Love in The Key of Britpop is spoken word artist Emily Andersen’s performance of her self-professed ‘ode to Britpop, nightclub romance, visa marriages and anglophilic love’.
Andersen is an earnest and animated narrator and in the hour she was on stage it was hard to look away or break her gaze. The audience were drawn in as she recounted, with tender and sometimes painful clarity, her experience of falling in and out of love. Hardly your ‘boy meets girl’ theme, Love in The Key of Britpop recalls it being more British boy meets Australian girl in Melbourne indie disco, they bond over a knowledge of the Britpop genre, start dating, and, when his visa is about to run out, they get married.
As hinted at by the show’s title, Andersen’s self-confessed Anglophilia, with emphasis on music, constantly peppered the performance. Whilst it was on the surface dismissable only as quirky and a gimmick to keep the story distinctive; her frequent references to Cocker, Albarn and McCartney - she admits to being controversially pro-Paul - actually became something more thoughtful as the show progressed. We saw how it assisted in shaping her impressions and memories of the relationship, and made it relatable to a room full of strangers who had never met Andersen or her visa-husband, but who are likely to have heard the emotive strains of The Smith’s ‘I Know It’s Over’ or Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
Refreshingly, her depiction of both the wide-eyed pleasure of falling in love as well as the realities of heartbreak, was touching and engaging without veering too close to the hyperbolic. This is helped by the fact that Andersen’s poetry has that magic ability to err between pithy one-liners and something more honest and bleak and to make the transition feel entirely natural.
