Of all the people for Dua Lipa to bring on as a guest for her first night at Wembley, Jamiroquai would not have been top of my list of likely suspects. Or, I suspect, anybody’s.
And yet, the 70,000 strong crowd roared for him when he appeared on Friday night. When the pair duetted on his 1996 hit Virtual Insanity, the energy levels went stratospheric. At least, among the older attendees who knew who he was.
But that’s Lipa’s tour all over: a good time, yes, but ultimately, a victory lap for the megalithic pop star. A celebration of doing things her own way – a way that has gotten the British-Albanian artist (as she told the crowd) from playing 350-person gigs to a sold out three nights in one of the biggest venues in the country.
”This is such a massive, massive milestone for me,” she told her massed fans. “I've had a lump in my throat from the moment this show started.”
It certainly didn’t affect her performance: what we got was two hours of high octane euphoria, a formula that Lipa has polished and perfected over the course of her months on tour.
Lipa’s stock in trade, these days, is hazy club bangers: perfect for the sweltering summer. And we got them: things kicked off with her Radical Optimism hit Training Season, which saw the stage flooded with backing dancers.
There were fireworks; there was confetti. There was the general sense of the kitchen sink being thrown at the entire gig, in the best way possible – the pyrotechnics budget must have been tremendous.
From there, we had the bouncy, breezy End of an Era, followed by Break My Heart, which came with an extravaganza of backing dancers. Adding to the victory lap-ness of it all, at one point she simply stopped singing, letting the crowd roar out their approval into the silence.
From there, we veered into her older material: One Kiss, which dropped into a thundering bass-heavy remix. Hot on its heels came her big hit Levitating, which was delivered on full strut, complete with fireworks – and then a pared back version of If These Walls Could Talk and a Western flavoured rendition of Maria.
Lipa was clearly having fun, too, breaking character to smile and dance around with her dancers. And she was keen to underline how far she’d come, introducing her old hit Hotter Than Hell as “the song that got me signed”, to raucous cheers from the crowd.
To be honest, the big hits came so thick and fast that the excitement of seeing Jamiroquai was soon forgotten (though she was obviously in fangirl mode for that, too). There was the slinky Illusion, an aggressively muscular Physical, and Hallucinate, which turned the bass and reverb way up to rattle the stadium walls.
At one point, Lipa descended into the crowd to chat with her fans – which had the effect of sapping the night’s momentum somewhat – before heading out into a stage in the audience’s centre. From there, dressed in a Union Jack-lined fur coat and lifted high into the air, she conducted the audience’s cheers before leading them in a dreamy, hazy rendition of Be The One, just up the road from where she shot the music video in Hampstead Heath.
And though she rounded off the gig with an encore featuring some more of her biggest hits – a Bicep remix of New Rules stood out, then Houdini – that image was the one that stuck. Lipa, triumphant, in the place where it all started. Home at last.
Wembley Stadium, also June 21 and 22; ticketmaster.co.uk
