Lorde’s disembodied voice purrs out across the darkened palace. “I sip the drink,” it says, darkly, defiantly. “I lie to you. I go to secret worlds.” We are in a brief interval, in which a black, chiffon-clad Lorde goes backstage to become the white-gowned prom queen of the second section. Vintage video snippets flicker across a giant old-school TV sat on stage.
The 20-year-old New Zealander has just sung a throaty version of Sober, one of the darker songs from her latest album, Melodrama. She is about to sing The Louvre, a superlative love song in which Lorde imagines a megaphone being held to her chest, so that the rush of her new affair can become a kick-drum and we can all lose it to her beat. Her hair is wild, her earpiece dangling loose; we’re only half-a-dozen songs in.
Those very same words – “I sip the drink, I lie to you, I go to secret worlds” – recur in the second intermission, when Lorde swaps all-white for all-red. They must matter. Melodrama, Lorde’s second album, was conceived as a suite of songs tracking the arc of a party and the Melodrama world tour sets out to take its ticket-buyers on a journey into other realms, where edges melt, other rules hold sway and only the rush matters. A blue neon astronaut lights up the first section; giant trippy flowers provide the second backdrop. The drink Lorde is sipping in the portentous voiceover reminds you a little of Beyoncé’s Lemonade (“you come home at 3am and lie to me”), but the spirit is more of a teenager disappearing out a window. Lorde’s set walks this ledge – sometimes weighty, sometimes flighty.
Melodrama could have been played a number of ways: fully club-facing, as per songs such as Green Light, with its house-y piano and rush of freedom, or as heartbreak writ large – filmic, stark and intimate.
It turns out to be more of a standard pop gig, all dancers and confetti cannons, than artsier fans might have hoped for. Certainly, Lorde’s intro music, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill, writes a promissory note the show can’t quite pay off. (Few female pop stars have managed to take nonstandard creativity into the mainstream so well as Bush did in the early 80s.) “Is it a Wednesday?” asks Lorde, popstarrily. “Serious question.”
But it is also the sort of gig whose gaps are filled with screamed adulation. People really do love the shiny new songs as much as the strange old ones and they lose it willingly to faster tracks such as Supercut. Royals, as brilliant as it remains, and lit up by more phones than any other track, is not the encore: the strange coda of Loveless is.
Lorde, too, has outgrown her youthful seriousness, dancing joyously like no one is looking, even though 10,000 people are. She was so much older on the first album, you could argue. She’s younger than that now, a trick Miley Cyrus, incidentally, is also trying to pull off. As though to emphasise the point, Lorde fetches a little boxed xylophone and plays Buzzcut Season’s melody on it, sitting, childlike, on the ground.
But her old soul is never all that far away. The big reveal of the set lies in a cover of Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight, another big-drumming landmark of the 80s. The Collins original is a masterpiece of seething fury, presumed infidelity at its core. Lorde’s version falls short of the bunny-boiling intensity the song requires (the drummer could use some steroids, too) but its presence at the heart of this set raises all sorts of questions about who might have done what to whom in the disintegration of Lorde’s own relationship – the real grist of Melodrama.
The night’s biggest frisson comes during the moving ballad Liability, and its reprise, where Lorde diagnoses herself as “a little much” for her ex, and everyone else for that matter; she really does have a sold-out crowd eating out of her hand. For the reprise, a solitary dancer twirls in place as though in a music box, the loveliest visual touch.
Surprisingly, Lorde does not play Melodrama’s killer track, Writer in the Dark, where she does channel Kate Bush with conviction. It’s not the only question mark lingering over the set. A string section plays on some songs, but it’s the wrong accompaniment – Sober really needed its magnificent horns live and direct.
It is phenomenally hard, being a mass-market visionary; you need to be mould-breaking, but bring enough ordinary punters with you. But you can’t help but wish there were a few more secret worlds to get lost in tonight; a few more lies, a bit more potent hooch.
