Grande understandably cancelled the rest of her UK dates on the tour, while she and the country mourned, but she somehow managed to muster up the strength and courage to organise the One Love benefit concert just two weeks after the event. A few days before I was supposed to see her at the O2, tragedy struck at Manchester Arena, when 22 people died in the most deadly terrorist attack since the 2005 bombings in London. Nobody could have predicted just how significant Grande’s Dangerous Woman tour would be. I could travel down from Hull and stay with a friend for the ultimate end of exams celebration. Tickets went on sale and there was a date at London’s O2 Arena just after my last university deadline of final year. It would be an experience I could brag about to my kids someday, in the same way that my father used to reminisce about seeing Michael Jackson on his Bad tour (before the world woke up to the truth about Jackson's character, of course). It felt like it was going to be a big moment in her career, the point at which she would graduate from being a pop princess to a genuine superstar. When Ariana Grande announced her Dangerous Woman tour in 2016, I knew that I had to go. However, before we went our separate ways – Graffiti Bridge finally finished us off – we tried one more time to make it work and I bought tickets for Prince’s Nude Tour at Wembley Arena. I got hold of a bootleg copy of the then mythical Black Album (aka The Funk Bible) and a bunch of old-school 12-inch remixes that restored a little faith, but then came the Batman soundtrack and we decided we should start to see other people. In hindsight, it was the beginning of the end. The following year I went to university and Prince released Lovesexy. I knew it was bad and a little bit weird, but the heart wants what the heart wants. First there was the album, then there was the cinema release of the concert, so now I wasn’t just listening to Prince all the time, I was watching him too. I devoured his back catalogue, played his music nonstop and just when I thought it couldn’t get any better he brought out Sign O’ The Times. And that was it – his Purple Reign over me began. “Raspberry Beret” lured me back in and then came “Kiss” in 1986, the most perfect pop song ever released, full stop. “Little Red Corvette” almost had me, but then “When Doves Cry” put me off a bit. He didn’t get me straight away, of course. All it takes is one song to hook you in and then it’s down the Paisley Park rabbit hole you go. And sooner or later everyone goes through a “Prince phase”. “I'm not quite ready to hang up my boxing gloves,” he told the crowd between songs, “but I know where the hook is." His music has always been profoundly melancholic, preoccupied with times past, mortality and transience, and to hear him sing them at that age, in the knowledge that he was nearing journey’s end, made for a moving and unforgettable evening – for all 20,000 of us.Īnyone who likes music… No, scrap that, anyone who has ears, likes Prince. At the O2 that night, he was 78 years old. It was lucky (for us, though not for him) that we were seeing him at all: the discovery in 2005 that his manager had stolen millions from his accounts had forced him back on the road. The show was made all the more powerful by the sense that there would not be many more of them. Singing with extraordinary delicacy and beauty and sadness and humour, he made the place shrink. Not because he had his audience fired up, but because he achieved something much more difficult in a venue of that size: he had us enraptured. Yet his concert at the O2 in September 2013 was one of the greatest I’ve ever been to. Leonard Cohen, on the other hand… he seems better suited to somewhere more intimate. If you’re en route to see Jay-Z or U2 play there, you have no doubt they are up to the challenge. With its 20,000 capacity, it is an absolutely vast room – you typically need big music, a big personality and an even bigger show to make it work. Leonard Cohen at the O2 should have been a bad fit.
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