Lana Del Rey: inside the tragi-glam world of our greatest millennial troubadour
When you find yourself in the snow globe world of Lana Del Rey you immediately realise you couldn’t be anywhere else. The pink-sunset desert vista is sepia-tinted and slightly solarised, the smell a mixture of bougainvillea and weed, the whole thing seen through the lens of David Lynch or Kourtney Roy. There are hints of the past, plenty of West Coast pop-cultural references, and a veneer of perennially doomed relationships.
It is VERY Lana.
She remains our greatest millennial troubadour, whose songs are saturated in Americana. Cinematic, melancholic and deliberately transgressive, she uses California’s tarnished dreams as a metaphor for her own, and vice versa. She mixes romance and dread like no one since Lou Reed. Sometimes it’s a bit gloopy, but basically it’s pretty damn good.
And her Hyde Park concert this weekend is one of the most hotly anticipated of the year.
Fresh from a confusing performance at Glastonbury, this week she brings her tortured beauty queen persona (detached yet sincere, coy but deadly) to London. Her last appearance here was six years ago at a one-off performance at the Academy in Brixton, a massively oversubscribed gig which sold out in minutes. As she attracts the kind of super fans who don’t brook criticism, the show was more like a rally than a concert. She generated the kind of adulation not seen since Beatlemania.
With velvet green curtains draped from the top of the stage, as well as a smattering of trees and glitzy podiums, the set looked like one of those photographs of disused petrol stations in the Midwest that are so popular with art photographers these days. You know, Twin Peaks seen through the eyes of Wes Anderson. In Brixton she played just 14 songs, a kind of greatest hits setlist including Video Games, Blue Jeans and Summertime Sadness.
This new London date promises to be spectacular, not least because it gives her the opportunity to showcase her recent material, and in particular the classic set of songs on her 2019 album Norman F***ing Rockwell! as well as this year’s almost-as-good Did You Know That There Is a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Her previous two tours were not brought to the UK, meaning that she has not toured here since her Paradise tour 10 years ago.
In Lana Del Rey world you can cover a lot of neon-lit backstreets in a decade, a lot of California scrub, and a hell of a lot of West Coast freeway. In that time, she has spun new icons out of old, playing with imagery, tropes and touchstones of the past and separating them from their original context in such a way as to completely reinvent them.
A critic in the New Yorker said that her work is becoming more personal, if not necessarily autobiographical; this isn’t as crass as it sounds and is perhaps an example of just how successful her alter ego has become at maturing. She might still be tragi-glam, but it’s the kind of kohl-eyed style that only works if you’ve got the energy and the talent to sustain it.
She is revered by musicians from the generation before hers: Stevie Nicks, who appeared on Del Rey’s 2017 Lust for Life; Cat Power, who’s covered her White Mustang; and Courtney Love, who recently said that Del Rey and Kurt Cobain are “the only two true musical geniuses I’ve ever known.”
Elizabeth Woolridge Grant’s decision to pursue her career using a stage name is no more complicated than Bob Dylan’s. Robert Zimmerman may have taken a little longer to become famous, while white-bread East Coast boarding-school alum Grant obviously felt that Lana Del Rey had more of an enigmatic feel to it. Is her angsty rebellion simply a kind of sullen glamour? Is her low-fi chamber pop just the pivot of an anxious generation, or is it more than that? Some have said that she increasingly paws for happiness in a world more hardened than the one in which her star rose, although maybe she’s just better now at impersonating how she feels.
“With past stuff, I would talk about the garden of evil and good and bad, but I really was meeting some characters,” she told Billie Eilish earlier in the year. “Like they used to say, ‘When girls got to Hollywood, they were fresh off the boat’. I didn’t hear that term until later, but I did meet some people that I thought were really cool who were like, ‘Do you want to go to the Guns N’ Roses concert?’ And I would be like, ‘Yeah.’ Then, somehow, I would be sitting in a garden and I would see David Lynch behind a red curtain with a cigarette.
“I got to LA I was mostly touring. I didn’t know that many people. I had a lot of random experiences that I wrote about, and at the time, they made me really happy because I was like, ‘I’m not just watching someone else live their life, I’m living my life,’ which was new for me because I’ve always been so shy. I think the storytelling vibe that people get is because I was just in awe of the things that were going on. Coming from a farming town, LA was never a possibility. My brother and sister and I always say, every time we drive through a perfectly symmetrical palm tree lane, we feel like we’re on a set. Maybe it was my lens on how heightened everything felt.”
When her spaceship lands in Hyde Park at the weekend, she will no doubt be greeted with a kind of blind appreciation, but after her disastrous Glastonbury performance a few weeks ago the press will not be so forgiving. Being half an hour late, blaming your hairdresser and misunderstanding the curfew didn’t endear her to anyone who waited for her on the Other Stage. Especially as she didn’t have enough time to play her signature hit, Video Games.
However, for some her appearance on Sunday will be the closest they come to a religious experience this year, a physical manifestation of a character who has spent much of her career amplifying a weird hinterland.
Let’s see.
Lana Del Rey plays BST Hyde Park on July 9; bst-hydepark.com
