The Observer | 01. 1 0. 17 | THE NEW REVIEW 29
Lorde’s disembodied voice purrs out
across the darkened palace. “I sip the
drink,” it says, darkly, defi antly. “I lie
to you. I go to secret worlds.” We are
in a brief interval, in which a black,
chiff on-clad Lorde goes backstage to
become the white-gowned prom queen
of the second section. Vintage video
snippets fl icker across a giant old-
school TV sat on stage.
The 20-year-old New Zealander has
just sung a throaty version of Sober ,
one of the darker songs from her latest
album, Melodrama. She is about to sing
The Louvre , a superlative love song in
which Lorde imagines a megaphone
being held to her chest, so that the rush
of her new aff air can become a kick-
drum and we can all lose it to her beat.
Her hair is wild, her earpiece dangling
loose; we’re only half-a-dozen songs in.
Those very same words – “I sip the
drink, I lie to you, I go to secret worlds”
- recur in the second intermission,
when Lorde swaps all-white for all-
red. They must matter. Melodrama,
Lorde’s second album, was conceived
as a suite of songs tracking the arc
of a party and the Melodrama world
tour sets out to take its ticket-buyers
on a journey into other realms, where
edges melt, other rules hold sway and
only the rush matters. A blue neon
astronaut lights up the fi rst section;
giant trippy fl owers provide the second
backdrop. The drink Lorde is sipping in
the portentous voice over reminds you
a little of Beyoncé’s Lemonade (“you
come home at 3am and lie to me” ),
but the spirit is more of a teenager
disappearing out a window. Lorde’s set
Melodrama for the masses
a promissory note the show can’t
quite pay off. (Few female pop stars
have managed to take non standard
creativity into the mainstream so well
as Bush did in the early 80s.) “Is it a
Wednesday?” asks Lorde, pop starrily.
“Serious question.”
But it is also the sort of gig whose
gaps are fi lled with screamed
adulation. People really do love
the shiny new songs as much as
the strange old ones and they lose
it willingly to faster tracks such aswalks this ledge – sometimes weighty,
sometimes fl ighty.
Melodrama could have been played
a number of ways: fully club-facing,
as per songs such as Green Light ,
with its house-y piano and rush of
freedom, or as heartbreak writ large- fi lmic, stark and intimate. It turns
out to be more of a standard pop gig,
all dancers and confetti cannons, than
artsier fans might have hoped for.
Certainly, Lorde’s intro music, Kate
Bush’s Running Up That Hill , writes
Lorde’s latest album
walks a tightrope
between art pop and
the mainstream –
but can she maintain
the balance live?
‘The sort of gig whose
gaps are filled with
screamed adulation’:
Lorde at Alexandra
Palace last week.
Richard Isaac/RexPop
Lorde
Alexandra Palace, London N22KittyKitty
EmpireEmpire@kittyempire666@kittyempire666Lorde’s outgrown her
youthful seriousness,
dancing joyously like
no one is looking, even
though 10,000 are
GAMES
Th ere’s a
copycat
killer on
the loose
Part of the elemental appeal of zombie
fi ction is the permission it provides to
imagine which household item, when
pressed, you might use to st ove in the
face of a lunging, undead version of
Mrs Brown from No 37. In the glare of
such an apocalypse, familiar domestic
items such as tea towels, cafetieres andloo brushes must be reappraised, their
value now dependent on their ability
to cause brain damage rather than
effi ciently dry a plate, deliver coff ee,
or clean the glum residue from a toilet
bowl. Do you reach for the bread knife
(rasping, noble), or the biro (intimate,
cruel)?
The 17-year-old fi lm Battle Royale
further elevated the premise. In the
fi lm a busload of high school students
are gassed and delivered to a remote
island. There, they’re provided with a
map, a pocketful of rations and a single
weapon each, which range in effi ciency
from crossbows to paper fans. The
class teacher, played by Takeshi Kitano ,
informs the class that they must,
during the next three days, fi ght to the
death till only one student remains.
The structure is similar to that of a
zombie fi lm except your friends and
colleagues are no longer the lumbering,
insentient undead, but scheming, very
much mortal enemies.
Battle Royale infl uenced countless
books and fi lms, from The Hunger
Games toa Marvel Comics Avengers
spin-off. Its premise has been borrowed
by video game designers too, although
never with as much verve and success
as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds ( a
forgettable title initialised to the morememorable PUBG by many players).
This independently produced game
launched earlier this year and has, in
recent months, become a phenomenon
of near-Minecraft proportions; in
September the game broke the record
for the highest number of concurrent
players on Steam ( video gaming’s
iTunes). Last week, more than 1.5
million people around the world
simultaneously logged in to the game.
In PUBG 100 players arrive at a small
remote island in a fl eet of fat transport
planes. You choose at which point toSimonSimon
ParkinParkin
@SimonParkin@SimonParkin
leap from the aircraft and whereabouts
on the quilted island below to drift
towards on your parachute. On land,
it’s a case of arming yourself with
whatever item is to hand: a frying
pan in a kitchen cupboard, a sickle in
the shed, a dune buggy in the garage.
Every few minutes the playable area of
the island shrinks towards a random
location, drawing players into ever
deadlier proximity until, fi nally, only
the sole victor is left standing. It’s
tense, exhilarating and, as with all
success in art and entertainment,destined to be closely copied.
Last week, PUBG’s battle spilled
into reality with the arrival of one
such copycat. Fortnite closely follows
PUBG’s template, even aping the
100-player limit, albeit with the
multi million-dollar backing of Epic
Games , one of North America’s most
celebrated studios. Following Fortnite’s
announcement, PUBG’s producer
Chang-han Kim stated that his studio
was “concerned ” about Fortnite’s
similarities to PUBG, and that the team
would explore legal action.
As developers of iPhone games who
in the past few years have seen their
ideas closely replicated by rivals are
aware, there is no legal recourse here.
Protection in cases of game plagiarism
(often known as “cloning”) covers
only the game’s original source code
and the specifi c art used in a game. It
is not possible to copyright a game’s
mechanics or its functionality. This
may frustrate the PUBG team, who
must watch dismayed as the shape
and mood of their runaway success is
imitated ad nauseam. But this is surely
nothing compared with that felt by
Koushun Takami , from whose 1999
novel Battle Royale so many titans
of the 21st- century entertainment
landscape have risen.Supercut. Royals, as brilliant as it
remains, and lit up by more phones
than any other track, is not the encore:
the strange coda of Loveless is.
Lorde, too, has outgrown her
youthful seriousness, dancing joyously
like no one is looking, even though
10,000 people are. She was so much
older on the fi rst album, you could
argue. She’s younger than that now,
a trick Miley Cyrus , incidentally, is
also trying to pull off. As though to
emphasise the point, Lorde fetches
a little boxed xylophone and plays
Buzzcut Season ’ s melody on it, sitting,
child like, on the ground.
But her old soul is never all that
far away. The big reveal of the set
lies in a cover of Phil Collins’s In the
Air Tonight, another big-drumming
landmark of the 80s. The Collins
original is a masterpiece of seething
fury, presumed infi delity at its core.
Lorde’s version falls short of the
bunny-boiling intensity the song
requires (the drummer could use
some steroids, too) but its presence at
the heart of this set raises all sorts of
questions about who might have done
what to whom in the disintegration
of Lorde’s own relationship – the real
grist of Melodrama.
The night’s biggest frisson comes
during the moving ballad Liability ,
and its reprise, where Lorde diagnoses
herself as “a little much” for her ex, and
everyone else for that matter; she really
does have a sold-out crowd eating out
of her hand. For the reprise, a solitary
dancer twirls in place as though in a
music box, the loveliest visual touch.
Surprisingly, Lorde does not play
Melodrama’s killer track, Writer in the
Dark , where she does channel Kate
Bush with conviction. It’s not the only
question mark lingering over the set. A
string section plays on some songs, but
it’s the wrong accompaniment – Sober
really needed its magnifi cent horns
live and direct.
It is phenomenally hard, being a
mass-market visionary; you need to
be mould-breaking, but bring enough
ordinary punters with you. But you
can’t help but wish there were a few
more secret worlds to get lost in
tonight; a few more lies, a bit more
potent hooch.New game Fortnite, left, is remarkably similar to the massively successful PUGB, right.