“THIS IS THEATER” reads a message across the gigantic screen dominating the stadium, as an operatic violinist struts and saws her few minutes on the stage, around two-and-a-half hours into the barrage of glitz, glamour and belt-thumbing boot-slaps that is Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter show. And it’s a grand-scale theater (sic) of the absurd.
For a good decade now, Queen Bey has been a proud pioneer of pop music as progressive art, making wildly exploratory, shape-shifting and genre-splicing albums that have elevated the form and absorbed several others: queer culture dance music on 2022’s Renaissance, country on last year’s Cowboy Carter. Translating them into stadium and festival sets, though, has tended to result in bewildering bombardments of entertainment, and she do-si-dos into a damp Tottenham Hotspur Stadium tonight with her 10-gallon crystal crown apparently slipping.
A country chart hit, Cowboy Carter nevertheless sold a fraction of Renaissance and, though you wouldn’t know it from this packed and roaring house, rumours are that some of the six London performances of this three-hour pop opera in seven acts have struggled to sell. We like it, obviously, but perhaps we don’t want to put an entire Ring Cycle on it.
To be fair, the venue itself might bear some of the blame. Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is, by some considerable distance, the worst venue for gigs in the capital – getting here and back is a challenge that would defeat any Race Across the World team, and the security screening is effectively a shakedown by a black-market umbrella syndicate. It’s saying something that the place is significantly more life-affirming when there’s football on; in the name of God, Live Nation, stop putting concerts on here.
Or maybe fans have caught videos of this dizzyingly expensive show from less attractive angles. Full disclosure: I wasn’t really at this gig. At best, tucked down one side of the stage, I was watching from the wings as Beyoncé and her troupes of sparkle-chapped hoedowners square-danced frantically for the wide-shot cameras. An entitled reviewer griping over a bad seat, yes, but from a vantage point that exposes just how poorly staged, plotted and designed the Cowboy Carter tour is.
The stage itself is essentially just an enormous changing room behind a screen that spans the field; a small triangular indentation in the middle houses some quite spectacular moments. Beyoncé rises atop a golden horse, or dons an LCD neon dress for “Daughter”, which must be breathtaking for the 65 per cent or so of the crowd that can see in there. The rest of the show is directed unwaveringly towards the large lyric autocue at the back of the stadium, and with conspicuous cameras everywhere and the bulk of Cowboy Carter’s 78 minutes performed over three hours, the effect is of being the studio audience at a hard-sell TV album showcase.
The Cowboy Carter material has its moments. A Motown big band is wheeled out on – I can attest – elegantly constructed scaffolding for “Ya Ya” before Beyoncé, in worryingly flammable fur trousers, finds herself sitting at a golden piano on fire. “Flamenco” opens with a four-part vocal harmony segment recalling the old Destiny’s Child magic; “Levii’s Jeans” closes with a stirring soul crescendo as our heroine leads a parade of strutting cowboy Magic Mikes around her stadium-length walkway. Beyoncé and her dancers display a variety of interpretations on the theme of “riding” their golden bulls on the R&B noir “Tyrant”, while the motherly folk of “Protector” becomes the centrepiece of a touching familial segment, as Bey is joined amid a pyramid of writhing nymphs by her daughters Rumi (aged seven) and 13-year-old Blue Ivy, who also steals several parts of the show as a solo dancer.
But the set’s kaleidoscopic, often quickfire mash-up of styles (electro C&W, trap, disco, hyper-diva-pop and more) becomes a formless mulch in such a boomy space. The seven acts, too, lack any thematic solidity, besides the “Revolution” section, which sees Beyoncé declaring “America Has a Problem” from a podium, covered in headlines and flanked by dancing newspapers. It’s a moment of focus for the political undercurrent of a show drenched in the sounds and images of Black pride: Gil Scott-Heron, Kendrick Lamar, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner”, Carter family home videos.
Expensive, Lynchian visuals do little to aid cohesion. Why is Beyoncé sipping brandy on an alligator, watching a stack of TVs with a horse or waggling a diamante carrot at us? And when the old hits do finally, briefly come, they’re in disjointed snippet form, as with “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”, or in sluggish slo-mo (“Crazy in Love”). Ultimately, it’s left to a few show-stopping stadium gimmicks to make the evening: Bey flying over the crowd on a neon horseshoe on a thumping “Jolene”, or in a classic American car for “16 Carriages”. Yet, all the videos fans show each other on our hen’s-tooth train home look fantastic. I suppose you had to be there.
