Dua Lipa review at Glastonbury – headliners are rarely so hook-laden and hedonistic | Glastonbury 2024

AAccording to the most intriguing part of her between-song conversation, Dua Lipa’s appearance as a headliner at Glastonbury is the result of a childhood act manifesting itself. The singer claims she wrote in detail about her desire to headline the Pyramid stage, including the night the event was scheduled to take place: a Friday, so she “could spend the rest of the weekend partying.” “. And now here we are: watching a rather unusual video of Dua Lipa signing her name and writing the words “GLASTO 24” on a window, then licking it.

Whether you believe in manifesting or not, Dua Lipa has clearly spent a lot of time carefully studying and absorbing how a successful Glastonbury concert works, and putting what she’s learned to good use. The announcement of his presence caused some consternation, particularly after his latest album, Radical Optimism, failed to replicate the kind of global success delivered by its predecessor, the lockdown hit Future Nostalgia. But she already has a stock of essential hits, from New Rules to her collaboration with Elton John Cold Heart, which is half the battle won. What’s more, she puts everything she has into her concert to make it feel like an event, rather than just another pop show set in a field in Somerset, another stop on a world tour. which takes place on a farm.

There are confetti cannons galore. There are fireworks – so many during Levitating that you wonder what they’re doing for the finale, even if they manage to do better. There’s a crowd-pleasing reference to the festival’s hedonism, though it’s not from the singer herself, who largely confines herself to asking the audience how they’re feeling: instead, she takes to the stage to the famous Peter Fonda clip from the 1966 biker film The Wild Angels , informing the crowd that he wants to get high and have fun. And there’s an equally crowd-pleasing appearance from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker – his jeans and T-shirt at odds with the main attraction’s constant costume changes; a moment where the duo puff up their voices and laugh in contradiction to the choreographed mood of the show – performing not one of their collaborations with Dua Lipa but their biggest hit, The Less I Know the Better: 1.6 billion streams to date.

Hallucinate makes some of Lipa’s more recent efforts look a little pale in comparison. Fueled by house and loaded with exciting hooks, it may well be one of the best pop singles in recent memory—which is not a claim anyone is going to make on behalf of the serviceable but unexceptional Houdini or Training Season. There are a few less impressive songs from Radical Optimism thrown into the mix: the pass-aggy Happy for You; the acoustic-guitar-driven These Walls.

The latter track was the only one on the album, vaguely suggesting the Britpop influence she spent a lot of time talking about before its release, but listening to it tonight, it sounds more like other tracks that sold by millions in the 90s. It’s not a stretch to imagine it being sung by Texas, Natalie Imbruglia or even the Corrs. But the set places these songs in the middle of the hits so successfully that we barely notice them. There’s always another cast iron hit on the way: Levitating, Physical, Illusion.

“It’s a lot, isn’t it,” she gasps at one point, surveying the vast expanse of a huge crowd that, incidentally, remains in place: there’s none of the waste that signals a Glastonbury headliner getting his audience wrong and leading him to the other side of the festival’s many delights. It’s an unmitigated success.