Intimacy and ecstasy from the patron saint of heartbroken disco dancers
It is perhaps easier to spot Robyn’s prowess by what she doesn’t, rather than does, do. She boasted neither showy proclamations nor smiles for the first chunk of her set on Friday night. Her name was not in lights; there were no pyrotechnics, nor cannons firing confetti. In short, the trappings of a pop concert were not to be found here. And Robyn, too, had until now been absent: this was her first London gig in eight years.
Honey, released last October, was her first full album since 2010. The chart-topping Swedish singersongwriter – too odd, too gleefully weird, to be considered a pop star – ascended to arena shows with her last record, the hit-packed Bodytalk, but then retreated to her homeland, where her life unravelled. Her collaborator and friend, Christian Falk, died from cancer; she split and then reunited with her partner; she spent years in psychoanalysis to heal the wounds of an adolescence spent in the limelight.
While she was away, Robyn (her surname is Carlsson, but nobody uses it) became the international patron saint of broken-hearted disco dancers. Her ability to translate the searing, antisocial brutality of heartbreak became a balm for millions.
Now she is back. The 39-year-old drifted on to the stage at the Alexandra Palace, which was bedecked with
lumpen hanging sculptures recalling the work of the YBA Sarah Lucas, and turned that cavernous venue into the most intimate of spaces: a heaving basement club, or a dimly lit bedroom; somewhere to release and confide.
With Honey, Robyn escaped the predictable, satisfying methodology of the pop songs she had perfected. Instead, it plays with the chords of house; glitching rhythms and rich, other-worldly synth layers.
These constructs held the set-list in a heady embrace. Familiar hits such as With Every Heartbeat and Hang With Me were engulfed in new waves of sound, punctuated with clubland cowbells, leaving only her crystalline voice to guide her devoted fans through such pleasingly amorphous new landscapes.
Throughout, she retained the authenticity of a musician in solitary rehearsal. Although she threw herself around, crawled along the floor and gyrated down to her ankles, it was not until the encore, while riding an imaginary pony across the stage, that a wry smile to the audience suggested that she was in on the show. To watch it was to feel like a privileged voyeur, as if witnessing something rare and true, devised from and for pleasure, rather than meticulously calibrated for a paying crowd of thousands.
It was an absence that allowed her to really see us, too. One verse into Dancing On My Own – arguably pop’s finest teardrops-on-the-dance-floor number – the music stopped and so did Robyn, silenced by the sound of 10,000 people singing the song’s chorus in pained, effortful peals. She stood and roughly wiped her eyes with her palms, laughing at the erupting cheers, no longer dancing on her own.