Charli xcx is smoking a cigarette and surveying her disciples from an elevated platform. Most are clad in the ubiquitous slime green that adorned the cover of June’s culture-swallowing Brat album, while some sport the same wraparound glasses as their unapologetic idol. Everyone is dancing in unison to Apple, a curious bop about nature v nurture, fruit and airports, that went viral thanks to a TikTok dance. The Essex 32-year-old nonchalantly waves her cigarette like a baton, controlling an orchestra of mainly gay men and young women, before unleashing a familiar trigger warning for an oncoming crowd meltdown: “Manchester, where the fuck you at?” she roars as delirium ensues.
It’s an unexpected spectacle. When this short UK arena tour was first announced in April, it felt slightly overambitious for a peripheral but hugely influential pop star. Charli’s flirtations with mainstream success – Boom Clap, Fancy, 1999 – were often sandwiched between more outre experimentations with various affiliates of gonzo UK electronic label PC Music, moving her into “if you know, you know” territory. Even 2022’s Crash, her knowing attempt at being a pop sellout, only spent two weeks in the UK Top 40.
This year all that has changed. From the British high street to the US presidential elections, via memes, a dedicated season (“How to have a Brat summer”, ran one Vogue piece) and nine Grammy nominations, Charli’s sixth album has mushroomed into a phenomenon. That garish shade of green is still everywhere, while “brat” was recently named Collins’s word of the year and redefined as “a confident, independent and hedonistic attitude”. Musically, Brat married Charli’s brand of forward-thinking, jagged dance-pop to easily digestible lyrics slathered in partying, sex and drugs, tapping into a collective desire for reckless escapism. October’s spin-off remix album, Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat, welcomed superstars Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish into her orbit and propelled Brat to No 1 in the UK and No 3 in America.
Like those two artists, Charli can now command a stage on her own terms. Flanked by two huge screens and a runway that leads to a small B-stage, with no band and no dancers, she is left to her own devices. The minimalism, paired with retina-melting strobe lights and the occasional puff of a smoke machine, gives the heavily sponsored arena the grimy feel of a warehouse rave. That’s cemented by a frantic opening section that starts with a remix of 365, featuring fellow experimentalist Shygirl, and quickly crashes into the swaggering 360 (“I’m your favourite reference, baby”). Shimmying in ruffled hot pants in front of a floor-to-ceiling fabric screen in – you guessed it – Brat green, Charli suddenly yanks it down to reveal nothing but more space for her to stomp around.
But Brat is more than just a party soundtrack, and tonight the gloriously empty tracks rub shoulders with songs that muse on alienation, questions of self-worth and loss. Rewind and I Might Say Something Stupid grapple with impostor syndrome – something you assume Brat may have only complicated – while the gorgeous So I, and its more pulverising remix, honour Charli’s friend and collaborator Sophie, who died in 2021. In the show’s club context, these are the moments you snot-cry on a friend’s shoulder, locked in a memory, before the lights change, a massive bass drops and you’re off again. A pummelling Spring Breakers follows, performed under the Perspex runway and beamed on to the screens as if filmed on a janky iPhone.
Two of Brat’s biggest remixes are also aired: the sapphic, Billie Eilish-assisted Guess and Girl, So Confusing, featuring Lorde, which finds the pair working out their differences over thunderous electropop. Neither guest star is present tonight, with their respective verses thrown over to the sweat-drenched crowd. Charli, meanwhile, sashays up and down the runway, revelling in her own status as go-to collaborator and surveying the magnificent mess she’s made. She then adds to it by spitting on the floor and dropping to her knees to lick it up.
Hopped-up Barbie anthem Speed Drive and the elasticated snap, crackle and pop of Vroom Vroom whiz by in a blur, while even the midtempo moments such as Party 4 U feature bowel-rupturing bass notes that shake the walls. As the set nears its climax, the B-stage becomes a giant shower, Charli splashing around to the detuned artifice of 2017’s blown-out ballad Track 10. It’s a small moment of arena pop spectacle, but the singer’s irony-laden, designer sleaze still makes it feel more foam party than early 00s Britney. Sopping wet, she then tears into a I Love It, her UK No 1 collaboration with Icona Pop from 2012.
It’s a neat reminder of how long Charli xcx has been around, and how far she’s come. In between the hype woman overtures – “I can’t fucking hear you!”, “Louder, bitches” and “Is that all you’ve got?” get more than one airing tonight – she tells us that one of her first gigs was in Manchester “to 10 people”. As 20,000 fans roar back now, the 365 party girl allows herself a moment: “Thanks for sticking by me”. It turns out sentimentality, like everything else, is so Brat.