For a festival Saturday evening, the atmosphere was dramatic to say the least on the Plains of Abraham – to the delight of the tens of thousands of fans of American diva Lana del Rey, who performed some twenty songs in 90 minutes during a one of his rare appearances on Quebec soil. Nobody danced, nor celebrated elsewhere, communing rather with the musician in her vision of an idealized America.
At Britain’s Glastonbury Festival three weeks ago, the diva angered the audience by showing up on stage a good half-hour late, forcing her to cut her performance. Last Saturday evening, the 20-minute delay on schedule was no whim: the technical team had their work cut out to clear the imposing stage equipment of the excellent The War on Drugs which preceded it (we will come back to this) and arrange the decor of the musician including, among other things, a lamppost, arches, a grand piano erected on a small platform, swings and a tree.
The handful of concerts she had given in Montreal (the last in Osheaga in 2016) had not left a strong impression on us, del Rey not being exactly a beast of the stage with her pretty, fair, but without wingspan. A beast, she was no more yesterday evening, but here is the whole genius of her scenography: ambition on the set, surround her with six very good dancers and three excellent gospel singers, not to mention her four competent stage musicians. The maneuver succeeds: while all these beautiful people are busy, Lana hatches preciously, singing very well but very softly (we sometimes lost her voice in the orchestra), dancing little if not with discomfort.
This is the paradox of the Lana del Rey phenomenon. Revealed by his second album Born to Die thanks to the magnificent Blue Jeans And Video Gamesextolled as a singer-songwriter thanks to the album Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019), the musician is venerated as an icon of the new pop song, but her song is more about the secret that we keep to ourselves, the intimacy that she installs between herself and the listener. She would be in her place in a small dark room, but her success condemns her to the big stages. It’s tragic, basically, but this tragedy sticks precisely to his character.
His song is an intimate, introspective experience, with texts that fantasize about America, and particularly California, of the 1950s and 1960s. A distress of living expressed by ingenious images and a sensitive voice that seems to sing to us a truth illuminating the dark corners of our own lives — nothing, in short, to electrify 80,000 spectators gathered on a beautiful Saturday evening in July in front of one of the largest stages in Quebec.
And yet, a magic happens. The bass rumbles for A&W opening, taken from the album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, released earlier this year. Del Rey wears a wedding dress, her backup singers will be her bridesmaids, as dancers lift her parachute-length veil during Young and Beautiful.
” Thank you so much Quebec! “, she says with a smile that we never see him in his polished music videos. Suddenly, the image of the diva fades, as she tells us that she grew up near here, “3:30 am south of the river”, in the Adirondacks. Several times during the concert, she will come out of character to offer a few sincere words to the festival-goers, who in turn will sing her best-known refrains with her.
The others, often sung simply accompanied by an accompaniment of piano, diffuse guitar and cymbal, will arouse less interest. During the long too calm moments of the first two thirds of the concert, we hear too many conversations between spectators, sometimes distracted by the studied choreographies. The favorites break the discussions: Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Pretty When You Cry, Born to Diethe excellent Blue Jeans finally making us understand that an authentic rock orchestra with aplomb accompanies it.
After interpreting the languorous rock Ultraviolence, Lana del Ray descended from her pedestal to greet the fans packed along the security fences. Fascinating moment which, once again, shattered the image of diva that she has studiously built over the years: shaking hands, agreeing to be kissed, she sometimes stopped to chat with a fan, s grabbed a phone to take a selfie.
She thus visited the row of fans from end to end; going back on stage to sing White Mustang, she apologizes: “A little blood, does that bother you? Somewhere in her walkabout, the musician scraped her knee. The last stretch of the show was the most dynamic. No more tearful ballads with Diet Mountain Dew, Summertime Sadnessthe title track of his latest album and, of course, Video Gamesthe highlight of this show opposing the fragile and sophisticated personality of the musician to the artifices of an event of such magnitude.
On the other hand, The War on Drugs was tailor-made for such a scene. The band of Adam Granduciel, singer, knight of the psychedelic rock guitar, leads an orchestra that has become an expert in the art of installing a groove and propelling it for seven, eight, ten, twelve minutes.
Rich, hovering, spontaneous, the sound of the orchestra flooded the plains with its songs with familiar references (Springsteen, Tom Petty), but fattened with layers of synths skilfully extended by Robbie Bennett. We should also mention the essential contribution of Jon Natchez on bass saxophone and the formidable Eliza Hardy Jones on percussion, guitars, keyboards and a beaming smile. The War on Drugs only played an hour, without wasting a minute of his stage time – we would have taken more.
Finally, a new tile fell on the organization of the FEQ: for medical reasons, Patrice Michaud had to cancel the rest of his summer tour, which was to take him to the Festif in particular! in Baie-Saint-Paul, at the Festival en chanson de Petite-Vallée, and on one of the stages in the Parc de la Francophonie this Sunday. He will be replaced by American pop singer Fletcher, who will perform after Dominique Fils-Aimé.