Twenty minutes into Aldous Harding’s set, after a spellbinding version of Treasure, from her 2019 breakthrough album Designer, has provoked a particularly vociferous response from the crowd, she speaks her first words to the audience. It feels oddly like a warning. “I am friendly and open,” she says. “But we do have to do things my way.”
As warnings go, it feels a little after the fact: you could have worked out Harding is intent on doing things her way pretty much from the moment she walked on stage. That means a gig punctuated by long, pregnant silences – “the no charisma between songs thing”, as she puts it – during which Harding adjusts her microphone stand, moves a chair across the stage and switches instruments, which she has a habit of looking at as if she’s never seen them before. When she does say something, it’s often a non sequitur: “I found this guitar in a river”; “I need a reset because this” – the venue – “is … a dome”.
