113. Chvrches
Alexandra Palace
27 November 2015
God, I hate Ally Pally as a venue. Aside from the fact that it is about as far north as it gets without disappearing up its own Python sketch, it is also a bloody awful musical venue. There is, and I cannot stress this enough, nothing nearby. No cosy gastropubs. No vibey bars. Your choices are limited to what’s en route (kebab shop with plastic chairs and a glowing meat-rotisserie shrine), or the on-site “food village,” where a collection of repurposed shipping containers masquerade as food trucks, serving overpriced tacos with all the enthusiasm of a teenager doing work experience, rendering the air into a thick fug of frying meats.
My best mate and I long ago vowed never to hike this far north for a show again but Chvrches and their sprite-queen Lauren Mayberry forced a temporary truce. So up the hill we trudged in the November gloom, stopping twice to clutch lampposts like Victorian consumptives while sprightly millennials jogged past, running for their ciders and avocado tacos. Inside the glass-domed concourse, the air was thick with the fug of frying meat, a sea of excitable girl-gangs and dutiful boyfriends wearing the expression that says, “yes mate, I am definitely here because she once screamed this chorus at a hen do”. Karma for every lad-rock gig they’ve dragged their partners to, I suppose.
The hall itself is a Victorian greenhouse masquerading as a music venue, which means the PA has is cranked up to a setting just shy of “May Cause Nose Bleeds” just to outrun the reverb. Two billboard-sized screens flank the stage, already flickering like slot machines when Chvrches burst out with “Never Ending Circles.” Synths sparkle, drums thump, and Mayberry darts across the risers, less Bambi-awkward than tours past, more pocket-sized thunderbolt. Between songs she’s charmingly self-deprecating: “I’m no Mötley Crüe,” she insists, before unleashing a banshee howl and striking a power pose on a speaker riser. Yeah, not rock ’n’ roll, she says.
The new album leans pop, all neon fizz and heartbreak, but live it punches hard enough to pin back every fringe in the building. “Leave a Trace” glows like a city at midnight; “Clearest Blue” detonates and the entire floor levitates, “The Mother We Share” causes a squealed reaction from the girl-gang demographic, now completely sozzled on cider, taking a short break from photographing themselves next to their mates. Even the acoustics, normally Ally Pally’s death sentence, surrender under the decibel onslaught.
Ally Pally is still a logistical nightmare, but for ninety incandescent minutes, Chvrches made this Narnian outpost feel like the centre of the universe, and we had all fallen a little bit in love with this diminutive Scottish dynamo.