[Source: BBC]
At one point during the first UK date of Rosalía’s jaw-dropping Lux tour, the Spanish star recalled her childhood ambition of playing a show in London.
“When I was studying music in Barcelona, I always dreamt of singing in one very specific place,” she told fans at the O2 Arena, before adding, with perfect comic timing: “And that place is the Royal Albert Hall.
“I would say it constantly to myself,” she continued. “The Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Albert Hall…
“And I never did it. But now I’ve sold out the O2 twice. God bless London!”
It was a tiny detail in a massive show. But it drove home the unlikely phenomenon of Rosalía’s emergence as a global pop star.
She’s a Barcelona-born artist who took her flamenco training and used it to launch a career that seemingly has no boundaries – incorporating everything from opera and classical to hip-hop and mamba, in multiple languages and styles.
Even more unusually, she’s been embraced in the UK, where music fans have been notoriously resistant to Spanish music (or any other music that’s not in English).
In February, she won the Brit Award for best international artist. This week, she’s playing to 40,000 fans in London over two nights at a venue that’s four times the size of the Albert Hall.
Those fans turned up wearing lace mantillas and carrying votive candles on Tube trains that buzzed with Spanish slang, as they clamoured for this long-awaited concert.
And from the opening moments, Rosalía delivered, with a show crammed with breathtaking vocals and unforgettable set pieces inspired by religious and secular iconography.
She appeared as the Mona Lisa and an Edwards Degas ballerina. She asked the audience to teach her an English accent, then danced with joyous abandon, and toyed with concepts of devotion, fame and idol worship.
The narrative was inspired by her fourth album, also titled Lux, an exhilarating – and profoundly moving – exploration of the human condition, which asks why the earthly and the holy have to be so far apart.
Accordingly, the 33-year-old presented herself as pure and pristine; or flawed and devilish, as the mood suited.
“I fit in the world / And the world fits into me,” she sang on La Yugular. “I contradict myself / I transform,” she added on a thunderous version of Saoko, from her second album, Motomami.
And yet, all of her contradictions genuinely make heaven seem with reach, for an hour and a half at least.
The show opened with Rosalía portraying a music box ballerina, her movements restricted, with dancers required to carry her across the stage.
Slowly, she gained agency – dancing en pointe during Porcelana and singing with tear-stained emotion (and astonishing vocal control) on the operatic Mio Cristo Piange Diamante.
By the third act, she was in full swing – downing a glass of wine before performing Sauvignon Blanc, a ballad about renouncing worldly possessions in pursuit of love, before leading the audience in an enthusiastic rave during Cuuuuuuuuuute (complete with a massive incense burner swinging from the ceiling dispensing smoke and strobe lights).
It was all extremely high concept. But Rosalía is too smart and funny to let the theatre get in the way of having fun.
