charli

I went to see Charli XCX perform live in Manchester on Wednesday night. I was excited when I booked it. I was dreading it for the week leading up to it. I always dread concerts on their approach. The way they end a day, usually a weekday. Ending in another weekday. The train, bus, tram, walking, weeing, drinking, etc. It all just seems a bit more than my broken bones can take. However, Wednesday rolled around, and I didn’t feel like shit. I felt fine. I felt like tonight might be okay.

         I meet my best friend at the train station down the road. The train passes a decent sunset. I watch them get angry on the phone. The big city doesn’t seem big. It’s not London. But it’s also not Lancaster. Fucking Lancaster. We wait a mere hour for our friend who is usually two hours late.

         “Why are you late?”

         “I don’t know.”

         Luckily for us, Charli fans are far less organised than our superfluously disorganised friend and we are SIX rows from the front, in the pit. Phew.

         There are over two hours before charli breaks us all. I run to the toilet and get in after someone who has had a gargantuan shit. Bad timing. I run back and can’t be more happy to see these two people together. At a concert, just like we’ve been to so many times before. Like we’ve been doing together since we became an ickle trio. There are years of history between the three of us now, which feels like far too much and nowhere near enough. And now we’re all begrudgingly entering some kind of adulthood. Some attempt to mature. Which we probably thought we were doing when we met. And in years will laugh at having believed it this time.

         One of us throws up as the lights go down. We are determined though and hold our space among the liquified McPlant underneath our soles. And she comes out. She has no set decoration. No back-up dancers. No band. She has trellises and strobes and curtains and a glow pole and one of the best solo performers I’ve ever seen, in herself.

         My expectations were decent, but I like a concert that will make me emotional, and I didn’t expect that from Charli. But I was left breathless, gasping, and dumbstruck with awe so many times that night. I can call it a near-on religious experience and you won’t believe me and you shouldn’t but I’m not a religious person and concerts are the closest I can get and I got it.

         In the penultimate song of the night, rain falls in a neat square at the bottom of the B-stage. It falls like in a movie and charli manages to give her best vocal performance of the night. And she swings her hair around like she can control twenty thousand people with it because she can. And the rain washes away the stale smoke she probably reeks of and everything that has ever happened to her, to any of us. And everyone’s left alone with Charli.