Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The queue to see the latest pop sensation stretched around the block. Cutesy devil horns and sparkly cowboy hats were popular accessories. Inside Brixton Academy, drag queens performed dance routines. Your correspondent, observing from the balcony, was schooled in ballroom-culture hand gestures by a friendly neighbour: a middle finger and thumb tap with an unprintable meaning and rapidly clicking fingers, a “you-slay-girl” kind of thing.There were 5,000 people in the venue, mostly girls and young women, with a strong LGBT+ element too, all agog at the prospect of seeing Chappell Roan. A year ago, the FT reviewed her at Heaven, a celebrated but compact gay nightclub in London. Since then, the singer from small-town Missouri has made a Wizard of Oz breakthrough into technicolour stardom. Her album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess came out in 2023 but peaked in the charts this summer. Its songs have swept TikTok and streaming platforms. The “pop girls” — Charli, Olivia, Sabrina, Billie and so on — have welcomed Chappell to their ranks.The choice of drag queens as an opening act was not decorative. Roan, real name Kayleigh Amstutz, considers herself a “drag project” too. In one of her biggest hits, “Pink Pony Club”, she imagines a “special place where boys and girls can all be queens every single day”. This “special place” is pop music. The unhappy product of a Midwestern culture of guns and God, Roan has found liberation in the girls-and-gays demographics of pop. Now based in Los Angeles, the 26-year-old represents the next stage in a lineage running back to Lady Gaga and Madonna.Those are big names to follow: the biggest, even. At the first of three London shows, Roan showed herself equipped for the challenge. Booked as part of a European tour before her popularity took off, the venue’s mid-circuit size was a time-lag. Rub your eyes and there she was, resplendent in fringed red bodysuit and cowboy boots, fronting a three-piece band on a bare-bones stage engulfed by an uproar of cheering and screams.Although out of kilter with her A-list ascendancy, the unfancy set-up suited her. Roan did not come across as a manicured, tightly drilled presence. Instead she radiated a scruff-of-the-neck energy, bounding from side to side of the stage, twirling and dropping to her knees. Songs were illustrated by a knowing repertoire of rolled eyeballs and draggy handography, but also the eyes-shut, clenched-fist posture of the power vocalist in full flight.“Femininomenon” met with a word-for-word singalong, the words in question being a witty rejection of useless men and dismal heterosexual relationships. The song, written with Olivia Rodrigo’s producer Daniel Nigro, had a jauntiness that sailed close to cheesiness. However, other tracks showed a rare ability to synthesise the often opposing attributes of camp and emotion. When Roan sang “I just want to get to know you” in “Red Wine Supernova”, she invested the line with a level of feeling that added an extra dimension to the song’s comical tale of picking up a woman in a club.She was accompanied by Andrea Ferrero on guitar, Allee Futterer on bass and Lucy Ritter on drums. The musical styles went from fizzy sing-speak numbers reminiscent of Rodrigo to the ballroom- and Gaga-channelling “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl”. A switch to ballads with the doo-wop of “Picture You” highlighted the reach of Roan’s highly impressive voice. The huskiness in her lower register gave her a certain mystery, while quavering higher notes carried just the right amount of emotiveness. Amid the zeitgeisty sense of a new queer-pop figurehead were old-fashioned virtues of charismatic performance, first-rate singing and vibrant songs.★★★★★iamchappellroan.com
