Graeme Thomson

Dazzling – if you ignore the music: Beyoncé, at Murrayfield Stadium, reviewed

The sound was muddy and the songs don't cut it – but there's no denying the power of her voice

Opening night of Beyoncé's 2023 Renaissance World Tour in Stockholm. Photo: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images / Parkwood  
issue 27 May 2023

Scheduling open-air concerts in mid-May in northern Europe is a triumph of hope over experience. I last spent time with Beyoncé – I’m sure she remembers it fondly and well – in 2016, in a football stadium in Sunderland on a damp, drizzly, early-summer English evening of the type that even strutting soul divas struggle to enliven. I don’t think it was merely the weather which left me underwhelmed by her brutalist attack, the sheer choreographed drill of the show, the lack of engagement, of spontaneity, of joy.

By then, Beyoncé was no longer seeking to be regarded as a mere pop star. She had recently taken on the unearthly qualities of an alien presence, entirely unrelatable, tilting for something far more culturally significant than a spot in the charts. She re-cast herself as cross-genre auteur, icon, uber-feminist, woman scorned and furious black rights’ campaigner. She did it with conviction. Plenty seemed persuaded.

Fast forward seven years and Beyoncé is both more totemic still and yet even less of a pop star than ever before.

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