Perry’s dazzling pyrotechnics put her songs in the shade
LIVE: KATY PERRY (O2 Arena, London) Verdict: Fast-paced pop pageant ★★★✩✩
Aware of the competition she faces in a summer of extravagant stadium and arena concerts, Katy Perry threw everything into the first night of her UK tour.
This was a show that featured giant flamingos, gospel singers and Day-Glo dancers on a floating yellow girder. The singer herself wore an LeD bra that flashed the words ‘hot’ and ‘cold’.
and those were just the opening sequences. The fizzy routines and striking digital effects continued unabated for two hours. ‘I’m taking a risk doing the splits at 33,’ Katy said after singing California Gurls, but she still managed to pull off the manoeuvre with commendable agility.
The whistles and bells came as no surprise. with no Glastonbury this year, there’s never been a month quite like this one for major tours, with Taylor Swift, Beyonce & Jay-Z, ed Sheeran, the rolling Stones, Foo Fighters and Shakira all on the road. You need quite a show to stand out.
Perry, who has swapped her flowing locks for a neat platinum crop, had opened this tour in questionable shape commercially.
Sales of her most recent album, witness, were poor in comparison to 2008’s One Of The Boys and 2010’s Teenage Dream, while the Californian has spoken of her desire to be taken more seriously as she moves away from bubblegum music towards ‘purposeful pop’.
any such cravings for credibility were not immediately apparent here, though. Perry’s first outing since 2014-15’s Prismatic tour cast her as an unreconstructed, allamerican showgirl.
when she sang Chained To The rhythm at the Brits in February 2017, her stage props included two towering puppets of Theresa May and Donald Trump. Here, the same song was sung as an escapist, Ibizastyle rave-up.
Having been married — for 14 months — to russell Brand, she made the most of her British connections.
She recalled her UK live debut in front of 60 people at London venue The water rats and came over all schmaltzy about Coronation Street, eastenders and ‘a proper cuppa tea’. ‘Heinz meanz beanz,’ she added, inadvertently butchering one of our vintage advertising slogans.
THeBritish links extended to her music. The witness album included contributions by three British acts, with Duke Dumont co- writing Swish Swish, Jack Garratt helping out on Power and electronic act Hot Chip involved in the powerful piano ballad Into Me You See — and all three songs featured here.
The night was punctuated by laboured comedy skits. The first, featuring a dancer in shark costume (Left Shark), was a play on Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl half-time performance.
another found her hauling a ‘drunk hot dad’ onstage for a basketball shoot- out with oversized hoops — he Showmanship: Katy Perry and (inset) her LED bra inevitably won. what of the music? when it wasn’t being overshadowed by the visuals, there were some memorable moments. a strident Hot N Cold was accompanied by Katy, in her LeD bra, strumming rudimentary chords on a pink Flying V guitar.
Pendulum and Last Friday Night saw her backed on an extended, curved walkway by two gospel vocalists, a throwback of sorts to her roots in church music ( Perry’s first independent album was a Christian rock LP).
Firework and roar turned into mass singalongs. Bon appétit, with Katy perched atop a giant lettuce leaf, segued into a slick take on Janet Jackson’s what Have You Done For Me Lately.
But there were misfires, too. I Kissed a Girl was marred by screeching guitars. an electro-dance arrangement of Teenage Dream fell flat.
It was only on her ballads that the show took on any emotional heft. wide awake, sung as Katy sailed above the crowd on a floating planet, was moving. Into Me You See was even better.
BeFOrethe latter, the singer told fans the 2017 song was written about ‘an english boy’, though she failed to say whether the lad in question was exhusband Brand or Orlando Bloom, with whom she has been romantically linked, on and off, since 2016.
‘as you know, I fall in love with the english very easily,’ she teased, before adding: ‘I can’t wait to have a place here — and a pseudo, fake english accent like Madonna one day.’
It was a rare flicker of intimacy in a show that, for all its spectacular set pieces, often felt like a trolley dash between frothy pop videos. Perry’s return was euphoric — but also strangely disjointed.