"This song is for all the crazy bitches tonight!" Avril Lavigne informs an Apollo filled with schoolgirls and their star-shaped glowsticks. A roar erupts, and she is off into Smile, which clamps together bubblepunk guitar and a few wayward four-letter words. "You don't really give a shit … you're fucking crazy, rock'n'roll!" she bawls, artlessly defiant as ever. Lavigne may be 26 and divorced, but a large part of her will be forever 16.
Kesha might have usurped her as the go-to girl for tattooed adolescent attitude, but, arguably, Lavigne has more in common with adolescent audiences. She sounds like them, looks like them – flat-ironed hair and shiny black leggings – and her live show has the substance of a trip to the mall. The failed marriage to fellow Canadian Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 seems to have instilled no introspection, unless it's encrypted in one of the five songs from new album Goodbye Lullaby: "You say I'm messing with your head 'cos I was making out with your friend", perhaps?
Still, 75 minutes slip by painlessly. Unlike most pop acts of her 30m-selling stature, she doesn't bother with dancers and expensive widgets; it's just her and a band, with "effects" confined to sitting atop a piano to grind out a couple of ballads. And if her expressionless-but-loud singing isn't lovely, it does get the job done. The set interlaces hits, covers and album tracks so there's always something for her and the crowd to stamp their feet to.
Lavigne doesn't bother to announce song titles, because there is nobody in the room who doesn't know every petulant word of Sk8er Boi, Complicated and Girlfriend. On I'm With You, the fans do the work for her, singing large chunks of it as she meanders across the stage. Things threaten to get rather beautiful on an unadorned version of Coldplay's Fix You; luckily, her band put a stop to it with screeching power-riffs. Overall, a watchable gig that proves adulthood is no bar to being a full-time sk8er girl.