There are those who primarily know of Annie Clark – the performer billed as St Vincent – as the ex-partner of the British model Cara Delevingne, a partnership lived in the full glare of paparazzi flashbulbs. That all ended a while ago, but the period was captured in painful, prurient detail on Masseduction, St Vincent’s landmark 2017 album. Clark is currently touring that record through summer festivals and roofed venues with a full band, a retina-scarring light show and a vague undercurrent of personal-political resistance; Fear the Future is the tour’s original name, although these latter-day dates seem to be operating under a lyric from Sugarboy, the first song on the setlist: I Am a Lot Like You! In these four walls, the performer declares, about halfway through the set, there will always be “a chance to hope and to dance” – but mainly, it seems, to boggle.
The banks of lights at the rear aren’t the only things pulling the crowd’s eyes out on stalks. Everyone on stage is dressed in tight flesh tones which, for a couple of seconds, registers as nudity – save for Clark’s thigh-high dominatrix boots and belt. (The band are in fact wearing leotards, dresses or shapeless jumpsuits).
Then you notice the male players have bowl-haircut wigs and what look like tights over their faces – as though they are about to rob a bank, or worse. Drummer Matt Johnson (formerly of Jeff Buckley’s band) and keyboard player Daniel Mintseris are featureless mannequins, while the women – Clark and Toko Yasuda, who plays bass and keyboards – get to breathe normally. As a performance, it’s hard to read precisely: of a piece with the plasticity, kinkiness and electronics swirling around the Masseduction songs and their videos, but with the tables turned: Clark is nobody’s vapid eye-candy, but a female musician playing with gender roles, control and abandon; very forbidding, a little inviting.
Or maybe she really just likes all the S&M get-ups. “I can’t turn off what turns me on!” Clark wails during Masseduction’s title track. One of the album’s fundamental appeals is as an unapologetic portrait of female desire.
Naturally, her sex songs are often about other things, too. Lubricious and minimal, Savior revs up like a flirty Prince tribute, getting a little shoulder action out of the crowd. The song’s lyrics detail a little light cosplay, but the roles we play for one another are the real issue. “Baby, I am not your martyr,” purrs Clark tellingly, before being undone. “But then you say, ‘please’,” she seethes, the final word stretched through a dozen notes as the lights flicker behind her, one of this show’s high points.
St Vincent recently revealed, in a 6 Music interview about her favourite guitar riffs, that she thought that particular melody up when she was 15. At the end of the song, a scary bondage gimp in a black vinyl trenchcoat appears behind Clark. He touches her shoulder creepily, before circling her and handing her an acid-yellow guitar.
That yellow guitar is one of many Clark plays tonight. Those who came on board with St Vincent before her more high-profile hookups will know Clark as a versatile writer and an incendiary guitarist; she was writing her fourth solo album before she met “some bluebloods” (the reference, on a song called New York, is probably to Delevingne’s aristocratic roots).
Not only that, but Clark now has her own signature instrument, made to her specifications. As though the flesh-toned bodysuits and pervy guitar techs weren’t enough to distract you from the music being played tonight, you find yourself obsessively counting her guitars – yellow, white, black, blue-and white, red, pink. There are probably eight in all; Clark swaps them round, sometimes after every song. You can only presume they need frequent retuning, because she wrings so much out of them, on laser-pointer riffs or solos that produce great dirty washes of sound.
The guitar solo on Digital Witness marks a turning point in the set, where Clark’s extemporisations go from functional, serving the song, to deranged smears of abandon; somehow, the band find an extra gear too, and become genuinely overwhelming for a time. Fear the Future finds Clark flinging her hair and creating a squall like 50 giant mosquitoes.
Rather than swapping types of electric guitar, Clark’s tone is consistent in this romp through her recent pop campaign and older songs, updated to suit the mood (80s, throbbing). She has spoken about how she updated these older songs, reprogramming them to work alongside the more synth-heavy last two albums. The results can be disconcerting. Although gnarly with guitar effects, Marrow, from her 2009 album Actor, did not use to sound like this rave monster version with added synth harpsichords. Tonight’s rendition of Cruel, from 2011’s Strange Mercy, turns down the Disney-ish orchestral filigree of the original, and amps up its disco undercarriage and Clark’s bagpipe-like guitar.
Does it all get a bit samey? Well, yes – although effective, the heavily stylised aesthetic of this show does grate, and the weirdness that used to be a feature of St Vincent’s output seems in thrall to a number of familiar 80s motifs. Back then, Robert Palmer had a notorious video in which a gaggle of models were dressed up as musicians. Although it’s clear that St Vincent is purposely performing a kind of takedown of that robotic, gazed-upon femininity, after a while, it becomes hard to separate from empty sexiness.
Gradually, though, as the sweat makes its way through her hair, Clark becomes more naturalistic as the set draws to a close. Laughing, she tries to insert Cambridge road names into New York and delivers Smoking Section with a husky, Left Bank feel.
The real weirdness in this otherworldly performer’s offering now lies, perhaps, in how fans are supposed to dance to what are often terribly sad Masseduction songs. Fear the Future imagines an apocalypse and pleads for reassurance: “my baby’s lost to the monster”, Clark gnashes. Young Lover is a harrowing portrayal of someone ODing in a bathtub. “I thought you were dying,” wails Clark. The lights throb, the 80s disco pumps on.
