FKA Twigs, Brixton Academy, review: ‘a perfectly calibrated show’
FKA Twigs was an hour late for her largest headline UK show to date, with the crowd – arguably the most polite in pop – growing testy. But then, this is an artist who operates on her own terms and after a UK absence of four years, she delivered a performance that was worth the wait.
Tahliah Barnett, originally from Tewkesbury, contorts music and dance to create something wholly new. She has prompted understandable comparisons to Kate Bush and Bjork, but neither of them have her operatic glissando, her contortionist’s body, her magpie approach to production, pinching as many sounds and structures from religious music as she does from sticky club dancefloors. Every juddering beat of her maiden album, LP1, appeared to skitter through her limbs. Even if her ambition occasionally overreached her, I was nevertheless convinced that an innovative talent had arrived.
Since we last saw her in the UK in 2015, Twigs (as her fans know her) has had severe personal problems. She’s had her heart broken (by Twilight heart-throb Robert Pattison), endured the chronic pain of fibroid tumours and then channelled her creativity into second album Magdalene, an excruciatingly beautiful reflection on loss and life in the public eye.
Live, her pain was often fragmented in a setlist comprised less of songs than vignettes. Over the course of two hours, layers of curtain drew back to reveal, 40 minutes in, a scaffolding rig upon which Barnett’s band and ferociously dynamic dancers (all costumed, like her, from the remnants of a dystopian fancy dress box) became her backdrop.
Barnett was a pop video dancer before she was Twigs, but since breaking into music she’s spent a long time furthering her original art. She took six months to perfect pole dancing and learned wushu, a Chinese sword dance that dates back to the Bronze Age. Both were on spectacular display, after an eerie, almost Baroque opening routine which combined tap dancing and masks.
But such theatrics didn’t swallow Barnett’s performance. This was a perfectly calibrated show, her music – crystalline vocals soaring over a throbbing orchestra – so immaculately deployed that it created feverish tension and, ultimately, an ecstatic release.
Because Barnett now knows when to leave the dancers behind. Mary Madgalene (the album’s concept plays on re-casting the woman often assumed to be a whore) and Day Bed held moments when we were given just Twigs, pouring so much of her heart into the mic her voice cracked. Such a quiet sound held seemingly infinite power.
