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.
Nevertheless, their presence turns out to be a mixed blessing. There are moments when they summon up the requisite MFSB-esque thunder, as on Whatcha Doing, but there are also moments where the additional musicians seem to be adding a layer of costly stodge, when the memory of the 1970s they evoke is that of the disco artists forced by the Musicians’ Union rules to perform with the BBC’s in-house orchestra on Top of the Pops. They’re on safer ground with the ballads, including a fantastic cover of Cleo Sol’s Sunshine, but their presence on the perky These Walls lends it a hint of – uh-oh – old-fashioned Eurovision.
The show offers an impressively ballsy setlist that skips a lot of Lipa’s hits – no New Rules, IDGAF, One Kiss, Hallucinate or Break My Heart – in favour of playing every track from this year’s coolly received Radical Optimism, presumably with the cameras in mind. A perfectly serviceable, glossy pop album that had the misfortune to be released just as Charli xcx and Chappell Roan shifted the pop zeitgeist into messier, more headstrong territory, Radical Optimism could use the boost of TV exposure.
In fairness, some of its contents sound more striking tonight – the passive-aggressive Happy for You gains a surprising amount of emotional heft – and equally, you can’t miss the surge in audience excitement when she rolls out Levitating, or summons an ebullient Elton John to the stage to perform their duet Cold Heart. The latter gets the loudest response of the night, kicking off an encore that delves into her back catalogue – Be the One, Don’t Start Now, the Barbie-soundtracking Dance the Night, killer pop songs all – suggesting that Dua Lipa is probably just one undeniable banger away from reaffirming her place at pop’s summit.
