★★★★☆

Panning the cramped room, the overarching demographic were Gen Z, alt girlies, and winning this competitive prize draw could only serve as affirmation of their collectively manifested lucky girl syndrome – the belief that you’re the luckiest girl in the world.

The crowd’s ears adjusted to the night ahead with early noughties indie rock bangers blasting from the speakers, broken by a distorted “Is it me or recently, time is moving slowly” from her ‘Beatopia Cultsong’ as the stage’s red lights dimmed in anticipation of Bea’s arrival.

Without time to waste, the cool singer and her equally cool band took to stage, easing into the evening with a slog of her earlier tracks ‘Worth It’, ‘Together’, ‘Charlie Brown’ and ‘Care’ from her debut studio album Fake It Flowers, testing the audience to single out the true day ones.

Given this first album dropped a mere three years ago, and Beabadoobee was plucked out as a BRITs rising star nominee, all seems pretty silly considering the scale of the singer’s success today, but when you see Bea playing live, it’s easy to validate the hype surrounding her. She really is that good.

The crowd volume instantly cranks all the way up when the bossa nova intro of ‘the perfect pair’ sounded out. From there, Bea and her band flitted between tracks from her different eras, with the songs from her latest album Beatopia popping off the most. She only played a small handful of these, most likely due to the personal depth these tracks offer, especially off the back of her recent breakup. On top of that, this emotional vulnerability must be even more challenging in a setting so intimate.

She sheepishly confessed her nerves and let the crowd know “I haven’t played a gig this small for a while”. Comparing the cosy Lafayette to her last sold-out London show at the eight times larger O2 Brixton Academy, it actually feels as though the setting is more suited to an artist like Beabadoobee.

Her USP is essentially rooted in noughties nostalgia, pairing her soft, nonchalant vocals over heavy rock instrumentals. So gigging in an unpolished manner at an intimate venue like Lafayette, therefore, feels straight out of the closing prom scene of a coming-of-age chick flick. The moment in the film you watched as a kid and deeply wished you were there.

Though not as epic as her Beatopia tracks, songs from her earlier discography got the crowd going nonetheless, with recognisable thrashers ‘She Plays Bass’ and ‘Back To Mars’ met with lots of soft-moshing and collective crowd bouncing. Bea and her fans do a very good job of getting you on board with the cutesy adolescence of it all, regardless of whether you’re a teenage girl or her 50-year-old, supervising dad.

After a faux ending with ‘Last Day on Earth’, Bea returned to stage and sat alone on a stool with her trusty acoustic guitar, starting off with the sickly-sweet ‘Coffee’, credited as the original catalyst of her career after it did the rounds on Tik Tok. The innocence of the room was palpable as the crowd swayed along and mimicked back the song’s infantile singing. This was broken up throughout by some drunken heckles of adoration, with a personal favourite being the very mis-timed “Bea!! You’re a bad bitch!!”; not to mention the lobbing of plushies and red rose bouquets which the singer had to dodge throughout the set.

She introduced her penultimate song with the preface, “This song isn’t out yet”, referring to her upcoming release ‘Glue’. Surprisingly, every word was sung back by the super fans who clearly did their homework, revising her Tiny Desk performance of it a couple months ago, which left the singer visibly touched and giggly throughout the song.

The full band returned for one last gritty banger, ‘Cologne’, to sign off the night, as Bea thanked and hugged all the stans within reaching distance. Even after a set as short and sweet as Friday night’s, it’s very easy to see why these Gen Z girlies choose Bea as their matriarch. All hail Beabadoobee.