In many ways, pop singer Chappell Roan’s show in Dublin resembles the Platonic ideal of a gig. It’s like watching lightning escape from a bottle. Roan is a white-hot name, far too big for this venue, despite the show having been upgraded to a bigger space. It is packed to the gills. In the past six months, the outre, Missouri-born singer has gone from being a buzzy, best-kept-cult act to stealing the show at a succession of US summer festivals.
After a decade of stop-starts in the industry, fame for Roan came very slowly, then seemingly overnight. Some calculate that her set at Chicago’s Lollapalooza last month was the biggest crowd for any artist, ever, in the daytime in that festival’s 33-year history, mirroring her streaming rise from 1 million Spotify listeners to 21 million in, effectively, a heartbeat. Charli XCX may have inaugurated a Brat summer, but Chappell Roan picked up that lime-green sequined baton and tossed it sky high, celebrating the liberation in hedonistic femme fun.
