2024-07-03 14:34:57
Pop singer Dua Lipa warmed up visitors to the British Glastonbury festival on a cold Friday evening. She turned his famous main stage, called the Pyramid, into an imaginary open-air nightclub, where thousands of listeners danced to hits like Levitating or Houdini.
The main star of the show in the south of England, which expects more than 200,000 visitors this year, was a twenty-eight-year-old Albanian singer living in London for the first time. She put on a polished, energetic show that, in addition to the band, included fireworks, confetti and dancers. The singer changed five times during the evening.
She told the audience that it was her childhood dream to perform on the famous Pyramida festival stage, where Paul McCartney, Beyoncé or David Bowie have played for more than half a century.
“I dreamed about this moment, I wrote about it in my journal and I worked so hard to make it happen. If I was still a little girl, I would be completely crazy right now. I really couldn’t believe it. I am so grateful to you, Dua Lipa said. She recalled one of her first concerts, where ten people were sitting in the audience. “They only came because we were offering free drinks,” she noted.
The singer was born in London to ethnic Kosovo Albanians who fled the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the general tension between the majority Albanians and the minority Serbs. Her first name means love in Albanian.
The family did not return until Kosovo gained independence after a conflict with the Serbian regime of President Slobodan Milosevic in 1998-1999. It achieved this with the help of NATO allies, formally declaring it in Serbia in 2008.
Dua Lipa performed at Glastonbury on Friday. | Photo: ČTK / AP
But by that time the girl was almost 13 years old and she was getting used to England. Around the age of fifteen, she started recording covers of pop hits and posting them on YouTube. Because of her success with them, she persuaded her parents to let her return to London alone.
In 2014, when she was 18 years old, she signed her first contract with the record company Warner Music, but for a while she made a living as a model or a waitress in a cocktail bar. She definitely broke through in 2017 with the worldwide hit New Rules, in which she turns the painful end of a relationship into fun. Two years later, Dua Lipa already received two Grammy awards, including the prestigious statuette for discovery of the year.
She performed shortly after 10pm at Glastonbury this Friday. When she introduced dance tracks like Love Again, the people below the stage immediately started dancing. According to the British BBC, the concert was ambitious, it set a high bar and it didn’t fall until the end.
Dua Lipa left nothing to chance. Every moment was thought out, as if her entire career had been leading to this point. In some places, it was almost possible to consider whether the dance choreography is not too perfect and whether it leaves at least a minimal space for spontaneity, thinks the BBC.
The British newspaper Guardian rewarded the performance with four stars out of five. According to his critic Alexis Petridis, the concert proved that Dua Lipa has ambitions to be one of the biggest pop stars in the world. And the fact that this year’s album Radical Optimism did not give birth to as many hits as her previous pandemic record Future Nostalgia did not stop her in any way.
Be The One as sung by Dua Lipa at Glastonbury yesterday. | Video: BBC Music
The audience heard 15 hits that reached the British charts. But surprisingly, Dua Lipa left Dance The Night off the soundtrack to last year’s Barbie movie. She only played this song during a short stage set-up, when she was changing clothes backstage. The BBC estimates that there were roughly 100,000 listeners in the audience.
As a special guest of Dua Lipa, she invited Kevin Parker from the psychedelic rock band Tame Impala, who collaborated on her album this year, on stage.
Together they sang his band’s song The Less I Know the Better live. The concert culminated with a piece by Houdini. “Tonight I can pretend I’m a member of Tame Impala,” commented Dua Lipa.
Other stars of this year’s Glastonbury include British Coldplay, R&B singer SZA or country star Shania Twain. This year is marked by women, whose absence among the main performers last year was criticized by some.
The topic is obviously also close to the Albanian singer. At one point, Dua Lipa wore the album cover of Hormonally Yours by the British pop duo Shakespeare Sister, who in 1992 became one of the first female headliners on the Glastonbury main stage.
The festival kicked off on Friday, as it traditionally does, at Worthy Farm near the village of Pilton. It is accompanied by recommendations from the organizers regarding possible traffic congestion around the venue and the importance of using sunscreen. Last year, the organizers increased the maximum capacity of the area to 210,000 people, reported the ČTK agency.
At the end of the performance at Glastonbury, Dua Lipa performed her hit Houdini. | Video: BBC Music
Other highlights on Friday included boy band Seventeen becoming the first Korean performers at Glastonbury. Rockers Idles, Irish Fontaines DC, New York’s LCD Soundsystem, producer Fred Again, dance project Jungle and electronic music creator Jamie xx also performed at the festival. He delighted the fans when he invited Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, his former bandmates from The xx, to the stage.
The British indie-rock group Bombay Bicycle Club invited Damon Albarn, the frontman of Blur, as a guest, who performed the songs Tender and Heaven with them. Albarn urged Britons to go to the polls next week and appeared to be critical of Thursday’s debate between US presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump. “We would no longer have to send only octogenarians to leadership positions,” urged Albarn.
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