A delight: Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park reviewed

Spectator

2 days ago

We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many areas of life. Football supporters, for example, are not 'customers'; they are supporters. They are at the club before a new owner arrives, they remain there after that owner leaves. In the meantime, they do not make rational decisions. They do not, when QPR are rubbish, pop across west London to support Chelsea, though it might be the economically rational thing to do.
Same with pop. I'm a music fan more than I am a customer. The other week, immediately after filing my review of Bruce Springsteen, which was tinged with a little disappointment, I went online and forked out a few hundred quid to give myself the opportunity to drive to Liverpool and back in a day to see him once more. That was not rational behaviour.
And it's not rational that outdoor music shows even exist. Put it this way: imagine being asked for the thick end of 150 quid to stand in a public park in a vast crowd with inadequate toilets for several hours, hundreds of yards away from a stage that is obscured by delay towers anyway, so you end up watching it all on a screen. It's a no from me, thanks – and, truly there is almost nobody I would actually pay to see at an outdoor show, because they are just so expensive. But once you add in the element of fandom, all good sense goes out of the window.
I thought of that watching a quite wonderful show by Sabrina Carpenter in Hyde Park. Around me, as well as the usual gig-goers, were plenty of parents accompanying groups of girls. They had paid more than £200 for each golden circle ticket, and while they may have thrilled to the experience, few of those kids saw a single thing. Everyone must have known that would happen – except perhaps the very youngest kids – but still those families threw their money at the tickets.
Carpenter has those young fans in part because she's another graduate of Disney's popstar finishing school, alongside Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Olivia Rodrigo, Demi Lovato and more; from tween TV to music career in one swift ascent. Carpenter has the more usual gig-goers there – 130,000 people across two nights – because she's very, very good. She's more from the Taylor Swift school: she doesn't so much sing her songs as make them into a conversation – and here, the big screens are very useful. They enable artists like her, who are acting during their performance as much as singing, to communicate very vividly, and she projects an entirely relaxed self-confidence.
To be fair, your couple of hundred quid do pay for a marvellous staging. These days, big pop shows are less like concerts than giant musicals, with production values a West End theatre could only dream of (and you don't have to suffer some ageing Shakesperean who wants to have a bash at Cole Porter, despite being tone deaf).
So Carpenter's show was framed as a 70s TV variety special – Sabrina Carpenter! Live From London! – complete with opening credits featuring old Routemaster buses, and a set from which you expected the cream of light entertainment to emerge at any moment. Between songs, there were fake ads: before the new single 'Manchild', the screens showed a clip for 'Sabrina's Manchild Spray Away – removes the mess men make, and messy men!' It was a truly witty presentation.
And the songs were really good. Though last year's single 'Espresso' catapulted her to a new level, she's already made six albums, with a seventh imminent. There's no problem putting together a tight 90-minute set from that material, especially the most recent album Short n' Sweet, which was racy enough to provoke controversy. (At Hyde Park, she introduced the track 'Juno' by offering to take two young women at the barrier back to her hotel to handcuff them together.)
She didn't stand still musically: the opening 'Busy Woman' was the kind of sleek, grown-up pop that everyone would love if Christine McVie had written it ('Taste', which followed, has some pretty blatant steals from McVie's 'Everywhere'). 'Slim Pickins', as the title suggests, was country. 'Because I Liked a Boy' updated the 1960s girl-group ballad sonically and lyrically. And, wonderfully, the inevitable special guest wasn't 'whichever priority act from the label is in town' as it so often is, but Simon Le Bon and John Taylor from Duran Duran, who came out for a punchy and fun 'Hungry Like the Wolf'.
Honestly, the whole thing was a delight: I was beaming by the end. That said, it helped that I hadn't had to pay lots of money to take my daughter. And that she's tall enough to see.