Like spider plants and exotic cats, certain artists are best suited to the great indoors. Lana Del Rey, for instance, proves the point that just because you can sell enough tickets to fill a stadium doesn’t mean you should necessarily perform in one. Some music blossoms in the sun, some ripens in the shadows.
Billie Eilish belongs in the latter camp. Even though her biggest hit, ‘Birds of a Feather’, was the most streamed song on Spotify last year and is now approaching three billion listens, and her duet with
Charli xcx on ‘Guess’ was another ubiquitous sound of 2024, her appeal remains slightly subversive. Eilish’s songs – composed with her older brother Finneas – are twisty, introspective and somewhat tortured things, while the devotion of her (mostly female) fans feels like the fervour of cult appeal played out on a mass scale.
The last time I saw Eilish was in Glasgow in 2019, shortly before the release of her debut album. She played a warehouse down a lane near the railroad tracks, a mile and several leagues from tonight’s cavernous venue. Still only 17, she wore oversized sports clothing and protective splints on her legs from all the jumping around.
Much has changed since then – though not the oversized sports gear. And although it would have been fascinating to see her in a similarly sized room again, Eilish is so famous these days that even the 14,000-capacity Hydro felt like a concession to keeping things relatively intimate, when she could easily have played Hampden Park or Murrayfield instead.
Keeping a roof over her head was a wise move, yet the level of her success presents a dilemma to an artist whose songs are written in and for the bedroom, and which contain the kind of sonic subtleties best investigated through a good pair of headphones.
She is touring her third album Hit Me Hard And Soft, and the boom-boom-bash of arena acoustics took much of these more interesting fringe sounds out of play; the spectral qualities of the likes of ‘Lunch’, ‘Wildflower’ and ‘The Greatest’ were mostly lost. The natural register of her music is soft and sad and between the ballads and whispers there was a palpable sense of Eilish having to consciously crank up the show to pop speed.
Sitting cross-legged to sing beneath a single spotlight, she brought the entire place to a hushed standstill
The staging, however, was ingenious. Eilish understands that visual overload and voyeurism are the tenor of the times. In her hands, the Hydro became part boxing arena, part goldfish bowl. Rather than the traditional front-facing arrangement, the stage was a small, stark cube in the middle of the floor. The musicians were buried in two pits. There were no dancers, no sleek choreography. This was all about the star, tracked and projected from every angle via 360 Jumbotron screens and numerous cameras. Yet the effect was not one of distance but sometimes uncomfortable proximity.
Such staging was a smart comment on the nature of stardom. At times Eilish appeared like a caged animal, surrounded by her pursuers; there was some inventive play with a handheld camera that turned the focus back on to an audience which clung to her every word and gesture. At other points she was a triumphant sports champ, goading the crowd into celebratory cheers, or a crackling ghost figure, split in two by violent strobe lighting.
While the songs came and went, some not quite hitting the mark, her voice was never less than compelling. On ‘Happier Than Ever’ she moved through the gears to illustrate a mastery of shifting dynamics. Playing ‘Your Power’ on acoustic guitar gave it an intimate quality that was faintly mesmerising in such a vast space.
But still, this was more about what could be seen than heard. With every detail maximised on the screens, the performance sometimes became the equivalent of a theatrical one-woman show. During ‘The Diner’ her eyes rolled into her head as though she was playing a possessed demon. Sitting cross-legged beneath a single spotlight to sing ‘When the Party’s Over’, she brought the entire place to a hushed standstill.
The set ended with ‘Birds of a Feather’. Singing her most straightforwardly accessible song beneath a shower of ticker tape was one of the few moments when Eilish seemed to conform to the rules of the standard arena show. Mostly, however, this felt like a creditable attempt to keep the smaller, stranger qualities in her music and herself alive in a bigger, brasher space. If she ever succumbs to the lure of the stadia, I wouldn’t bet against her finding a way to make it work.
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