Charli XCX at Lafayette review: a sweaty, rib-rattling release bursting with love

Charli XCX’s career has been built on fruitful collaborations and songs about infinite nights out with neverending afters - basically, she does not seem like a person who would thrive during a global lockdown. For a long time the album that she made during those long, strange months in 2020 (How I’m Feeling Now) didn’t feel like it would ever reach its full potential - making a sweaty club full of screeching people dance - but at Lafayette on Sunday night all that pent up energy finally found its outlet. More than any other live show I’ve seen since gigs returned, this show said: lockdown is over - now make out with the stranger next to you.

Of course, it’s sort of surreal to be feeling that during a time when another lockdown seems like it might actually be a good idea, but the release that Charli XCX brought to the small venue bit its thumb at all that. She strode out looking like someone from The Matrix styled by Miss Piggy, all flouncy black and Oakley sunglasses with a high ponytail that would make Ariana Grande wince.

As an aficionado of autotune, Charli doesn’t give a powerhouse vocal performance. That’s not the point - rather, she gave us something that drew on the pummelling energy of dank techno clubs and the melodrama of a drag show. She thrived on the small stage with mere inches between her and the crowd, and threw her body through gyrations and air punches as though she were an anonymous body in a crowd. She occasionally got frustrated that the power she was giving out wasn’t matched by a crowd who seemed bowled over by her. “I wanna see you f***ing do something,” she yelled as her song forever descended into clanking industrial noise with a beat that wanted to see you on all fours. “Anything!”

Songs that had failed to grab me on record fizzled and spun as she rattled through the album’s 11 songs: it seemed to confirm that no Charli XCX song can reach its full potential without feeling the bass rattle your rib cage. At one point I checked the time and marvelled that we were only half an hour in - it had been half an hour of relentless movement and songs that ceaselessly rushed into one another.

The tenderness of c.20 and party 4 u was a reminder that under that brash bravado and demands for more beats is a heart that truly ached for human connection during the time when all we had was Zoom. Charli XCX gave us the anti-lockdown: a thrumming, crackling mass of sweaty, breathless, clawing love.

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