But, increasingly, just playing your album live is not enough; we’re seeing a rise in more inventive, odder live shows, that owe a debt to performance art.
And it seems to be a particular trend among smart, interesting female artists.
Grimes’s Ac!d Reign tour is billed as an “uniquely immersive live experience”; early reports described her “mystical rave cave”, thick with strobes, lasers, projections and camo-netting, with ribbon-twirling dancers and a hyper-energetic, stage-ruling performance.
Bianca Casady, one half of CocoRosie, is touring her first solo album with a theatre concert called Porno Thietor, giving herself free rein to be more “dark” and “scary”. Given CocoRosie stage some of strangest live concerts going – heavily costumed, with grotesque gender-bending and disturbing video-art – that’s quite a promise.
Meanwhile Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, touring this month, will play her new record Crab Day in full, “like a live stream” – but the first half of the show is performed with LA musical collective Banana, playing “improvised adventures [for] movement and dance followed by half-time orange segments and costume changes.”
Meanwhile Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, touring this month, will play her new record Crab Day in full, “like a live stream” – but the first half of the show is performed with LA musical collective Banana, playing “improvised adventures [for] movement and dance followed by half-time orange segments and costume changes.”
