After spending 10 days in Northern Ireland, Katy Perry’s world tour kicked off in Belfast on the 7th May to a full house. With merch stands packed to the hilt and boys and girls of all ages filling the Odyssey Arena, everyone is out for a good time.
Swedish duo Icona Pop are supporting and they do a great job. Usually I’m not too fussy about the support act, but I’d heard that one Icona Pop song that everyone knows, so I’m quite looking forward to seeing what they’re like live and they definitely don’t disappoint.
Caroline and Aino own the stage in their space-age style outfits, singing into microphones with lightsaber style stands and generally just having fun. They talk quite a lot for a support act (which I love), offering snippets about each song and expressing their gratitude for being there and overall they just seem like they’re having the best time ever bounding about the stage with each other. Icona Pop are actually surprisingly gangster, not at all the sickly sweet pop laden princesses that I’m expecting and a definite highlight is their final number, mixing DJ Snake & Lil Jon’s Turn Down For What with their own hit I Love It while they dance about in leather jackets – it’s exactly the kind of thing that a normal person would do when given a sound system and a massive stage. They aren’t pitch perfect by any means, but what they lack in voice they more than make up for in enthusiasm.
Next up is the long wait before Katy is due on, but this wait is broken up with some shameless advertising on the big screens at the side of the stage. Twice they play through a loop of an advertisement for Katy’s perfume Killer Queen and then a public service announcement style ad for ‘prism-vision’ – 3D style glasses which you can buy at the merch stand. Sure, there’s thousands of people just waiting about, so why not?
The stage features a triangular shaped screen at the back, alongside two long walkways that stretch out into the crowd and meet in the middle, forming a sort of prism with a gap in the middle where there’s more of the crowd – this is the über expensive reflection zone. Before long, the lights go down and that predictable wooping noise from the crowd goes up. We see some glow in the dark mohawk men strutting about the stage with spears and then all of a sudden Katy Perry is belting out the opening lines to Roar.
