Why Charli XCX's 'Brat Strat' is my Favourite Reference
The green thread from Charli xcx beginnings to Brat
I read great Substacks all the time and this one by Grace Gordon for The Sociology of Business is fantastic. It comes off the back of Charli xcx release for her sixth album, Brat, detailing and visualising the components of the marketing strategy for it.
As a social media marketing strategist, analysing the Brat roll-out sits squarely in my lane…
BUT ALSO
As a former band manager and club co-promoter who put on Charli xcx first ever shows, for me, the ‘Brat Strat’ goes deep.
I drop this into conversation here and there but I rarely give any details. It could come off like I’m old and cringe and living in the past. So even writing about this feels, on a level, deeply uncool. But I’m gonna put that aside because there’s a story to tell.
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Rewind to when I was 21. I managed a band in Shoreditch called The Coolness and co-ran a club night called ‘Club Cool’ with the frontman, Chaz. He often shared MySpace artists he found that he thought would be good to play at our clubnight. This one seemed cool. Ed Banger in top friends. He invited her to play…
Charli xcx MTV feature interview (2015)
The internet will tell you Charli xcx first performance happened in a peanut factory in Hackney Wick. Which is a half memory of Charli’s. That came later.
Her first performance was upstairs at a pub called the White Hart in Whitechapel. We stacked up old tvs ‘playing’ visual static and filled the room with smoke machines. Charli got up on a chair and performed. It was chaotic energy. But so was the whole operation.
Chaz clearly saw Charli xcx artistic potential. He even said to me “she'll be like Kate Bush”. At first I thought that was kind of ridiculous and incongruous to what I was seeing, however, Chaz had a great knowledge of pop music history, and seemed to inherently understand how these things, at least should, work.
Charli xcx wasn’t the centrepiece though, that was our band. We had a whole fifty point manifesto: No gaps between songs so the audience can’t applaud; Fill the room with so much smoke you can’t see; It should feel like a club not a gig; No laptops on stage… the whole ethos put us more in the realm of performance art than indie band. While other bands wore skinny ripped jeans and sang about the mundanity of life, Chaz wore lycra and sang about taking your clothes off.
The Coolness - Take It Off (version: presumed lost official music video)
He wielded a guitar, a charity shop Casio keyboard and iPod backing track. There were some guitarists and dancers too, and sometimes a drummer. References were KISS, Daft Punk and New Order. We didn’t want to play at 9pm. We wanted to perform at 2am. At Club Cool we could do what we wanted.
Chaz seemed to live in clubs. He resided in the middle of Shoreditch and was out 7 nights a week. In amongst marching us straight to the front of lines at clubnights such as Nag Nag Nag, Durrr and BoomBox, one night he took me along to ‘Computer Blue’, a night run by an unassuming guy named Fonteyn. He intentionally folded it at its peak. Cool. ‘NUKE THEM ALL’ was run by Fonteyn and Antisocial’s Buster Bennett with live visuals by Alex Sedano, and was in a strip club in Bethnal Green. It was cartoon gothic and lurid neon green. I loved it. I was intimidated by how cool people there like Dean Golden, Namalee and Niyi were, wearing Cassette Playa t-shirts and huge chains. We went to visit Buster at Super Super magazine HQ one day. The magazine covered MIA, Dev Hynes, Frankmusik and a load of people who felt like they could be stars but you might see them in a bar the next night along with a Klaxon.
Before Charli played with other promoters she played for months just with us. This included Hoxton pubs (label A&R suits showed up - we howled at making them wait until 1am to watch her stand on another chair), Barcode in Soho, sketchy warehouses that were broken into in Hackney Wick before the area was redeveloped, a railway arch warehouse behind Cambridge Heath Road run by Lucha Libre wrestlers which later became our fixed address, a house party with a ‘marquee’ in the back garden in Dalston somewhere and, memorably, an evening car trip with us all up to her hometown to play the nightclub her dad owned. I spoke with him a few times about running a club night...
Image: Billa Baldwin
… at Club Cool; HEALTH, SOPHIE, Micachu & The Shapes, Princess Superstar, The Saoudis (later Fat White Family), Is Tropical, Crystal Fighters, and Chairlift (Caroline Polachek) amongst many others played. It didn’t live in isolation but it was seminal in its own weird little way. It was chaotic but it had energy.
Club Cool ‘Door Whore’ Jonny & Me
We recorded our music video for ‘Kids on K’ at Mother bar 333 in the basement on a light up disco floor - Charli showed up to dance, roll around on the floor and blow a whistle. She’s in the video. One of our dancers, Brenda, designed the artwork for her single, Emeline/Art Bitch. Lillica Libertine had just done a remix for our friends - an aggressive but fun Arabic-German-American synth punk band called Dead Kids. Man I loved that band. Outside on Kingsland Road, the singer told me about falling through a roof at a party (not ours). It was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. Then they went upstairs at Catch and demanded you dance. The room lost its mind. Lillica Libertine did a remix of Charli’s single Emeline/Art Bitch. I still have the CD, and a copy of her ‘lost’ debut album ‘14’…
Artwork by The Coolness dancer: Brendalina Badchild
While Charli has undoubtedly grown and developed away from that scene, she’s managed to retain the attitude of it. And that’s fucking cool.
This may all sound like a bratty brag, but what I’m trying to convey is that I’m incredibly proud of her. While Charli has undoubtedly grown and developed away from that scene, she’s managed to retain the attitude of it. And that’s fucking cool. I don’t think she’d be doing what she’s doing now if she didn’t have to learn to get attention by standing on a chair and fighting to be seen through clouds of smoke.
I’m a quiet fanboy. For 16 years I’ve watched almost every single thing she’s done as an artist. But I’ve not seen her live again. I’ve always been quietly confident that, inevitably, one day she would release a record - and go about it in a way - that reflects the roots of the DIY club sub-culture she came from. And I knew it would go hard. That’s a powerful thing. The quiet confidence is obviously because she’s talented and smart, but it’s also because she’s legit.
The Brat release strategy is going to become my favourite reference. It’s world building marketing. Unique Monocultural Moments (UMM’s); opportunities for fans and newcomers to find the right jumping in point for them. She’s everywhere but she’s also close with her fans - putting on her own raves now! Free parties - like we used to. It’s smart but it’s alsodumb fun. And that’s her. That’s Club Cool. That’s why our music video she was in was about being out of your mind and lost in a disco.
The Sociology of Business Substack article is a fantastic read with some great data viz. It’s New York centric, which I get (hi Dimes Square) but it’s also skewed because to me there’s a lurid green thread that goes all the way from East London to Brat.
I wonder sometimes if someone should make a film about all this. I don’t know whether there’s enough footage. I have some old DV tapes. I used to wear them around my neck as some kind of fashion along with USB cables around my wrists. WTF.
The trajectories of Chaz and Charli are sadly at odds. We made a few videos, played over 250 shows including SXSW and won an MTV Iggy award and that was the pinnacle. She lives mostly in LA and is kind of a big deal. The music industry is hard. Make the most of what you can get. It was of its time and its hard to go back. But, I listen to her song, and I too sometimes think it would be cool to rewind