‘Tonight is gonna be the best night of your life! It’s Charli baby, and I’m gonna take you to heaven.” Charli XCX knows how to throw a party, and this one – the first night of a sold-out UK tour – has it all. Rainbow-coloured strobes, mountains of smoke, surprise guests and, at the centre of the chaos, Charlotte Aitchison in a scarlet, matador-inspired two-piece, punching the air like pop’s own Power Ranger. Her opening words may read like hyperbole, but her most feverish Angels queued all day for a chance to meet her, and even the more casual fans at the back of SWG3’s largest room grab each other in frenzied delight when her biggest songs hit.
The tour, the lights, the costume changes are all in honour of her newly released third album, Charli – an expansive follow-up to the playful, challenging mixtapes she dropped in 2017. In Charli-world, there isn’t much difference to split between a tape or an album, and the new record still feels like a frenetic mood board, but with a surprisingly confrontational vulnerability. The first hint of that, tonight, is found in Gone – an antisocial anthem written with Christine and the Queens’ Chris. Charli’s queasy, lonely chorus, “I feel so unstable, fucking hate these people”, burns up the room, turning each party-goer’s party inside out.
She’s a generous, prolific collaborator, and reels off a brief, sweet speech thanking the many guests on the album: Chris, Haim, Lizzo, Kim Petras, Troye Sivan, Sky Ferreira, Clairo, Yaeji. The list is so long, and so glittering, that the moment could almost be a flex. And yet, the flex is more that their absence is barely felt in the live show. Charli breezily fills in on vocals, dances gleefully during their verses and employs the population of Glasgow to stand in for Lizzo. During Shake It – a bone-rattling rager built on the swag and spit of rappers Cupcakke, Brooke Candy and bounce queen Big Freedia – local drag queens take turns to provoke the screaming crowd.
Tracks like Click go harder still. Finessed by her go-to producer AG Cook and post-PC Music innovators Dylan Brady and Umru, the beats are sugary whip-cracks. They pop like cash registers on Black Friday before the song explodes into harsh, satisfying noise. The bass is so heavy during the gothy glamour of Cross You Out that Charli stands, braced, as if enduring an earthquake. It’s barely 10pm on a Sunday night but it feels like 4am on Saturday morning.
An emotional run through the album’s almost-ballads briefly shifts the tone. “Thank you for letting me be me,” she says, suddenly serious. “I’m gonna make you feel the same way.” She holds herself with poise and precision, pushing through the swelling, self-interrogating tragedy of White Mercedes: “I hate the silence, that’s why the music’s always loud.”
The encore is stuffed with big singles: Icona Pop’s freewheeling I Love It (she wrote it), female-gaze anthem Boys and the silly kitsch of 1999 – a song as irrepressible as the Vengaboys, which proves that any of her songs could be a radio smash if she chose it to be. Often it’s assumed Charli will eventually choose a side – mainstream shine or underground clout. Tonight, she shows that her laser-sharp focus is concentrated only on the future.
