Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour and the art of the stadium show
A truly great pop show can go on forever, in ways that bands can never achieve
7 JUNE, TOTTENHAM STADIUM, LONDON: Beyoncé was approaching 2 hours on stage when she asked, “Can we play y’all one more?” ‘If I Were A Boy’ then brought home a gold run of classics: ‘Crazy In Love’, ‘Single Ladies’, ‘Love On Top’, ‘Irreplaceable’. One song later she floated past my head on a neon-lit horseshoe singing her Cowboy Carter version of ‘Jolene’. We waved at each other. The guy next to me thought she was waving at him. Twelve more songs and she floated by again, this time in a flying Cadillac for ‘16 Carriages’. Now there really was one song left, but before she reached ‘Amen’, she thanked us for coming to a show she “designed to make everyone feel like they had a front row seat”.
People have been knocking the Cowboy Carter Tour, saying Beyoncé can’t even sell out a stadium for 6 nights in a row. But have you ever tried to get anyone to come to anything and not been stood in the pub’s backroom calculating the minimum number of people you need to turn up for it to not feel empty? (The answer is always 30.) Ticket prices have been blamed, and Cowboy Carter the album, too: a record that finally earned Beyoncé the Album of the Year Grammy but divided music fans into those who like country music and those who don’t. And here in the UK, we mostly don’t. It’s a hard genre to love when your country doesn’t have the vistas for it. Or the roads. Or the guns or religion. Or, frankly, the ownership. Fans who spent any meaningful time with Cowboy Carter, though, saw Beyoncé’s take on the country album for what it was – a high concept experimentation on Americana’s Black roots, performed by the best singer in the world.
Beyoncé is also pop’s greatest creative director and details nerd, as seen in her 2019 Coachella documentary Homecoming. The results of designing a show with a ‘front row seat for everyone’ spoke for themselves before she mentioned it: the entire stage wall a screen; catwalks forming a diamond that stretch from one Tottenham goalmouth to the edge of the attacking penalty box, poking at the dugouts and opposite touchline; as much action going on down one end of the stadium as the other. In her flying horseshoe, Beyoncé rotated in turn to face each side stand; her Cadillac curb crawled laps to give everyone sat higher up a good look at its red velvet exterior.