Dua Lipa @ OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 24 Apr

Dua Lipa and her team clearly had more fruitful lockdowns than the rest of us. While some of us were smushing 90 Day Fiancé and endless biscuits into our idiot faces, they were working out how to translate Future Nostalgia, a pop album of generational brilliance, into the live arena. Turns out they’ve nailed it in the most spectacular fashion. 

The vast majority of tonight's 15,000-strong crowd have been giddily sat on their tickets for near two years, and there’s such volcanic goodwill in the room, that, so long as these songs were playing, she could sit in a wicker chair, checking her phone, occasionally scowling in the direction of the audience and still be received rapturously. But there isn’t a second where everyone involved doesn’t feel fully committed. Lipa's voice in particular is great. She aces the mixture of insouciance and heart-on-sleeve vulnerability that the Future Nostalgia songs require, something that could so easily be lost in a venue this cavernous, but when she needs to belt it out, as in the spritely, monumental Be the One, it’s seemingly similarly effortless.

Image: Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia Tour by Shirlaine Forrest

After an opening three song belt of Physical, New Rules and Love Again, all of which are brilliantly imperious in delivery, you’d think in most other cases she’d sunk too many hits early doors. Then, obviously, no. With two albums and a string of collaborations she’s built herself a catalogue of so many bangers that she can sit atop all this gold like some fairytale dragon, doling out brilliant pop songs as if they’re the easiest things to come by in the world. It means that everything has to be full effort, there’s no duff numbers where things can calm down a bit, even the one slow song of the set (Boys Will Be Boys) is a cacophanous singalong, and she, her band and her dancers expertly manage to maintain this energy without it slacking up once.

On paper it bears all the hallmarks of an arena show of a pop star of this magnitude. There’s the confetti, the balloons and the superb, metronomically honed dancing. There’s a point, somewhere between the giant inflatable lobster that turns up for We’re Good and the roller skating breakdown that leads into One Kiss, that the spectacle reaches a point of such ecstatic daftness that it’s almost overwhelming. But no one of Dua Lipa's generation is marrying these things to songs this consistently great. Once she’s up on a giant mechanical UFO performing Levitating, things hit that sweet spot that some of the best British pop hits, where your cynicism wants you to roll your eyes at the pantomime of it all, but the sheer brilliance of the tunes just won’t allow it.

Image: Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia Tour by Shirlaine Forrest

By the time she’s closing with the genuinely perfect Don’t Start Now the brilliance of it all borders on the vulgar. That bass – simultaneously slinky, bouncy and pummelling – and her back and forth with the backing singers during that monster of a final chorus is just sublime. To have a songbook of such opulent riches, to still have the flex of such a brilliant song after 90 minutes of nothing but hits; it’s genuinely remarkable. It’s a joy to see an artist emphatically seizing their moment and absolutely stamping themselves on it. An imperious cementing of her place as the premier pop star of the era.