The Weeknd’s 2023 stadium tour – postponed so many times that its title features not just the name of his most recent album, Dawn FM, but its 2020 predecessor, After Hours – is nothing if not spectacular.
The set is a vast metallic cityscape, filled with ruined landmarks – St Paul’s Cathedral, Toronto’s CN Tower and the Empire State Building among them – which belch out fire or shoot violet-coloured lasers above the crowd at strategic moments. But most of the action takes place on a runway that stretches nearly the full length of the Etihad Stadium’s pitch, which also belches out fire at strategic moments, and comes illuminated by dozens of spotlights that either point skywards or focus on the audience, illuminating huge sections of the stands, which are already illuminated by the crowd themselves, equipped with Coldplay-inspired flashing wristbands on arrival. The walkway is decorated with an immense moon dangling over its far end and an even more immense model of the Hajime Sorayama-designed robot featured in the video for 2011’s Echoes of Silence. The song doesn’t feature in the setlist, but no matter: the model slowly rotates, shoots coloured lights from its eyes, and provides a focal point around which dancers, clad in white robes and veils that look not unlike Tuareg tagelmusts, move in slow concentric circles.
All this is intended to represent “a journey through a cosmic cataclysm that has erupted and plagued the Earth”. Coupled with the speed at which the show’s tracks are dispatched – they are truncated and segue into each other, which enables the Weeknd to cram a staggering 33 songs into just under two hours – it’s a lot to take in, although apparently not enough to distract at least one fan’s attention from what’s happening in the Ataturk Stadium. He spends virtually the entire gig glued to coverage of the Champions League final on his mobile, blind to any cosmic cataclysm that doesn’t involve City failing to win the treble.
He obviously goes home happy, but it’s hard not to feel that he has missed out. The concept is pretty opaque – you wouldn’t have a clue what was supposed to be going on up there unless you’d read the advance publicity – but the relentlessness of its visual and aural bombardment is impressively beguiling.
On stage, Abel Tesfaye is a noticeably sweeter but less charismatic figure than you might expect. He spends the show’s first half performing with his face concealed by an MF Doom-style metallic mask, but proves surprisingly big on the kind of old-fashioned rabble-rousing that involves claiming that one half of the audience is his favourite, then changing his mind when the other half cheers louder and asking them if they’re ready to go home yet when the show is barely halfway through.
Mask or not, the air of darkly brooding mystery projected by his videos is punctured slightly by the sight of him enthusiastically playing air guitar, and at one point air keyboards, during solos. For a man who has spent the past 13 years inhabiting the persona of a creepily decadent but conflicted libertine, big on auto-erotic asphyxiation, punishing cocaine binges, abusive relationships and wilfully hollow materialism (The Morning’s chorus of “the money is the motive” is an impressively cynical line with which to provoke a heartfelt audience singalong), he cuts a surprisingly cuddly figure on stage.
But perhaps that’s a persona he is tiring of. Tesfaye has been making noises about this being his final tour, at least as the Weeknd. He has said stuff like that before, but if it is the end of an era, the show acts both as a perfect summation and an impressive way to bow out. The setlist is expansive enough to reach back to his earliest work – the Siouxsie and the Banshees-fuelled lurch of House of Balloons sounds fantastic – and even pay a passing visit to 2013’s Kiss Land, the relative flop that nearly derailed his career entirely. You’re struck by how varied his work has been: the woozy, weary balladry of Often is dramatically different to the neon-hued pop of Blinding Lights and Less Than Zero, the latter’s chorus sounding positively Abba-esque as it booms around the stadium.
But you’re also struck by how well it fits when crammed together cheek-by-jowl. The segues feel seamless, the shifts in temperature never jar – it’s all held together by a sharp melodic sense that means even the cloudiest tracks never feel as if they are they’re rambling. If this is a kind of retirement party for said persona, then it’s a euphorically celebratory one: even those punters whose enjoyment of the evening isn’t predicated on City’s performance in Turkey leave looking thrilled.
• At London Stadium on 7 and 8 July, and Wembley on 18 August.
