Sober reflection demands acknow-ledgment of this show's flaws. It starts late, there are long gaps and the mood is broken when a faulty projector screen reveals a message asking the audience if they're sure they'd like to shut down their computer. But when she's in full flow, 24-year-old Atlanta-based Janelle Monáe has a way of blowing sober reflection to atoms.
This is Monáe's first UK appearance to promote her wildly ambitious full-length debut The Archandroid, and at first it's unclear how she will recreate its scope with just three musicians (dressed like Monáe, in crisp black and white) and a tiny stage, but the power of the performance is breathtaking. At various points, it recalls James Brown, Otis Redding, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Outkast, Jimi Hendrix and the Flaming Lips – not as a series of poses, but as a single ecstatic explosion of noise and showmanship, which seems more than this sweatbox of a venue can contain.
Monáe is a fine singer, as she shows on a version of the old standard, Smile, but she refuses to coast on her voice. She is constantly in motion. Sometimes flanked by two dancers in black cowls and plague masks, she punches the air in time to newsreel footage of Muhammad Ali, raises her microphone stand like a flagpole and dances like a robot doused with water, as the set flips between high-energy R&B and howling psychedelic rock.
Monáe is fiercely stylish but joyfully uninhibited. At particularly frantic points, her vertical coiffure loses its moorings and fountains outwards like Sideshow Mel from The Simpsons. At the climax of current single Tightrope, she channels Brown at the Apollo, wearing a cape, bent double and commanding her band "onemoreonemoreonemoretime". You feel like you're witnessing the most exciting new pop star in the world.
