By the time Marina Diamandis reaches “Cuntissimo”, Birmingham’s O2 Academy is a sing-along sauna. We’re squeezed in like rice in vine leaves, drenched in human juice. Attempts to dance are restricted to meagre hip wiggles and hands waved above the head. No-one seems to care. The outrageous, pop-ballistic single of last year hits the desired chord. “Your ex is hitting you up,” Marina sings, and holds the mic towards us all. “BUT YOU NO LONGER GIVE A FUCK!” the place roars as one.
Marina is that curiosity, a cult female star making pop music. Unlike most female pop stars of her longevity, she’s never had one of those monster hits that everyone knows. She has no “Poker Face”, “In For the Kill” or “Tik Tok”. She’s never reached the UK Top 10, and not had a hit at all since “Primadonna” in 2012 (unless you count guesting on Clean Bandit’s “Baby” in 2018). But she’s fiercely beloved by devoted fans across Europe and the States. Her albums chart, her tours do the business, she’s a viral sensation, and she even played Coachella last year to much acclaim.
Tonight she appears in a cream bodysuit overlaid with a black bustier from which two skirt-like tails trail at the back. Her lustrous mane of hair has a clip emblazoned with a large pink butterfly. She presents like a voluptuous Hollywood star of the Fifties or Sixties, Sophia Loren energy with a smidgeon of girl-next-door self-effacement. Her band – guitar, synth and drums – are two-thirds female.
The show is based around her most recent album, Princess of Power. Behind her is a screen within a screen, gaudy and glitzy. The concert concept is a retro videogame and it’s divided into “levels”, song sections announced onscreen and by a voiceover - “Princess of power finds herself lost among the stars…”, and so forth – while words scroll up, Star Wars-style, and zooming hyperspace sequences play out amongst electro-chintzy cartoons.
The atmosphere is intense. It feels like the stalls are oversold. The place is jammed, right back to the bars, no room at all, in a way I’ve not seen for years, not since venues started taking crowd safety more seriously. It’s a hot night, close, and a fog of steam is visible above the crowd. It’s not comfortable but this adds to the euphoric feeling of fan mania, as they sing along, not only to old songs such as “Are You Satisfied”, the opener of her first album, back when she was known as Marina and The Diamonds, but also to album tracks that have only been around a year.
Some of these new ones are belters; notably the Fat Dog-ish synthetic thump of “Cupid’s Girl”, the outrageous emotional explosion of “Everybody Knows I’m Sad”, and the Disney-princess-gone-L.A.-hippy stomp of “Butterfly”. Marina has an outrageous voice, swooping from bassy tones to clear alto operatics, ever playful but emotional. The music is effusively over-the-top electro-pop, laced with indie crunch.
Marina’s lyrics are hugely engaging too, sometimes trite to the point of comic, yet somehow still spot on. On slowie “Adult Girl”, the crowd wave their phone torches aloft as she emotes, “Now I'm too old to die young, but at least I had some fun/Spent my twenties on the run, drеaming of suicide and love/Think I'm stuck somewhеre between childhood and va-va-voom/Always cycling between existential dread and doom.”
These are not your average girl-pop lyrics. When she belts out the strident “Man’s World”. I can only agree that I really “don’t want to live in a man’s world anymore.” I howl along accordingly, perspiration pouring into my eyes. She doesn’t chat much, apart from one speech about how making the Princess of Power album helped her “self-actualise” and she hopes "it will help others self-actualise too”. She doesn’t need to talk, just sing.
For my money, she leans too heavily into Princess of Power. She plays 11 of the album’s 13 songs in an 18-song set. Particularly during the final third of the concert, this very slightly lowers the overall quality. She could safely have swapped some of the lesser numbers – notably the cheesy, oversweet “I <3 you”, with which she closes – for other, older songs. I’m not suggesting, “PLAY THE HITS”. Marina’s fans, myself included, love the deep cuts and her six albums are jammed with gems ripe for disinterring.
But this is a minor quibble. As she slams “Metallic Stallion” into Madonna’s “Hung Up”, such matters are not on anyone’s mind. We all just want to spend more time with this witchy, kitschy new age feminist who has a voice to die for and songs that wallop.
Below: Watch the video for "Cuntissimo" by Marina
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