Charlie XCX, Glasgow review: 'a cacophonous, unforgiving set'

Henry Redcliffe | Henry Redcliffe

Charlie XCX, Hydro, Glasgow ★★★

“Glasgow, we saved the best till last” hollered the pop star and hit songwriter who literally made the summer of 2024 her own. In an audacious exercise in pop marketing, Charli XCX swept all before her promoting her sixth album Brat across the so-called “brat summer”. Welcome now to a (brief) brat autumn of four UK dates, celebrating that blockbusting album with a brash light show to match the hard beats and quaking bass.

The singer born Charlotte Emma Aitchison emerged from behind a huge curtain bearing the name of the album, to be joined briefly by support act Shygirl on their hit 360. Apart from that fleeting cameo, she held this sold out arena solo for the next 80 minutes, filling the stage with her hair flicks and exuberant twerking in boots which meant business.

The curtain dropped to reveal an empty stage emblazoned with the word Girl. This was minimalism on a serious scale – no band, no dancers, just one fleet-footed cameraman tracking her moves along a catwalk under the stage during Von Dutch and offering selfie-like close-ups while some blaring club beats covered the costume changes.

Everything was lapped up by the audience, from banging dance tune Talk Talk to electro ballad So I, with some loss of energy when the vocal hooklines were replaced with instrumentals.

The fans just wanted to party with their pop star bestie, revelling in Girl, So Confusing, her bassy ode to the complexities of friendship, executing the dance moves to Apple and enduring the queasy bass on Speed Drive.

The curtain bearing the word “Party” was surplus to requirements for the encore, accorded disproportionate melodrama when Charli stepped into an onstage shower before unleashing by far the best song of a cacophonous, unforgiving set, her original brattish tune I Love It, during which she lived up to its carefree sentiment by shaking off a last minute wardrobe malfunction.