14 hours ago
Lana Del Rey is unpredictable and chaotic – in a good way
These days, pop music campaigns tend to be hyper-meticulous, planned down to the last social media post. Not if you're Lana Del Rey. A chronicler of heartland heartache, purveyor of 'sad girl' pop songs furnished with the trappings of 20th-century America, she enjoys some of the biggest streaming numbers in the business, and since her 2011 breakthrough Video Games, she's become a generational songwriting talent. A stadium tour seems appropriate, then, except that she is Lana Del Rey: unpredictable, capricious, a little chaotic. You never know when she will release an album, appear on stage, or leave it. These attributes make her UK tour a fascinating if strange experience.
Across a 14-year career, her live appearances in the UK average out to less than once a year, so it's not surprising she has sold out a short stadium run culminating in two nights at Wembley Stadium. In Cardiff, she emerged shyly from a pale blue cottage to a stage festooned with lights, candles, vines, even a lily pond: the lush vegetation of the bayou transplanted to Wales, more fairytale film set than pop show – as you might expect from someone who makes incredibly cinematic music.
To her right, five string players performed under an arbour, as if at a wedding. Many of the crowd, so young they would have been in nappies when Video Games came out, wore white dresses. Del Rey, who recently got married to Louisiana alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene, ran to embrace him in the wings after the first song, overcome by emotion, 'They're good tears!' she insisted. 'It's just a long way to come.' This was only her second ever stadium show.
A compelling vulnerability remained all night. Del Rey deals in emotional rather than physical energy, and her music doesn't always lend itself to stadium singalongs: particularly when the set-list is preoccupied with country music instead of her usual alt-pop fare. She opened with two tracks from her upcoming 10th album – originally a country music record titled Lasso, now renamed and postponed into obscurity – including recent single Henry, come on, and a cover of Stand By Your Man, dedicated to Dufrene.
The audience were here for the hits, for songs that have inspired the shimmering pop of Addison Rae and the southern gothic elegies of Ethel Cain. Del Rey obliged with a scant sprinkle that included Born To Die and Summertime Sadness. Yet, rather disappointingly, two of the tracks you'd be most interested to see her perform – Norman F---ing Rockwell and Arcadia – were instead handed over to her hologram, beamed down from a bedroom window.
Nevertheless, the hits nudged the show towards stadium-sized energy, and Del Rey remains a captivating performer. Consider the billowing drama of Chemtrails Over The Country Club, the breathtaking instrumentation on 2023 single Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, the strummed immediacy of unreleased song 57.5 (named for her millions of monthly listeners on Spotify), and the final blare of strobe lighting on Ultraviolence that felt like car headlights pulling up to a house. These moments were wrested from a dense, if endearingly ambitious show, stuffed with ghostly holograms, Allen Ginsberg recitals, and confused metaphors about houses burning down – precious detail lost in the vast stadium space.
Stadium sets generally demand at least two hours of hits and deep cuts. Instead, after scarcely 90 minutes and a closing cover of Take Me Home, Country Roads, Del Rey danced back into her blue cottage, turning to smile before she shut the door on the stadium and returned to domestic bliss – doing things her way, once again.
