As the American superstar starts singing another slow, sad, rather beautiful song, my mind begins to drift. I’m thinking that our appreciation of music is so much about the who, the when and perhaps most crucially the where; the significance of place is an under-examined element in our relationship with what we’re hearing at any given moment. I’m also thinking that a massive over-reliance on concert revenue to sustain artists’ livelihoods means that nowadays bigger is almost always seen as better – even when ‘bigger’ comes at the obvious detriment of the music. And I’m thinking that an act’s popularity – and indeed their excellence – isn’t necessarily proportionate to their ability to successfully perform at the top end of the bill at a major music festival.
These thoughts float around while watching Lana Del Rey sing in a field near Leeds. Del Rey, the alter ego of American singer-songwriter Elizabeth Grant, is one of the most interesting pop stars of the past decade or so. She channels the weird, cinematic America of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a world of Hells Angels, sugar daddies, cult leaders, whacked-out ennui, endless romantic tragedy and good girls gone rogue. She is the Ava Gardner of the ketamine age. A dozen David Lynch films in sound. Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ made even sadder and stretched out for ever.
In her songs, a tranquillised Mansonic dread creeps over the Californian landscape like horror-movie smog. Most of the action takes place in the witching hours; when the sun is out, everything simply seems worse. It’s all done with knowing humour, drenched in degraded Hollywood glamour. Del Rey’s Glastonbury slot last year was cut short after she arrived on stage late because, she said, she was having her hair done, which seems a very Gardner thing to do (and say).
She is also a little late at Leeds, meaning her advertised 75-minute set is over in an hour. Though Del Rey is headlining on Sunday night she is not the closing act, presumably because her hazy Valium anthems are deemed just a little too downbeat to conclude this post-GCSE results, mid-teen bacchanal.
It seems an odd booking: a bit like asking the Wurzels to perform a closing medley at Henley Regatta. A typical Del Rey song tootles along a good 25mph below the cruising speed of the average festival banger, with a wide dynamic range and lots of quiet moments. On a chilly, grey evening, with a gusty wind kicking the sound around, the nuances of her music are bullied by the elements. Her voice, too, is initially underpowered, though it picks up for the sumptuous melancholy of ‘Summertime Sadness’ and the churning bad vibes boogie of ‘West Coast’. A countrified ‘Ride’ ripples with pedal steel, its mood heightened by grainy Super 8 video footage.
Framed within the fairytale-themed set, and leaning into gothic nightmare, Del Rey is a study in dramatic understatement. You might argue her stage presence is lacklustre, particularly compared to British soul/R&B singer Raye, who appears directly before her and provides a hit of loud, sassy energy. In contrast, save for a closing fireworks display, Del Rey deploys few of the glad-handing tropes this slot traditionally demands. There is no attempt to come to us. We are silently commanded to go to her. The Del Rey fans in the crowd – and there are many thousands singing every line back at her – are happy to comply, but she loses the interest of a good number of the less devoted fairly quickly.
Yet there is a stillness, a blankness, about her persona that is fascinating, even at scale. She speaks only a few words, smiles sadly, waves some little girl ta-tas, and generally seems as inscrutable and slightly alien as she does in her songs. For ‘Bartender’ she sits at a dressing table and stares wanly into a mirror. For ‘Pretty When You Cry’ she writhes around on the stage floor, oddly unsensual. For ‘Hope is a Dangerous Thing…’ she appears as a hologram, which seems a perfect metaphor: she is both here and not here.
Following a glorious ‘Video Games’, the rapped coda of ‘A&W’ is the only point where proceedings could be said to become anything close to lively. Though it’s far from a bad show, the key elements of time and place never connect. If Del Rey wants to better serve the compelling world in which her songs exist, she might consider making the difficult decision – one made previously by the likes of Tom Waits and Kate Bush – of only playing spaces where her music can shine darkly rather than be bullied, buffeted and blown away.
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