It’s difficult to fight the urge to push back determinedly against your rocking chair when an artist yells, “You can turn on the flashes on your iPhones and wave them around … if you’re lucky I’ll put it on Instagram” before launching into a ballad.
But then it is 2014, and we are in the presence of an artist who first made her presence felt on MySpace, and that’s precisely how Lily Allen introduced her sweet 2009 confessional, I Could Say.
Stopping off at Melbourne’s venerable Festival Hall (venerable or crusty – take your pick depending on your demographic) before her Splendour In The Grass appearance, Allen is accompanied by a small band, and the arrangements work better for some songs than others.
The opener, the shit-talking title track from her latest album Sheezus, finds her sweet voice drowned out by a muddy mix. Its follow up, Hard Out Here, fares better, perhaps due to the presence of a troupe of energetic booty dancers wearing 3D labrador masks (it’s hard out here, you see, for a bitch).
The diminutive pop star takes the stage – decked out with light-up baby bottles – in a Bowie-esque silver catsuit, teetering atop vertiginous platforms. Despite her Moonage Daydream throwback attire, in its brazen self-promotion this gig is a determinedly Web 2.0 affair.
Ducking off stage due to a “wardrobe malfunction”, Allen keeps her radio mic on in order to command the crowd: “Have you checked out the merch stall?” she chats, before returning in a Tumblr-friendly ensemble of holographic logo T-shirt and tie-dyed cut-off shorts.
Later, she’ll bark, “Thank you, Melbourne!” while looking down at her iPhone.
Impressively upbeat despite being struck down with the flu, Allen’s set is an even mix of material from all three of her studio albums, plus a few oddities like her cover of Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know (the soundtrack to UK store John Lewis’ tear-jerking 2013 Christmas commercial) and, less captivatingly, Bass Like Home, her World Cup anthem.
Her earlier material – LDN, Fuck You, the evergreen Smile – seems best suited to the band’s capabilities; newer songs like Hard Out Here seem bludgeoned somewhat by a guitar and drum-heavy mix. More than once I found myself wishing for the innocent days of a pre-recorded backing track. Allen’s voice has more oomph live than on record, so it’s a shame that it was too often overpowered by the band.
For all the internet-feminist aspirations of tracks like Hard Out Here and troll-baiting new single URL Badman, Allen’s personal politics are most arresting when she explores the complexities of being a working mother whose work happens to involve vast amounts of partying. Her new-mum FOMO anthem Life For Me – punctuated at Festival Hall with a rousing “Are there any mums out there?” – with its refrain, “Tell me I'm normal for feeling like this/It's a bit early for a midlife crisis” is a deceptively upbeat 21st century take on “the problem that has no name”.
Coincidentally, it’s also this song that turns out to be the evening’s most infectious live number. Its Vampire Weekend (or Paul Simon; the eternal chicken-or-the-egg quandary of new millennium pop) arrangements are buoyed beyond their rather slight album incarnations into something approaching M’bilia Bel at full tilt.
And, despite the all-ages crowd, it turns out there are quite a few mums out there, all of whom seem to revel in this momentary catharsis.
• Lily Allen is performing in Sydney on 25 July and at Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay on 27 July.
