Lorde at Alexandra Palace, London, review: Artist performs her clever, danceable pop at a perfect live show
Ella Yelich-O’Connor surveys a mesmerised and euphoric crowd. “Alexandra Palace, you look f***ing sensational,” she beams, a broad, wide smile flashing across her face.
“I like playing in London cos I'm kind of awkward and you're kind of awkward… and we find it weird to express ourselves.”
As you watch her for the next two hours joyfully flailing and throwing herself across the stage you get what she means. For watching Lorde live is to uncover more of who she is: half spellbindingly self-aware performer, half jagged, unchoreographed effervescence.
It’s that dichotomy that makes her so interesting - her consciousness and the lack of it. Tonight sees her spin and weave her pop into clever, sleek and danceable shapes but there’s also the sense that she’s letting go. She can’t stop smiling. “This show is all feelings, all the time,” she exclaims at one point. She’s supported by perhaps the hottest name in music right now.
Lorde herself has called the teenage prodigy Khalid's “Young, Dumb and Broke” “f***ing gorgeous,” and, as that title implies, their music shares that rare knack of capturing what it’s like to be young as the world opens up in front of you. With his high kicks and crotch thrusts he already feels like a headliner. Live the intricate, breezy soul of his record is swapped for something bigger and more bombastic.
Songs like "Cold Blooded" has something of Frank Ocean in its DNA, yet playing with a live band means that some of those nuances get a little lost under pounding drums and unnecessary 80s stadium guitar. But as he finishes with the scintillating one-two of “Location” (with the amazing lyric “I don’t want to fall in love off of subtweets”) and ”Young, Dumb and Broke” his star quality can’t be hidden and you remember as a 19-year-old with the world at his feet he has a lot of time to get his live show right.
It does however make the fact that Lorde, one year his senior, has perfected hers seem even more remarkable. Three costume changes, an interpretative dance troupe and a 10-minute soliloquy about on fame, ageing and the journey she’s been on - it’s all here.
She talks about the fact that it’s the four-year anniversary of her debut album Pure Heroine – “it changed my life… you changed my life,” – and her new record Melodrama - “It’s a record about a wide open heart”. If this all sounds like an overly long awards acceptance speech it’s all part of the drama and knowing-yet-lovingly-dorky theatrics of the night.
It helps to view Melodrama through that lens - a diary of her path from teenage ennui to the rush and tumult of early adulthood; and the music matches that; from clipped sleek, pop to the anthemic, almost breathless heady rush of the follow up.
Through irresistible hits like "Ribs" and "World Alone", she strides confidently across the stage, all hair and peculiar, erratic arm movements. At one point she sits on the floor with a box. “I'm going to try something,” she tells us as she begins to play an extended intro for "Buzzcut Season" on a xylophone. It can be too try hard and artsy. A film plays during one costume change which hears Lorde ponder “Don't you wish you could go inside a heart? The strings, the atrium…” to which the answer I’m pretty sure is no.
A cover of Phil Collins’ "In The Air Tonight" also feels a little leaden and out of place. Yet we get banger after banger as the set gears up for glory. After the last costume change we build from "Supercut" through a clipped and wonderful "Royals", into ‘Perfect Places’ until she’s in the crowd for "Team". Then we’ve somehow arrived breathlessly at the end of the show, with Lorde literally lying down on the stage, taking a moment.
Then it’s "Green Light", the song of 2017, an exhilarating burst of bliss. There are glitter cannons, there are flashing lights (green, of course), there's the crowd: arms aloft, singing lyrics about telling yourself you can start your life once more.
Most of all there’s that palpable feeling of letting go again. David Bowie once described Lorde’s music as “like listening to tomorrow”. But now it feels less like Lorde is a detached observer from the future, more that she’s here, in the moment, and tonight we’re all living it out with her.
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