How did we miss that: A dancing, waving crowd, hands in the air and even the glowing smartphones aren’t annoying. With a two-year delay, Dua Lipa is catching up on her world tour and bringing something like normality back. A function hall like the Mercedes Benz Arena cannot be a club, and yet it felt a bit like that. At least in the last half hour of their brilliant 90-minute concert, which spirals into a rousing disco medley in which Balearic and Balkan beats, old-school vocal house and funk guitars, EDM and R&B come together to create a crazy flow.
Dua Lipa is a pop sovereign in a deep pink gymnastics catsuit as she takes the stage. “Let’s get physical!” she briefly quotes Olivia Newton-John; later she will quote “I wanna dance with somebody”, two of the many quotations in the Dua Lipa cosmos, boldly set, powerful. She previously featured all the dancers framing them with cute plastic umbrellas as she performs “New Rules,” the hit that catapulted her to the top of the charts five years ago. With the cool line “If you’re under him, you ain’t getting over him”.
This was not foreseeable when my colleague Ralf Niemczyk met Dua Lipa a year earlier for ROLLING STONE in Pristina, where she gave a concert, received a bouquet from the Kosovar Prime Minister and where her grandmother lives. The path from there to becoming a world star is also the path of an artist who sees her art as a hard-earned craft. Friends of synchronous choreographies and well-built pops will not be disappointed by their live show. Just as she coolly incorporates the obscure string sample of an ultra-obscure 1930s jazz band, known from the one-hit wonder White Town, into her glorious “Love Again”, the show and music are a journey through dance-pop snippets of the decades. “Future Nostagia”, the title of their current album, says it all.
Whether Dua Lipa throws herself in table dance poses or struts across the stage as a strict countess in a floor-length glittering dress, every pose sits and reflects her self-confidence as a “female alpha” that the world has to get used to, as she did on the title track “Future Nostalgia” sings. The album was a blessing in the pandemic – a zero-depressive, self-confidently grooving statement against the isolation and for what is now happening in the hall: a cheerful come together on the dance floor (well, yes, on the functional hall floor). There’s roller skating and disco balls and the snappy beats of Break My Heart.
With “Be The One” from the debut album, the artist then shows the original building blocks of the Dua Lipa sound again: Europop, disco, a shot of electro beeper, flash dance, Abba. Expandable at any time. For example through official vocal house of the early 90s, like in the great “One Kiss”. Or, much less great, through Tangerine Dream-like tangles, featuring rising planets above the stage. Or through Elton John, who is enthroned in the background via video message and sings his pretty line “I think it’s gonna be a long, long time” from “Rocket Man”, the pop grandmaster’s accompaniment to Dua Lipa’s “Cold Heart”.
Perhaps the biggest moment comes when the larger-than-life Lobster arrives onstage, while Dua Lipa sings from the sidelines. Despite all the focus and formatting, a relaxed lack of seriousness shines through again and again, the pleasure of quoting and putting the quoted together in impossible combinations to create something new. Nash the lobster come giant cocktail cherries. Everything goes. Somehow. Before Dua Lipa leaves the stage headbanging in a laser storm and in a golden catsuit.
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