One of Gen-Z's biggest popstars graced the Rock City stage...
Back at the start of February this year, a monumental chart moment slipped under the radar. That week, the top five in the UK singles chart was entirely populated by female artists with Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift sitting alongside SZA, Raye, and venbee.
While lots of the fantastic up-and-coming artists are pushing genre boundaries and creating their own unique style, there is still a place in the world for high quality, don’t-take-it-too-seriously pop music.
Having been signed at the age of just eighteen, Mimi Webb sits in a group of radio-friendly female stars who make catchy, relatable, three-minute pop songs. The worlds of Instagram and TikTok are the perfect home for these upbeat, feel-good hits – and by the look of the young crowd at Rock City it’s social media where many of the audience would have discovered the 22-year-old star.
Bouncing on stage to recent single Ghost Of You in a leotard and fishnet combo – my grandma would have commented that “she must be freezing in that” – Webb treated the audience to a prepared and fixed setlist that left little room for banter. All the tracks of 2023 debut album Amelia featured here, alongside a handful of hits from her earlier Seven Shades of Heartbreak EP.
While there has always been a place for a catchy chorus, what is great about Webb – and fellow artists like Cian Ducrot and Benson Boone – is that she has brought the balls-out power ballad back into the public consciousness.
Is It Possible? sounds like something Diane Warren would have written for a Meg Ryan romcom and includes a guitar solo that was so cheesily 1980s it made Bon Jovi sound like Aitch.
Webb’s first top ten hit, Good Without, is a terrific example of a 2020s torch song, and showcased her fine vocal range. The likes of piano ballads such as Roles Reversed and 24/5 sounded great and are destined to be exactly the sort of thing that members of Gen Z would attempt at karaoke after a few passion fruit ciders.
While there’s nothing wrong with simple pop songs, there were essentially just two gears here – the catchy singles and the giant ballads – which did mean that the seventy minute set eventually began to drag a little bit.
It perhaps didn’t help that these are not songs about existential issues facing humanity. After a while, chirruping about the beginnings, middles, and ends of good, bad, and indifferent relationships began to feel a bit samey. It’s very much the Lewis Capaldi approach.
An acoustic version of the eponymous Amelia was a nice change of pace and the most personal moment of the evening, shortly before an encore of two giant bangers, Red Flags – the front row handed the singer a red flag to wave – and House On Fire, arguably the biggest ever hit about arson.
The crowd lapped it all up, although I feel that turning up and belting out faithful recreations of your album is the minimum expectation when you charge twenty pounds for a gig ticket. Having recently seen fellow British popstress Rina Sawayama demonstrate that you can put on a sassy, inventive and engaging show on the Rock City stage, this felt a bit like going through the motions.
If Mimi Webb is going to take the next step and end up in arena territory, you can’t help but feel like she needs to add some variety to her songwriting and up the creative production of the show. Still, hearing some solid gold pop tunes live is never a waste of a Monday evening so for that, Mimi, I salute you.
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