Charli XCX thrives in the dark. It’s where her songs make most sense, the shadows allowing you to cut free from your inhibitions and just be. But when her Reading 2026 headline set kicks off – the bill has her performing before co-headliners Fontaines D.C. – the sky is still so light you can spot a huge rainbow arching over the festival site.

As pretty as that sight is, it’s also unfortunate for the star. The first chunk of her set feels a little flat in these sub-optimal conditions, the glitchy electronics of ‘Track 10’ and ‘Pink Diamond’ diluted by the lingering light. But the show must go on, and Charli’s brought with her a production that’s both simple and staggering – a multi-level system of platforms that’s topped with a giant speaker stack, which her band, dancers and she herself scale as the performance ticks on.

Charli’s well-deserved ascent to the top of the bill comes in tandem with her latest album, ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ – a record that finds her grappling with the levels of fame ‘Brat’ brought to her and toying with the world’s perception of her, while doing a hard reset on her sound. ‘Rock Music’, the album’s first single, wiped the slate clean and ushered this new world in, so it makes sense that she sets the tone with it first tonight, playing out the lyrics (“I’m really banging my head”) on the same storey as her band.

From there, she immerses us in the universe of ‘Music, Fashion, Film’, dancers strutting like models down a runway for ‘Card Declined’, and snippets of David Cronenberg’s monologue in ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ woven in throughout the set – an utterance of “oblivion” here, a mention of “freedom” there. To maintain the atmosphere, our headliner largely keeps schtum, her only address to the crowd to (perhaps prematurely) declare, “Here’s a classic for you, Reading” before dropping ‘Apple’.

The set really comes alive after ‘House’, when John Cale’s recorded voice booms out of the PA over black screens, before Charli re-enters the fray for her part of the Wuthering Heights song, crawling across one of the platforms as lights flash artfully around her. As sparks fall from the roof and fire bursts up in the background, it passes the baton to ‘Dying For You’, that soundtrack album’s far poppier cut, before she leans into ‘Brat’ with a megamix that ends with underwear shooting into the sky at the end of ‘Guess’.

Then, it’s back to ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ territory with B-side ‘If You Take Away The Music Then What Has She Got?’, a song so good it should have made the album. Charli works through her existential crisis, punching the air and throwing her body around to the beat, but her doubts just bubble back up in ‘Camera’ minutes later. It’s in this headspace that ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ strides in, Cronenberg a voice of assurance as he muses on the nature of art, legacy and permanence.

As his sermon gets chopped up and repeated for effect (“They are dead. They are gone. No one lasts forever”), Charli and her dancers gather on one platform, the star in the centre, frozen in a power stance staring straight out at the crowd. It’s an incredibly powerful ending – almost emotional in its confidence and confrontation. If only the whole set could have landed quite as hard.

Charli xcx played:

‘Rock Music’
‘Yeah’
‘Apple’
‘Wink Wink’
‘Card Declined’
‘Track 10’
‘Girl, So Confusing’
‘Pink Diamond’
‘House’
‘Dying For You’
‘Club Classics’
‘365’
‘360’
‘Sympathy Is A Knife’
‘Von Dutch’
‘Guess’
‘If You Take Away The Music Then What Has She Got?’
‘2007’
‘Camera’
‘Party 4 U’
‘Playboy Bunny’
‘SS26’
‘No One Lasts Forever’

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