Marina review – pom-poms, lightsabers and striking pop showtunes
The family is out for Marina Diamandis tonight – not just the blood relatives, a dozen of whom have turned out to cheer on pop’s presiding Greek-Welsh conceptualist, but also the fan family. They’ve kept faith with the singer during a three-year period of regrouping that culminated in dropping the “and the Diamonds” suffix – it was constricting, tying her to a past in which she constructed a new persona for each record, such as the chilly American antihero of the Electra Heart album. Thus, for the new Love + Fear, she’s simply Marina.
The sight of her tonight, statuesque and shimmering in a pink dress, opening with the Love + Fear track Handmade Heaven, is the signal for the audience to squawk and raise Welsh flags – and that’s nothing compared with the joy unleashed when she announces that Love + Fear has entered the album chart at No 5. The current, simplified iteration is still heavily stylised, which is all to the good. The show would have been the poorer without beautiful, naturethemed videos and balletic backing dancers of all sizes, against which the singer is a serene presence who lets her fluting, theatrical vocals do the heavy lifting. Half the 20-song setlist is electropop from Love + Fear that leaves little aftertaste; redeemingly, the other half is hits, bumped up into showpieces. Her solo piano turn on Happy highlights both voice and musicianship, and Froot is presented as a Eurovision-ready carnival of lightsabers and drum-pads; during Hollywood she’s a skewed American cheerleader, shaking tinsel pom-poms. The one let-down of this striking show is that it’s all performed to backing tracks – an incongruously low-cost way of marking the live return of a singular pop star.
• At O2 Academy, Bournemouth, 7 May. Then touring the UK until 10 May.