Am I too old to like Charli XCX? It’s a bit naff isn’t it, people my age going on about a “brat summer”, thinking it makes them down with the kids. “God, shut up,” you want to say, “can’t you just carry on listening to your old vinyl and leave SOMETHING for the young people to call their own?”
A male journalist I know posted about going to Mitski’s London show recently, and noted that the audience was made up of cool 20-something women, with a smattering of 6 Music dads. I’d been at the same gig, with my cool 20-something daughter, so I wondered, did this make me a 6 Music mum? Is there even such a thing? Or is it only the dads who get hauled aside by security – as happened at a recent Last Dinner Party gig – and asked if they have good intentions towards the band?
I suppose the worry is that there’s something predatory about a person of my age liking younger artists. I’ve talked a lot about wanting more music that reflects the stage of life I’m at now. And I’ve written my own lyrics about going through the ageing process – about menopause and divorces, ageing bodies and long-term relationships. But I also love music that makes me feel young, or reminds me what it felt like to be young. This year, I have really loved Charli’s album Brat, but in terms of it making me feel young, I wonder, how young do I mean?
Charli XCX was born Charlotte Emma Aitchison in 1992, and grew up in Stuart Hill in Essex. In the new verses which Lorde added to the remix of “Girl, So Confusing” she sings of Charli: “Inside the icon, there’s still a young girl from Essex”. Of course, Charli isn’t that young. She’s 32. Not a teenager, not a young girl. A young woman.
And maybe that’s partly what I hear in the record: a vivid encapsulation of what it feels like to be in your early thirties, that stage of life when you are just past being truly youthful but before middle age starts to set in with all its anxieties and drawbacks. In many ways it’s a good and interesting age. You’re not a kid any more and you’re beginning to notice that fact; you’re looking both backwards and forwards, full of a mixture of nostalgia and anticipation.
I was 32 years old in 1994 when “Missing” came out, the song that would be the biggest hit of my life and get more attention than anything else I’ve ever written. And it is similarly fixated on that transitional life moment – a dance-floor anthem about longing for a childhood friend, while also feeling angst about being unable to “move on”. The lyric is universal enough to have appealed to a lot of people, but its particular mood comes from the struggle to accept the loss of youth and an uncertainty about what comes next.
Charli’s choice of album title makes it sound like her record is childish. Collins Dictionary has made “brat” its Word of the Year, the definition being a person with a “confident, independent and hedonistic attitude”. But there’s always been something gleefully, punkily irreverent about Charli, and the title is surely meant to be more provocative than those slightly sanitised adjectives suggest. A brat is spoiled, and over-indulged, and doesn’t know how to behave. Doesn’t know how to grow up. Is that what Charli’s worried about?
There have been different takes on the album’s meaning since it came out. Early on, some called it a hymn to hedonism, or said it was an album all about doing coke. Now I see people saying that, in fact, it’s a record about failing to be an A-list pop star, which has ironically propelled Charli into that very league.
As the months have gone by I’ve found myself hearing it more and more as an album about being in your early thirties; I hear so much longing for the past and fear for the future. It’s like a freeze frame of that precise moment when you realise that your younger days are behind you, and time is marching on, and what are you going to do with what the poet Mary Oliver called “your one wild and precious life”?
The party vibes start to sound like an attempt to drown those nagging voices out, but they won’t be silenced. Memories are everywhere on the record, so when she goes to the club she doesn’t want to hear new stuff, but “those club classics”. She “used to live for the party”, but now dreams of past holidays, all “Winding roads doing manual drive… Early nights in white sheets with lace curtains… Neon orange drinks on the beach”. She longs for the days when “I wasn’t insecure… when I didn’t overanalyse my face shape”, when she’d sit in her bedroom and “burn CDs full of songs I didn’t know… a way simpler time”.
She’s worried already that younger girls are having more fun, “Yeah, she’s in her mid-twenties, real intelligent/And we hate the fact she’s New York City’s darling”. Then meeting a friend’s new baby makes her worry about the future, “cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all”. On the way home she has a conversation with her partner: “Should I stop my birth control?”
These lyrics are basically my diary from when I was 32. The fact that she sets all these thoughts to spectacularly catchy, hooky, punky dance music is what made me fall fully in love with Brat, and is what has brought me here tonight to the O2 Arena for her big London gig. I’ve managed to get two tickets so as my plus one I’ve brought our son Blake, age 23.
I’m wearing my knee support underneath a cool pair of hugely baggy Gucci jeans. Everyone else is wearing something in that deliberately unflattering Brat neon green. There are lots of cropped T-shirts and brief shorts and cowboy boots. There is no one over the age of 25.
I don’t usually go to such big gigs, but there is no denying the warmth and excitement in this huge space. A couple of Blake’s friends are also here and they try to locate each other in the crowd. “I’ll flash my phone torch eight times,” texts his mate, and we scan the upper level of seating, until suddenly – yes! – we see a light flash eight times, and then Blake flashes his phone in return, and it’s like we’ve made contact across the vast emptiness of space. A little winking light from a friend.
And that’s basically the vibe in the room as we wait for the show to start – a huge space, filled with groups of friends, all connecting and sharing the buzz of excitement. And then Charli comes on and the roof blows off.
There is no band, no backing singers, no dancers. Nothing really in the way of a set, or backdrops. The whole thing treads that line between minimal and maximal in a way that is so Charli – stripped down to basics, but every single one of those basics working its arse off. You almost can’t call it a show. The strength of the material carries it, along with the force of Charli herself. Here she has nothing to hide behind, except her songs. They stand alone, in all their glory.
And glorious they are. I mean, if your set consists mostly of the tracks from Brat – so that within the first 15 minutes of your gig you’ve performed “360”, “Von Dutch” and “Club Classics” – you have basically won gig of the year already. Up on the stage and screens, Charli is all big hair and tiny shorts; sunglasses, and slouchy boots. She struts up and down the catwalk. She bumps and grinds. We all dance, we all scream.
I was worried we might have to do the “Apple” dance – choreography that went viral on social media when the album was released – but no, of course not. Instead we see some brief video of Charli’s boyfriend George in the crowd, trying to do the dance but getting it a bit wrong and laughing. Which is of course much more Brat than coerced audience participation.
The remix album – Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat, each song featuring a contemporary pop artist, be they underground or mainstream – showed how much Charli has inspired her contemporaries, and of course raises expectations tonight of possible guest appearances. The set has opened with support act Shygirl joining her for their reworking of “365”. In New York recently, Lorde appeared to sing her incredible extra verses for “Girl, So Confusing”, and while that doesn’t happen tonight, we get those verses anyway: the audience sings Lorde’s part.
When Caroline Polachek appears to perform her take on “Everything Is Romantic” we scream even louder. Her east London-centric new lyrics are perfect here, with their images of urban foxes and cheap wine, a “silver scratch card in the canal”, a girl being sick “from the back of a Lime” bike. The evening is building up to a climax, and just when you think things can’t get any more intense, Robyn comes on, not just for her version of “360” but also to perform her appropriately sad banger “Dancing on My Own”.
Look, I’ll be honest with you, in the arena the vibe isn’t overwhelmingly “this is a collection of thoughtful songs about being 32”. The mood is chaotic and euphoric, a bit messy, a bit frantic and drunkenly tearful. There isn’t time at a gig like this, in a space like this, for true introspection, or doubt, even though those qualities are contained within the songs. The gig is simply a triumphant and well-deserved celebration of the album of the year. It’s Charli’s moment, and we are here to watch her revel in it.
“What will you do next?” interviewers always ask, when you’ve just done something amazing. It’s impossible not to wonder what Charli will do after Brat, how she can possibly top it. But she doesn’t have to of course. She has every right to do whatever she likes – retire, have a baby, or come back with something even better. Or none of those things.
I worried at the start of this piece about being too old for this music, and my sore knee at the end of tonight’s show reminds me that however much I relate to Charli’s feelings about being thirty-something, I’ll never be that age again. But the revelation is that I don’t care. The gig didn’t make me feel young, but it made me feel alive, and I’ll take that, thanks.
[See also: Bob Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall: the best he’s been in years]
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