Lana Del Rey and the triumphant anti-stadium show experience

There are boxes to be ticked to let the audience know they’re here for a big event – potentially a career defining one. The opening song is a banger from the back catalogue to get the crowd going, it ends with an anthem that sends everyone home with a smile on their face, making the task of trying to get onto a tube with tens of thousands of people more bearable.

The set will be all killer no filler, all the hits get played with keystone songs to highlight their cultural significance – indeed, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour took this to a new level by showcasing songs from each of her albums chronologically. The show will be long - at least two hours - to make the audience feel they’re getting their money’s worth, stadium tickets aren’t cheap after all, especially in a world of Predictive pricing.

There will be a dazzling light show, both to ramp up the sense of event and make up for the fact the artist is so far away from the crowd you’re effectively watching them on a screen. Oasis start their seven-night Wembley Stadium residency later this month, Coldplay are playing ten. They will both follow these rules, because it’s what’s expected, and to stretch the stadium metaphor a little further, it’s how you play the game, and when it’s done well, it’s wonderful.

But of course, Lana Del Rey, the most idiosyncratic and inscrutable pop artist of the 21^st Century, does absolutely none of these things. Before she arrived in London, did she play any songs from her imperial phase of Honeymoon, Lust for Life and Norman Fucking Rockwell!? No, which is perhaps surprising, given her desire to include songs from her back catalogue that fit with the ode to country of her upcoming album. So many songs, “Mariners Apartment Complex”, “Blue Jeans”, “Love”, “Brooklyn Baby”, “A&W” for me – take your pick from her songbook - would have fitted perfectly in the set and thrilling to hear within the context of her new songs, which lean into that holy grail that artists of a certain calibre seek to add to, the Great American Songbook.

The new record, which was initially titled Lasso, was changed to The Right Person Will Stay, but is now going be called something else entirely, still doesn’t have a release date. And that’s another way Del Rey rewrites the rules of the stadium show, there’s no product to push and a clutch of unreleased songs are being road tested in front of the audience’s eyes.

My plus one is my friends’ 18-year-old daughter, who has a far better insight into pop fandom than I do. When we meet at Paddington Station, we notice Lana fans hidden in plain sight, there are cowboy boots and hats everywhere. The commuters on their way home probably don’t notice these codes of fandom, but they’re a way of fans signifying their identities to each other. After the show, when I get off the train in a sleepy suburb, there are teenagers wearing cowboy boots getting off at my stop, and I can’t help but think, ‘Where did you come from?’.

I ask my plus one about the setlist, where “Venice Bitch”, “If You Lie Down with Me” and “Diet Pepsi”, a duet with Addison Rae, have been added to the set for London, and she says, ‘Yes, there were new songs, but all the others are really famous, everyone knows them’. Del Rey’s back catalogue is formidable, and like her fans making the pilgrimage to North-West London on a balmy summer day, they’re also hidden in plain sight, not always in the mainstream, but they’re simultaneously so catchy and subversive, they’re part of the musical muscle memory.

Del Rey bucks the expected with her start and finish. She comes on early, perhaps tired of the sniping for some late arrivals, or because with more songs added to the set she wants to finish on time. Yet regardless, as she walks through the front door of the Gothic southern house set - which tells the audience they’re in for as much a theatrical experience as they are a musical one - the crowd reaction is euphoric. I’ve seldom heard a cacophony of noise like it, and the opening bars of the unreleased “Stars Fell On Alabama”, get drowned out. At its close she simply says, ‘It’s nice to be here with you guys.”

She closes with John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads”, and whilst there are songs from his catalogue that could have been more thrilling to hear Del Rey’s take on, such as “Rocky Mountain High”, or “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” that’s the point of all this, and what the approach to the performance means. It’s the prerogative of the artist to make the calls. And tonight, Del Rey gets most of them right.

“Henry come on” is a study in minimalism, which on paper shouldn’t work in a stadium, but it totally does. Starting with a plucked and spoken vocal, Del Rey sings it from a rocking chair and two songs in you realise that she’s absolutely setting and redefining the agenda for what she wants a stadium show to be, which has nothing to do with the long to do list other artists find themselves needing to tick.

The triptych of “Ultraviolence”, “Ride” and “Video Games” fill the stadium in different ways, the former a study in restraint, where Del Rey lies on the floor, flanked by her formidable backing singers and dancers, as if she’s been shot. When “Ride” finishes, she tells the audiences about the importance of hearing her singing voice and her perfectionism, before singing a few more lines from it and telling the soundman, “Can you take a tip of the reverb off?” “Video Games” is sung on a swing, and in contrast to the view that Del Rey can’t write songs fit for a stadium, the swell of the chorus says otherwise, and when it closes a visibly moved Del Rey says, “That’s still my favourite song to song with everyone.”

We then get to the part of the set where Del Rey leaves the stage and recorded versions of “Norman Fucking Rockwell” and “Arcadia are played with a hologram of her in the top window, and it doesn’t completely work. One on level it fits with an ambition to play a stadium in a new way, having created a theatrical experience with the stage set and the dancers wondering in and out of doors, an interlude adds to the drama, but it also slows the pace; everyone knows it’s coming and sits down.

As dusk sets over the stadium, she reappears for a three song run, where Del Rey is lifted into the air by a dancer on “If You Lie Down with Me”, and on “Quiet in the South” she stands in line with her backing singers, like a hoedown, with each taking a line and transporting the vocal melodies into the world of ‘60s girl groups. It could be The Ronettes in a stadium, and it works wonderfully.

At this point, the southern gothic house, which could have come straight from the page of a William Faulkner novel, is metaphorically set on fire, with the lighting creating flames, and we get another interlude, which meshes Bernard Herrmann’s “Scene D'Amour” from Vertigo, and Del Rey’s take on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" from her own short film Tropico, with the opening line “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”, feeling especially on the nose.

And this artistic creativity makes you think of how other people would play this. When Oasis play Wembley, how likely is it that Liam or Noel will read “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost? The closing lines of that poem work as a metaphor for the artist Del Rey is and always has been. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

As the refrain of “Young and Beautiful” weaves into the interlude, everyone stands up, as Del Rey remerges and the home straight of the set is a home run. “Summertime Sadness”, “Born To Die” and “Venice Bitch” are transformed into country-tinged stadium fillers that write their own rules of pacing and melody, and as “Born to Die” ends she tells the crowd, “That one never gets old.” She then welcomes Addison Rae, who earlier played a fearless support set, to duet on Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” and Rae stays on for “57.5”, the pick of the new songs, and as gestures go, it’s quite the co-sign.

Curiously, the UK tour has divided both fans and critics, with groans that she should have adhered to the rules of what the stadium experience is, the shows should have been longer, there should have been less new songs. And the number of reviews that add her age in the headline is, I would argue, incredibly sexist. I can’t imagine Chris Martin’s age be a feature of standfirsts in Coldplay reviews.

Rules are there to be broken and it takes an artist of the highest calibre to break them. Even The Beatles couldn’t get their heads around stadium shows and retired from live performance when the crowds became too loud and the music too intricate. When Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, was he following the rule book? No, he was ripping it up. In the world of cinema, would Christopher Nolan make a Marvel film? Not on your life. Nolan’s approach to making films is akin to what Del Rey does, operating and subverting in the mainstream, which is after all, what makes for great art.

As an artist Lana Del Rey isn’t a people pleaser, following her muse brings a purity to her art, it confounds expectations, and I think that’s why her fans love her. There’s an excellent thread on Reddit where one user posted “Girl is a marketing mess, but that makes her likeable to me”. I ask my insightful eighteen-year-old plus one what is it that fans love about Del Rey, and she says, ‘She’s angelic, untouchable, but she’s relatable,” which are all more important things than playing a three-hour set.

Her last words to the audience are “Our band has wanted to play this stadium for a long time, hopefully we’ll be back soon.” Once an artist makes the step into the stadium circuit, barring artistic suicide, they’re there to stay. Even more interestingly, when an artist steps up as a rebel in the mainstream, their credibility and vision can ride the wave of not playing the game and keep them in it.

Del Rey’s set tonight was so different to the established rules, so single-minded and so well executed, that there’s no turning back now. The stadium show has a new definition, it can combine intimacy and euphoria, but only with a singular pair of hands behind the wheel.

Setlist

“Stars Fell on Alabama”
“Henry, come on”
“Stand by Your Man”
“Chemtrails Over the Country Club”
“Ultraviolence”
“Ride”
“Video Games”
“Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd”
“If You Lie Down with Me”
“Quiet in the South”
“Young and Beautiful”
“Summertime Sadness”
“Born to Die”
“Venice Bitch”
“Diet Pepsi”
“57.5”
“Take Me Home, Country Roads”