I wasn't a Billie Eilish fan until her London gig completely changed my mind
Two years on from being the youngest ever Glastonbury headliner, my expectations were high for the opening night of a five-night run at London's O2 Arena.
After that one gig, I have gone from a sceptic to a full convert into the cult of Billie.
I'm unsure why the magnitude of her stardom has passed me by for so many years, but her Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour managed to reignite my love for forgotten tracks and emotionally connected me to others, which I never paid enough attention to.
That's what good live music should do.
Hard and soft couldn't be a more perfect name for this tour as she opened with huge hits CHIHIRO and LUNCH, immediately getting the energy up and everyone dancing.
While she has plenty of big dance hits, it was the soft core of the show that really stood out, with those undeniably incredible vocals taking centre stage.
By placing said stage in the middle of the O2 — with no viewing restrictions other than the occasional floating speaker — the 23-year-old star made a 20,000-person venue feel downright cosy.
Fans were within touching distance without even trying, and coupled with her selfie camera streamed onto the screens, it felt like Billie was reaching back out.
It's impossible not to warm to her with her beaming smile and emotional message to the audience that this was a 'safe space' for everyone.
Such a stripped-back show is not what I expected from a former Glastonbury headliner's entire tour, but it all feels effortless. Billie was made for this.
While her rendition of her Barbie hit, What Was I Made For?, was a particular highlight, the standout moment was by far When The Party's Over.
Created by looping vocals, Billie boldly asked the audience for complete silence for one minute.
Having seen Beyoncé's mute challenge, I was apprehensive, but the crowd obliged, resulting in a haunting moment with Billie's harmonising filling the O2 arena.
It's no surprise her show was a hot ticket, with ticket exchange and resale platform, Viagogo, revealing the number of searches for her shows could have filled Wembley Stadium 12 times over.
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
By far the most popular night was Thursday, July 10, with fans desperate to be the first to see their idol.
Of course, Billie's popularity has been helped (as if it needed to be) by viral tracks like Bird of a Feather and her appearance on Charli XCX's Guess remix — both of which feature on the setlist.
In fact, when she opened her tour and played Guess for the first time in September, it became Charli XCX's fifth highest-viewed day on Viagogo that year. That's the power of Billie.
In a way, I was thankful for the lack of a Charli special guest cameo, although she is projected on screens. This was not her moment. Instead, it proved what the entire hour and a half set had emphasised from the start – a true icon needs no stunts.
Yes, Billie floated on a platform a few times, but ultimately this was about the raw talent of the Lunch hitmaker and her band. More Trending
I'm still emotional thinking about her rendition of What Was I Made For, sung while kneeling in front of an adoring crowd. Or her shortened version of Happier Than Ever, a song I wish had been given five extra verses rather than cut down.
This is where Billie shines; she is in a league of her own among the pop girlies when it comes to sheer vocal talent.
I might be so bold as to say that the star delivered the perfect gig. Visually stunning in its simplicity, pitch perfect vocals, dance numbers and a prompt finish at 10pm – I was on the tube home by quarter past (a real win in my books).
In a world where more is more and big-name cameos are what make a show memorable, Billie Eilish proved that sometimes just being a strong performer is enough.
Got a story?
If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you.
MORE: Judge eviscerates singer suing Grammy winners for copying song 'played 670 times'
MORE: Singer Ethel Cain admits she is 'not proud' of disturbing posts after backlash
MORE: Grammy-winning star battling cancer fears 'cruel' deportation under new Trump law
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
10 hours ago
- BBC News
School 'bangers' performed back where they began
You may remember belting out assembly songs like He's Got the Whole World In His Hands while sitting crossed-legged on the hall floor of your primary they are being sung at festivals like Camp Bestival by the Dorset-born music teacher James P 34-year-old's Primary School Assembly Bangers set was so popular at Glastonbury this year organisers had to shut the Partridge said going to school in Dorset and performing at Poole Lighthouse was what inspired him to start the sing-alongs. "I started singing with the Bournemouth Symphony Youth Chorus and then with the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus for a long time at the Poole Lighthouse as well," he said."That was a very special place to experience live music and kind of set me on a path of being a professional musician."He attended Stanley Green First School, Oakdale Middle and Poole year he went back to his primary school for its 70th anniversary."I actually judged the school talent show and it was the first time I had been in that assembly hall since I left in the mid 90s," he added. He started his school bangers set while teaching online during Covid lockdown and posted a video for his pupils to sing along to."I put up a video which was my top 10 primary school bangers as a joke for my friends and family and it really kicked off," he lockdown lifted, he held his first sing-along event which he said "snowballed organically and now I am back in Dorset where it all started". You can follow BBC Dorset on Facebook, X, or Instagram.
The Guardian
11 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘I have different weathers in my brain': how Celeste rekindled her love of music after heartbreak and loss
On Glastonbury's Pyramid stage in June, Celeste appeared wearing smeared black eye makeup and a leather jacket moulded with the impression of feathers, latched at the throat. She evoked glamour and tragedy, a bird with its wings clipped. 'My first album came out nearly five years ago and I didn't expect it to take so long,' she said of its follow-up. 'But I'm here now.' Celeste broke through in 2020, her voice reminiscent of Billie Holiday's racked beauty, but sparkling with a distinctly British lilt: a controlled, powerful vibrato that stirs the soul. Despite her jazz-leaning balladry not being obvious chart fodder, she became the first British female act in five years to reach No 1 with her debut album, Not Your Muse, which was nominated for the Mercury prize. She also won the BBC's Sound of 2020 poll and the Brit award for rising star and was nominated for an Oscar for best original song (for Hear My Voice from The Trial of the Chicago 7) the year after – but her chance to capitalise on those accolades was stalled by the pandemic. She had to halt her touring ambitions. Of the years since, she says: 'Sometimes you worry: are you on your path?' Celeste was haunting and spectacular when I saw her at Glastonbury, but now, as we stroll through Hyde Park in central London, she is relaxed and laughs easily. She becomes distracted by a carousel ride – 'They're my favourite! I love the music' – then she is back to talking about the five-year struggle to make her excellent second album, Woman of Faces, which will be released in November. 'The title was kind of a diagnosis of how I feel sometimes; a device to help me begin to understand my own complexity,' she says. She was born Celeste Waite in California to a mother from Dagenham, east London, and a Jamaican father. Her mother had found her way to Hollywood as a makeup artist and Celeste was born 'quite quickly' after her parents met there. They separated when Celeste turned one and she and her mother moved to England to live in Celeste's grandparents' home. 'It was almost like my mother was my sister, because we were both being looked after by my nan and grandad.' These are happy memories, but she has 'these different weathers in my brain … I've always had this little tinge of melancholy.' Maybe, she says, it stems in part from a lack of rootedness: 'You move from America to England and you don't really remember it, but you know that there's people that you've known there and built connections with. And then you don't have that.' She wondered if she would end up with a mental health diagnosis, 'something more clinical later on down the line. But I didn't feel I really needed that.' Instead, she found solace in other artists' music, 'people's lyrics and emotions and melodies, even how they dress themselves – that's always been quite a big remedy without needing to have a professional'. While she is frequently compared to Adele and Amy Winehouse, unlike them Celeste did not attend the Brit school of performing arts, instead studying music technology at sixth-form college in Brighton and working in a pub as she got her career off the ground. 'I'm really glad I taught myself to sing,' she says, arguing that it gives her 'rawness and authenticity'. Her venture into music was galvanised by the death of her father from lung cancer when she was 16: 'When you lose someone, every day you wake up and you're stunned by the fact that they're gone. And there's a certain point where you say to yourself: I can't do this any more, and that's when you start to either go to the gym or get into a practice. For me, that was where I picked up music and became really focused.' In the mid-2010s, she started uploading music to YouTube and SoundCloud and got a manager. She was picked up as a guest vocalist for producers such as Avicii, while Lily Allen's label released her debut single. 'I worked double shifts in a pub on weekends to afford to go to the studio,' she says. 'It took my energy away and I wasn't able to sing as well any more.' But she carried on doggedly, got signed to the major label Polydor, bagged the 2020 John Lewis Christmas ad soundtrack and beguiled listeners on songs such as Strange, in which her vocal tone expresses every contradictory emotion in a breakup – resignation, hurt, bafflement, poignancy, even a kind of helpless amusement at how awful it all is – in just four minutes. She is clear that she has received plenty of support and encouragement within Polydor: 'The people that signed me came into music with the intention to make meaningful, poignant, credible music.' But at the commercial end of the industry, there is still 'a huge pressure to make money. If you're not in the top 2% of acts who have such a huge fanbase, you maybe don't get the freedom' to do adventurous work. She says that developing her initial sound caused friction. 'I was hanging around all these jazz musicians like Steam Down and Nubya Garcia, real innovators, and it wasn't easy for me to go into the label and be like: this is what I want to do.' She has managed to preserve a sense of strangeness and singularity. Unlike her earlier peppy soul-pop hit Stop This Flame, familiar to millions as backing music on Sky Sports, most of the songs on Woman of Faces don't even feature percussion – almost unthinkable in 21st-century pop – and there aren't many British singers on major labels doing symphonic jazz. She wanted 'a cinematic feel' and referenced Bernard Herrmann – a composer for films by Hitchcock, Welles and Scorsese – in the studio as she worked with the conductor Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra. 'Herrmann was a real innovator and it's reflected in people like Busta Rhymes sampling him [on Gimme Some More] all those years later. So we wanted to make sure that if we went into that territory of a cinematic string orchestra, it didn't feel like an impression of the 1950s – it sounded like something new.' With this ambitious scope and Celeste shuttling between sessions in Los Angeles and London, it took a lot longer than expected to complete Woman of Faces. It was originally due to be finished by the end of 2022 and released a year later. 'I didn't expect it to take so long,' she says. 'And if I'm really honest with you, at the end of 2021, into 2022, I experienced some heartache and I fell into such a depression about it all.' A relationship had ended. 'When you lose the person from your life that you really love, there's a grief that comes over you,' she says. The album's first single, On With the Show, was written at her lowest point. 'I didn't really want to go to the studio; I didn't really feel like I actually wanted to live at that point. I didn't find meaning and purpose in the music.' She just had the song title, which she shared with her collaborator Matt Maltese. 'I didn't even have to explain to him what it would be about, because he just knew. We spoke about the song and what it needed to be.' She had also recently seen Marius Petipa's 1898 classical ballet Raymonda. 'It's about a woman in the Crimean war and she has two lovers: one is in Russia and one is in Crimea,' she says. 'I could relate, because she was torn between these two entities: at that point, my dedication to music and my dedication to a person. And one was taking the energy from the other. So On With the Show was about me having to find the courage to let go of something, to meet back in with the path of my life as a singer.' Worse, she says, 'social media had come in to erode my relationship'. As a public figure on social media, 'people can view your relationship and have so much awareness of the fact that you're even in one. There's this really strange, invisible, intangible impression that interactions in that space can leave upon your living reality. I was upset at how much that had come to affect my personal, real life.' On Could Be Machine, a curveball industrial pop song inspired by Lady Gaga, Celeste explores the idea that 'the more time we spend with this technology, the more we become it'. 'My phone had become this antagonist in my life, via communication that I didn't want to receive and the fact it could just be in your hand. It was quite alien, in a way. I hadn't grown up with a phone stuck to my hand and it was something that I had to become more and more 'one' with in my music career.' She says that, during the relationship, love had reverted her to a kind of 'child-like state … a really pure version of yourself, before the world has seeped in and shaped you'. Losing the person who brought her into that state meant that she had to 'learn how to steer and guide' herself to rediscover it. She is leaning on other musicians to help her understand these difficult years. She cites Nina Simone's song Stars, a ballad about the cruelty and melancholy of being a professional musician. 'It says so much about the tragedy of where her life is at that moment in time, but then there's so much triumph in the fact she even gets to express herself in that way.' Another inspiration for Woman of Faces was the 1951 musical romantic comedy An American in Paris and one of its stars, Oscar Levant, who spent time in mental health institutions. 'I was really moved by what he seemed to carry in his being. And, I suppose, I relate a lot to artists who carry this pain, but their work eases it.' Whereas Celeste was previously in thrall to American blues and R&B ('the older sense of what R&B was in the 1940s'), down to the way she might 'time things and phrase things and even pronounce things', she has 'learned what my true voice is and who I really am as a person. I still have some of that phrasing and pronunciation there, but I exist a lot more as myself, therefore I sing a lot more as myself.' Buoyed up by her and others' art, does she feel happy? 'Yes!' She grins and throws her hands in the air. 'The main thing is finding happiness within the relationships I maintain around me and making sure those are kept really positive and nourishing.' She is glad to be in her 30s: 'Age becomes kind of taboo for a woman in the music industry – but then you hear people like Solange speak about women really coming into their true sense of who they are within their work. There's been a shift.' And if the happiness in her career ever dissipates, she has decided she will simply move on. 'I don't really see the need to live in a feeling of oppression, when I know there's so much freedom outside this world. And anyway, I'm sure I would find my way back to it again. But on my own terms.' Woman of Faces is released on 14 November on Polydor In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Daily Mail
11 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Rita Ora flaunts her washboard abs in a nude bikini before slipping into a busty neon green gym set as she shares a glimpse into her fun-filled summer
Rita Ora ensured all eyes were on her as she shared a fun-filled summer photo dump on Instagram on Thursday. The singer, 34, first sent temperatures soaring as she showed off her rock-hard abs in a nude bikini. Posing for the mirror selfie with a jelly face mask, Rita accessorised her toned figure with an array of gold jewellery that complemented her glowing tan. In another snap, the star put on a busty display in a neon green sports bra and shorts as she enjoyed a hike. The singer added a bright red Ralph Lauren baseball cap and shielded her eyes with a pair of sunglasses. This was followed by another selfie in the gym while donning a skimpy black gym set. The singer, 34, put on a busty display in a neon green sports bra and shorts as she enjoyed a hike Rita's photo dump also included glam shots, a snap with Glen Powell at Glastonbury, some delicious food, and time with friends. She captioned the carousel: 'Summer and tings.' The sexy snaps come just weeks after Rita admitted that she felt 'ugly' in her late twenties because she 'wasn't as thin as other people'. The singer appeared on Fearne Cotton's Happy Place podcast in partnership with Dove's Self Esteem Project for a candid body confidence chat. Rita opened up about how her relationship with her body has changed in recent years, as she revealed she used to feel like her body wasn't 'hot'. 'I think for me the idea of looking a certain way in my late 20s, that's when it started to hit me because my stamina was low, I wasn't looking after my body, I was getting sick a lot and I didn't feel like my body was hot,' Rita said. 'And I didn't accept the idea of okay well I'm not as thin as these other people - and so I'm ugly. And that's really sad to think back on because I know I wasn't. 'It's like what you do when you're attacking your younger self like in therapy, and it's like that girl was still really beautiful.' Sharing the clip on Instagram, Rita wrote: 'I sat down with @Dove and @HappyPlaceOfficial to share why I believe body confidence starts with self care focusing on what your body needs - not what it looks like. 'Proud to partner with the Dove Self Esteem Project on #Why2k - together we're rewriting the rules and helping women build body confidence.' Rita recently revealed how Beyoncé has always been her 'protector' as she discussed being hit by speculation that she was 'Becky with the good hair'. Beyoncé's smash hit 2016 album Lemonade featured poignant lyrics about cheating and she sang about the mysterious woman in her track Sorry. Fans widely speculated it referred to alleged infidelity by Beyoncé's husband Jay-Z with a woman called 'Becky', and theories began circulating online about her identity. Rita found herself at the centre of the rumours as she was wrongly accused of having an affair with Jay-Z, with the singer forced to hit back and deny the claims. Now, Rita - who was represented by Jay-Z's Roc Nation label at the time - revealed she was so upset by the claims because Beyoncé has always been her 'protector'. Speaking on Davina McCall's Begin Again podcast, Rita explained: 'Behind closed doors, [Beyoncé] is literally my fairy godmother, she was my protector - that's what's insane because there was nothing but love.'
