Toilet sinks are streaked with purple glitter and lost hair ribbons decorate the foyer. Olivia Rodrigo has not yet arrived, but the Hydro already feels like a teen girl’s bedroom. On stage, Guts – the title of her Grammy-nominated second album – is spelled out by towering, melting candles. A soldout crowd, clad in homemade merch, scream when the T teeters and falls; they know it means the show’s about to start.
Expectations are sky-high for the American singer-songwriter’s second UK tour, not least because her original opening night was rescheduled due to ongoing technical problems with Manchester’s new Co-op Live arena. Rodrigo’s previous visit, in 2022, intentionally played to small venues that could barely meet demand; a smart decision she has described as “ultimate practice” in stagecraft, designed to balance out her rapid rise to fame in 2021.
That patience, and practice, pays off tonight. Rodrigo skips on stage with the proud, puffed-out chest of a WWE wrestler, over the surging bass line from her sarcastic pop-punk rager Bad Idea Right? Her band would have been riot grrrl heroines in another decade; they careen through an extended outro stuffed with guitar solos while Rodrigo pogos and headbangs and air-guitars with dorky dance-like-nobody’s-watching exuberance.
Collaging a grungy, 90s MTV vibe with silver-screen glamour, the show flicks between all-out rock show and elegant, intimate pop balladeering. Rodrigo tucks her Dr Martens under a grand piano to perform her break-out single Drivers License, but later uses them to stomp on a camera set into the stage. For Vampire, a showstopping, stormy rock opera, she is cast in black and white like a cursed silent film heroine, yet still curls her lip to snarl the song’s furious accusation: “Fame-fucker.”
Rodrigo rides around the arena on a glowing half moon prop to sing Logical, a Guts album track about a manipulative relationship, but ear-splitting cheering from each section of the crowd as she floats nearer relegates it to background music. Other ballads shine with far simpler treatment; she sits cross-legged with guitarist Daisy Spencer for Happier, from her blockbuster first album Sour, and turns it into a campfire song.
The 21-year-old leads her band with breezy confidence, somersaults her ballads’ big notes with ease and instead focuses on delivering feeling. No wonder she saves Good 4 U and Get Him Back! for the encore: in a feat of stamina, she runs, leaps, bounces and screams through the two pop-rock teen anthems with total commitment to their messy, witty lyrics.
But it’s on All-American Bitch that she directly confronts those enormous expectations. A cathartic, sarcastic song inspired by Joan Didion, the track implodes under the weight of societal pressure – “I’m built like a mother and a total machine” goes one brutal line. “Think about someone that pisses you off and scream your fucking heads off!” Rodrigo yells and thousands of young women take the cue. “I know my place … and this is it,” she shrieks, every inch at home.
Olivia Rodrigo plays Glasgow, Birmingham, and London on a UK tour until 18 May
