Lana Del Rey’s midsummer night’s dream

After a spell as The Right Person Will Stay, now the album may be called Classic, according to a since-redacted W magazine social media post. She acknowledges the forthcoming record’s existence tonight, but neither names it, nor says any more about it. Instead, we enter a strange southern fever dream in which Del Rey plays a handful of new songs and country covers such as Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man and John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads. Her own new music, however, is among some of her best.

Released in April, Henry, Come On is entrancing, a distillation of Del Rey’s ability to cram an entire movie into a few minutes of song. She deftly captures mood, but also a sense of place and time: moneyed debutante ennui, trailer park drama and damaged Hollywood glamour. On Arcadia, she sings: “My body is a map of LA.” Now she heads to the South.

The stage is dominated by a clapboard house nestled in a verdant garden; Del Rey’s backing vocalists and dancers make use of swing seats. A five-strong string section adds weepy stateliness to the capable band, who also boast a lap steel player and a percussionist on washboard, an ensemble redolent of the slow, humid, song-making that takes place on porches, accompanied by cicadas.

This antebellum aesthetic finds room, too, for relatively faithful retellings of Del Rey’s classics – her breakout hit Video Games comes midset; the heat of Summertime Sadness is cooled by the dancers’ white feather fans.

In its languid pace and semi-theatrical layout, this show is unlike any other stadium pop show. Del Rey’s dancers mostly wilt winsomely in various tableau settings. She delivers Young and Beautiful on a hydraulic platform that goes up a bit, before coming down again – a laughably chilled-out approach to big-venue production tropes. Del Rey subcontracts any soulful vocalising to her three backing singers. For Ultraviolence, the lamps lighting the garden double as strippers’ poles, bringing Del Rey’s darker side into the midsummer night’s party idyll.

Broadly, it’s a successful experiment, in so far as Del Rey is a singular artist taking an unconventional approach to arena performance. She clambers into the pit to take a fan request – reading the lyrics to her own a cappella rendering of Salvatore from a production member’s phone.

But elements of the show remain baffling. One interlude features a hologram of Del Rey; another finds her reciting large swathes of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, as she did on Tropico, her 2013 short musical film. A piano appears at the end of the runway but isn’t used; a small pool of water is entirely decorative. Del Rey mentions her London gigs a few too many times for a Welsh audience.

Oh, but the new songs. Dragging us into the present day, the meta, autobiographical 57.5 brags wryly about the millions of people who listen to Del Rey on Spotify each month. “I guess some people still like to cry,” she winks.

The piano-led Quiet in the South, meanwhile, finds Del Rey’s protagonist waiting for her man to come home. As she wonders “should I turn off the light or burn down our house?”, dancers set fire to a large doll’s house. Others wander around, pouring kerosene all over the clapboard building. The shack goes up in a projected lighting blaze. It’s an electrifying few minutes, emblematic of the latent danger in this elegant artist’s writing – and her own flame-like capacity to mesmerise.

Photography by Joe Okpako