After an opening medley of End of an Era and Houdini, Dua Lipa starts telling the audience about the many legendary performers who have preceded her on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall. There’s certainly plenty of pivotal moments in musical history to choose from – it was here that Bob Dylan and his Fender Stratocaster faced down a mob of baying folkies in 1966 and the Jimi Hendrix Experience ended their last European show amid the wreckage of smashed equipment – but it turns out that the singer has rather more august figures in mind: “Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Albert Einstein,” she offers. “But I bet none of them had a dress as nice as this.”
Presumably not: she’s clad in a floor-length red Gaultier gown, complete with a train, a look befitting what she calls “a show unlike any I’ve done before”. In front of cameras filming for a forthcoming TV special, she’s performing accompanied by a 53-piece orchestra and a 14-strong choir. It’s impressive in scale and ambition, her voice is strong enough not to be swamped by the instrumentation, and there’s absolutely no reason why her brand of dance-pop shouldn’t work laden with strings and brass – it is, after all, ultimately rooted in disco, a genre seldom noted for its minimalist approach to arrangements.
