Marina, Royal Albert Hall, review: what happened to the homewrecker?

Biba Kang
Marina performs at the Royal Albert Hall in London on May 3 - 152894-5
Marina performs at the Royal Albert Hall in London on May 3 - 152894-5

To drop your internationally recognisable and confusingly plural stage name is a bold move. She was once known as “Marina and the Diamonds”, to the bafflement of everyone’s mum (“is it a band?”), but the 33-year-old Welsh pop artist Marina Diamandis now goes by her first name alone.

Diamandis is returning after a four-year break from the music industry. Striding onto the Royal Albert Hall stage on Friday night, however, swathed in layers of hot-pink tulle, she had the presence of a pop veteran, to add to the freshness of someone who’d had a much-needed rest.

The show followed the same two-part structure as her pensive fourth album, Love + Fear (2019), and Diamandis used the evening to showcase her new material, interspersed with hits from The Family Jewels (2010), Electra Heart (2012) and Froot (2015).

Any performer is bound to have more luck with the old favourites, and Diamandis could still channel the theatricality, humour and irony that characterised her old bubble-gum-blowing, heart-breaking, home-wrecking persona. During her best-known singles Hollywood, Primadonna and How to Be a Heartbreaker, the audience were out of their seats and bopping with as much gusto as the four tireless backing dancers on stage.

But the new material had no such effect. During Life is Strange, Diamandis had to prompt her audience to stand up and sing, with all the peppy enthusiasm of a schoolteacher. The fans were happy to oblige, but the forgettable song, with its tepid hook and predictable lyrics, didn’t give them much to work with. These new cuts were hindered by more than unfamiliarity.

Marina had her 'tireless backing dancers' for company throughout - Credit: KGC-138
Marina had her 'tireless backing dancers' for company throughout Credit: KGC-138

As well as her ethereal voice, Diamandis is loved for her vampy melodrama, her lyrical wit and her incisive exploration of ego. Yet the songs on Love + Fear are full of perspective and level-headedness; it’s an emotionally mature progression, but a musically disappointing shift.

This meant that Diamandis’s frou-frou costumes, flamboyant choreography and ambitious set changes couldn’t make up for the dramatic deficit at the heart of the evening: the new numbers just felt bathetic after the old hits.

Marina can put the Diamonds to one side if she wants – but the world looks like it’s going to miss that sparkle.