Chappell Roan
3Olympia Theatre, Dublin
★★★★★
There’s a video clip of Chappell Roan performing at the Gov Ball festival in New York this summer. A crowd enthusiastically dances in sync to Hot to Go, one of her hits, before the camera zooms out, capturing a sea of people that’s the size of audience usually reserved for a Glastonbury headline slot, the state funeral of a despot or a popular uprising.
Yet here we are, on a Tuesday evening in Dublin, where the ludicrousness of squeezing an artist who can command 100,000-strong crowds into 3Olympia Theatre has even further intensified the feral energy surrounding this gig. “Feral but polite,” as one audience member puts it. It’s a year this week since Roan released The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, an album that – like bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly – burned its lyrics, melodies and sentiment on to the popular consciousness. (“You’re lucky. You won’t get to see her again that close,” the taxi driver says when he sees we’re heading to the Olympia, adjusting his Spotify to play her hit Good Luck, Babe!) The young Missouri woman has had to contend with being elevated to the type of cultural figure who captures a contemporary desire for everything to be that bit more 1990s – including a throwback so-called lesbian renaissance – back when there were pop stars as towering as skyscrapers, and when people bequeathed tickets in wills lest they not make it to the show (probably).
This is a gig so big that it even has as subplot. Who would be her support act? An entire drag queen Hunger Games is under way in every city this tour visits, as denizens as far away as RuPaulia and Pantistan wait with bated breath to be the chosen ones. Tonight’s honour goes to Haus of Wig, three young queens who have been shaking up the city with their sporadic, brilliant parties at the Sugar Club. The venue is already packed when they take to the stage, earning a reception that would delight a headliner.
Outside the fences of the smoking area, more ticketless fans wait, attending vicariously, blaring music from speakers, asking people to buy them merch. “Have a ball, won’t you? Please have a ball,” one young person says across the barricades, willing the moment not to be wasted on those inside.
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So the gig. Any use? Yes. It is excellent. We’re in the presence of a real star. Roan arrives on stage with all the velocity of a stadium slayer, and the first three songs pass in almost a blur. Whatever is going on with these songs – the party songs, the torch songs, the occasional metamodernism, the sincerity, the catchiness of it all – she is connecting deeply and passionately with audiences.
The tones and colours in the music pull from 1980s spectra, then launch them into a nostalgic present. As it did at Gov Ball, Hot to Go induces a mass dance routine, one that here takes over all floors of the Olympia. Roan thanks the queer community for keeping her going and supporting her, and says the live shows mean a lot to her as she so desired this kind of community when she was 15.
Many of her songs are undeniably brilliant, especially Casual and Good, Luck Babe!, both of which Roan performs with vigour and generosity. She and her fantastic pink-and-black-clad band are leaving it all on the stage.
For the encore, Roan’s fringed pink corseted leotard outfit now topped with a pink cowboy hat, she launches into California. The crowd sing back her anthem Pink Pony Club at an outrageous volume. A pink pony balloon somehow appears and bobs along the crowd.
Then she’s gone, but not before waving and blowing kisses to the audience at length. Chappell Roan means it. And so do those who love what she’s doing.
