An astronaut sees us into the show, before being replaced by a floral arrangement that accompanies the more emotional middle section, and finally a shooting star for the euphoric final segment. What we do get is three neon sculptures, each of which punctuates a different portion of the performance.
Save for a few choice moments – most notably a beautiful little routine during the industrial, clattering climax of ‘Hard Feelings’ – they keep their distance from Lorde, their movements entirely unrelated to her own, as if they’re ethereal creatures that only we can see. They create an accompanying image for each song in which they appear without ever pulling focus from the woman whose name is on the marquee outside. This is a pared-back ‘Melodrama’-era Lorde show – instead of a troupe of partying revellers, we have just two dancers, who subtly navigate the space around Ella in the set’s more energetic moments (the next night, in the much larger Alexandra Palace, the pair were joined by four others). The staging is simple: gone is the large, tilting transparent box that was the centrepiece of the summer festival shows that supported the June release of Yelich-O’Connor’s second studio album.
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Similar clips return for ‘Supercut,’ turning earth-shattering, melodramatic movie romances into fleeting, flash-in-the-pan moments, like a highlights package for the concept of love. As the opening clicks of ‘Magnets’ fade in, it fades away, and we’ve got the main attraction before us. What it all amounts to is never quite clear, but it’s entertaining and intriguing enough.
James Dean in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. Matt Damon telling Graham Norton what a great time he’s having.
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A series of seemingly unrelated, perhaps even irrelevant clips, play on a large, late-20 th Century TV in the downstage left corner. As he jumps around the stage to set-closer ‘Young, Dumb and Broke,’ his joy at being able to share that vision with adoring crowds in faraway places is evident. That Grammy-winning 2013 debut told awkward, quietly emotional kids like Khalid that their voices were important, and the way they see the world was worth sharing. Khalid’s strong, punchy opening set drove many attendees wild, and it’s easy to see why there is such a crossover between the two artists’ fans, as well as the influence of ‘Pure Heroine’ on his debut record ‘American Teen’. “I live really far away from here,” she tells the 3,500-strong crowd, and don’t we know it. All were in support of her debut LP ‘Pure Heroine,’ and therefore well over three years ago. Prior to this past Tuesday at the O2 Apollo in Manchester, the opening night of the Melodrama World Tour, Lorde had only played six headline shows in Europe: three in London, two in Germany, and one in The Netherlands.