St. Vincent
Woodsies, Sunday June 29, 2025
Spidery, faintly villainous, Annie Clark takes the Glastonbury stage in a slate-grey ’80s power suit plus hotpants, her slender, perma-startled visage made starker with gun-metal eyeshadow and a hot slash of ultra-red lipstick. She’d make a great Cruella De Vil.
What follows is extraordinary: an angular, noisy, quasi-gothic, obsessively micro-controlled set relying heavily on her two broadly electro-rock albums – 2017’s Masseduction and last year’s All Born Screaming, accounting for eight songs out of 12.
It begins with All Born Screaming’s Broken Man, gnarly as Nine Inch Nails, with Clark investing her “What are you looking at?” refrain with deranged threat, and staring out the crowd and cameras like a distaff Johnny Rotten. Masseduction’s Fear The Future is heavy metal My Bloody Valentine. Big Time Nothing evokes Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music, but on 11. Whatever this sonic war is about, her band – notably awesome Jellyfish and Beck alumnus Jason Falkner on second guitar – have her back, swords unsheathed.
There’s so much going on, possibly too much. Clark is always mugging, vogueing, crotch-grabbing. Her volcanic guitar solos howl, glitch and fit all at once. Her virtuosity is on constant display – like Prince if Prince was giving you homework. For Masseduction’s New York, Clark fires all her guns at once. She gets on a security guy’s shoulders, stands on the lip of the stage and screams “I am a cunt!” before leading the crowd into an epic singalong of her career-best chorus: “I have lost a hero, I have lost a friend / But for you, darling, I’d do it all again.”
It’s possible to salute Clark for her intellectual and creative hunger – the speed with which she burns through styles and personae – and to also feel a little left behind sometimes. Hard cheese, for instance, if your favourite St Vincent album is 2021’s exquisite callback to late ’70s West Coast singer-songwriting, Daddy’s Home. Only one song from that today: Pay Your Way In Pain. The old songs have to fit the new schtick.
In Cheerleader, a track from 2011’s Strange Mercy album that she plays midway through, Clark sings “I’ve played dumb / When I knew better / Tried too hard / just to be clever”. Trying too hard, being very clever, are both St Vincent special moves. But sometimes dumb can be fun, too.
St. Vincent Glastonbury 2025 Setlist:
Broken Man
Fear The Future
Los Ageless
Birth In Reverse
Pay Your Way In Pain
Flea
Cheerleader
Big Time Nothing
Marrow
New York
Sugarboy
All Born Screaming
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