Charli XCX is not your friend. Tonight, at Manchester’s once-beleaguered Co-op Live arena, she will wear her sunglasses indoors, smoke a cigarette on stage and not only spit on the ground but drop down on all-fours to lick up the mess. It’s a performance, of course – how else would Britain’s most exciting pop star kick off the UK leg of her Brat tour, with its built-in brazenness and sewage-dump-green merch? But part of Charli’s mean swagger also feels genuine: here is a woman fiercely uninterested in the milquetoast relatability demanded of her peers. Instead, she embodies stroppy chaos and cocaine-fuelled bravado, feral club-sweat rather than pristine poise.
All of this contributed to her cultural ubiquity this year, which lifted her out of the lower rungs of pop fame she’s called home for more than a decade. Brat – her sixth album – wasn’t just a collection of songs about sex, parties and insecurity, but a mood, a lifestyle, an entire season (“Who here had a Brat summer?” Charli asks, somewhat inevitably, between songs tonight). This tour, then, is a victory lap and something of a finale. The last gasp of a moment in time that was unexpected, mystifying and curiously amorphous: what was Brat if it could both adequately soundtrack a drug binge and inspire the early online aesthetic of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign? Will we ever know? Are we all too done with it to probe further?
