Content:
It’s PinkPantheress’ camaraderie with the audience between songs that makes the show.
Words: Abi Firth.
Transitioning from the For You page to a massive stage isn’t easy. Many of the artists who’ve been fast-tracked to impressive festival slots and big venue bookings after a viral hit have been criticised for their disappointing shows and lack of stage presence.
But PinkPantheress might be TikTok’s first proper success story. Although her early tracks spread like wildfire over there, she arrived on the platform fully loaded, with an artistic vision that extended beyond the 30-second clips, a refusal to be tied down to one genre, and both critical and commercial triumphs fleshing out her discography.
It’s a journey that’s led PinkPantheress to a sold-out show at Alexandra Palace, just three stops into her first proper headline tour and less than three years after her breakout singles landed on streaming platforms. It’s one of those early tracks that opens the show tonight, Pink stepping out to ‘Break It Off”s thundering drum’n’bass beat, beefed up dramatically with a live band.
The introduction of a live band particularly helps Pink cut through in ways she’d struggled to in her early days, her once hushed voice also perfectly clear now. The bag she’d become notorious for carrying on stage with her remains, at least for the first couple of tracks, before setting it down for ‘Mosquito’, the lead single from last year’s debut album ‘Heaven knows’.
A front-loaded set, ‘Pain’, ‘Passion’ and ‘Just for Me’ come and go early on, all strung together so the audience needn’t bother putting their phones down, while the less familiar album tracks shine in the show’s second half. Assisted by showgirls as backing dancers for the Willow collaboration ‘Where You Are’, and ballroom dancers for ‘The aisle’, while she reclines on a chaise longue similar to that featured on the ‘Heaven knows’ album art, she notes that she had to do something special for Ally Pally.
She’s also joined by friend and fellow producer-pop-star-multi-hyphenate Shygirl, lending her the stage for Shy’s track ‘Coochie (a bedtime story)’ and a returning for a performance of ‘bbycakes’, the rework of 2004 3 Of A Kind track the pair collaborated on with Mura Masa. It’s a fun change of pace as the collaborative tracks that fill the second half – that’s ‘Bury me’ sans Kelela, ‘Another life’ sans Rema, and ‘Boys a liar Pt. 2’ sans Ice Spice – mostly involve Pink wandering around the stage until the featured verse passes.
Still, it’s not the additional guests or even the production (which includes a stage setup of chandeliers, candelabras and three ornate mirrors that speak to the audience intermittently, Snow White stylee) that make the show, but PinkPantheress’ camaraderie with the audience between songs.
Off-the-cuff remarks like telling a story of how she ‘shaved’ before seeing Panic! At The Disco as a teenager “in case anything happened” as a prelude to the track about exactly that, ‘True romance’, is the kind of internet over-sharing that keeps her grounded, as is the moment she says she has tea on her old school teachers, if there’s anyone from her school there. She accepts numerous gifts from the front row, too, including flowers and a K-pop photo card, popping them in her bag each time.
It’s representative of the way she’s inched further from the faceless artist she was at the very start; the three giant mirrors surrounding her on stage reflect (sorry) that growth, too. So when the newer TikTok hits come at the end, the inescapable ‘Boys a liar Pt. 2’ and ‘Nice to meet you’, it becomes clear that PinkPantheress kind of balances it all perfectly; the undeniable hits with their innovation, the stage show and its curated randomness, the mystery and the very real person behind it when the illusion briefly shatters.
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