Is Brat summer over? Not if Charli xcx has anything to say about it.
The singer, fresh off a trip around Europe, has had quite the year. Since supercharging her rise to the top of the pop tree with her zeitgeisty album Brat, she’s been cementing her place there with her hardcore live performances – featuring spitting, sneering and a fair amount of thrashing.
At this point, the Charli machine is a well-oiled one: such is the aura of cool mystique around her that she almost didn’t need to sing to deliver a performance at LIDO Festival in Victoria Park. The moment she appeared on stage in the golden glow of the setting sun – framed by a tattered green Brat banner – the crowd began to cheer, and didn’t stop until the show was over.
She was on full business mode here. No audience banter, no heartfelt speeches to the crowd: she delivered a perfunctory, “you ready?” before launching into her set.
The fans wanted Brat, and she gave them it in spades, kicking things off with 365, then the song’s counterpart 360. That was followed by a punchy Von Dutch, which lit up the all-black stage in flashes of white, among the shattering bass lines.
I might say something stupid came right on its heels – slower in tempo, which featured a lot of Charli writhing around on the stage as the bass dropped crushingly hard. Although in fairness, the same could be said for a lot of the set, all of it faithfully captured by the Jumbotron camera, which followed her around like a puppy dog. The girl has knees of steel.
All the hits were there. We had Apple, for which Charli carted out an Aperol spritz and proceeded to drink it while the audience sang the chorus at her. We had Speed Drive, where she asked the audience – distinctly unimpressed – “you out there, or what?”
We even had the remixed version of her Lorde collab, Girl, so confusing – after which she fully left the stage, leaving the crowd to cheer at the space where she’d been for five minutes. She was negging the crowd hard, and they were loving it. This was a performance with an absolute confidence in her own ability to command a crowd, even when she wasn’t in front of it.
The only truly dud note came, oddly, when she brought on guests Bladee and A.G. Cook – both of whom had played earlier in the day – for a version of her hit Rewind. “Wait, wait,” she exclaimed, as Bladee kept missing the cue for his verse. “Are we playing the wrong version?”
Even when they launched into the correct one, though, the fan response was muted: an occupational hazard of bringing on guests like Lorde, Troye Sivan and Billie Eilish in previous sets.
With energy levels flagging, things closed out with a punchy all-hit finisher: her revived hit Party 4 u (“f*****g louder!”, she demanded, as the audience failed to cheer wildly enough), Vroom Vroom, and then a cover of the song she wrote for girl band Icona Pop, I Love It.
It was an odd one to end on – a departure from Brat in favour of some high-energy, sugar-sweet pop – but the crowd bellowed out every word, and when the beat dropped, the energy went through the roof. The party girl energy was undiluted; looks like we’ll be enjoying Brat 2.0 for a while yet.
