Lily emerges through the floor atop a large staircase, which she saunters down to the sound of her latest album’s opening track, ‘Everyone’s at It’. Still, just her appearance on stage is enough draw hysteria from this massive crowd. Even Lily herself acknowledges this, commenting: “This is a big fucking room!” And it is, many people have made the step up to playing arena sized venues and failed abysmally, Lily is not one of them as she holds the audience and sound just as good as she had in the Academy and ABC. Although she seems tiny to the majority of the crowd three large screens enable to audience to view her antics, including pulling pints of Guinness for the front row, apparently what she chose to spend her extended budget on.
As the ska-tinged introduction to ‘LDN’ plays, for her second song, there is a sudden realisation to why Lily is so successful as a pop star. Lily’s debut album, ‘Alright, Still’ is a superb effort full of sharp ska-pop which could have any open listener hooked. Her latest effort, ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’, sees a more electronic sound and tracks like ‘The Fear’ still drip with that accessible yet clever feel Lily’s debut had. However, some newer tracks lack the quality her debut carried and with only three old tracks remain in the set, a very nasal version ‘Littlest Things’ and her classic number one ‘Smile’, along with the aforementioned ‘LDN’. Obviously the lack of a brass section has had a major impact on this decision, even her version of Kaiser Chiefs single ‘Oh My God’ produced by the moronically corrupting, horrendously untalented and evil Mark Ronson only has his signature trumpets on backing track.
Still, to the majority of Lily’s extraordinarily varied audience the lack of older material doesn’t seen to matter as they latch on to Lily’s every word, whether genuinely meaningful or just idiotic. Her performance cannot really be faulted, even her cover of straw hated, fake accented, indie lightweights The Kooks’ ‘Naïve’ brings it close to sounding credible. Her nationalist bashing single ‘Fuck You’ also seems to carry a new punch with the recent high profile the BNP have been receiving.
Mid set Lily is joined by chirpy London MC Professor Green to perform ‘Just Be Good to Green’ which Lily featured on. This acts as superb interlude and brings an extra energy to the stage as the rapper runs about around drawing massive cheers from the crowd. The cheeky grin plastered on Green’s face says it all as he performs to an audience surely much bigger than he is used to.
As Lily disappears throw the centre of the stage at the end of her first encore there is a feel of great satisfaction, a set full of sing-a-longs, expensive looking props and costume changes only add to the spectacle. However, it should have ended there, as Lily re-enters to perform the frankly awful country-tinged ‘Not Fair’, where she moans about some ex being bad in bed. Still, if you forget about this ending the performance is enthralling, if only the track list could have been stronger.
Photo: Joshua Porter
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