Billie Eilish has always done things a little differently. Everything about the 23-year-old pop phenom is just a scooch off centre. The music she makes (from trap to electro-goth to bossa nova); the clothes she wears (baggy and androgynous) – it is all so unmistakeably her. Which is why it makes perfect sense that Eilish would shake up the O2 Arena tonight, bending the walls of the cavernous venue to her will as she does everything else: charts, awards shows, fashion trends. (Almost everyone is wearing some combination of a bandana, basketball shorts, and an American football jersey.)
Doing away with the usual front-facing stage, Eilish plonks her own smack-bang in the middle of the action: a figure eight with two sunken pits carved out for her four-piece band. On top, surrounded by darkness, is a giant white cube, fuzzy on all sides with the static of an idle TV. The screens drop away for a split second to reveal Eilish sitting caged within. Flash! Bang! Now she’s on top of it. David Blaine, eat your heart out.
The rest of the night unfolds like a series of magic tricks, as Eilish transforms her most muted numbers for a stadium setting: pulling a rager out of a ballad hat – ta-da! “Chihiro” is an apt mood-setter to begin, a claustrophobic, mid-tempo pulse steadily invading like an encroaching mist, flowing almost imperceptibly into “NDA” and the sapphic come-on of “Lunch”. Eilish sprints around the stage, arms up, needlessly egging on a crowd already raring to go. (Happily, this new set-up allows her to flit between fans in the arena who crane towards her in bunches like plants stretching towards the sunlight.)
Professional though she is – this is, after all, a nine-time Grammy winner and the youngest Coachella headliner in history – Eilish still manages to feel spontaneous. What she lacks in back-up dancers and choreography, she makes up for in pure, Duracell bunny energy. She springs across the stage, inky black hair trailing behind like the tail of a comet. (Her outfit is practical more than anything else: capacious tent-like shorts to accommodate high knees and low lunges.)
Part of her spontaneity is down to her facial expressions, which are blown up on the NBA-style jumbotron – only the whites of her eyes visible as she rolls them back, looking downright demonic for serial-killer love song “The Diner”. At one point, during the electro-goth throwback of “bad guy” (one of four songs lifted from her nightmarish 2019 debut), she picks up the camera herself, turning the lens on her band and crew instead.
It’s a testament to Eilish’s presence that the staging is so sparse, albeit visually striking. Strobe lights are working overtime: it’s Laser Quest on steroids during “Guess”, the singer’s knicker-flinging collab with Charli xcx. The Brat herself is nowhere to be seen, but manifests in the lime-green colour wash; later, the existential lullaby “What Was I Made For?”, written for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, turns the arena powder pink.
There is a singular moment of quiet across the whole two hours, and it is only because Eilish herself requests it so that she can loop her voice for the cascading intro of “when the party’s over”. Holding court sitting cross-legged beneath a singular spotlight, she wields as much power in her stillness as she does in her hyperactivity.
Chat is kept to a minimum, mostly constrained to a cursory “I’m so happy to be here” or “I love you guys”. There is a brief acknowledgement of politics – “In LA, it’s just been really bleak, so I’m sending all my love to everyone back home and everyone suffering now” – and a sweet address to the women in the room before she rolls into “Your Power” on her acoustic guitar.
Sometimes, the translation of certain songs into their stadium-ready counterparts is more of a necessary evil. It is a shame to lose the oddball intricacies that lurk in the peripherals of her and brother Finneas O’Connell’s production. “Wildflower” and “The Greatest” whizz past without incident (other than a rare, gorgeous belt on the latter). “Ocean Eyes” is an outlier. No matter how soft and supple it is, one hopes this song remains a fixture on her set list for ever – the SoundCloud-sounding ballad a reminder of her precociously rapid rise.
It is a misstep to end on “Birds of a Feather”. For all its fans (the song is coming up to 3 billion listens on Spotify), the pretty melody pales in comparison to its much more satisfying predecessor. A three-course meal of a track, “Happier Than Ever” is something to sink your teeth into – and Eilish does, strapping on her electric guitar as the delicate ukulele ditty turns on a dime and skids into a pile-up of blown out guitars. The song, like Eilish and tonight’s performance, is many things at once – a rollicking good time, first and foremost.
