Featured image and gallery: Gracie Hall
Talia Mar is a South London-born singer and YouTuber. She starts the evening with a lovely set that showcases her velvety vocals and vibrant sound. Despite releasing songs since 2016, Mar mentions that this is her first ever support tour. The crowd receives her well as she covers ‘No Scrubs’ by TLC, before launching into her collaboration with Sigala, ‘Stay the Night’, as its dance beat gets the party started for the evening.
21-year-old Southampton native Caity Baser makes an explosive entrance as she breaks through a massive paper sheet adorned with a red learner driver’s L, a reference to her latest mixtape, Still Learning. She smashes through this with a baseball bat before opening with hit song ‘I’m A Problem’.
Baser’s energy doesn’t falter once as she launches into an energetic set of pop songs, dancing and moving around the stage non-stop. Her outfit comprises a green and orange skin-tight suit, paired with orange moon boots that perfectly reflects Baser’s ability to be completely and unapologetically herself.
A fan holds up a sign that explains they were dumped by their boyfriend the night before and Caity decides to dedicate ‘STD’, a song about being cheated on, to her. For ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, a love-heart shaped piñata is hung up on the skeleton of the frame that held the large learner’s L, with Caity furiously hitting it to symbolise her lack of faith in cupid.
Baser is a fantastic role model to her adoring fans. She shows that it’s okay to take up space, to be loud, to be out there, to be ‘too much’. Female artists are often told to “tone it down” or “stay quiet”, but it’s clear that Caity Baser is absolutely not like that, and she doesn’t want to be.
At one point, Caity infuses Queen’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ with her own ‘Oh Well’, a hyper-feminine and energetic number about being carefree and just saying “oh well” when life decides to go wrong. The song is reflective of the presence Caity radiates on stage, allowing fans to let go, dance and be silly whilst feeling seen and safe in doing so.
Baser ends her set with ‘Pretty Boys’, arguably her breakout hit with the help of TikTok. She has seen a gradual growth in her fanbase over the past few years, already upgrading her live show from Academy 2 last year to this show at the main Academy. With the release of her new album and appearances at Isle of Wight and Radio 1’s Big Weekend in the calendar, this rise will surely continue.
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