Halfway through FKA twigs’s performance of Video Girl, I didn’t think my Glasto music experience would be surpassed – it was an exquisite demonstration of tempo, speeding up and down like a panic attack coming in and out of control. Even the crane camera suddenly drew back, startled from one burst of movement.
But surpassed it was. Over the subsequent set, twigs showed off psychosexual theatre, futurist love song and elemental dance that can be counted with the greatest art being made on the planet today. Her band were masterful, triggering drums and samples live – at one point this involved a percussion solo being played forwards, then backwards, in perfect symmetry.
She was also aided by a troupe of male dancers who backbroke, vogued and glitched around her with perfect athleticism. Give Up flew into a gun battle of balletic vogue moves, with the body of dancer Benjamin Milan shot down in mid air – one particularly breathtaking moment. Meanwhile, Glass and Patron turned into a tableau of shifting sexual-power dynamics, the men variously hypnotising and hypnotised by twigs. In the set’s climax she chased them down, eventually mad and lonely, in a sudden heart-thumping narrative.
And so to twigs herself, whose voice wobbled with gratitude and emotion as she thanked her local crowd, having grown up just up the road. Dressed in an outfit that nods at Glasto’s penchant for glitter and which inverted the coquettishness of stockings and babydoll nightie, she does everything they do, but backwards in heels and is note-perfect.
Her trembling smallness can become steely and massive in a microsecond; she is simply the most adventurous pop star working today.
