FEATURE:
Levitating: Saluting a Global Superstar
PHOTO CREDIT: Tyrone Lebon
to revisit Dua Lipa’s music. She has just completed a run of gigs in the U.K. She has a brief break before engaging in live shows in the U.S. It is clear that she is going to have a very busy rest of the year. I wanted to feature her again as she turns thirty in August. One of our very best Pop artists, Dua Lipa is also busy planning a wedding. I was also a big fan of her most recent album, 2024’s Radical Optimism. That album did not get the love it deserved. Someone who also has a future in acting and documentaries, this is a supreme talent who is also one of the best live performers in the world. I am going to end with a review of a recent gig from The Standard. Before that, I want to start off with an interview from British Vogue. A window into the life and routine of Dua Lipa. Her Service95 Book Club is wonderful and inspirational. It even has its own podcast. The Queen of British Pop – though one feels Charli xcx might challenge, or she be the queen of a sub-genre -, it is amazing seeing her rise. This incredible artist whose passion for literature is just as interesting and important as her music:
“At 15, Dua made a much marvelled-at decision: to return to London on her own and pursue a career in music.
“When I look back on it, I’m like: ‘Bloody hell, 15 really is so little,’” Dua reflects now. “But at the time I felt like I had such a clear idea of where I was going.”
“I think that’s the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life,” Anesa remembers, of letting Dua go, “but she was so determined and full of dreams. From an early age she knew what she wanted. She was very mature, and we believed in her.”
Dua shared a flat in London with the daughter of a family friend from Albania who was doing a master’s. On her first day at Parliament Hill School, two girls in her year – Sarah and Ella – heard there was a new starter and eventually found someone who looked younger than her years. She was sitting alone on a stage. “That must be the new girl,” they thought. Soon Sarah was spreading the word about Dua’s gifts. “Guys,” she said to their fellow drama students, “you have to listen to her sing, she’s amazing.”
Another girl joined their group: Rosie. When she went home she told her friends that Dua was going to be the next Beyoncé. “They were like: ‘What are you talking about, she’s only got one song on YouTube!’” Rosie recalls. “But it’s the way she makes you feel. The way she puts her energy into everything. She spends every single day making small decisions in the right direction.”
The group of friends went out all the time. Dua was always the one to host pre-drinks. She wore Jeffrey Campbell shoes with studs and extra high heels. “Do you ever wonder how Dua can perform a whole show in high heels?” Sarah asks. “I just remember: we were maybe 15, 16, and she would literally be stomping around Soho in the highest, highest high heels.”
PHOTO CREDIT: David Sims
“There’s a wild side to me, but I’m also very sensible,” Dua suggests. “I think I was quite aware of the fact that my parents had allowed me to be away from them. They put so much trust into me I was like: ‘I’m not going to fuck that up.’” Her background had a handy side-effect: “When I was young, trying to get into clubs was kind of easy because every bouncer was Albanian,” Dua remembers. “All I needed to do was speak Albanian to the bouncer.”
There was a slight hiccup. “Basically I started going out so much that I failed my A levels,” Dua confesses. She asked to redo the year at Parliament Hill and wasn’t allowed back. Threatened with a return to Kosovo, she found a workaround: a course in advertising and marketing that would equal two years of A levels. As her mother tells me poetically: “There are no obstacles. Only stepping stones.”
But it hardly mattered: the apprenticeships that served Dua best were the nights out and the friendships forged. “My whole goal, with my show, is: ‘I want to start people dancing and I want them to leave for home dancing,’” Dua explains. “And I guess that is to do with my love of going out and bringing people together in that time.”
At 18 she was working in clubs and posting covers online when she was cast in an ad for The X Factor. She played a fresh-faced star-to-be who sings along to “Lost in Music” on her headphones while pinning laundry on a line. In the advert, everyone within hearing distance flocks to listen. In life, a similar thing happened. The allure of Dua’s voice became undeniable, and the rest, with a few twists and turns, is pop history.
On the short drive to the stadium in Madrid, the tinted windows are up for privacy, the air conditioning off to protect Dua’s vocal cords. She doesn’t mind – she says she’s prepared to “roast”. When we get there she’ll go into vocal exercises, sound check, hair and make-up, dance warm-ups: everything timed to the minute.
After her last tour in 2022, for Future Nostalgia, when she listened back to the album she preferred the live versions of the songs. This time she’s planned them that way: the songs on Radical Optimism were “written for live”, and she hopes they show more of her range as a musician, not just as a pop star. On this tour, she’s added a new cover version each night for the country she’s in. She likes a little added risk: feet dangling off the edge, as she puts it – and she’ll get that in spades when she plays Wembley this summer.
So what do Dua’s 30s hold for the Radical empire? “I think I’d love to expand Service95 and the book club,” she says. “I’d love to publish authors. I would love to help produce them into film and TV.” She recently executive produced a documentary about the music scene in Camden for Disney+, and would like to do more. She’s keen to see the music festival she set up in Kosovo grow. And at some point she wants to look after other musicians, “maybe have my own record label, maybe represent other artists”. Overall, she’s thinking: “How can I be of service, literally, to other artists, whether that be in film, TV, books, music?” You get the impression she doesn’t so much want to conquer the world as invite it to join her.
“Can you do all that?” I ask. She throws me an “are you kidding – I got this” look. “Yeah,” she says. “Nothing’s impossible. You’ve just got to get up and do it”.
I will celebrate her music closer to her thirtieth birthday on 22nd August. Before that, I wanted to react to her incredible live performances. Shows that rank alongside her most electrifying. This is what The Standard wrote in their review of a huge Wembley show from an artist who must have dreamt about this when she was a child. She did not disappoint her fans:
“Of all the people for Dua Lipa to bring on as a guest for her first night at Wembley, Jamiroquai would not have been top of my list of likely suspects. Or, I suspect, anybody’s.
And yet, the 70,000 strong crowd roared for him when he appeared on Friday night. When the pair duetted on his 1996 hit Virtual Insanity, the energy levels went stratospheric. At least, among the older attendees who knew who he was.
But that’s Lipa’s tour all over: a good time, yes, but ultimately, a victory lap for the megalithic pop star. A celebration of doing things her own way – a way that has gotten the British-Albanian artist (as she told the crowd) from playing 350-person gigs to a sold out three nights in one of the biggest venues in the country.
”This is such a massive, massive milestone for me,” she told her massed fans. “I've had a lump in my throat from the moment this show started.”
It certainly didn’t affect her performance: what we got was two hours of high octane euphoria, a formula that Lipa has polished and perfected over the course of her months on tour.
Lipa’s stock in trade, these days, is hazy club bangers: perfect for the sweltering summer. And we got them: things kicked off with her Radical Optimism hit Training Season, which saw the stage flooded with backing dancers.
There were fireworks; there was confetti. There was the general sense of the kitchen sink being thrown at the entire gig, in the best way possible – the pyrotechnics budget must have been tremendous.
From there, we had the bouncy, breezy End of an Era, followed by Break My Heart, which came with an extravaganza of backing dancers. Adding to the victory lap-ness of it all, at one point she simply stopped singing, letting the crowd roar out their approval into the silence.
From there, we veered into her older material: One Kiss, which dropped into a thundering bass-heavy remix. Hot on its heels came her big hit Levitating, which was delivered on full strut, complete with fireworks – and then a pared back version of If These Walls Could Talk and a Western flavoured rendition of Maria.
Lipa was clearly having fun, too, breaking character to smile and dance around with her dancers. And she was keen to underline how far she’d come, introducing her old hit Hotter Than Hell as “the song that got me signed”, to raucous cheers from the crowd.
To be honest, the big hits came so thick and fast that the excitement of seeing Jamiroquai was soon forgotten (though she was obviously in fangirl mode for that, too). There was the slinky Illusion, an aggressively muscular Physical, and Hallucinate, which turned the bass and reverb way up to rattle the stadium walls.
At one point, Lipa descended into the crowd to chat with her fans – which had the effect of sapping the night’s momentum somewhat – before heading out into a stage in the audience’s centre. From there, dressed in a Union Jack-lined fur coat and lifted high into the air, she conducted the audience’s cheers before leading them in a dreamy, hazy rendition of Be The One, just up the road from where she shot the music video in Hampstead Heath.
And though she rounded off the gig with an encore featuring some more of her biggest hits – a Bicep remix of New Rules stood out, then Houdini – that image was the one that stuck. Lipa, triumphant, in the place where it all started. Home at last”.
I will end there. One of the greatest artists in the world, Dua Lipa does not get the same focus as the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Beyoncé, or even Charli xcx. She is a very special artist who has this incredible talent. There is also the Service95 Book Club. Always so busy and barely giving herself a moment to rest, I feel like the next year is going to be very important and eventful. To highlight her sensational music, below is a very special mixtape…
FEATURING Dua Lipa’s best music.