In the audience of the Manchester Arena there’s a girl holding up a homemade sign: “Billie,” it reads. “We will never outgrow you”.
It’s an oddly touching and apposite message. The last time Billie Eilish played a solo show in Britain was in 2019. Her debut album When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? had just been released, and the venues she was booked into were clearly too small to cope with her burgeoning success among a largely female, early teens audience. But three years is a long time in teenage pop – the things you like at 14 aren’t usually the things you like at 17 – and a lot has happened to Eilish in the interim. She cancelled a world tour as a result of Covid and released a new album, noticeably light on the kind of electro-goth bangers that helped propel its predecessor to multi-platinum success but heavy on wistfully opaque songs that suggested becoming a global teen idol when you were still a teenager yourself wasn’t much fun. She appeared on the cover of Vogue looking less like the sulky, skatewear-clad figure her audience was used to than the kind of blond vamp Raymond Chandler dreamed up in order to give Philip Marlowe a rough time. One regularly expressed theory was that Eilish had, perhaps deliberately, lost the room: teen audiences had moved on to other teenaged stars, such as Olivia Rodrigo.
