Battersea Arts Centre welcomes back audiences to the stunning Grand Hall for an exhilarating week of in-person celebration with Life: LIVE! (7-15 July). The subversive pop concert spectacular is the latest show from artist and provocateur Lucy McCormick, following smash hits Triple Threat (2016) and Post-Popular (2019), as she forefronts her aspiration to be a famous pop star. This show has been reimag-ined in lockdown as a site specific performance especially for the Grand Hall and is the world premier of Lucy’s live band.

Originally programmed for spring 2020, Life: LIVE! is now the culmination of Battersea Arts Centre’s mainly digital current season, Wild Times. This new production will showcase Lucy Muck’s debut album of original music, with live musicians, Dave Page (guitar and bass) and Chloe Rianna (drums and keys), and featuring shonky-spectacular, stadium-chic visuals created on stage by artist Morven Mulgrew.

Life: LIVE! is a hilarious, crumbling, live music extravaganza that straddles stardom, self-care and re-demption. With Lucy’s trademark mix of absurdity, feminism and the grotesque, she embraces sculp-ture, choreography, comedy and performance art. The DIY cross-genre performance comically mean-ders through some of life’s big questions, while the despair and damage of false dreams seep through the cracks of B&Q timber.

Songs featured in the show will be available on Lucy Muck’s debut album and released throughout June and July 2021. Known for belting out full-throttle renditions of pop classics in her previous live shows, Lucy now channels her formidable musical talents into songwriting for the first time. The album draws on personal experiences and explores loss, grief and grappling with identity whilst leaning into her love of the highs and lows of pop-culture, producing irresistibly catchy, dance-along beats with soulful bal-lads. The first single ‘Let You Go’, will be released in early June.

“Lucy McCormick has the moves of Beyoncé, the lungs of Christina Aguilera and the morals of a punk iconoclast. As a comedian she is fearless. As a performer she is reckless. She is one of the most extraor-dinary and extreme performers around.” – The Scotsman

In Lucy McCormick’s debut, Triple Threat, she attempted to retell the story of the New Testament, playing all the lead roles herself with the help of backing dancers, pop ballads and absurdist art. The award-winning show, developed through working with cabaret legend, Ursula Martinez, established her practice as one of the UK’s most stand out new voices in experimental performance and it toured extensively around the world. Lucy’s second full scale show, Post Popular, was a piercing, subversive look at women’s stories through history. Its sold-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe opened to a slate of 4 & 5 star reviews and led to a further four-week run at London’s Soho Theatre.

Life: LIVE!, Lucy’s first original music show, was originally commissioned by Fierce, Teatro do Bairro Alto and Cambridge Junction. The premier was highlighted in a 5-star Guardian review of the 2019 fes-tival. Lucy recently performed her single ‘Rain’ as a featured artist in the award-winning, one-take film The Way Out (Battersea Arts Centre/ Arts Council England/ BBC Arts).

Continuing to explore extremes in different performance contexts, Lucy developed a cult following through her frenzied underground club acts at Duckie, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, Dalston Su-perstore and The Glory. She has also received critical acclaim for acting roles in theatre productions such as Collective Rage (Southwark Theatre, her performance was nominated for an Offie Award) and Cabaret including Effigies of Wickedness (The Gate/ENO). On screen, she will appear in the second sea-son of This Time with Alan Partridge. She will star as Catherine in the National Theatre’s upcoming pro-duction of Wuthering Heights, directed by Emma Rice.

Life: LIVE! is co-commissioned by Fierce, Teatro do Bairro Alto and Cambridge Junction with support from Alkantara, Tramway, Civic House Glasgow and Battersea Arts Centre and funded by Arts Council England.