There is no shortage of alpha women filling the world’s big venues this summer. As Shakira arrives for her first British date since 2010, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Beyoncé (performing with Jay-Z) are in the UK this week, and Britney Spears is here in August. Of them all, though, only one gave a speech at the World Economic Forum last year, after receiving an award for her work on early childhood education.
That’s not the only thing that distinguishes Shakira from her peers – the singer is a formative figure in the mainstreaming of Latin music, having paved the way for the current ubiquity of Luis Fonsi and her fellow Colombian J Balvin, whose success has, in turn, provided a launchpad for her comeback.
Her years away from the live circuit have been consumed by child-rearing and relocation to Barcelona, the hometown of her partner, footballer Gerard Piqué. (Tonight, she turns her guitar to display a picture of Piqué and their children on the back – the pop equivalent of pulling photos out of her handbag.) A self-titled English-language album reached No 2 in the US in 2014 despite not being supported by a tour, but it was 2017’s mainly Spanish record El Dorado that marked the real start of her return.
She can still fill arenas, although much of tonight’s crowd seem to be drawn from south London’s Colombian population, who vociferously welcome back-catalogue hits such as La Tortura and ¿Dónde Estás Corazón?. The setlist skews Spanish, and wisely so, given the reaction to songs such as Me Enamoré and her recent venture into reggaeton, Chantaje. If anything, English-language hits such as Hips Don’t Lie and her 2014 duet with Rihanna, Can’t Remember to Forget You, don’t excite quite the same joy and waving of Colombian flags as, say, the sentimental Antologia and Tú.
Therein lies the question hovering over the El Dorado tour: can she emphasise her Latin identity by hitching herself to reggaeton and retain the English speakers who came aboard during the era of big pop hits like Hips Don’t Lie and She Wolf? Shakira certainly has a good go at it here. Her last major pop song was her Rihanna duet (which gets a novel twist tonight, with Shakira playing drums as footage of Rihanna appears on video screens), so the tour lacks the white heat that surrounds an artist on a hot streak, yet the set bubbles away at a tremendous pace.
It’s apt that the second song tonight, She Wolf, begins with her straining against chains that shackle her wrists before bursting free – Shakira, fearless and frothy-maned, is positively lupine in her power and litheness. One moment she’s acting out standard arena rituals (asking the girls in the house to howl She Wolf’s chorus, demanding that the crowd roar the word “chantaje”) and the next she’s reinforcing her links to Colombia with a video depicting the mother goddess Bachué. Belly dancing, long a feature of her shows, is a tribute to her father’s Lebanese heritage, and an especially limber one at that, complete with gold death mask on the back of her head.
“A few months ago, I didn’t think I’d ever play for you again,” she says, alluding to a vocal cord haemorrhage that forced the postponement of the tour’s opening dates. “But miracles do exist.”
Long may she howl.
