ON Wednesday last week, Chappell Roan took to the stage of the MTV VMA awards armed with a flaming crossbow that set the stage alight.
By Sunday, she was at Glasgow’s O2 Academy and – clearly unsympathetic to the plight of the city’s struggling student flats developers – left the pyrotechnics and props at home.
They would have been entirely superfluous. Roan’s stripped-down staging only helped her connect more closely with a fever-pitch crowd.
And they were there for her. An opening of Femininomenon, Naked In Manhattan and Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl was followed by chants of “Chappell. Chappell. Chappell f***king Roan”.
“I’ve never had a chant like that,” came the delighted response.
Glasgow also got to enjoy Guilty Pleasure. “Europe enjoys this song more," the singer feels. It does have some of the silliness we seem to love in our pop.
If you’re a non-fan tagging along with a Midwest Princess to one of the gigs on this tour, you’ll appreciate the more low-key offerings on the setlist, like Love Me Anyway and Coffee. Or Picture You, as the mic stand adorns a wig while Roan twirls around it.
Because for the rest of the night, it’s full singalong mode – her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess makes up the vast majority of the setlist but even with yet to be released tracks like The Subway – though her voice still rises above it at all the key points. That's what the fans want and that's what Roan delivers.
It’s a concert that makes the case for venues of this capacity.
This gig was booked in before Roan catapulted to pop stardom. There’s every chance, given who else has recently attempted it, that next time around she’ll be shooting for the Hydro.
And she’d need the staging to match that. But here, with the help of a tight band, the focus is all on the lyrics. And unrequited love is a theme that’ll never go far amiss.
It’s not a long set and if you’d somehow scored a ticket just out of curiosity, you may have been left a bit miffed with that. But there was plenty of quality for the quantity. These songs were made to be played live.
The dress code for the night was “Midwest Princess” and, tiaras aside, the singer herself and gig-goers seemed to have settled on camouflage for that.
Amid all the dramas that go with the soaring celebrity status Roan is experiencing right now, it felt a fitting choice – leaving those troubles behind to do what she does best for a crowd that remembered why they fell in love with her.
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