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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 sort of fascinatingly 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?
Within the walls of the Co-op Live, at least, the songs themselves still pop. Charli has always been a live act who treats the bulk of her past material like unwanted toys, so this is a Brat-heavy setlist, with only the repetitive techno of “B2B” and the likely-too-confessional-for-this “I Think About It All the Time” left off. Original versions of the tracks tend to bleed into the versions released on Brat’s remix album, like a web of frenetic dance music being endlessly stretched, distorted and reimagined. Underwear-themed bop “Guess”, her collaboration with Billie Eilish, and the chugging, honest “Girl, So Confusing”, her track with Lorde, are the biggest crowd-pleasers – the former sees an on-stage cameraman shooting up Charli’s skirt as she crawls across a glass-bottomed runway.
Charli herself is not an out-of-this-world performer. Her vocals are concealed behind thick layers of Autotune, her movement more or less oscillating between static poses, Naomi Campbell-style struts, and floor-based gyration. But her limitations are oddly fascinating – her dancing seems improvised and unstudied, with lots of finger-pistols and arm-throwing. It might look awkward if someone less cool was doing it.
One of the major questions going into Charli’s arena tour was how well she’d translate to a bigger crowd. Her safe space has long been the dingy nightclub set, or the mid-size venue (“The first time I played Manchester 10 people came,” she tells the crowd at one point). As if not wanting to veer too far into big-pop-show territory – how deeply unchic – there are few bells or whistles in terms of staging. Curtains read “brat” in drab typeface, the word “GIRL” decorates the floor. A long rope hangs from the ceiling and lights up like a glow worm. An enormous shower at the bottom of a runway leaves Charli drenched and pawing at her clothes; a cage under the stage is there for her to writhe around in.
The crowd loves it. The floor is the most raucous spot in the arena, young bodies slamming into one another not unlike Charli shows of yore. But a party atmosphere is fostered even in the stalls – no one seems to stay seated, and few dare to ignore Charli’s demands to jump up and scream.
It’s unclear where Charli goes from here. She’s spoken for a few months now about the bubble bursting, that you “can’t be omnipresent forever”. Her attitude on stage – that nasty, scowling, you-can’t-sit-with-us glamour – suggests that a full embrace of the mainstream was never on the cards. Instead she’ll bend commercial success to her will, “twist it into new shapes” to quote an old song of hers. The fringes remain her home, no matter how many cultural moments bear her fingerprints.
On the way out, I pass a Manchester tramline employee informing her colleague that the woman playing the Co-op Live tonight is “that girl Charli SCS”, blending the name of one of Britain’s greatest modern artists with a sofa company you’ve probably seen advertised on daytime TV. “Never heard of her,” they reply. Even after a Brat summer, some things never change.