🚨 EMERGENCY ROSALÍA POST 🚨

and again: what the actual fuck

Until 8.45pm last night, Rosalía’s Motomami tour was the best pop show I’d ever seen: a single take – no costume stages, no leaving the stage – undimmed physical effort and complete excellence, a cameraman relentlessly dogging her in a game of cat and mouse, displayed on phone-shaped vertical screens either side of the stage that understand how we consume and capture art through a lens. There’s no question that it influenced the tours for Brat and Virgin.

As of about 8.53pm last night, Rosalía’s Lux tour became the best pop show I have ever seen. In the late 2000s, it became a thing for indie bands to play with orchestras – how elegant, refined, respectable etc. Rosalía had the 22-piece Heritage Orchestra on the floor of the O2, playing at plane-landing volume. There was nothing respectable about the frenzy they produced during Berghain, a moment so otherworldly and unlike anything I’ve seen before – felt before – that I can only describe my reaction as a kind of panic at a feeling my body didn’t know how to process. Say what you like about whether the recorded version of that song grafts on classical signifiers (love you Hugh!!!) but seeing it live made me understand what it might have been like to see the Rites of Spring premiere. The conductor, Yudania Gómez, was, rightly, the show’s second focal point, majestically commanding and a killer dancer. Simon Rattle could never.

When I interviewed Rosalía last November, she said she wasn’t sure if she would tour the record yet as it would have to be better than Motomami. I am absolutely certain that this was a feint and that she was probably already learning ballet for the show’s immaculate first section, some of which she does en pointe while singing the most godly notes that have ever emerged from a human throat. There’s a bit in Mad Men where Peggy says of Megan, “I think she’s just one of those girls who’s good at everything”. Watching Rosalía, I truly wondered – in what might be an interview question so stupid it’s actually good – what it feels like to know you can flex on all those levels: singing, dancing, the vision, being more or less the most beautiful woman on the planet. Save something for the rest of us mortals, Rosí!!! As well as Lux being evidence of her deep study, I also 100000000% interpret it as a flex at her treacherous ex and at the critics who have questioned who she is to work within so many musical idioms that aren’t necessarily her own as a woman from Catalonia. I find it all extremely “just you fucking watch me” in a way that’s thrilling and brazen because she can pull it off like no one else.

The effect was like the Royal Opera House, the Royal Ballet, the Royal Albert Hall and Berghain all rolled into one. I feel like some stars of her calibre would want to command a venue like the ROH for a show like this, for a little referred gravitas, but it felt more provocative to stage it in a classic pop arena like the O2 (Malamente Mule cocktail: £18) to situate this as a vision of pop straining at and splintering every boundary. Actually, chuck the National Portrait Gallery into all that, too. The stage starts with the curtain down, painted like the back of a canvas and signed in the corner by Rosalía. She’s the artist, and when the curtain raises, she’s the art, too: literally being unloaded from a specialist art crate by gloved handlers to make her entrance; repeatedly being carried around like an objet d’art. She’s the masterpiece, also, one suspects, reproaching the “emotional terrorist” of La Perla who failed to treat her with that kind of care.

For a cover of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, she stands on a podium, in front of a landscape, then closely framed by a smaller gold rectangle, perfectly Mona Lisa-sized. A gaggle of audience members are invited onstage to behold the artwork; presumably they were asked to hold up their phones and take photos and footage as part of the bit – a scene recognisable from any museum; I watched people do this with The Girl With a Pearl Earring just last month – but I suspect they didn’t needed asking. Through the frame, Rosalía – a master of face – gave her most pointedly giggly and coquettish performance: an invitation to look, to try and capture, no matter how she remains out of reach. During one costume change, the screen came down for a game called “Imitate the pose! Art Cam”, where a kisscam roamed the crowd and got fans to imitate paintings from The Scream to Monkey Jesus. It was a riot, and another great wink at how social media means we’re all always trying to wriggle inside the frame.

Getting into Rosalía with El Mal Querer is what made me start to learn Spanish so that I could understand a little of what she was singing. Last night the lyrics were in translation on the screen, a fun jab about the accessibility of subtitled culture. (It made me feel less bad about having forgotten to do my Duolingo, though I can never hope to be as good as the two Spanish guys behind us, who knew every word in every language, and were serving almost as hard as Rosalía.) Still, one of the only lyrics I can confidently sing along to is “yo me transformo” in Saoko. I felt like the way she depicted herself in so many styles of art reflected her vision of how permutable beauty is, between language, culture, highbrow, lowbrow, but also how uncapturable, unfixable she is. I went with my bff of 26 years and told her I half wished I had my computer with me because I wanted to write down every reference, every scene, every thought. She said, “it makes me want to fuck”, which is why she’s a writer and I’m just a hack. I’m sure there were a zillion references I’ll never catch, but it also never felt like someone showing off their homework; it felt so human, openhearted, lived in, engaged with beauty.

We’ve been in a pretty golden age of pop show production for a while, but this was just another level: every song staged like a high-budget MTV awards extravaganza; a well-judged celeb cameo bit (gotta get those headlines) where Rosalía invites famouses into her confession box; we got Cara Delevingne talking about learning to love life as a submissive. Towards the end, a huge, flashing incense box descended from the ceiling and swung across the crowd like a pendulum, a ravey benediction. Rosalía moved to the b-stage by the orchestra, wearing the most literal religious headpiece of a night full of bridal and cloistered imagery. The screens showed a view we hadn’t seen before, the floor shot from above: Rosalía and the orchestra were in fact inside a giant illuminated cross. The peak-Kanye resonance was clear, and deserved.

What makes it even crazier is that just a few songs into the performance, she told the crowd how her body had been failing her the night before, that it’s in her nature to push through but that we might have to bear with her on the last night of her European run. “The body has its own truth,” she says. If this was her on diminished form, I tremble at the thought of her on 100%.