Bbc Radio 1's Biggest Weekend Review – Icy Taylor Swift Leads Pop Panoply
BBC Radio 1's Biggest Weekend review – icy Taylor Swift leads pop panoply Swift was imperious and Liam Payne icky, while Years & Years and Christine and the Queens were truly transporting To the right of the main stage at BBC Radio 1’s Biggest Weekend is a hillside lined with terraced houses. It’s strangely moving to see the globe’s biggest pop stars juxtaposed against the Swansea suburbs, a surreal manifestation of how radio brings bring different worlds into remote enclaves – by turns thri
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BBC Radio 1's Biggest Weekend review – icy Taylor Swift leads pop panoply
Swift was imperious and Liam Payne icky, while Years & Years and Christine and the Queens were truly transporting. To the right of the main stage at BBC Radio 1’s Biggest Weekend is a hillside lined with terraced houses.
It’s strangely moving to see the globe’s biggest pop stars juxtaposed against the Swansea suburbs, a surreal manifestation of how radio brings bring different worlds into remote enclaves – by turns thrillingly transgressive and profoundly humdrum.
Nobody embodies the latter more than Liam Payne, who has the harried stage patter of a comic losing steam.
“What are we up to next – oh yeah, I like this one,” the ex-One Direction member says to introduce a cover of Charlie Puth’s Attention, a song that affirms his set’s main theme, namely how shallow girls are for succumbing to his irresistibility.
His own lyrics about sex are oddly biological. “Let me be the one to fill it up,” he sings on Familiar, a lyric to cross one’s legs to.
It continues: “You’re shaped like a model or some kind of bottle.” Newcastle Brown Ale? Cycling flask?.
Payne is as charmless as George Ezra is endearing. Ezra might be a cleaned-up Paolo Nutini with an affected baritone, but his jaunty barbecue anthems have the power to part clouds.
Plus, he seems thrilled to be here, which is more than you can say for some. Demi Lovato disappears for a whole song, ceding the floor to Luis Fonsi.
Whether singing or talking, she shouts incessantly, and with her hi-vis jacket, wouldn’t seem misplaced directing traffic in the car park. Equally vapid but disturbingly compelling are 30 Seconds to Mars.
Jared Leto resembles Charles Manson in athleisure and basks like a pig in muck as the crowd roar his words back at him, as if he had written God Only Knows instead of a series of longueurs anchored by deathless calls of “whoa-oh-oh”.
More innovative are J Hus and Camila Cabello, the former upgrading his much-mimicked Afrobeats for a staunch seven-piece group. And Cabello makes time stop in her excellent, unhurried set.
Unlike Lovato’s gale-force belting, she wields her powerful voice as a vaporous falsetto on Never Be the Same and a sultry wink on Havana, and savours a rendition of Can’t Help Falling in Love at the piano.
She seems properly in tune with her material, an oddly rare sensation this weekend. Without question the most transporting moments come from from Years & Years and Christine and the Queens.
Their sets foreground queerness with muscular, *** dancing – the former’s finds frontman Olly Alexander writhing against figures dressed as gimps and cyberpunks in a way that suggests he’s been studying Perfume Genius.
During Desire’s liberationist dance-pop, the dancers peel away his jumpsuit and attach a silver cape to his front.
A riser then propels him – and this vast cape that makes Meghan Markle’s train look like a napkin – 10 metres into the air while he sings Palo Santo.
The fabric falls away to reveal a green, navel-skimming jumpsuit: Peter Pan crossed with Bowie. Payne’s warmed-over tropical house is a distant memory.
If Alexander’s weapon is glitter, Héloïse Letissier’s is sweat. Her armpits are soaked, the knees of her pink trousers lagged in dirt; her agile neck movements reveal a love bite.
While fashion prizes matte surfaces and suppressed effort, Letissier’s insistence on the consequences of physical contact is revelatory.
Her new album is “about leaving your teenage room to go out into the world”: a song like Saint Claude was about “trying to fit in”, and features delicate dancing focused around her hands.
In contrast, the choreography behind new single Girlfriend is macho, muscular and aggressive. If only more people could see it – Letissier suffers from being scheduled opposite Taylor Swift.
The latter half of Swift’s set is ironclad, though there’s a dissonance between her acidic new aesthetic and the sincere interactions with her fans that she still clearly enjoys.
As they do her: as divisive as Swift may be, there is no moment all weekend as unifying as Shake It Off.
