"Where've you been?" yells a wag down the front of Elly Jackson's first London gig in four years, an aeon in electropop, a genre that dates faster than a 12-phoned Tinder addict. "I didn't want to release anything that wasn't pretty much perfect," replies pop's lost neon imp, her tangerine coiffure, green shirt and red blazer making her look like a trick-or-treat Joker. "I took time to do what I needed to do." And to deal with some issues, including a crippling anxiety about the celebrity that La Roux's hits In for the Kill and Bulletproof inflicted on her in 2009, the split with her long-term cohort Ben Langmaid while she was writing the second La Roux album, Trouble in Paradise, and from the sound of it, being thoroughly dicked around romantically.
Still, she's putting on the bravest of faces and taking the album's title very literally. The stage is strewn with surfboards, palm fronds and cardboard cut-outs of 80s beach glitterati; and the bar serves cocktails named after new songs. In this makeshift paradise, Jackson dances around her dark and squalid troubles. "Why must you keep me in a prison at night?" she trills to an overbearing control freak on Cruel Sexuality. Tropical Chancer finds her falling for some Caribbean slimeball and Sexotheque concerns a partner sneaking off to have his sleaziest peccadillos pampered. These are sullen and internally fractured sentiments, yet they're still set within gloriously upbeat pop tunes, with churchy soul segments and tropical hints, that soften the spiked electronic edges of La Roux's debut and get the crowd doing invisible limbo. Even Silent Partner, which finds Jackson pleading for escape from a violent relationship, is effervescent doom disco that becomes a Billie Jean remix and, finally, a rave Batman theme.
With so many harmonies and backing vocals emanating from one microphone, it's tough to tell just how much is being played live, but when these fresh neo-disco classics mingle with first-album favourites to form the bedrock of a formidable pop canon, it's best to just revel in this Paradise regained.
• La Roux: 'I don't get fame. I don't understand what you're supposed to do'
