists and well-heeled literary Londoners, to an animal print-spattered, hotpant clad, bejewelled bastion of mostly young Brazilian girls and gays.
The burgeoning power of Brazilian pop music in the West is mind-blowing, and ever growing. Drag star Pabllo Vittar’s April gig at Heaven sold out in seconds, some fans getting trains from the farthest-flung reaches of the UK, just to get a glimpse of Pabllo’s flawless weave and peach-perfect buttocks.
Anitta commands an even bigger audience and – despite some misgivings over her silence on the subject of Bolsonaro – a formidable gay following. She’s currently Brazil’s biggest pop star, with streaming numbers to rival the likes of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.
Like much of popular South American music right now, her sound is relentlessly uptempo, colourful and high energy. Which could explain its increasing popularity in the Northern Hemisphere. The cheeky lyrics, unselfconsciously nuts production and infectious, danceable hooks are a welcome respite from the soulless underproduced pop that’s been dominating the UK charts for almost a decade now.
She stormed into London as part of Nile Rodgers’ Meltdown Festival at the South Bank, a week-long celebration of Nile’s favourite artists and collaborators, spanning several decades, genres and cultures. It’s an ingenious, always acclaimed initiative from the South Bank – last year’s Meltdown was curated by The Cure’s Robert Smith; the year before, M.I.A.
But one thing’s for sure, The Royal Festival Hall has never seen anything quite like an Anitta gig. The venue’s friendly, timid staff looked on with a mixture of faint horror and barely contained laughter as the singer’s healthily energetic fanbase proceeded to knock back drinks, screech, snog and twerk all over the seats, light fittings and one another.
Anitta bounced through one song after another, rarely slowing and never totally stopping. It went on, relentlessly, for an hour and a half – the end result was the musical equivalent of escaping a multi-car motorway pile-up. Highlights included perhaps her most UK-friendly song in terms of sound, “Is That For Me”; a fun, plinky pop number with a tropical vibe, reminisicent of Dua Lipa’s earlier work.
Bolschy banger “Vai Malandra” was when things really kicked off though, the RFH’s tasteful brutalist ceilings literally shaking as Anitta effortlessly skipped across the stage as sleek dancers flipped and dived around her like dolphins.
The whole experience was exhausting and unapologetic in the extreme – if the Telegraph had been there reviewing it (needless to say, they weren’t), they might have dubbed it “vulgar”. In fact, it WAS vulgar, and that’s what was so great about it. If the UK pop scene embraced a little vulgar, harking back to the days of Geri Halliwell licking poles and the Sugababes in toilet cubicles, people might actually start caring again.
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