Charli XCX Turned Phoenix Into a Brat-Fueled Nightclub

I discovered Charli XCX backwards.

For years, I basically knew her as the “Boom Clap” girl.

That was it.

Then somehow, almost a decade later, Daisy Edgar-Jones changed that.

I had gotten really into Normal People, followed Daisy on Instagram, and one night while I was visiting my grandparents in Pennsylvania, I was lying in bed doomscrolling because I couldn’t sleep.

She had posted a reel from Glastonbury.

The edit was chaotic, fun and kind of perfect.

And over it was “Guess.”

I remember hearing the song and immediately thinking:

Wait.

What did she just say?

So I looked.

Charli XCX.

And my first reaction was basically:

Wait.

The “Boom Clap” girl?

That sent me down the rabbit hole.

I found Brat.

Then I listened to the whole thing.

And suddenly I realized I had misunderstood Charli XCX for almost ten years.

She wasn’t some artist who had one giant pop song and disappeared.

She had spent years building this strange, experimental, emotional world that I had completely missed.

Brat hit me almost immediately.

There was something about the contradiction inside it that felt familiar.

The album could sound completely fearless one minute and deeply insecure the next.

It could be sexy, funny, arrogant, jealous, vulnerable, messy and confident without pretending those emotions canceled each other out.

That was what got me.

Charli wasn’t just chaos.

She was feeling underneath the chaos.

And I recognized that.

I can be intense.

I can be confident.

I can act like I don’t care what anyone thinks.

But underneath all of that, I care a lot.

I want connection.

I want love.

I overthink things.

I feel things probably more deeply than I sometimes want people to know.

Brat understood that contradiction without trying to clean it up.

Very quickly, Charli went from an artist I had barely paid attention to into one of my favorites.

I went backward through the catalog.

Pop 2.

Charli.

How I’m Feeling Now.

Crash.

And suddenly Brat made even more sense.

It didn’t feel like Charli had appeared out of nowhere.

It felt like the moment years of experimenting finally collided with mass culture.

And I had discovered her right as that collision was happening.

So when I realized the Sweat Tour was coming to Phoenix, there was no question.

I was going.

The only problem was that this wasn’t going to be a normal photo-pit assignment for me.

I didn’t have credentialed access.

So I bought a floor ticket.

I waited.

I got barricade.

And I brought my Sony RX100 VII.

If I couldn’t photograph Charli from the official pit, then I was going to photograph the show from inside the party.

Honestly, that probably ended up being the better way to experience Sweat anyway.

Before the show started, I was talking to the people around me like I usually do at concerts.

At one point, the guy next to me started laughing.

I asked what was funny.

He told me to look around.

Then he pointed out that I might have been one of the only straight guys standing anywhere near us on the floor.

I looked around.

He might have had a point.

And I kind of loved that.

Because none of that mattered once the lights went down.

The Brat-green curtain was hanging across the stage.

The arena was dark.

The lighting was harsh.

Everything already felt less like a traditional pop concert and more like we were waiting for some giant club night to begin.

Then the curtain dropped.

The room exploded.

Charli appeared through the haze.

“365” hit.

Shygirl was there.

Bass everywhere.

Lights flashing.

Bodies moving.

The entire floor immediately started bouncing.

And that was when the concept of the show made sense.

The Sweat Tour wasn’t trying to make Footprint Center feel like an arena.

It was trying to make an arena feel like a nightclub.

And somehow it worked.

That is much harder than it sounds.

Arena shows usually emphasize scale.

Huge screens.

Huge stages.

Huge effects.

Sweat had plenty of production, but the thing that made it feel massive was how intentionally claustrophobic everything looked.

Smoke swallowed the stage.

Harsh lights cut through silhouettes.

Industrial scaffolding surrounded the performers.

The screens felt more like surveillance cameras than polished pop visuals.

Brat green flashed through darkness.

Bodies disappeared into haze and reappeared seconds later.

The whole thing looked sweaty before I was even sweaty.

It felt underground and enormous at the same time.

That visual contradiction was perfect for Charli.

And standing against the barricade with the RX100 in my hand, I realized I didn’t want normal concert photographs.

I wanted movie posters.

I wanted silhouettes.

Hands.

Smoke.

Shapes.

Green light.

Moments where the image looked like it belonged to the world of the show instead of simply proving Charli had been standing onstage.

That is what excites me most about concert photography anyway.

A perfectly sharp image of somebody holding a microphone can be great.

But I want atmosphere.

I want the photograph to tell you what the room felt like.

Sweat gave me that constantly.

And because I knew Brat so well by that point, I wasn’t standing there analyzing the show from a distance.

I was inside it.

I knew the songs.

I knew the moments.

I was jumping with people I had never met.

Screaming lyrics with strangers.

Trying to take photographs while also completely losing myself in the show.

There are concerts you watch.

And then there are concerts where the line between watching and participating basically disappears.

Sweat was the second kind.

That is why I still think it might be the best concert I have ever attended.

I don’t say that because it was necessarily the biggest production I’ve ever seen.

It wasn’t.

Travis Scott’s Circus Maximus Tour was one of the most physically intense shows I had ever experienced.

That show made me want to mosh, jump and throw myself into the energy of the room.

Sweat hit somewhere different.

The chaos felt personal.

I had spent months listening to an album that somehow understood the version of myself I was living through.

Now I was standing front row inside a physical version of it.

That gave the night weight beyond spectacle.

And then there was Troye Sivan.

Before the Sweat Tour, I genuinely had no idea who he was.

Not in a disrespectful way.

He just had never entered my world.

I didn’t know his music.

I didn’t know his history.

I didn’t know what kind of performer he was.

So when his part of the show started, I had absolutely no expectations.

And that ended up making him one of the biggest surprises of the entire night.

Troye brought a completely different energy into Sweat.

Charli’s side felt aggressive, bratty, messy and rave-driven.

Troye’s performance was more sensual, theatrical and deliberately provocative.

There was a precision to the choreography and presentation that contrasted with Charli’s more chaotic energy.

But instead of those styles fighting each other, they made the show feel larger.

Sweat didn’t feel like two artists taking turns performing separate concerts.

It felt like two different versions of the same club night.

Charli was the chaos.

Troye was the seduction.

And somehow they belonged in the same room.

Then came “Rush.”

Before that night, I had no history with the song.

No nostalgia.

No memory attached to it.

I didn’t even really know what I was about to hear.

Then it hit live.

The whole floor started moving.

Hands everywhere.

Lights flashing.

People screaming.

Bodies bouncing in rhythm.

The entire room suddenly felt completely synchronized.

And I remember having that immediate reaction:

Okay.

Now I get it.

Sometimes a song needs a room.

“Rush” needed that room.

Hearing it live made the song make sense to me in a way it probably never could have through headphones alone.

It became one of my favorite moments of the entire concert, which is kind of crazy considering I had walked into Footprint Center not even knowing who Troye Sivan was.

That surprise also proved something important about Sweat.

The show worked because it wasn’t only a celebration of Brat.

It had built its own environment.

By the end, it almost didn’t matter who was technically closing.

Everybody was inside the same world.

That is probably what I remember most clearly now.

Not one song.

Not one photograph.

Not one lighting cue.

The feeling of the whole thing.

Sweat.

Bass.

Green.

Bodies.

Darkness.

Flashing light.

Sex.

Humor.

Confidence.

Insecurity.

People dressing however they wanted.

People dancing however they wanted.

A giant arena collectively agreeing for a couple hours that being messy could be fun.

That was Brat in physical form.

And I think that is also why the era became so important to me.

It wasn’t just an album I liked.

It arrived at a time when I needed some permission to stop policing every contradictory part of myself.

To understand that I could be ambitious and insecure.

Confident and vulnerable.

Masculine and still deeply emotional.

Driven and still desperate for connection.

You don’t have to resolve every contradiction inside yourself before you’re allowed to enjoy who you are.

Charli’s music never seemed interested in resolving them either.

She put them on the record.

Then turned them up.

That affected me creatively too.

Her “Forever” video from How I’m Feeling Now eventually inspired me to create my own version using footage from ten years of my life.

I studied the pacing and editing closely enough to realize how much Charli’s visual language had started influencing the way I thought about my own work.

That is one of my favorite things about finding an artist at the right moment.

Sometimes they don’t just give you music.

They make you want to create.

And that is what Charli became for me during the Brat era.

By the time I reached Footprint Center, Brat had already become the soundtrack to a specific version of my life.

The Sweat Tour gave that version of my life a physical space.

A nightclub inside an arena.

A room where confidence and insecurity could exist beside each other.

Where the chaos could be fun without pretending there wasn’t feeling underneath it.

I went into Sweat thinking Brat was the soundtrack to a period of my life.

By the time the lights came up, I understood why.

The whole night looked fearless.

Sweat.

Bass.

Bodies.

Green light.

Sex.

Attitude.

Noise.

But underneath all of it was the thing that made me love Charli in the first place.

Feeling.

Brat taught me that confidence and insecurity can exist inside the same person.

Sweat turned that contradiction into an arena.

And for a couple hours, I got to live inside it.