It’s roughly a decade since Kathleen Hanna last played live in the UK, time she has mostly spent experiencing chronic fatigue due to late-stage Lyme disease. As the crowd of the Electric Ballroom await her arrival, the usual anticipation is tinged with disbelief: having seen The Punk Singer – the documentary about her in which she talks candidly about her illness – and had our tickets refunded for the Julie Ruin’s cancelled 2014 tour, many of us present tonight thought she wouldn’t come back.
This matters because for more than two decades Hanna has been an iconic figure, a loud-and-proud feminist who, with her punk band Bikini Kill and dancier outfit Le Tigre, has melded pop and politics with galvanising deftness. She does it again with the Julie Ruin: stage banter during the hour-long set runs the gamut from Ireland’s marriage referendum to abortion rights, the drought in California and gender essentialism. But whereas in Bikini Kill, Hanna did most of the talking, here she has a sparring partner: Kenny Mellman, previously the latter half of cabaret duo Kiki and Herb. Pretending to be chat-show hosts and skitting each other’s stage outfits, Hanna and Mellman make a scintilliating comedy duo themselves, the affection between them palpable.
It’s just as well they talk politics between songs, because almost every word Hanna sings is indistinguishable amid the clang and clatter of Mellman’s popcorn keyboards and Kathi Willcox’s space-hopper basslines. The Julie Ruin are a playground translated into sound: Oh Come On has the angularity of a climbing frame, South Coast Plaza the spin and swirl of a merry-go-round, and every song makes you want to trampoline. Run Fast, the title track from their 2013 album, is oddly downbeat for an encore but, dealing with the multitude of ways young women are belittled, it argues the need for accessible feminism exquisitely.
