Podcast Corner: Dua Lipa's show proves she's more than a pop star
Dua Lipa hosts At Your Service.
Despite being holed up in her apartment for most of 2020, Dua Lipa cemented herself as one of the biggest pop stars in the world with the release of her second album, the irresistible Future Nostalgia. After a couple of cancellations and rescheduling, she finally brings her tour to Ireland for a date at Dublin’s 3Arena on Wednesday. Dua’s also just wrapped her first season as a podcast host with At Your Service.
It’s pretty standard interview fare but when you’ve got a contacts list like Dua, you can call on some pretty big guests. The list includes Three Women author Lisa Taddeo, Elton John, and Megan Thee Stallion, who discusses their just released collaboration, ‘The Sweetest Pie’. But the first episode, with Olivier Rousteing, creative director of French fashion house Balmain, is the best of the bunch. Dua offers empathy as Rousteing discusses the search for his birth parents and coming to terms with the burn injuries he sustained in a fireplace explosion in 2020. We could have taken a series of interviews just between those two.
Dua Lipa is not the first popstar to host a podcast. Table Manners with Jessie Ware and her mum Lennie is in its 13th season - and currently touring the UK. Recent guests include Diplo, Michael Bublé, and Elvis Costello.
‘Shotgun’ singer George Ezra looks to have a quiet summer ahead - maybe he’s working on a new season of his podcast, George Ezra & Friends, which concluded in a chat with Shania Twain at the start of 2020 - what a way to finish up though! The other two dozen episodes featured the likes of Tom Jones, Lewis Capaldi, and Lily Allen.
Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor, the undisputed disco-dancing-in-the-kitchen queen of lockdown, has been running since June 2020, clocking up 60 episodes as she talks to “busy working women, who also happen to be mothers, about how they make it work”.
- The latest podcast from the Irish Examiner features the fascinating and ultimately tragic tale of Thomas Stofiel, an American man who died in a Direct Provision centre in Co Kerry. The Lost American comes in two parts, with episode one available now.
- Mark Horgan, Tric Kearney, Gary O’Toole, and many more will discuss ‘The Making Of Where is George Gibney?’ at Dublin’s National Concert Hall on Wednesday, April 20. Tickets are €40 with all proceeds going to the One In Four sexual abuse charity.
