Rosalía, The O2, London review • DIY Magazine

“You’ve all come, even my enemies,” sings Rosalía in Spanish during ‘Magnolias’, a track on which she imagines her own funeral. Tonight, at the first of two sold-out nights at The O2, it sounds less like a fantasy and more like a fact. Whatever your relationship to her music, it’s increasingly difficult to look away from the Spanish megastar.

There were questions, before the tour started, about how ‘LUX’ would translate live. Met with five-star reviews across the board, her fourth album was a bold reimagining of what music could be – classical, pop, flamenco, and club music colliding to tell stories across 13 languages. How could such an ambitious work of art, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, work as a touring production? The ‘LUX’ tour answers them all.

Tonight, the production is staggering. A 22-piece orchestra, arranged in a cross formation, anchors a five-act spectacle that also includes a dance troupe, set pieces (including staircases, a grand piano, and a glowing orb behind her), and closed captions to translate the album’s 13 languages.

Sonically, the show plants itself somewhere in between the Proms and a Berlin club, and the distance in between these two poles is where she does her most exciting work. During ‘Mio Christo Piange Diamanti’, she stands alone, teary-eyed, singing almost acapella, before a ferocious crescendo brings it to a grinding, concussive stop. It’s a sound so loud that it makes the floor vibrate. The O2 is, it seems, a better venue for the occasion than the Royal Albert Hall.

‘Berghain’ careens into a thunderous techno remix and lurches the O2 into a 20,000-person rave that carries through ‘SAOKO’, ‘LA FAMA’, ‘LA COMBI VERSACE’, and a jacked-up version of ‘De Madrugá’ – the club beats provided, in great part, by the orchestra itself.

But underneath the spectacle, there is something more searching. The references accumulate – a Degas tutu in Act 1, a transformation into the Mona Lisa during a cover of Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, a swinging incense spotlight during ‘CUUUUuuuuuute’. This is a show obsessed with devotion: to art, to God, to fame. On ‘La Fama’, she sings, in Spanish: “Fame is a bad lover and isn’t going to really love you”, and yet she sings it to 40,000 across two sold-out nights. On ‘La Yugular’, God fits inside her chest. How do you demonstrate that in an hour-and-a-half set? Rather than resolving these contradictions, she lets them hang, content to leave the audience in the uncertain in-between. It’s the most honest thing she could do in a show that leaves little room for improvisation.

The fact that she is able to pull this all off without tipping into pretension is largely due to her sense of humour. She takes English-accent lessons from a fan who turns out to be Italian. An art-cam zooms in on audience members, encouraging them to impersonate famous works. Lola Young, appearing as a special guest, tells the story of how she was sleeping with a married man and only found out when his phone connected to the Bluetooth speaker.

She closes the show as she opened: alone on stage, with minimal instrumentation, her voice carrying the room. However, the funeral she imagined for herself on ‘Magnolias’ has 20,000 guests who don’t look particularly sad. Rather, quite the opposite.

Rosalía has always been interested in the relationship between devotion and spectacle, the intimate and the overwhelming. Tonight, for an hour and a half, she makes that space the only place worth being.