Live music review: Grimes at the Olympia, Dublin

4/5

Grimes’s Claire Boucher caused sparks to fly on the final night of her European tour but the pyrotechnics were more literal than she had surely intended.

At the midpoint of this engaging sell-out performance Boucher — who deploys Grimes as stage name, fashion brand and alter-ego — was jolted backwards, her confident smile transforming into a wince.

“I’ve been electrocuted,” she told the room, which sounded like a joke until we worked out that it wasn’t. Into the wings she trotted while a roadie mucked about with cables and duct tape.

Whether Boucher truly was on the receiving end of a blast of alternating current or had merely suffered a fusillade of feedback from her apparently chronically malfunctioning earpiece was never clarified. Yet the incident took some of the momentum out a concert that, until then, had been a masterclass of pop pretension.

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Boucher had arrived in the guise of a charming contradiction as she dipped into stand-outs from her 2015 album Art Angels.

She exhibited Taylor Swift-levels of prim perkiness; her cork-screw hair might have been on extended loan from a 1980s’ metal band.

Her music, meanwhile, leaped from Bjork-esque weirdo pop to Tay-Tay grade chart froth. Accompanying her were a troop of backing singers who doubled as dancers. In a good way, it was like watching the Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ video repurposed by a final year avant-garde choreography class.

Then, at the start of ‘Butterfly’, came the technical hiccups. Grimes was a trooper and battled on, despite several further kicks from her equipment. To her credit, her enthusiasm never wilted and, with the closing kung-fu kick of ‘Kill V Maim’, she exited on a high. A charmingly chaotic delve into pop’s outer limits — but how much better might it have been had technology not got in the way?