Charli xcx, Reading Festival review – Pretentious? Just a bit. But Nietzsche would have loved it
Reading Festival There’s not much time to dig into her deep catalogue of future-facing pop, but she satisfies the hardcore “Time itself is a circle,” as the rock’n’roll philosopher Nietzsche once said, accurately foreshadowing Charli xcx’s only UK festival appearance this summer.
Like her performance on Glastonbury’s Other Stage last year – a pyrotechnic farewell to the puke-green reign of Brat – Charli’s Reading and Leeds appearance is a not-quite-headline slot that also follows a rowdy set from grime don Skepta.
As before, her sunglasses remain glued on throughout.
Yet in the past 14 months, everything else in Charli’s pop factory has undergone a hard reset.
She’s released two albums – a grandiose, gothic soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and last month’s high-concept Music, Fashion, Film, an album of raw, glitching micro-rock, with guitars shredded into Tetris-like pieces, and fitted with lacerating lyrics about shopping, egotism and mortality.
She’s also launched an acting career, thrown a big fat celebrity wedding and, somewhere along the way, found time to rehearse her biggest, most vertiginous show to date.
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5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theguardian.com — the content belongs to The Guardian UK.
