Dua Lipa at the Aviva review: Confident and often sublime evening of pulsing stomp-pop

Irish Times

8 hours ago

Dua Lipa
Aviva Stadium, Dublin
★★★★☆
Dua Lipa
is seamlessly executing the night's shimmering dance workout when the crowd at the
Aviva
miss an opportunity. The singer's pandemic hit Levitating belongs to that select group of disco-pop songs blessed with double handclaps, the finest adornment in all of music, and an optimist might have hoped for the magic of an entire stadium clapping in sync.
A realist would have known that fans' hands would be occupied, but that their phones would create their own special effect during the occasional moments in the English-Albanian star's set when she slows down.
During the portion of the show reserved for a tribute to a local artist, torches are switched on as a reward for her smart choice of
Sinéad O'Connor
's Nothing Compares 2 U. The song becomes more of a stage-school product in this context, but she doesn't totally overcook it, and when she blows a kiss to the crowd at the end, satisfied, you think, 'Yes, that worked.'
Tonight, the last date in the European leg of her
Radical Optimism
tour, we've got steam jets, jewelled collars and joy. She kicks off the celebration with Training Season, a typically relentless Lipa song beloved of sadistic exercise-class instructors, and she's soon running on the spot and shoulder-rolling in silver corsetry.
READ MORE
Later, Physical, off superior second album
Future Nostalgia
, is preceded by a mock aerobics video, and that's the sort of regimented, disciplined shape of things with Lipa. She excels as a purveyor of super-honed bops that, at their best, lean into robotic elements, huskily voiced confidence and Eighties-infused brashness, while exuding their own likable, propulsive groove.
After third song Break My Heart, in which she contemplates the dire consequences of falling in love after a single 'hello', she laps up the Aviva's adoration, then we're straight on to the similarly themed One Kiss, her tropical-house smash with Calvin Harris and the first real banger of the set.
Among the evening's standouts is Love Again, another slice of Future Nostalgia, in which Lipa, resigned to the whole love thing by now, exclaims 'goddamn' at the inevitability of it all beneath giant rings of fire while somehow acquiring a faux-fur coat to match her cobalt blue lace dress and stockings.
But the best thing about Love Again is the vintage sample that propels it – a muted trumpet line originally recorded in 1932 for the composition My Woman, with a 'vocal refrain' by Al Bowlly, has wended its way through musical history to reach the Aviva in the year 2025. That's objectively delightful, and a reminder of how rich the textures of pop music can be.
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When Lipa indulges in overt crowd orchestration, she pulls that off, too, and nowhere is this more effective than on Be the One, from her debut – it's like a manual for euphoria. Not everything attains such heady heights and there's a patience-testing segment where she interacts with an emotional front row, but she still does more than enough tonight to make us know we're never more than seconds away from something fun, something cool. She's got this.
London-born Lipa's next listed concert is a performance at a festival that she and her family organise in Pristina, Kosovo – from where her Kosovo Albanian parents emigrated to the UK – and then there's the small matter of turning 30 to do before she embarks on her North American tour.
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But, for now, on this sultry night in Dublin, she just has her kaleidoscopic final stretch to complete. It starts with infectious early breakthrough New Rules, in which she reminds herself and us how to swerve a man who doesn't love her back. (In real life, she recently announced her engagement to British actor Callum Turner.)
The artist also known as Mermaid Barbie then slips into an all-too-short snippet of Dance the Night from the soundtrack to Greta Gerwig's Barbie film before injecting what's left of her professional energy into 2019 mega-hit Don't Start Now and rumbling Radical Optimism track Houdini.
With the confetti cannons working overtime, she extricates herself from the stage, wrapping up what has been an efficient and often sublime two hours of pulsing stomp-pop, and her replenished fans leave so high they might as well be levitating.