Olivia Rodrigo’s London O2 Arena residency is an all guns blazing powerhouse of pop brilliance

From the moment you step into London’s O2 Arena, there’s no question as to which pop megastar is currently in residence. They’ve rolled out the purple carpet, whilst the same signature hue can be seen everywhere - on cowboy hats and seas of sparkly tops, each uniform-wearer attesting to the sheer devotion that Olivia Rodrigo has instilled in her legions of fans (80,000 over four nights, just in London).

Whilst it’s no new thing for a top tier pop star to incite this kind of fervour, there’s something about Rodrigo - now two albums in and still only 21 - that feels more authentic than many of her more meticulously-curated peers. Though tonight’s show is an absolute capital letter Big Pop Spectacle, replete with backing dancers, star-shaped confetti cannons, and a giant crescent moon that the singer sits atop of, flying over the crowd like a sassy Tinkerbell, it also makes consciously interesting, slightly more edgy choices. The dancers lean towards the interpretive, adding eerie, shadowy silhouettes to ‘traitor’ and forming a clever human clock face around the singer on ‘lacy’. A camera placed under the stage allows for Rodrigo to loom into it, adding a cheeky, bratty, confrontational layer to ‘obsessed’, while the choice to utilise an all-female backing band lends a girl gang sense of fun to the atmosphere on stage.

There’s no question that Rodrigo has been racking up the hits since emerging with breakthrough ‘driver’s license’; last year’s single ‘vampire’ alone has reached nearly a billion streams in less than a year. But as she serves up both of those massive tracks alongside stomping opener ‘bad idea, right?’ within the first 20 minutes, it’s a brilliantly audacious acknowledgement of just how much she has in her arsenal. Recent ‘GUTS’ bonus tracks ‘obsessed’ and ‘so american’ land as two of her biggest crowd pleasers (by this metric, who can say what other gems may still be living on the cutting room floor), while throughout, the screams resonating around the arena are at One Direction levels of tinnitus-inducing.