Given the fortnight she’s just had, it would have been understandable if Beyonc? Knowles found it difficult to muster the necessary adrenalin for this British leg of her tour.
An arena in Liverpool must have been little match for the triumphant evening she enjoyed a few nights ago at the MTV Europe Music Awards. At the Berlin ceremony, the singer gave thanks for her triple prize-winning achievement by donning an eye-popping red basque for her performance of Sweet Dreams.
The Islamic conservatives of North Africa, where she had just played, may not have seen that coming. As it was, the singer’s Egyptian show went ahead despite strenuous protests and a complaint to the Government from Muslim Brotherhood denouncing what it felt was no better than an “insolent sex party”.
For the predominantly twentysomething women who filed into the Echo Arena, you suspected that the promise of an insolent sex party was key to their decision to come here in the first place.
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Beyonc? may rarely stray beyond the demure side of a line that separates her from, say, Madonna, but never let it be said that she isn’t aware of her assets. Dressed in a gold leotard for a thunderous Crazy In Love, the singer surveyed the scene with an imperious Amazonian air, heralding the opening section of a show that saw her 13-piece, all-female backing group hammering out riotously funky arrangements of the songs attributed, on the singer’s current I Am?Sasha Fierce album, to her racy alter ego.
But while the group’s presence was undoubtedly felt, it was impossible to avert your gaze from Beyonc? for more than a few seconds. Accompanied by her dancers on what could only be termed a prolonged act of stunt pilates, she was mesmerising on the snake-charmer funk of Naughty Girl while on Freakum Dress she fell on to the ground as her guitarist unleashed a Hendrix-like guitar solo.
Outfits were changed with brisk regularity – a leather bodice here, something shiny and futuristic there – but the lack of coverage on those toned colonnades that pass for legs was a merciful constant.
Resting her saucy alter ego to deliver the slushy Ave Maria, the singer stood still at the centre of the stage – the song’s emotional power only slightly dented by the stagehands who fixed her wedding outfit, seemingly dressed as the sperm from Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask. While it seemed harsh to begrudge Beyonc? the opportunity to show us the “real” her – not least on a funkier reconfiguration of If I Were A Girl – there was no denying the communal surge of excitement when her Sasha Fierce persona returned to rip through several hits from Beyonc?’s time in Destiny’s Child.
As a parting shot, the rump-slapping freakout of Single Ladies was all the better for its inevitability. Beyonc? looked predatory as she perfectly reproduced the dance moves that have long since conferred immortality on the song’s accompanying video.
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She turned a discreet blind eye as several thousand of her fans attempted to copy those same moves. For a hostess of a first-rate insolent sex party, she also has impeccable manners.
—Tour continues: Birmingham NIA, tonight; O2, Saturday-Monday. www.beyonceonline.com