Pink
Aviva Stadium
★★★★☆
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s pop superstar Pink zipping across the Aviva Stadium on an aerial wire.
In the first of her two Irish dates for her Summer Carnival tour, the reasoning behind the tour title is clear. There are inflatable flamingos on wheels, trampolines, flames and sparklers, and extraordinary dancers. If anything, there is almost too much going on, making it impossible to decide what to focus on.
Regardless, Alecia Moore, whose stage name is the well-touted Pink, knows how to put on a show. She begins her performance descending from a giant mouth, singing her chart-topping single Get The Party Started. And that is exactly what she does.
Though having been in the music industry for more than two decades, the 44-year-old has just as much energy and enthusiasm for her job as she did when she was first getting started.
Photograph: Laura Hutton
Having such a long career is a benefit, as it means every song on her set list are smash hits. There is not a single moment where it seems the crowd is unfamiliar with the tune she is singing.
“Holy s**t,” she says to the adoring crowd after her first few songs, before decreeing Dublin is her “favourite place in the whole world”.
Pink is an artist with whom everyone is familiar. Whether it be her earlier pop punk hits, to her more recent smashes such as Raise A Glass, it is no wonder why she has retained her status as a much-adored artist.
It helps, too, that this is the era of girlie pop. Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift are dominating charts and airplay. Concerts now require pink outfits, sequins and cowboy hats.
But it’s not just new generation artists who are creating this sort of fanfare; Thursday night’s concert is irrefutable evidence that she too is right on the zeitgeist.
But despite all of the hullabaloo, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the sheer talent of the artist on stage. It requires a particular talent to be able to make songs about loneliness, parental loss, childhood trauma and self-image into bombastic cult classics.
It’s hard enough to sing and dance to those songs, never mind doing it upside down, suspended from an aerial rope.
But when you take all of the dramatics out of the equation, you are left with someone who can leave an entire stadium enraptured when she is just singing alongside the piano or acoustic guitar. Her most powerful performance, by far, was When I Get There, a song about missing her late father.
And talent clearly runs in the family, too. She is joined onstage by her 13-year-old daughter Willow, as they sing their duet Cover Me in Sunshine.
She finishes her 1½-hour set strapped into a harness and gliding over the thousands of fans in attendance, all the while singing “So what, I’m still a rock star”. Anyone who witnessed it would have to agree that she certainly is.
Are you heading to Pink’s second concert on Friday evening? Here’s a guide to everything you need to know, from getting there to set lists and the weather forecast.
