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Lola Young review – the back-to-front rise of a powerhouse pop star


Juggling negative thoughts, disarming wit and several mobile phones, the straight-talking Londoner has come a long way since being the voice of the John Lewis Christmas ad

To the creative uses of social media (pretty much a prerequisite) and the knack for subsisting solely on Greggs’ vegan sausage rolls (it’s so hard to make money off music), we now add the requirement to take crowd selfies on two audience members’ phones at once, in the middle of a preamble to a song about your deepest, scariest thoughts. In the run-up to My Mind Wanders…, out went the coiffured performances at pianos; in came expletives, face piercings, false eyelashes out to here; what you might call “realness”, if that weren’t such an inexact and slippery term. Photograph: Andy Hall/The ObserverOn Mind …, a pissed-off and confused young woman delivered a set of songs packed with zingers about sub-par relationships and self-obsessed men.

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Lola Young