For beabadoobee, this Alexandra Palace performance is a homecoming. Having just closed off the US and UK legs of her tour, the stop in her native London was clearly nostalgic for the artist, whose album ‘This is How Tomorrow Moves’ has taken her from indie stardom to mainstream recognisability and an Alexandra Palace headliner slot.
The excitement in the queue for the venue is palpable, despite the freezing temperatures in which we’re shuffling up the hill to the concert hall. Looking around, I was surprised by the age diversity of the crowd, and also the sheer number of couples in attendance. Then again, ‘Glue Song’ is a lover girl track for the ages.
Watching Bea make her way through the ‘This is How Tomorrow Moves’ tracklist, you get the sense of an artist who’s become a truly formidable stage presence. Playing her way through four different guitars, she made playing to a 10,000 strong crowd look easy. It’s only when she plays ‘Coffee’ – the song that propelled her to early stardom – that she began to well up on stage, thanking her fans for sticking with her since the start. To move from rock-star confidence and musical command to vulnerability and back is no easy feat, and as a viewer it was hard not to be swept away.
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Stand out tracks included ‘Beaches’ – which was accompanied by a set changeover that saw the stage become a forest – and ‘Real Man’, which Bea addressed to her own ‘real man’ in the crowd. ‘She Plays Bass’ was another crowd pleaser, and saw Bea and her bass player Eliana – in her own right an up and coming star – transform back into their angst(ier) teenage selves on stage.
There’s something so special about watching an artist playing their first Alexandra Palace headline show. It felt like we were watching Bea on the cusp of a major breakthrough, though that’s not to downplay her very real success to date. And the venue itself, location of many of my own very first teenage gig trips, is nostalgic for any Londoner. Watching Bea perform felt like becoming a teenager again, with every messy emotion that entails, even as she’s now looking back on that time from a more grown-up lens.
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Words: Sasha Mills
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