If you are over the age of 25 and would like to feel old, I recommend going to a PinkPantheress gig. Last night at Alexandra Palace in north London I felt out of touch even in what I hoped were youth-approved baggy jeans: it was a festival of pedal pushers, rara skirts and the kind of coloured tights that I thought had been outlawed somewhere between the financial crash and Little Mix winning The X Factor. True to Gen Z form, when Pink – whose real name is Victoria Walker – arrived onstage for the final UK gig of her tour “An Evening with PinkPantheress”, 10,000 phones were held aloft to capture the moment.
The funny thing is, of course, that only if you are over the age of 25 would you have any frame of reference for the aesthetic of this former TikTok musician and now bona fide pop star (who is herself 25 – a fact that, I regret to inform you, means she was born in 2001). PinkPantheress is obsessed with the 2000s, from her GHD-straight hair to her peplum tops to her lurid, cutesy videos – and, most importantly, her music, which samples heavily from classic garage and drum and bass and sounds, fittingly, like someone has put the year 2002 through a Snapchat filter.
It is all, also, absolutely fantastic – a loving tribute to a golden period of dance music, an insouciant and yet reverential wink at fashion that’s so ugly it’s cool, and, most importantly, a prodigiously talented songwriter and producer working at the very top of her game: precise, innovative, charismatic and self-effacing, making the retro sound fresh and the future sound vintage.
