“Who likes sexy songs?” Marika Hackman teased, four songs into the set, and was immediately engulfed in a huge swell of cheers. In truth, we needn’t even look to last night’s performance for the answer. Considering the deluge of positive reviews August’s album Any Human Friend received, it’s clear that a lot of people like their pop music sexually liberated, especially when the songwriting’s as witty and mercilessly filter-free as Hackman’s.
Certainly the Hampshire-born singer has come a long way since her days as an elusive indie-folk ingenue. To listen to her third album is to clamber directly into the mind of the 27-year-old, with its candid mix of romantic desolation and carnal desires, self-loathing and spunk.
That directness was accentuated last night in a performance that found a boilersuit-clad Hackman and her three-piece band further subverting the traditionally patriarchal and heteronormative conventions of rock music.
Opening with a sparse solo rendition of Wanderlust, Hackman was then joined by the band for the loose grooves of The One. At the song’s conclusion, Hackman laughed sharing the memory of performing the song before the pupils and teachers of her former school, with its “All you f****** want my d***,” kiss-off.
Hackman disarmed throughout with her subtly told stories of queer sex and masturbation, and these were the lyrics that received some of the biggest cheers of the evening, in All Night and Hand Solo respectively.
Lead single I’m Not Where You Are was similarly rapturously received, its irresistible hook both buoyant and taut. And when a bra hit Hackman in the face during the glitter ball-powered funk-pop of Blow it felt less like an intrusion and more an official anointment of her status as an indie sex symbol.
