Photo: Chris MacDonald
My presence in the room has set Lauren Mayberry on edge.
Well, not my presence exactly - but that of the homogeneous 'journalist' to whom she refers every time she teeters towards saying something controversial. "I know there's journalists in the room," she says at one point, with a tone somewhere between playful and irritated, "and you guys..." Later on, after explaining in some detail why she could never belong to the hair metal era of rock stars, she begins imagining tomorrow's headlines: "Heinous feminist bitch insults Motley Crue."
Her defensiveness is hardly surprising. It's not just that her words get taken out of context - "An interviewer asked me if I wanted to go solo, and I said, 'No. Definitely not. That sounds far too stressful. But eventually everyone in the band will do their own thing," and all they quoted was that last bit," - but that she's become a bastion of feminism, unwilling to turn a blind eye to either everyday sexism or aggressive misogyny - and, in her own words, "painting a target on my back" as a result.
And so there's a heightened self-awareness in everything she says on stage. Every joking remark, flippant hand gesture or twitch of an eye is potential headline fodder, and tonight, at the end of an exhausting two-month tour, Chvrches would rather just shut up and play the hits. And that's exactly what they do.
Live, Chvrches' sound is deeper and bassier, their signature synth-pop filled out, turned up and extrapolated to reach the far corners of the expansive Alexandra Palace. Mayberry, too, manages to fill the space in which she's found herself with incredible ease - pacing up and down the stage, stomping and swinging her arms. At one point she collapses dramatically to the floor, head bowed, and stays there for much of the next song.
For much of the show, Mayberry's vocals are no more prominent than Iain Cook's bass or Martin Dohery's synths. They support, rather than compete with, the pulsing instrumentals her two band members are determinedly producing, their eyes cast downwards in sheer concentration. There are a few moments though - most noticeably during the encore's 'Afterglow' - where her vocals leap to centre-stage, and it becomes clear how much they've improved.
The last time Chvrches played Alexandra Palace, they'd only very recently become a band, and were playing to a half-empty room in support of Two Door Cinema Club. Tonight though, they've proved themselves more than headline-worthy - and not in the sense Mayberry has been worrying about all night.
