Charli XCX is a fascinating study in self-belief. Backlit, she strikes an attitude in front of an illuminated cube, bookended by more lighting. There is no band: just her, dressed a bit like a flamenco aerobics instructor. A gauzy train streams behind her, which she regularly whips for emphasis when she’s not pummelling the air with her fists.
She cuts even more of a solitary figure because her last album, third outing Charli, contained multitudes. There were so many guest features, you suspected the artist born Charlotte Aitchison in Cambridgeshire 27 years ago was trying to make an ironic point about the current rash of pop hook-ups – a predilection acquired from hip-hop. That, or she was just revelling in excess, a familiar habit for an artist for whom the party never seems to end.
There are 15 guests on Charli. None of them are in Birmingham, but all are thanked in a recorded message at the start of the gig. It’s worth listing them in full for the breadth of styles they encompass: French visionary Christine and the Queens, Los Angeles pop outrider Sky Ferreira, positivity powerhouse Lizzo, soft rock auteurs Haim, out pop pin-up Troye Sivan, trans electropop singer Kim Petras, Estonian mischief-maker Tommy Cash, bedroom-pop arriviste Clairo, Korean-American electronic producer Yaeji, New Orleans bounce star Big Freedia, rapper Cupcakke, sex-obsessed singer-rapper Brooke Candy and Brazilian rapper Pabllo Vittar. Aitchison also thanks AG Cook, who produced Charli with her.
So: how do you tour one of the most populous albums of 2019, a work not explicitly, but still quite clearly about female solidarity and LGBTQ+ acceptance, without the album’s unique selling point – a posse? By having the brass neck to do it entirely solo. Aitchison plays the new album virtually in its entirety, with only volume and charisma to accompany her.
She does have some company towards the end, though. Each stop on this jaunt has featured a handful of local drag queens, who cavort around the stage for Shake It, one of the album’s strangest, most deconstructed noise experiments.
It has taken Aitchison some time to distil her essence. Her canon contains bona fide hits (some, like 2014’s Boom Clap, now retired), many standalone singles (like 2018’s near-perfect Boys, played tonight), umpteen co-writes, a few EPs (2017’s Vroom Vroom marked a turning point), a handful of mixtapes and two previous studio albums.
But Charli marks peak Aitchison – an album of resonant, sad bangers that gives both Robyn and Mark Ronson a run for their money, and which ranks up there with Lana Del Rey in chronicling a version of LA, one where car engines and loud parties and “blue and yellow pills” can’t quite drown out the whirl of the abyss inside.
Aitchison makes a little speech about this being the music she has always wanted to make, and although the onstage effusions of pop stars can become wearing with repetition, this one rings true. She began her career as a home counties teen prodigy who decamped to LA and spent years wrangling with the pop sausage machine, eventually emerging with artistic control and rekindled success on her own terms. She sings with a British accent. Sigrid wrote Don’t Kill My Vibe about being pushed around by older male operatives; Aitchison has been fighting that corner for years, bristling since 2013’s True Romance.
She has written for others, hiding behind the scenes. Most lately, she has turned to A&R. A Netflix series begins in mid-November, charting the progress of Nasty Cherry, a girl band Aitchison has convened. It remains to be seen whether her Monkees succeed, but for now, she’s swapped opening for Taylor Swift in stadiums for making small venues rattle to the sound of a bonsai version of an arena show.
The song Next Level Charli finds Aitchison ramping up the celebrations. “Turn up the volume in your Prius,” she yells, with a wink, interpolating the “vroom vrooms” from Vroom Vroom, a tune that later makes its own gloriously cacophonous appearance: “Let’s ride!” it goes.
In its infancy, pop was all about cars and girls (as a Prefab Sprout hit once satirised the work of Bruce Springsteen). Aitchison’s pop is largely about cars and boys, a tendency that reaches an apotheosis of sorts on White Mercedes. It starts minimally, with her vocals front and centre; they gradually warp and bend with effects. The chorus is pure pop schmaltz (“Like a white Mercedes, always been running too fast”) but it finds her apologising to a lover she has wronged.
Aitchison is not one for highfalutin theory. Her work is very direct: (“I don’t care!” yelled her first hit, given to Icona Pop, “I love it!” It comes in the encore). But she is an avant gardist’s dream, taking all the ingredients of pappy mainstream chart-filler – nagging melody, partying beats, R&B excess, youthful lust, EDM drama and soggy heartbreak – to the very edge of what a pop audience can aurally bear. The saccharine insistence of J-pop looms large, as do cheerleader chants. When Aitchison connected with a cadre of London leftfield producers like Sophie and AG Cook, working as the label PC Music (PVC music would have been a better name, given their productions all sounded like lurex rubbing against polyvinyl chloride), two disruptive imperatives chimed.
Sometimes, this set suggests Dua Lipa remixed by Aphex Twin – or, on the gustier ballads, Bonnie Raitt produced by the Crazy Frog. Vroom Vroom (which was co-produced by Sophie) remains all futurism and onomatopoeia and sonic aggro. Click is functionally a hip-hop cut, made up entirely of posturing and digital shock and awe.
Aitchison seems to be made entirely of swagger – every whipcrack beat gets a kick or a slap – but simultaneously, she owns up to self-doubt, mistakes, and regrets, capturing the grand drama of love going wrong. The tunes ring out of the cacophony. Gone – sans Christine and the Queens – casts her as an unexpected introvert hating “all these people”, but this anti-party anthem still manages to sound huge. Strafed with screes of sound, Silver Cross builds and builds but – crucially – never peaks, withholding the satisfaction of a conventional EDM-pop bass drop, or much in the way of resolution. It just ratchets upwards and plateaus, leaving you wanting more of its lurid neon oversaturation.
