In the darkened basement of the Diesel store in Central, Anna Catherine Hartley is on the edge of a tantrum. A crowd of hip twenty-somethings look on, bemused, swilling bottled beer and bobbing to the music. The lights pump a neon rainbow across the stage, where a star in ballet flats and a strapless black jumpsuit is shouting at them, desperately, to dance.
Uffie, Hartley's artist persona, strikes her arms across her body in a gesture that says 'no more'. Her DJ, Kodh of electro/post-punk band Voice Hands Machine, plays on heroically. She loses her grip.
'I'm gonna stop the show if you guys don't dance! You can't just stand around like mother-f***ing cripples! I'm a cripple!' she shrieks, pointing at her swollen ankle, a sprain she sustained falling off a two-foot-high stage in high heels.
'I just got off the plane from Paris. After this I'm getting on a plane to Tokyo. I've been doing interviews for you guys all day.' She swears at the crowd, holds up her middle finger and thrusts it at the swirl of bodies.
Pedro Winter, helmsman of Ed Banger records to which Uffie is signed, lurches onto the stage from one side. 'Anna,' he implores, taking her arm. She shakes him off with a toss of her head and chants, 'On strike! On strike! On strike!' in the monotone of a petulant child. 'How French,' drawls one partygoer, as he pushes his way out.
It would be easy to write Hartley off now, to call her a brat and judge her incarnation as Uffie as the cynically packaged electro-pop parcel that it might be. And that's probably what we'd have done, had we not met her earlier in the day and been disarmed. She is smart and openly self-conscious. She's polite enough and funny in a deadpan sort of way. But she's tired, and not just any old tired. The girl is exhausted to the bone.