From hurdling octaves to a sing-off with some friendly bluebird
Lana Del Rey Brixton Academy
‘You can sing it with me if you know the words,” Lana Del Rey flirted with her 5,000-strong crowd, knowing full well that they would. This was Love, the opening track from her fifth album, Lust for Life, released just three days earlier. Love was so new, in fact, that the noir pop star warned she was “still getting used to singing it” – seconds before unleashing a glistening a cappella version.
It was a pointed show of authenticity from the 32-year-old, whose fame has always been scrutinised. Del Rey’s presentation – as a melancholic star who has been teleported from a bygone age – has aroused suspicion ever since Video Games became a mainstay of the British pop charts in late 2011.
Her first album barely touched the surface, so the fact that her second, Born to Die, sold seven million copies was surely due to some invisible helping hand, sceptics argued.
One conspiracy theory was that her father, from whom she was actually estranged, had funded her career; another was that she was the product of major industry management. Online, people became fascinated with her allegedly pre-plastic surgery identity – Elizabeth Grant, from Lake Placid, New York. Perhaps to keep them guessing, she kept her distance. This gig, announced a week before, was her first in the capital since 2013, three albums ago. In an industry where artists must relentlessly keep touring to survive, Del Rey is a unicorn.
She could have played the new record in its entirety and her teary audience would have devoured every word. Instead, Del Rey elegantly strolled through her back catalogue, including the rarely played Ride and a fleeting, unaccompanied rendition of Lust for Life’s In My Feelings, purely because it was requested by a fan in the front row. While she performed against a screen of surreal, Lynchian video collages, including some of her falling artfully off a precipice (during Born to Die), this was the limit of the aspic-coated gimmickry that she had made her debut with.
Del Rey sang about her “red dress” three times while wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, with only the slightest finger-wave hinting at the Shangri-la’s influence on her latest record. Twin dancers gyrated on perspex platforms underneath a neon Del Rey sign but the woman herself, whose beehive had been reduced to a whisper of hairspray, seemed separate from such trappings. Del Rey merely stood there, and let her voice do the work.
And work it certainly did. Del Rey hurdled octaves with a lustrous falsetto, while her breakdowns were featherlight, as if, like every classic Disney Princess, she was having a sing-off with some friendly bluebird. Sung like this, her trope-laden narratives – of bad boys and sad summers – ripened with emotion.
She closed with Off to the Races, an early album track that never made much impact, leaving her band to wig out. Del Rey never returned to play her two recent hits; rather, she quietly left the stage, like a pop Houdini, leaving the audience blinking as the house lights came up.
She may have shed her vintage shtick, and left her wiggle dresses in her past, but her prowess as an mistress of understated, old-school showbusiness remains.