Young British star whose voice is most remarkable when left well alone
Dua Lipa Brixton Academy, London SW2
In September, the Official Charts Company revealed that Vera Lynn, the 100-year-old wartime darling, had sold more albums in the UK this year than any other woman. After Adele, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift’s spiralling sales had proved that female voices could be a force for change and profit in pop, 2017 has been a relative desert for women achieving chart success at the poppier end of the music industry.
The next British woman to follow Lynn was Dua Lipa, a 22-year-old born to Albanian parents who spent her childhood in London and Kosovo. She writes her own music, has a record deal with Warner, fills the gossip columns with romantic links to Harry Styles and, in August, became the first solo woman to top the British singles chart since Adele, in November 2015. Could she fix pop’s women problem?
Lipa’s sold-out Brixton date was the last of her self-titled tour, supporting the top five album she released in June, and she brought the hard, plastic sheen of a well-worn arena tour to the Twenties theatre.
She eschewed backing dancers for an enormous screen filled with endless different iterations of her face, and there was little time for chatter. Lipa bashed out an unrelenting set list of hits that have fast-tracked her to stages as significant as this one in the space of just two years.
The overall effect was a brief education in recent pop production trends, from distended steel drums (Hotter Than Hell) to the whooping, evanescent samples that littered Last Dance. She was accompanied by a three-piece band, a female drummer providing the propulsive beats on nearly every song.
Lipa’s voice is, as Louis Walsh frequently says on The X Factor, one made for recording. Deep and full of texture, it leavens pop’s shiny trappings. Live, it had a tendency to get lost, rendered just another instrument amid the glimmers of piano house and fancy graphics, and equally devoid of feeling.
Left well alone, however, Lipa’s vocal abilities are a remarkable thing. With Thinking ’Bout You, on which she was joined by guitarist Kai Smith, she had the tonality of Amy Winehouse and the soul of Erykah Badu. With No Goodbyes, Lipa showed a flicker of emotion – but it had taken nearly the whole set list for this to happen.
It’s strange that an artist could write these songs but convey so little of their meaning. I took, instead, to watching her dance, a freewheeling, stage-filling act that occasionally winked at a childhood spent at Sylvia Young Theatre School. These moves punctured through the major-label gloss, leaving glimpses of a woman revelling in her own music.