According to the most intriguing bit of her between-song chat, Dua Lipa’s headlining Glastonbury slot came about as a result of an act of childhood manifesting. The singer claims she wrote out her desire to top the bill on the Pyramid stage in detail, up to and including what night said event should take place on: a Friday, so she “could spend the rest of the weekend partying”. And now here we are: watching a slightly peculiar video of Dua Lipa signing her name and writing the words “GLASTO 24” on a pane of glass, then licking it.
Whether you buy the stuff about manifesting or not, Dua Lipa has clearly spent a lot of time carefully studying and absorbing how a successful Glastonbury headline set works, and putting what she’s gleaned to good use. The announcement of her appearance led to a degree of consternation, particularly after her most recent album, Radical Optimism, failed to replicate the kind of world-beating success afforded its predecessor, the lockdown smash Future Nostalgia. But she already has a stockpile of inescapable hits, from New Rules to her Elton John collaboration Cold Heart, which is half the battle won. And furthermore she throws everything she has at her set in order to lend it a sense of event, rather than it being simply another pop show transposed to a field in Somerset, another stop-off on a world tour that happens to be on a farm.
There are confetti canons galore. There are pyrotechnics – so many of them during Levitating that you wonder what they can possibly do for the finale, although they just about manage to top it. There is a crowdpleasing reference to the festival’s hedonism, albeit not from the lips of the singer herself, who largely confines herself to asking the audience how they’re feeling: instead, she takes the stage to the famous clip of Peter Fonda in the 1966 biker movie The Wild Angels informing the squares that he wants to get loaded and have a good time. And there is an equally crowdpleasing guest appearance by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker – his jeans and T-shirt at odds with the main attraction’s constant costume changes; a moment where the pair fluff their vocals and laugh at odds with the show’s tightly choreographed feel – performing not one of his Dua Lipa collaborations but his own biggest hit, The Less I Know the Better: 1.6bn streams and counting.
Hallucinate makes some of Lipa’s more recent efforts look a little wan by comparison. House-fuelled and thrillingly hook-laden, it may well be one of the best pop singles in recent memory – which is not a claim anyone is going to make on behalf of the serviceable but unexceptional Houdini, nor Training Season. There are a couple of less impressive songs from Radical Optimism thrown into the mix: the pass-aggy Happy for You; the acoustic guitar-driven These Walls.
The latter was the solitary track on said album which vaguely suggested the Britpop influence she spent a lot of time talking up prior to its release, but listening to it tonight, it sounds more like the other stuff that sold millions in the 90s. It’s not a huge stretch to imagine it sung by Texas or Natalie Imbruglia or even the Corrs. But the set tucks these songs away amid the hits so successfully that you scarcely notice. There’s always another cast-iron banger on the way: Levitating, Physical, Illusion.
“It’s a lot, innit,” she gasps at one point, surveying the full extent of an enormous crowd, who moreover stay put throughout: there’s none of the wastage that signals a Glastonbury headliner getting it wrong and driving their audience towards the festival’s other manifold delights. It’s an unequivocal success.
