Did A Full 180, Crazy

I'll get it straight out there, I think Dua Lipa is pop perfection. At an age where the Top 40 (Top 100, to be honest) is largely meaningless to me, a string of names (plus Ed Sheeran) randomly and repeatedly placed together to adorn the latest hit, chock full of autotune, vocal gymnastics and mangled, uninspired samples, a few artists rise above the effluent.

I wasn't really that familiar with Dua Lipa's singles when I was loaned a copy of her self-titled debut from 2017 so it meant that I heard the album without prejudice as a complete work. I loved it. I loved follow-up Future Nostalgia even more. Released in 2020, it was a full-on party album and just the tonic for a locked down world.

One of my other discoveries during 2020 was NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts. Running since 2008 and typically filmed at the titular tiny desk in Washington D.C., lockdown forced a creative left turn and introduced the Tiny Desk (Home) Concert. Often literally in the artist's home, the easing of restrictions allowed some to venture a little further afield, as is the case with Dua Lipa, who performed with her band in a London studio.

There's an added warmth to this set of 4 songs in that this is Dua's first performance with her band since the pandemic put paid to planned rehearsals and a tour of her second album. I've not seen this Tiny Desk set before but it's a cracker. Dua's voice is fantastic, her backing vocalists on point and bass and guitar bring a wonderful live vibe to songs that already sounded great in the studio.

The set features four songs: Levitating, Pretty Please, Love Again and Don't Start Now. All four were released as singles from Future Nostalgia and are largely faithful versions though with a fresh energy from their change of setting. Love Again is markedly different from the album version: the original sampled the sample from White Town's one-hit wonder Your Woman and was a club banger; here it's a stripped back acoustic take, something that Dua does with a lot of her songs and does very well.

Dua Lipa's are also good fun. Not necessarily ground breaking and often very expensive-looking (and no doubt literally) with a cast of unfeasibly beautiful people, but good fun.  Here are the official videos for the four songs from the Tiny Desk Concert. There are two versions of Levitating, the second featuring a rather pointless rap from Da Baby; I've stuck with the first, which transforms Dua into an anime superstar. Great stuff. 

Tiny Desk Concerts have returned to their Washington D.C. home and new sets are uploaded roughly every couple of days. I can't keep up with them all to be honest, but they are well worth a deep dive. And I'm not going to end this post without recommending last week's superb set from Sparks.