Lana Del Rey
Aviva Stadium, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Lana Del Rey’s Aviva Stadium show is a blockbusting love letter to following your muse and playing by your own rules – even when those rules include reciting an Allen Ginsberg poem offstage while a hologram entertains the 50,000-capacity audience. Which is what happens three-quarters of the way through this bizarre set.
A southern gothic rhapsody featuring burning houses and dancers who look as if they’ve just escaped from a cult, plus Del Rey’s new husband, the alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene, waving from the wings, it is by far the strangest performance the Aviva has hosted. I stagger away as if emerging from a weird dream I can’t shake.
But if this is a strikingly capricious concert, it has to be asked whether it is value for money. Of the 14 songs Del Rey performs, five are from her unreleased new country album (title to be revealed) and another two are covers.
Which would be fine if Del Rey were playing an intimate venue, as she did when she made her Irish debut, at Vicar Street, in 2013. But given the effort involved in getting to the Aviva and the ticket prices – you won’t get in the door for less than €100 – the gig, at a trim 80 minutes or so, raises the question of where artistic expression ends and doing right by your fans begins.
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Because whatever else this bizarre and often brilliant performance is, it never tickles the punters under the chin.
There are crowd-pleasers, for sure. Nobody could quibble with Del Rey’s fantastic renditions of Summertime Sadness and Born to Die. Here are hazy bangers as all-American as a cheerleader’s pyramid yet shot through with David Lynch-style glimmerings of menace, like razor blades in a pompom.
The singer signals from the start that this is not going to be a ramble through her hit parade, however, as she opens with Stars Fell on Alabama, a baroque number from that forthcoming LP, which namechecks Tennessee Williams and Clint Eastwood.
It also doubles as an address to her new spouse, explaining why a prenup would kill the romance (“Husband of mine / don’t let them put all this paper between us”).
She’s only warming up. Another new track, Quiet in the South, features Del Rey singing from the porch of a shack that bursts into flame (which is to say dry ice and video projection). It is followed by Del Rey reciting all of Ginsberg’s Howl off camera as that hologram mouths the words.
If her production values are out there, the banter at least is sincere. “My sister, my dad and my family, we’ve had a good couple of days here, really feeling the magic. All of the beautiful greenery, everything Ireland is about,” Del Rey says at the end (just after 10pm). “I’m so grateful.”
She then embarks on a wafting take on John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, a tune surely not heard echoing around an Irish amphitheatre since Denver played Páirc Uí Chaoimh, as part of the Siamsa Cois Laoí festival, in Cork in 1986.
Stadium pop is full of slick, soulless soundalikes, and you have to applaud Del Rey for trying something different. That said, time and money have never been more precious, and you do have to wonder about the wisdom of such an eccentric set.
Good on Del Rey for chasing her creative impulses down the rabbit hole. But maybe next time she might consider charging a bit less for the privilege.
