Robyn, Alexandra Palace, review: a glorious return for disco's queen of heartbreak
It’s perhaps easier to spot Robyn’s prowess by what she doesn’t do than what she does. She boasted neither showy proclamations nor smiles for the first chunk of her set on Friday night. Her name was not in lights; there were no pyrotechnics or cannons firing confetti. In short, the trappings of a pop concert were not to be found here. And Robyn, too, had until now been absent: this was her first London gig in eight years.
Honey, released last October, was her first full album in as many. The chart-topping Swedish singer-songwriter – too odd, too gleefully weird, to be considered a pop star – had ascended to arena shows with her last record, 2010’s hit-packed Bodytalk, but then retreated to her homeland, where her life unravelled. Her closest collaborator and friend, Christian Falk, died from cancer; she split – and then reunited – with her partner; she spent years in daily psychoanalysis to heal the wounds induced by an adolescence in the limelight.
While she was away, Robyn (her surname is Carlsson, but nobody uses it) became the international patron saint of broken-hearted disco-dancers. Her ability to translate the searing, antisocial brutality of heartbreak became a balm for millions, who conjured her in nightclubs on vinyl alone.
And now she is back. The 39-year-old drifted onto the Alexandra Palace’s stage, which was bedecked with lumpen hanging sculptures that recalled the work of YBA Sarah Lucas, and turned that cavernous venue into the most intimate of spaces: a heaving basement club or dimly lit bedroom, even. Somewhere in which to release and confide.
With Honey, Robyn has escaped the predictable, satisfying methodology of the pop songs that she has perfected during her 25-year career. Instead, the record plays with the chords of house; the glitching rhythms and rich, otherworldly synth layers heard on Ibizan dancefloors.
These constructs held the setlist in a heady embrace. Familiar hits such as With Every Heartbeat and Hang With Me were engulfed in new waves of sound, punctuated with clubland cowbells, leaving only Robyn’s crystalline voice (always perfect, always powerful) to guide her devoted fans through such pleasingly amorphous new landscapes.
Throughout, Robyn’s performance retained the authenticity of a musician in private practice. Although she threw herself around, crawled along the floor and gyrated down to her ankles, it was only a wry smile to the audience while riding an imaginary pony across the stage during the encore that she suggested she was in on the show. To watch it was to feel a privileged voyeur, as if witnessing something rare and true devised from and for pleasure rather than meticulously calibrated for a crowd of paying thousands.
But, of course, we were there. And it was an absence that allowed her to really see us, too. One verse into Dancing On My Own – arguably pop’s finest teardrops-on-the-dance floor offering – the music stopped. With it, so did Robyn. Silenced by the sound of 10,000 people singing the song’s chorus – not in sloppy yells but in pained, effortful peals – she stood and roughly wiped her eyes with her palms, laughing at the erupting cheers, no longer dancing on her own.
