Dua Lipa review — playing it safe at sold-out Wembley

Times

4 hours ago

Playing her largest ever headline concert at the first of two back-to-back hometown mega-shows, Dua Lipa strutted through a two-hour maximalist spectacular of costume changes, confetti blizzards and weapons-grade pyrotechnics as 90,000 screaming fans packed into a sold-out Wembley Stadium. This show boasted more sequins than stars in the Milky Way, a glittery catwalk parade of precisely engineered corsets, and the hardest working hair in showbusiness. Just enough glamazon razzle-dazzle, in fact, to elevate Lipa's oddly anodyne music, which remained in generic dance-pop mode for most of the evening. Plenty of killer outfits, too few killer tunes.
Falling a year after the 29-year-old British-Albanian diva topped Glastonbury's main stage, these Wembley performances mark the British launch of Lipa's year-long Radical Optimism world tour, which kicked off in Australia last November. Divided into four acts, the set was sprinkled with tracks from the 2024 chart-topping album of the same name, which in fairness sounded more sparkly and dynamic than their studio versions, especially the opening stomper Training Season and the warmly melodic Falling Forever.
In Taylor Swift fashion, Lipa has been punctuating this tour with bespoke cover versions that change every night, including a few guest duets featuring the original artists themselves. Having previously tackled classic crowd-pleasers by AC/DC, Kylie, Daft Punk and more, she called on Jay Kay of Jamiroquai for her Wembley debut. Now grey of stubble but still reliably goofy of headgear, Kay shared vocals on his vintage 1996 funk-pop hit Virtual Insanity. Anyone under the age of 40, which was most of the audience, appeared slightly baffled but cheered politely anyway.
For a mainstream star with multiple global chart-toppers, three Grammy awards and billions in streaming sales, Lipa has an impressively rich cultural hinterland. Alongside the usual catalogue of luxury brand endorsements and charitable causes she also hosts a respected podcast interviewing authors, politicians, business leaders and fellow stars. She is commendably outspoken on politics, even contentious issues such as Israel and Palestine. Patti Smith recently endorsed Lipa as a feminist trailblazer, which is both surreal and sweet.
The pity is that very little of this extra-curricular depth filtered through to her carefully polished stage persona in Wembley. Instead, Lipa peppered the set with bland boy-meets-girl lyrics, beaming selfies with fans and obligatory humble expressions of gratitude to the audience for making her teenage pop-star dreams come true. Which was charmingly soppy but, for such an obviously bright and engaged artist, dull to an almost calculated degree.
After a dazzling, gravity-defying interlude on an elevated podium stage ringed by fire, Lipa galvanised herself for the finale with a disco-tastic medley of stronger tracks including her breakthrough hit New Rules, her Grammy-winning Barbie soundtrack contribution Dance the Night, and her almost-anthemic recent smash Houdini. In high-energy performance terms, she gave us everything. But in the confessional, funny, emotionally vulnerable terms that make good pop stars truly great, she gave us almost nothing. Businesslike to the last note, with an almost Tom Cruise-level of steely professionalism, the sense she left behind was a laser-focused star who knows how to work a room brilliantly, even when it's the biggest room in Britain.★★★☆☆Dua Lipa plays Wembley Stadium on Saturday, June 21, and Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 24 and 25.
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