FEATURE:
Dua Lipa at Thirty
PHOTO CREDIT: David Sims for British Vogue
What Next for a British Pop Queen?
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IT may seem too restrictive…
PHOTO CREDIT: David Sims for British Vogue
labelling Dua Lipa as purely ‘Pop’. Like Kylie Minogue, Charli xcx or any other queen on the scene, her music encompasses different genres and sounds. Hard to categorise. However, it is clear that Lipa is the jewel in the British Pop crown. Someone who has released three remarkable albums, a series of incredible tours and she has also picked up awards and done so much more. Whether that is producing documentaries, acting in films or running her own book club, Service95 Book Club. Dua Lipa says that reading has been “an anchor through every phase of my life”. As host of the podcast for the book club, she has interviewed the likes of George Saunders, Emma Cline and Patti Smith. In the midst of a series of tour dates, the rest of this year is going to be very busy for Lipa. The reason for doing this feature is that she turns thirty on 22nd August. Her most recent album, Radical Optimism, was released last year. It came seven years after her eponymous debut album. I want to use this feature to sources from some recent interviews with Dua Lipa. Three albums in and with this incredible reputation as a globe-straddling superstar, you wonder where she will head next. In fact, I think I will return to an interview that I used in a recent feature about her. In June, British Vogue spoke to Dua Lipa about her career, finding love (she is getting married shortly), turning thirty and playing Wembley (which she did in June). I am going to end this feature with some live reviews:
“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.
Dua’s daily schedule is “full, full, full, full, full”. She’s up at 6.30am and in bed by midnight and in between she does yoga, reformer Pilates, weight training, dance rehearsals. She looks after her body, she says, “like an athlete”, and thinks of her voice as a muscle. She has a singing coach as well as a speech therapist, to train her not to run her voice ragged by speaking in a raspy tone (“I love a chat”). When not on tour she’s in the studio with a producer and a fellow songwriter. She’s learning Spanish with a tutor three times a week, she reads (her friends get all their book recommendations from Dua) and when she is on tour she builds in time to explore cities and new restaurants. She loves to cook – even when just off a plane she makes pesto from scratch, not from a jar – and she eats healthily (“I never try and restrict myself from anything”). She looks after her skin, diligently washing her face three times after taking off her make-up, and once a year she sees a facialist in New York. All this, of course, while embarking on several high-profile collaborations in the worlds of fashion and beauty. In the past she has worked on a collection of clothes for Versace, been a brand ambassador for Tiffany & Co, and is a face of YSL Beauty. Notably this year she is front and centre for Chanel, both at the house’s shows and in launching the Chanel 25 handbag this past spring.
Dua’s appetite for life can’t be contained within the span of an ordinary human day – she needs every minute she can get just to meet the demands of her own curiosity. Her friend Mia laughs about this: “Maybe – a theory – she can stop time?”
“She’s been organised her entire life,” Anesa reflects. “She’s ahead of everything. The rest of us have to keep up.”
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
Twenty-two songs and five costume changes into her show, Dua has sung from a suspended platform, danced in the middle of a ring of fire, sprinkled autographs and taken selfies with tearful fans. She’s worn Valentino and Balenciaga. By the time the deep, familiar beat of her hit single “Houdini” comes on, the crowd has mutated into a single ecstatic organism.
“This is our last song!” Dua cries out. “So this is our last chance to dance! Are you ready?” The crowd goes wild. I think back to her telling me: “I feel so strong and I feel sexy and I feel kind of invincible when I’m on stage.”
With one last round of extraterrestrial energy, she launches into the precise and dauntless motions of the dance, gold chains shaking on her black Chanel bodysuit, lifted knee setting hips and shoulders rocking. This is music as physics – she has transformed the energy, changed the air, telegraphed the rhythms of the past two hours direct to the seat of our souls.
Backstage, Team Dua gathers, jaws slack with awe. Though they’ve seen her shows dozens of times before, they all agree that tonight she has transcended what you’d expect of mortals. In her dressing room, amid a joyful cluster of family and friends, Dua has shrunk in record time to a relatable scale. She’s changed back into her jeans, red Courrèges tank top and Puma Speedcats. It seems impossible that this and the giant I’ve just seen onstage are one and the same person.
“Are you human?” I find myself asking her. She laughs, and gives me a hug. “Did you have a good time?” she asks.
Perhaps that’s as much as you can ask of life. If so, Dua’s gift is to make it possible: for her friends, for her followers and for throngs of thousands, night after night. Anyone who thought radical optimism was just an album title hasn’t lived in Dua Lipa’s world”.
I will finish with a live review of a recent London show. Though Radical Optimism did not get the same hefty reviews as 2020’s Future Nostalgia, I think that it was among the best albums of 2024. Dua Lipa pushing her music forward and not repeating what went before. Houdini, Training Season and These Walls are among her best songs. I shall try not to duplicate too much of what I wrote about recently. Another reason for coming back to Dua Lipa is that she is someone who goes beyond the Pop world. In the previous feature, I mentioned her book club and podcast. I also put in a mixtape featuring some of her best songs. I feel there are artists who have or had the potential to be great actors. Gwen Stefani is one artist who should have been in a series of films! Dua Lipa has made some screen appearances. I don’t think she has been given the right roles yet. She has the potential to kick ass in a thriller or spy film or be the lead in a romantic comedy. Or a straight comedy. She could star in a music biopic or slot into a comedy-drama about life in Camden during the 1990s. At a very interesting time for music, focusing on this story that utilises some of the tracks of that time. She is so adaptable and talented, I would love to see her on the screen more. However, at her busiest right now, maybe this is something that will wait. She is getting married and priorities might shift! Also, there is that demand for a fourth studio album. Even though she took four years between her second and third albums, I feel a fourth might come sooner. New themes and subjects might inform the lyrics. Marriage and new love. Will it return to the sounds heard on Future Nostalgia or will she go in a completely different direction?
I also think her Service95 Book Club could get even bigger. In terms of side projects and new opportunities. Doing live episodes or recommendations and books featured appearing in their own section of book shops. I will get a feature that talks about that book club/service. I will come to it now, in fact. Another possibility beyond podcasting is Dua Lipa as an interviewer. Here is someone who could have a role in politics. She is an incredible interviewer and is hugely knowledgeable. She has such humanity too. The Guardian ran a feature in May and asked if Dua Lipa is the best literary interviewer ever:
“Firstly, Lipa seems to read a lot: in a keynote speech on the power of reading at the 2022 Booker prize, she mentions learning about the Albanian spirit of resistance through the work of author Ismail Kadare as a teenager. Her interviews are part of the book club she runs through her lifestyle website Service95, and while a cynic might suggest they’re a way to build a personal brand while pocketing a bit of affiliate-link cash (Reese Witherspoon, Dakota Fanning, Natalie Portman and Fallon himself are just a few of the celebrities to have their own clubs along with, of course, Oprah), she started her first book club with some close friends back in 2019.
She was posting recommendations on Instagram long before Service95, and her own bookshelf, tantalisingly visible in most of her interviews, is stuffed with an impressively esoteric mix of books, from Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men to Joe Coscarelli’s Rap Capital. Maybe, as someone who’s given hundreds of interviews in her time, she also understands what makes a good interview: the questions artists love and hate, the sorts of things they wish they were asked, and the things that make them open up. It’s unclear if she alone writes the questions – her reps didn’t respond to a request for comment – but she clearly knows the material: she’s always familiar with side characters and subplots, and never seems caught off guard by an unplanned author aside.
Beyond all of that, perhaps Dua Lipa is a good interviewer because she reads the books the way authors hope they’ll be read: diving into their characters and worlds for the sheer joy of the experience. It’s obvious she reads thoughtfully and deeply, bringing her to an understanding of each work that naturally leads her to want to know more. Listen to enough of her interviews, and her enthusiasm is so infectious that it’s difficult not to want to read more, or read more broadly, or just read better. All of that, and she also wrote Houdini. Time to step it up, Fallon”.
Dua Lipa is also one of the greatest live artists in the world. In the past few years alone, she has performed around the world and headlined Glastonbury last year. When Dua Lipa played Wembley Stadium in June, DIY were among the many who awarded it huge praise. We are in a moment where Dua Lipa is going to join the greats of Pop. She is an artist that we should be so proud of:
“For a long time, it’s felt as though Dua Lipa’s been simmering just below the pinnacle of pop icon status. Perhaps that’s because, between her book club and accompanying podcast, lifestyle newsletter, YSL Beauty ambassadorship (there’s a pop-up for the brand set up at the foot of the stadium’s front stairs), and non-stop run of globe-trotting holidays, music is just one of several projects and side hustles she’s turned her hand to. Don’t be deceived, though: like a very sparkly magician pulling an endless string of silk handkerchiefs from her sleeve, her second sold-out night at Wembley Stadium delivers two hours of back-to-back hits to rival any pop juggernaut.
PHOTO CREDIT: Samir Hussein/Getty Images
Beyond a smattering of glitter, it’s true that this tour hasn’t inspired the same cult dressing as contemporaries who have passed under Wembley’s arch. (That could just be a meteorological issue, to be fair - it’s hard to serve an extravagant look when a heatwave has turned London’s air to treacle-thick soup). Dua more than compensates with her own outfits, anyway - there are five, to be exact, each one heavily bedazzled and two involving fur, which can’t be fun in this temperature. On top of the costume changes, she also has chair-ography, burlesque feather fans, confetti, streamers, lasers, flames, fireworks, and a levitating C-stage. Make no mistake: this is a no-expense-spared spectacle in the truest sense.
Possibly the biggest spectacle tonight, though, is the reveal of her special guest. After last night’s somewhat unexpected Jamiroquai duet, the crowd are on more familiar ground - and predictably lose their minds - when Dua welcomes “the biggest brat” she’s ever met to join her onstage. Although Dua does feature on Charli’s remixed version of ‘Talk talk’, they opt instead for a storming rendition of ‘360’ that’s received with utterly unsurprising fervour.
Despite admitting to feeling nervous, Dua has the 70,000-strong crowd in the palm of her hand from the moment she appears tonight, performing like this is her 20th headline show here, not her second. Debut album singles ‘IDGAF’ and ‘Be the One’ receive just as much love as newer favourites ‘Training Season’, ‘Hallucinate’ and ‘Levitating’, while everyone merrily joins in with the mock fitness video intro for ‘Physical’. The hit parade slows down only when she takes a walk along the barricade - allowing her band to set up downstage - to compare nail art, hug, and take selfies with the front row, most of whom have travelled internationally to be here.
As the marathon show finally dances to a close with shimmering dancefloor-filler ‘Houdini’ (accompanied by even more fireworks, of course) it’s hard to deny that, when she’s not reading books or sampling restaurants on holiday, Dua can turn out a stadium-headlining set like it’s the most natural thing in the world”.
Because the superstar Dua Lipa turns thirty on 22nd August, I wanted to get in early when it comes to marking that. As she enters her fourth decade, what comes next?! A fourth studio album and more tour dates. I hope bigger acting roles and a chance for her to become more involved in politics as an ambassador and spokesperson. I can also see her interviewing more people, either for her podcast or in a different context. In terms of the affect and influence she can have on culture and status, Dua Lipa can match Madonna in years to come. Given her sheer talent and how she is influencing and touching people all around the world, that declaration is definitely not…
AN exaggeration.