Drake’s new tour is hugely dorky and weirdly heartening

The song became one of the year’s biggest hits, culminating in Lamar’s performance of it at this year’s Super Bowl, where the gigantic crowd rapped along to every word, especially the most accusatory lyrics.

Drake’s latest tour, a jaunt titled $ome $pecial $hows 4 UK – after his recent collaborative album, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, with fellow Canadian PartyNextDoor – is part of what I was recently told is a new mandate for his team: let’s go anywhere except the US.

Perhaps, the thinking goes, the reputational damage caused by Not Like Us wasn’t as great across the pond. And although Drake is playing arenas on this tour, while Lamar plays stadiums at the same time on the same continent – ouch – you wouldn’t be able to tell from the enthusiasm of the surprisingly young crowd at Manchester’s Co-op Live.

Teenagers and twentysomethings are practically falling over themselves upon hearing the first notes of Headlines and Marvins Room, released when they were just kids. Women shellacked in layers of fake tan are mobbing the guest-list queue – perhaps offered tickets via Instagram by members of Drake’s team, as one Irish woman claimed happened to her.

When, halfway through the show, Drake moves into the stands to perform with his DJ, so many punters leave their seats to try and get a closer view that the security guards don’t even attempt to stop them. Drake may no longer hold his status as the male Taylor Swift – minted over a decade-plus of setting sales and streaming records, and accruing levels of success and omnipresence previously unknown in the 21st century – but he is still clearly beloved, in this room at least.

It’s not hard to understand why. Although Drake has the capacity to be hugely dorky – at one point, he says: “Oh yeah, we in the doghouse tonight, huh?” and is met by a chorus of howls – he is also one of the greatest hit-makers of his generation, and tonight proves it by cycling through some of the biggest hits of all time at the beginning of the show, rattling through songs like God’s Plan as other artists might play deep cuts.

After performing What Did I Miss?, released a few weeks ago, he makes it clear that this tour is intended as an act of fealty to the fans who have stuck by him and a reminder that, no matter what his enemies might have on him, he still has one of the most impressive catalogues in pop history. “I’m here for one reason and one reason only,” he says, “and that’s to be your entertainer for this evening.”

That feeling is echoed in the show’s presentation; Drake’s stage forms a ring around the standing room audience, with walkways running along the long end of the floor and larger stages at opposite ends of the arena.

It’s minimal but works: he runs laps around the audience during Nonstop, from 2018’s Scorpion, one of his best and most energetic hits, while the audience becomes its own form of visual entertainment, with teenagers racing back and forth through the crowd to try and get as close as possible to their idol.

Later, when he’s moved into the stands to perform with his DJ, the intention seems to be for the crowd not to be able to see Drake and instead to dance to his most enduring hits – Hold On, We’re Going Home and One Dance. He does a double shot of tequila and encourages the audience to dance with and embrace the people they love – a soppy moment that’s nonetheless effective.

That the crowd can no longer see Drake is also something of a blessing – for me, anyway. At the risk of sounding like the oldest, most curmudgeonly member of gen Z alive, the single most frustrating thing about going to arena or stadium shows is the fact that at least one in five audience members insists upon filming themselves singing along.

At Lamar and SZA’s recent gig in London, a woman in the row in front was recording herself constantly, to the point that myself and the people next to me struck up a friendship over our shared efforts to not be in her videos. At tonight’s show, the person in front turns around, then sticks her arm out into my face, filming herself and the stage behind her. I can’t decide whether this is more or less annoying – I’m in the video, at least, but I’m having to dodge her swinging limb every few seconds.

This is the cost of going to a pop show in 2025 – I witnessed similar behaviour at recent gigs by Billie Eilish, Charli XCX and Chappell Roan – and, to be fair, Drake’s music encourages a certain kind of narcissism.

His music is about feeling good, feeling your own emotions, prioritising yourself in a totally toxic way. That feeling is magnified here. When he performs Nokia as his closer, a single from $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, it’s clear that everyone exists in their own personal TikTok, dancing for their friends and for their cameras. It feels weirdly heartening: Drake’s alternate universe is a strange but happy one.

Photograph by Theo Skudra