PinkPantheress live – the bedroom fangirl comes of age

As the lights dim and phones in the crowd rise, the video montage that opens PinkPantheress’s tour bursts colourfully on to a set of screens. It shows the 25-year-old British star wearing fat headphones, vibing sweetly to snippets of old 1990s and 2000s pop and club hits. There’s a roar of approval, mixed with fellow feeling.

Artists are so often fans first. And one of the joys of PinkPantheress in her imperial phase – racking up chart positions, awards and A-list collaborations on a continuing, extended world tour that has sold out its two nights in Manchester – is that this erstwhile bedroom producer still retains her fangirl-next-door brio. That vim, and those retro-leaning hits, shake this big industrial venue on night two in Manchester. The sweltering heat is no barrier to dancing.

In an age of declining youth attention spans, much has been made of the singer’s infamously short tracks. “A song doesn’t need to be longer than 2 minutes 30,” she told ABC News breezily in 2024 (bridges, it turns out, are so millennial). But there is a vast amount to be said in favour of starting strong, making your musical point succinctly and getting on to the next earworm. So PinkPantheress opens her punchy set with a stone-cold banger – Stateside – before swiftly moving through her tracks, stopping only for brief costume changes.

Cute but mighty, Stateside encapsulates the appeal of the artist born Victoria Beverley Walker. It charts in real time how the singer was taking a lot of flights and falling for an American guy, to a deliciously acrylic beat. The year-old track, now with Swedish pop siren Zara Larsson on the remix, recently went to No 1 on the US Billboard global chart, after the American gold-medal figure skater Alysa Liu aired it at the Winter Olympics in February.

That accolade followed PinkPantheress’s win at the Brit awards for producer of the year. Astoundingly (or perhaps not), she was the first woman to win the category. In pop, as in film, the job description of producer can be quite elastic, but there is no doubt at all that this sharp gen Z tastemaker is in control of her sounds.

She rose to TikTok fame in 2021, a DIY bedroom producer uploading fragments of song ideas set to UK underground samples – largely unknown and alien to a young US audience at that time. PinkPantheress’s music is, at its root, powered by wistful nostalgia for drum’n’bass and garage, the Spice Girls and what you may call UKY2K. Then she layers on simple vocal melodies, saccharine K-pop innocence and zingy, hyperpop. But she is no mere retromaniac; she is an artist of the then-as-now.

PinkPantheress goes deep and shallow at the same time. Seemingly vestigial footnotes – such as Just Jack’s 2007 one-hit-wonder track Starz in Their Eyes, about the perils of fame – have provided her with a rich seam of inspiration. Just Jack’s hook was repurposed as the foundation for her hit Stars, a late-set highlight. Tonight, its bass frequencies are penetrating, transforming the venue into a warehouse-like rave for a couple of minutes. Later, she says she had the “best night of her life” the previous evening in Canal Street, Manchester’s gay village, at a club called Via. She’s big, but not too big to move among her constituents.

More seasoned music aficionados seeking a way into her sound need look no further than tracks inspired by her love for Basement Jaxx, the fabulous, turn-of-the-millennium electronic duo: Girl Like Me is the most gloriously obvious. This evening, there’s also room for sampled interludes of 00s veterans the Streets. Meanwhile, Anz, a DJ/producer based in Manchester who worked with PinkPantheress in 2022, comes on for a cameo micro set that closes with Illegal.

There’s a delicious tension at play in the contrast between how seriously genres such as drum’n’bass are regarded in some circles and her sweet, poppy interpolation of them. Thumbing her nose at purists, PinkPantheress recodes sometimes po-faced, male-leaning sounds for a crowd of tartan-wearing zoomers.

Handwritten cue cards and other throwbacks to her older, more amateurish body of work underscore the idea that she is still on a level with her fans rather than an untouchable diva ennobled by her first big hit, 2023’s Boy’s a Liar Pt 2, with the US rapper Ice Spice on the remix.

When she started performing live, PinkPantheress used to bring a tiny handbag on stage with her as a kind of security blanket. Here, it makes a brief appearance halfway through her set, which is dominated by a three-tier construction, four dancers, the hyperactive DJ Joe and a terrific live drummer Blake Cascoe.

This pro iteration of PinkPantheress is well beyond needing the clutch, of course, but it is a democratising token – and a reminder that she has seized the means of musical production where others couldn’t.

Photograph by Nick Blandford