Absurdly entertaining – and almost live
Britney Spears may have lipsynced throughout her intimate London Apple Music show, but she was absurdly entertaining.
You have to ask, in what sense is a Britney Spears live show actually live? Well, she is living and breathing on stage, an iconic star whose very presence in the room sends devoted fans into an ecstasy of delight. There were four silhouetted musicians on podiums, though the massive techno pop sound emerging from the PA was incidental to anything they might or might not have been playing.
Spears wore a head-mounted microphone and moved her lips, yet her focus was almost entirely on dance moves that would leave any vocalist breathless. When she gasped encouragement during breaks in the set, her voice was squeaky thin with a note of surprised delight, almost as if she was as amazed to find herself in this situation as her fans. Her speaking tone bore little relation to the thickly layered autotuned voice confidently carrying melodies. But I am really not sure any of this matters any more.
There was a moment when Spears and her dance crew left the stage for a costume change and an entire song ( Radar) played out on a bank of digitally recreated Britney-themed TVs on a huge curved screen, while fans held up their phones to film it. Outside of the confines of the intimate Roundhouse theatre, where 2,000 competition-winners were proxies for Apple’s mass audience, millions more were tuning in to watch the simulacra of a simulacra on their phones. This is live musical entertainment in the 21stcentury, where the live element is almost irrelevant.
If Britney wasn’t singing live then the audience certainly was, joyously belting out songs that clearly meant the world to them. Baby One More Time, Oops!... I Did It Again and Toxic were given minor chord variations that underscored their melodiousness and brought out an almost wistful quality, emphasising the nostalgia inherent in much-loved tunes from a more innocent time in Spears’s turbulent history.
I have seen Spears before, when she seemed utterly detached and indifferent to her mimed performance, but here – having recently made a comeback with her ninth album, Glory – she was on her game, confidently and energetically heading a hi-tech extravaganza that played to her uncomplicated strengths.
The strangest thing was watching her at the end of highly choreographed routines, when she almost seemed to snap out of a dream. “Woah, I’m glad that’s over!” she rather bizarrely gushed after a particularly erotic routine for Make Me. It is almost as if she wasn’t directly responsible for her own staging and performance.
“Live floor show” used to be a euphemism displayed outside strip clubs, but now it’s a style of lap dancer pop. I lost count of the costume changes, most of which were variations on the same skimpy theme of thigh-high boots and bodysuit. Lithe male and female dancers enacted copulatory moves against synthetic, sumptuous backdrops.
In what has become an audience participation staple at a certain kind of post-Madonna pop show, a man was plucked from the crowd to be bound up and walked around like a dog by Spears in high heels and stockings, enjoying ritual humiliation as if it was a privilege. Spears seemed impressed by his enthusiastic dancing. “Great ass,” she giggled, as he scampered triumphantly back to his place.
This was escapist fantasy entertainment for the modern era, powered by monster pop hits. It is very hard to argue with an addictive hook line, and Spears has more than her fair share. At the Roundhouse, she doled out the hits. And you can watch them over and over again, streaming to a phone near you.