St. Vincent @ O2 Apollo, Manchester, 18 Oct

More than any other artist operating in 2017, St. Vincent controls her own narrative. In the run up to the release of her fifth solo album Masseduction and concurrent tour, her social media has been awash with the artist – real name Annie Clark – providing her own interview questions and answers, as well as images from mock press conferences, effectively trolling the media and multiplying the utility of her own platforms.

Continuing in this non-conformist vein, her support act in the grand surroundings of Manchester’s O2 Apollo isn’t an act in the traditional sense – it’s a screening of Clark’s directorial debut, The Birthday Party. Clark has a magpie’s eye for everything she puts her finger on, so as you would expect the film is visually rich, textually disconcerting and sonically abrasive. It’s the perfect appetiser to her live set.

Split into two halves, the first act sees Clark run through the most celebrated sections of her back catalogue chronologically, with more of the stage being revealed with each song. Opener Marry Me, from the 2007 record of the same name, sees Clark and a microphone occupy a slither of the stage, the rest still curtained off. When the full stage is revealed, we learn there’s no live band but a backing track to Clark and her guitar. There are murmurs of disappointment in reaction to this set-up, but Clark is not your by-the-book pop star and this is no by-the-book play-through: Cruel from 2011’s Strange Mercy is accelerated threefold, her guitar work careering into a phenomenal solo.

After a brief interval, Clark returns to play through Masseduction in full. New York flutters like the rhythm of a busy city or a motion picture soundtrack, while Happy Birthday, Johnny brings the room to a standstill – the only thing audible other than Clark’s voice are the multiple gasps drawn from the crowd. Los Ageless is all-over mutant electronic-funk brilliance and the careering Young Lover is the most emphatically pop, screaming 'future hit'.  

With Masseduction especially, Clark has created a whole world around St. Vincent, and this visually-rich narrative provides the backdrop to this one-woman show – a world of lurid, fluorescent colours, mass consumption and hypersexualisation. It makes perfect sense for the visuals to play out behind her; her choice not to perform with a band also rallies against the expectancy, in the rock world at least, for an act to be buoyed by the musicians around them.

This performance revolves around St. Vincent. She sits at the centre of her own solar system, surrounded by her songwriting, her art, her voice, her grit and her guitar playing, all of which are world class. And anyway, do you think she cares about anyone’s expectations? You get the feeling it’s all water off a latex boot to her.