Live – CSS | Vanity Fairy at Chalk – Breaking Glass Magazine

CSS & Vanity Fairy at Chalk, Brighton, 28th June 2024

Motorhead, Madonna and a most enjoyable evening as CSS brought their reunion tour to Brighton on Friday.

Opener for the night was the inimitable Vanity Fairy, shimmering gladrags and falsetto disco tunes capturing the imagination of the equally glitter-clad audience. Increasingly it seems that she is the perfect act to support a range of big names (Altered Images, Toyah, Electric 6 to name but a few). Always a happy crowd set up for what comes next, but don’t be surprised as she starts to pull the headline slot away with a sequinned leash as she surely will.

Vanity Fairy

And so to CSS – with their first live dates in the UK for over a decade, the huge wave of anticipation was met head on with equal amounts of energy, fun and ridiculously infectious tunes. From the moment they walked on stage to greet the crowd with CSS Suxxx, the pace was set and never faltered. Lovefoxxx, Ana Rezende, Carolina Parra and Luiza Sá have reformed CSS (Cansei de Ser Sexy) to focus on live shows while celebrating their 20th anniversary as a band. Their camaraderie is evident, and the stories shared made it feel like everyone there was a part of the journey. Lovefoxx talked about going to band practice fearing she would be asked the inevitable ‘Can you name 3 of their songs?’ about her Motorhead T-shirt, though it proved never to be mentioned, with a Madonna cover instead on the cards. Kudos though to seemingly the one person in the crowd who was able to come up with 5 Motorhead songs off the top of his head, and received a beer and several chants of ‘Ian! Ian!’ for his efforts. We got the Madonna track too – Hollywood segueing nicely into City Grrrl and Teenage Tiger Cat.

Almost 20 years down the line and perhaps their best known and still revered track Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above unsurprisingly received a massive reaction, the floor bouncing on and off stage, then a triple whammy encore of I Wanna Be Your J-Lo, Art Bitch and Alala finished an outstanding night of music and frolics. Raise your glass to a reunion worth the wait.

CSS