Charli XCX’s Brat album - and the other versions that are the same but varying degrees of different - sounds very much like a love letter to club music and culture, and in a new interview, the star has been discussing her long-term devotion to the underground scene and how it’s helped her creatively.
“I was so inspired by nightlife when I was younger because it was so exciting and fresh,” she tells WSJ Style. “Where I grew up, me and my friends, we weren’t really ‘in’ culture - we weren’t experiencing nightlife or London - we were just watching [British teen TV show] Skins. And so to go to these raves and parties and stuff, it really affected me a lot.”
Such was the power of these formative experiences that Charli says they’re still influencing her work today. In fact, the sound of live electronic music - even when it’s recorded - still has the power to move her.
“I was playing the Daft Punk live album, the Coachella one, and that album makes me tear up. It makes me emotional, just because I think, wow, imagine being there in that crowd, listening to one of the greatest bands of all time in this huge, collective group experience. It’s a very kind of emotional place.”
We suspect the album Charli is referring to is Alive 2007, which wasn’t actually recorded at Coachella - Daft Punk played there in 2006 - but at an arena in Paris the following year. The staging and tone of the shows was similar, though, with the band performing inside their famous pyramid, which looked like it had descended from space.
Both the Coachella set and live album were widely acclaimed, and have since been credited with helping to kickstart the explosion in popularity of electronic music in the US.
Elsewhere in the interview, Charli XCX discusses the origins of the “gross and unpleasant” Brat green, and says that, when she was growing up, “I really thought that I wanted to emulate Britney Spears.”
She also offers some advice to her younger self: “Trust your gut, and don’t be afraid of who you are."
