She is now on her seventh album, but Annie Clark, who trades as St Vincent, has never performed at the Albert Hall before. This feels like an oversight. Both she and the venue are showy, technically dazzling and unique in their bold style. She commanded the space like a musician perfectly at home.
Which St Vincent was present, however, was harder to decipher. Although she has a clear pop ear – she has duetted with Dua Lipa and co-wrote Taylor Swift’s huge hit “Cruel Summer” – her own songs tend to be heavy with scenic route diversions. On past albums she has played the part of cult leader, dominatrix or the transgender Warhol superstar Candy Darling. Of the latest album, titled All Born Screaming, she has said: “There’s no character – it’s just me.” She produced it alone for the first time, and largely favoured a weighty industrial rock sound over her previous electronic hyperactivity.
That didn’t necessarily mean that this audience got to see the real Annie Clark from Dallas. She has been too exposed before, blinded by flashbulbs during a spell dating the supermodel Cara Delevingne, and being asked more questions than she would have liked about her father’s 2019 release after nine years in prison for financial fraud. Here she delivered the first song, “Reckless”, in silhouette beneath one of three moving archways. Dressed in short skirt and suit jacket, like one of the models in Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video, she didn’t acknowledge the audience until she was six songs into the show.
But if guitars could talk, hers made a barnstorming speech. In tandem with Jason Falkner’s guitar, the pair summoned sounds from outer space on “Marrow”, stomping funkiness on “Big Time Nothing” and riffs like anvils dropped from above on “Flea”. The signature shape of her personalised instrument – sharp-cornered and near-symmetrical – suited the futuristic styling of many of her songs, particularly the audacious electro rock of those drawn from her 2017 release Masseduction.
For someone with such a strong sense of the theatrical, the stage set-up looked surprisingly simple: those arches pushed around by hand, three big screens that were actually pretty small, functional lighting and five musicians. This allowed for a more raw kind of excitement when a cameraman loomed millimetres from her face during “Pay Your Way in Pain”. When she ran into the crowd and rolled around on the floor during the punky rarity “Krokodil”, she briefly allowed herself loose from her imperious self control. An audience member even got a warm hug during one visit up the stairs into the stalls.
She showed some emotion before the new song “Sweetest Fruit”, which referenced the accidental death in 2021 of the music producer SOPHIE. “We’re all here for one reason and that reason is love,” she said. “There’s no other f***ing reason to do anything.”
The racing, Giorgio Moroder-inspired synthpop of “Sugarboy” brought the set to a fizzing climax, before a slow-burning finale in the title track of the new album. No encore, no goodbye, but the many versions of St Vincent were all fascinating company.
