Beyoncé live in London: giddy up for one of the stadium spectacles of the year
This ain’t Texas, it’s rainy Tottenham, but the stands are filled with more cowboy hats than a line-dancing convention. Since Beyoncé began her ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour in LA in April, there’s been a stream of news stories pontificating on why it hasn’t completely sold out. It’s even been reported that in some cities, she’s had to drop prices.
But at tonight’s show, the first of six at London’s 60,000-capacity Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, any empty seats are barely noticeable. When the singer’s 13-year-old daughter Blue Ivy gets a moment in the spotlight, delivering a dazzling dance solo to her mum’s funk banger ‘Déjà Vu’, the audience’s applause is deafening.
Cameos from Blue Ivy and her younger sister, seven-year-old Rumi, add intimacy to a glitzy and ambitious show from an artist who can seem a little unknowable. At this point in her remarkable career, Beyoncé may be enigmatic, but she’s also an incredibly generous performer. An elaborate star-shaped stage stretches well into the stadium floor, while a massive video screen ensures that fans up top can see each hair flip.
During the second half of this blockbuster seven-act concert – with a two-hour 45-minute runtime, it’s almost giving Springsteen – Beyoncé rides a flying Cadillac and a flying neon horseshoe high into the rafters so she can “see every one of you”. It’s a bit corny, but Beyoncé understands that a bit of corniness can elevate a stadium show.
She also understands that kitsch country imagery is still ridiculously fun, so her ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour is rhinestone-studded with high camp. After her athletic rendition of the Nancy Sinatra-sampling stomper ‘Ya Ya’, Beyoncé is rewarded with a shot of her own SirDavis whisky, dispensed by a gold mechanical arm. Later, she struts down the stage to ‘Pure/Honey’, a house-flavoured highlight from 2023’s ‘Renaissance’ album, flanked by topless male dancers in chaps.
Released last year, her eighth studio album ‘Cowboy Carter’ is a sprawling concept album that spotlights the overlooked contribution of Black artists to country music and adjacent genres. Notably, it features an interlude named after Linda Martell, the first Black female to play Nashville’s famed Grand Ole Opry.
During this show’s opening act, Beyoncé underlines her point with a screen-filling message in block capitals: “Never ask for something that already belongs to you.” During ‘Formation’, her empowering celebration of Black feminine energy, she claps back at bigots who questioned her own connection to the genre by pointedly repeating the line: “They never take the country out of me!”
Could she have swapped a few ‘Cowboy Carter’ cuts for copper-bottomed Beyoncé bangers like ‘Break My Soul’, ‘Green Light’ and ‘Countdown’, all of which are MIA? Of course – Act V’s medley of hit snippets, including ‘Crazy In Love’ and ‘Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)’, is euphoric. But if Beyoncé didn’t want to showcase great songs from her latest album like the wracked ballad ‘Alligator Tears’ and pulsing gospel bop ‘II Hands II Heaven’, she’d be heading into heritage act territory.
On tonight’s evidence, she isn’t anywhere near ready for that. As a performer, she remains pretty much flawless – who else can sing from a bucking mechanical bull without missing a note? And as a creator of stadium spectacle, she keeps getting better. No one leaving this show will be removing their cowboy hat on the ride home.
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Nick Levine
NME
