Ladytron

Helen Marnie’s playing games. As her dark, mascara-outlined eyes flit over the crowd, they move with a steady purpose. Her eye contact is precious to tonight’s audience, and she’s offering it to us in discriminate, tantalising stanzas. Live, the delightful, cold-heartedness Ladytron offer in recorded form must necessarily be let up in some way, so as for their performance not be sneering and remote. Hence, for interludes of a few precious seconds each we find ourselves the chief protagonists in the band’s sexual dramas, rather than absent third parties. And this without the music itself ever being compromised.

However, that’s not to say that Marnie is unable to reach to the whole audience at once. She does, on songs such as 'Evil', where she abandons a sheltered stance to gripp the microphone stand and saunter centre-stage like a true chanteuse. It’s one of the band’s only songs to appeal to a general ‘you’, and hence one of the few to reach directly to the listener, leaving Marnie free to work the crowd in other ways.

And, furthermore, a pacy, pounding encore take on Tweet’s _'Oops (Oh My)'_ finds her really putting out. It’s absolutely brilliant. But then, this being a cover, the words coming out of her mouth aren’t really hers, so how they frame her doesn’t matter so much. Not that she's unaware for a second what the effect lines like,‘Oops – there goes my skirt, dropping to my feet', have on the audience when she delievers them. Although, it might just be me that’s excited. And I fucking hated Tweet.

Nonetheless, Ladytron – invariably through Marnie, but no less engagingly when Mira Aroyo takes over lead vocals – are primarily interested in instructing the crowd one-on-one. Songs like 'Blue Jeans' are close-contact narratives after all. Delivered with a managed gaze this closeness is flawlessly intimated. Not that a cooking bassline ever did anyone any harm, either.

So, thank the Lord for Ladytron, a band who really know how to make a performance work. A pop band who won’t ever degrade themselves by substituting snivelling, needy, loathsome sentimentality for honest tactility. A band that even on stage resist crass self-parody with an immaculately tempered act, just as human as it needs to be.

Turn up and feel truly touched.