Billie Eilish review: Queen of pop delivers five-star performance at 3Arena, Dublin
Billie Eilish, seen here at Coachella, played the first of two sold-out dates in 3Arena, Dublin, on Saturday. File picture: Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Coachella
★★★★★
Billie Eilish has, at age 20, been a pop phenomenon the entirety of her adult life and at the first of two sold-out dates in Dublin she proved both comfortable in her stardom and also eager to strike up an authentic connection with her fans.
Swerving from the dark, stormy pop of Therefore I Am and Bury A Friend to playful interactions with the audience, it was an evening that spanned the emotional spectrum.
Eilish often demonstrated a mischievousness not always apparent in her music.
For Oxytocin she encouraged the crowd to stoop down and then leap euphorically in the air (that tiny minority in attendance with dodgy knees and creaky backs politely opted out).
And towards the end of the set, she climbed into a cherry-picker and swooped grinning over the room, exhorting those seated upstairs to wave their phones back and forth.
Cherry-picker aside, these were the sort of antics you were more likely to witness at an emo rock concert or an all-ages indie gig than at a stadium show by an artist whose European tour sold out in a heartbeat. It was easy to see why David Grohl of Foo Fighters and Nirvana had declared her the future of music. A grungy turbulence was layered through the performance.
Musically, she leaned towards last year’s Happier Than Ever album. A raw deconstruction of the price of fame, it took the trope of celebrity disillusionment and spun it into something new and vital.
The slow-burn angst pop of I Didn’t Change My Number and NDA found Eilish – still a teenager at the time she wrote the songs – trying to hold on to her humanity as her life became the real-life equivalent of an Instagram comment stream. And on Getting Older childhood videos of Eilish were paired with melancholy lyrics in which she lamented the responsibilities of adulthood.
But many of the emotional high-points were from her first record, 2019’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? This was a pop odyssey with goth overtones, as we were reminded during a medley of Bellyache and Ocean Eyes (her very first single, written by her brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell about an old girlfriend) as she swooshed about in her cherry-picker.
Eilish had several messages for fans. The first was to be kind to one another (she briefly interrupted herself to call security to attend to an audience member). The second was that the climate crisis posed a clear and present danger to her generation’s well-being.
That latter point was underscored by All The Good Girls Go To Hell, with lyrics that skewered climate change denial (“Hills burn in California/ My turn to ignore ya”) and a background film in which Eilish is enveloped by flames.
Yet she was never preachy and the energy she gave off was of a wise big sister. The crowd was certainly receptive to her enthusiasm. “You saved my life” declared one hand-drawn placard; a woman in front of me spent half the night live-streaming the concert to her mother in Australia.
Eilish’s first stand-alone Irish date also underscored the degree to which she departs from glossy pop cliches. Accompanied by musician brother Finneas on guitar and keyboards and by drummer Andrew Marshall, Eilish, wearing baggy shorts and high-top running shoes, spent the evening rocking, bopping and screaming.
This was hand-crafted arena pop with a punk spirit in its marrow. There was no cheesy synchronised dancing or elaborate stage sets: Eilish in that cherry picker was as close as it came to high concept.
Kicking off her tour in Belfast the previous night, she had expressed her fandom for Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy. In Dublin, she picked up a rainbow Pride flag thrown at her feet and proudly wore it like a superhero cape. Not for the first or last time, the response was rapturous exhalation from an audience on Eilish’s side from the very start and for whom the singer was something more than a mere pop star.
