Inside the mind of a pop star like no other
Ariana Grande: Sweetener Tour O2 Arena, London SE10
Last week, Ariana Grande tweeted a message of thanks while in rehearsals for the three London dates on her European tour. “I can’t express how free and full singing makes me feel,” she wrote. “I’ve been feeling so anxious lately and it all kinda lifts off when I sing. I’m grateful for this gift... it’s comforting because no one can take it away from me.”
For Grande, currently one of the biggest pop stars in the world, music has been therapy more than most, providing shelter from a number of traumas in recent years, each serving as a tragic backdrop to what has been a
creative and commercial flourishing.
On the first night of the European leg of her Sweetener tour, and her first major UK concert since the Manchester Arena terrorist attack that took the lives of 22 people in 2017, Grande was in good spirits, shimmying and strutting her way through a packed setlist, her vocals characteristically smooth, confident and effortlessly acrobatic.
But there was also a melancholy there in her relative lack of audience interaction, and in the animated stage backdrops that were as impressive as they were lonely, depicting night skies, starlight and solitary planets. For one track, Grande stood beneath an enormous projection of the moon, bathed solely in red light as if she were the only person in the O2.
That contradiction, of irresistible pop buoyancy and desperate sadness, has also made Grande one of the most fascinating and decidedly human superstars of the modern era. She’s a young woman who rejects typical pop-star artifice in favour of honesty about her grief and mental health, who has formed an unshakeable and mutually healing bond with her fans via social media, and who, after years of pulling disparately from a variety of sounds and genres, has finally found her artistic voice.
It also meant that her Sweetener setlist leaned heavily in favour of her two most recent and strongest albums, released within five months of each other. These comprised largely of dreamy, downtempo R&B and space-age pop. Into You and Break Free, two of her more straightforwardly energetic pop tracks from earlier in her career, were still the night’s biggest crowd-pleasers, but its most surprising pleasures were found in unexpected places. Breathin’, a head-rush of a single inspired by Grande’s struggles with anxiety, was transformed into something resembling a lost Prince number thanks to a frantic guitar solo that carried it to its climax, while The Light Is Coming, a repetitive racket featuring Nicki Minaj in original form, was reimagined as an assault of whistles and blips that brought to mind, of all things, The B-52s.
Wonderfully, the show felt like Grande at her most autonomous: entirely nonsensical as a piece of concert storytelling, but thrillingly so. At times, she was Jesus Christ at the centre of a Last Supper of writhing dancers; at others, she was Marilyn Monroe, warbling a cover of My Heart Belongs to Daddy during an interlude. There was footage from old home movies and the Goldie Hawn comedy The First Wives Club, snippets of tracks by Lil’ Kim and Diana Ross, and an encore performance of the number one single Thank U, Next, complete with Grande and her dancers waving Pride flags.
As her thoughts, ideas and inspirations tumbled over one another with no rhythm or logic, it felt as if we had all been drawn directly into her mind. While it was slightly exasperating, this is also the mind of the most exciting young star in pop, and you wished beyond all reason that you could stay there for ever.
Tonight and tomorrow, O2, London; Aug 24-25, Manchester Pride Festival, Mayfield: arianagrande.com