“This is making me wanna get assless chaps,” said the person next to me as Beyoncé sashayed onto stage in her fourth pair of the night (all variations of leather, tassled, and sparkly).
Taylor Swift may have nabbed the rights to the word, but Beyoncé is the true queen of eras. She was last at Tottenham Hotspur stadium exactly two years ago for her Renaissance tour, an ode to Black queer club culture which was all latex bodysuits and thumping dance anthems.
But the night club has become a honky tonk bar, and the Beyhive have switched out their cheap spandex for cowboy hats and denim cut-offs. The first night of Beyoncé’s six-date run at Spurs for the Cowboy Carter tour was an exercise in the singer’s ability to do whatever she wants, to an exceedingly high level.
Cowboy Carter made Beyoncé the first Black female artist to have a US country No 1, and netted her that long-awaited Grammy for best album.
Yet she has said that it is "a Beyoncé album, not a country album." It’s all contradictions, a love letter to America and a critique of it, full of genre-bending songs and rich references to the black music which inspired country.
The show plays with those contradictions. Not many singers could get away with belting out the national anthem in a jumpsuit sequinned with the US flag. But just as quickly, the star-spangled outfit is whipped off and replaced by papier-mâché newspapered armour emblazoned with the words “America has a problem”.
You wonder how different the mood of this tour would be if Kamala Harris had won the election. There’s hints of what could have been when Beyoncé sings Freedom, a song off Lemonade which was the anthem to Harris’s presidential campaign video.
The stage is set with the insignia of the American south, but Beyified: rodeo bulls in shiny gold, a neon bar sign which says “kntry”, and a light up horseshoe which Beyoncé mounts, before it bears her high in the air and careers off around the stadium at a rather alarming pace. At points, you might be in a saloon bar in rural Texas (if not for the 60,000-strong audience wearing light-up wrist bands) before the dazzling pyrotechnics kick in, or a red velvet car descends from space.
This is a family affair. The show’s emotional high point is during Protector, a song about motherhood, when Beyoncé’s 7-year-old daughter Rumi shyly totters onto the stage in a white fur coat and snuggles into the crook of her mother’s arm as she is serenaded.
But the Carter child who steals the show is Blue Ivy, who is giving nepo babies a good name. She joins the back-up dancers throughout the show and looks well beyond her 13 years as she tosses her hair and struts down the stage in a cowgirl outfit. Blue clearly got that uniquely American polish from her mother. At one point the heavens open, but it’s far from a dampener on the mood. 'This rain feels so good!' says Bey, flashing one of her beatific smiles.
Beyoncé’s pre-cowboy eras are sandwiched into the second half. Sasha Fierce and co rear their heads in a medley of greatest hits including Single Ladies, Love on Top and Irreplaceable. “Shall we do one more?” Beyoncé asks before singing a truncated If I Were a Boy, sending the audience of mainly millennial women into a tailspin of nostalgia.
While her solo career is only slightly longer than Taylor Swift’s, Bey hasn’t quite captured the attention of younger Gen Zs in a similar way. No matter, though – it saves your ears from the tinnitus-inducing screams of tweenagers. The only disappointment is a slowed-down version of Crazy in Love which features warbling trumpets and doesn’t pack the punch of the original.
This is a show which spans a dizzying array of emotions and epochs. It is angry and hopeful, ironic and earnest. There are moments of high camp and operatic stillness; whomping production value paired with kitschy outfits. The three-hour, 39-track spectacle is a riot, and a testament to the three-decade career of a powerhouse who appears to be capable of just about anything.
