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 Photo: Kristen Ashton
Sydney quartet Cassette Kids play to an almost capacity crowd – not bad for an early start on the wrong end of the long weekend. While the decidedly mismatched crowd of Nova and JJJ listeners crowd the bar (older), or stake out their spots on the floor (younger), the Kids are cramped into the measly offering of stage space at the very front. They do their best, and the excitement is palpable – flogged on radio, You Take It receives a positive response. But really, we’re all here to see the pocket rocket.
Lately there’s been a lessening of the ‘guilty-pleasure’ associated to admitting you like pop music. Beyonce borrowing from Bob Fosse, lent credibility (not to mention relations with Hova), P!nk essentially performs while suspended from a trapeze, and Britney – well, surviving – have eclipsed the bloated and overdone Catholic-baiting Madonna and ‘will-work-for-cash’ desperation of Michael Jackson. Don’t get me wrong their pillars of the genre, but, you’ve got to know when to retire, yo. (And don’t get me started on the reunion tours – cha-ching).
BASS DROP
Enter the fray, (after an ill-prepared initial assault in 2002) one daughter of Brit-pop hanger-on Keith Allen.
A curiosity in that she embodies the ‘soufie’, while hailing from well-healed West London, Lily Allen steps out for only her second Brisbane headline show of her career, clad not in trainers and Luella-inspired dresses circa Alright, Still. No. Tonight as part of her sold out It’s Not Me, It’s You album tour a re-styled Ms Allen teeters on Prada red suede heels, rolled denim and some kind of complimentary strappy upstairs option as the synths swell for Everyone’s At It, and out pops a visibly grinning girl abusing her ‘tweak-box’ (akin to a less-sexualised version of Alison Goldfrapp’s theremin-work).
Taking cosmetic cues from Bat For Lashes the diminutive Allen bounces around her life-size letter cut-outs – with a voice much-strengthened since her last appearance at The Arena. It would want to be, the overpowering bass in the mix renders most other instruments redundant – I’d like to say more about her four-piece band, sadly, I couldn’t hear them through a ridiculously poor mix.
Cheeky and coy though, Allen epitomises the ‘modern girl’ motif, while not yet traversing into unattainability.
Oddly, you can spot a seldom-referred auto-cue from the front few rows, but gulping her way through a lager, she delivers a new track-heavy set-list with a vim and vigour not previously experienced. Shout-outs to Mark Ronson (who introduced her to current beau, Aussie expat Daniel Merriweather) before her brassless cover of Oh My God, a clipped rendition of Everything’s Just Wonderful and a ‘dedication’ of Fuck You to recent parliamentary seat-claimers, the terrifying British National Party; all the while flouting Queenland’s smoking laws and being rather stunned by the call-and-response appreciation in the room that results in the visibly chuffed 24 year-old returning for an encore.
Smile, The Fear, spinning on the spot during the Lee & Nancy-inspired Not Fair, replete with toned-torso flash, she concludes with a rather adorable cover of Britney’s Womaniser.
Adorable because no matter how many men in the room cower at Allen’s ball-breaking spiked-cuteness, she still has to climb upon a stair to see over the heads to the lowered crowd. Bless.
EMILY WILLIAMS
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