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The most prestigious music festival at the UK’s largest arts centre reached a nadir last year. Once a destination event, Meltdown’s decline into irrelevance was summed up by guest curator Chaka Khan’s opening-night concert, during which the disco legend played the same creaky set that she took to the stately-pile festival circuit a few weeks later. Like the old advertising slogan for the V&A (“An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”), the Southbank Centre risked becoming a great place for a summer drink, with some ancillary arts stuff taking place too.
But after the darkest hour comes the dawn. This year’s Meltdown curator is the rapper Little Simz, a far more invigorating choice. She will close the festival with a specially staged orchestral gig on Sunday. Other acts in her line-up include UK rap outlier-pioneer The Streets, Afrobeats singer Tiwa Savage and, filling the Royal Festival Hall with partisan teenage girls, Lola Young.
This was the youngest audience I can recall seeing at the venerable venue. Young is an up-and-comer who went to British pop’s premier talent factory, the BRIT School, a selective state school for the performing arts. It counts Adele and Amy Winehouse among its alumni. Young’s managers have links to both those illustrious singers.
It would be unfair to burden the 24-year-old with comparisons, although she shares related characteristics of a big voice and unfiltered personality. Her breakthrough hit, “Messy”, is a take-me-as-I-am anthem that took off on TikTok last year and topped the UK chart. It was the reason for the electric atmosphere at the Festival Hall, where every belted vocal was greeted with cheers.
The singer performed these showpiece moments at a rate of about one per song, head tilted back and arms flung wide in the manner of a theatre kid. But the songs themselves bore no trace of Broadway polish. Bashed out by a five-piece band, they were closer to what Tom Waits calls “bawlers” and “brawlers”. “You Noticed” was a bawler about unrealised love. A song with a sweary title (“Fuck”), in which Young sang about punching any woman who looked at her man, was a brawler.
Her singing had a wild edge, not so much moving around the scale as spilling over it. Her lower register was husky, while there was a touch of the Florence Welch foghorn when she did her belting. An untitled song performed alone on acoustic guitar, written the previous day, was a roughly scrawled sketch. It addressed the subject of ADHD, a condition with which she has been diagnosed.
Neurodiversity has become something of a marketing tool, but in Young’s case the concept retains its edge. Lasting just over an hour and ending with “Messy”, her gig had an almost punk-like energy. As with Chaka Khan, Young will no doubt play much the same setlist at the European festivals where she’ll be appearing over coming weeks. But her show was a shot in the arm for Meltdown.
★★★★☆
lola-young.com
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