Notes on Lana Del Rey, Wembley
(cowritten with her biggest fan)
I wake up at 5:00 (
at half two) and arrive at 7:40. There are more than 300 people in the queue already — a number of people had been camping outside in tents for at least two days before the show. They have collapsible chairs and blow-up mattresses and huddle under emergency foil blankets.We consider what to buy for breakfast. As we weigh our options, a young man starts badmouthing someone who he saw drinking Starbucks, an Israeli coffee shop that makes Zionist coffee out of genocide. “Lana Del Rey fans drinking Starbucks, what a surprise.” *rolls eyes*. When I return with my McDonalds hash browns, they’re concealed in a plastic bag.
There are three genders in the queue: women, gays, and boyfriends. We spoke to a nice lesbian couple, a girl with her mum from Tenerife, and a boyfriend from Germany. I ingratiated myself to the boyfriend by thanking him for accidentally getting me with his fan; like all Germans, he speaks his “bad” English perfectly.
The queue suffers from Ricardo Derangement Syndrome. On TikTok, not that I have TikTok, there is a Lana superfan called Ricardo who hasn’t missed a concert since 2012. He flies around the world to see her, and they have a “special bond”. She greets him and takes his song requests. Lana’s other fans are green with envy and hate Ricardo, with his… moustache, and his… face. Various anonymous comments on TikTok and Reddit claim that Ricardo is a bully: he allegedly kicks and shoves fans, sprains their ankles, is a “mentally unstable stalker” because he goes to all the shows, etc. There is a video of him embarrassing another fan in front of Lana that people saw and didn’t like. Fans are bragging loudly about what they would do to Ricardo if they saw him. It is widely felt that he should be punched in the face, but some would like to take it further. Ricardo is the most hated man in London, perhaps the world. I say: “Is that Ricardo?”. A number of people swivel their heads.
The queue is nine hours long. The temperature peaks at 24 degrees C, but there is nothing hotter than English heat — not Australia, not Robert Nozick, not the middle of the Sun. We have a battery powered fan; I read my book on political obligation and why it isn’t real. The girls around us are reading Animal Farm, The Bell Jar, and The Woman in Black. Leonie is reading Georges Simenon. Wow we are so cool, except I am not because my shoes and trousers are black and we are trying to save battery on the fan.
Eventually we are ushered to stand up and walk to the gates, where our tickets will be scanned and then checked again as our bag is searched. The bag is clear and A4 sized so we have no problem. As soon as we get past bag inspection, the game is to speed walk as quickly as possible to the front of the stage without running, since there are security guards saying things like “don’t run” and “stop running”. They are distanced out and function as human barricades: you walk faster and faster until “don’t run”, at which point you slow to a walk and then resume a fast pace once you are past them. There is no room at the barricade (should’ve been here five weeks earlier), but we do find a great position in the middle about 5-6 bodies from the stage.
We sit down with our legs crossed; the pushing has already started but you can’t nudge what’s on the floor. We take out our books and read. Around us, about 40% of people are sitting and 60% have to stand. The standing people are resentful of the sitting people because they won’t have a chance to sit down for another six hours, if they manage to get a seat on the tube, which they won’t. One girl — dehydrated, hangry, mean — starts shittalking the people sitting down. “It’s soooooooooooooooo selfish”, she announces, after pushing past three people. The friends she helped cut the queue are scattered around. A group of people (including herself) slags off the people who are reading, which is only us because we are the only people with books out. She is crouching slightly to shout in our faces, but Simenon is revealing the murderer and Simmons is murdering Rawls. Eventually, she tries a different group of sitters; one of them (gay voice; Brummie) informs her no, because she’s acting “like a cunt.” He and his friends spend the next few minutes making fun of her (“it’s sooo selfish”, “sorry girlypop”, snickering). The führer chews her nails and mumbles to her number two. Eventually number two summons the courage to whip around on her friend’s behalf to say, “could you actually just, like, not, its actually kind of pathetic.” Her voice breaks at the word pathetic. Wembley’s new security is still chewing her polka-dot acrylic nail and suddenly refuses eye contact with the group of sitters. She spends the next few minutes telling her number two how unbothered she is, and how she’s not interested in engaging with people like that. We don’t hear from her again. My book is increasingly fire.
The crowd starts jeering, “Ricardo, where are you….” and demands that another curly haired gay at barricade turn around and identify himself. The crowd is chanting “Ricardo Ricardo Ricardo”, though it’s not to hear him sing. Threats are hurled; London does not like Ricardo.
After two and a half hours, a TikToker/new singer called Addison Rae comes on and sings us some songs. Apparently it’s her first concert. I recognised the last one but none of the others; the people around me know the choruses but only some of them know all the words. The performance is slick and the dancing is extremely impressive. The performance ends. People liked it.
The fans have opinions on Lana’s husband Jeremy, an alligator swamp tour-guide. “I don’t know if I like him. I like that she’s happy, but I don’t like him. She could have been happy with someone else. Like me.”
An hour later, Lana’s stage is revealed: a wooden house with a patio, swamp trees, two swings, stripper poles, a pool, and lots of lights. Apparently, Lana is always late to her shows — sometimes egregiously so. People are guessing how late she’d be this time, guesses ranging between 10 minutes and an hour. Someone recalls she was 40 minutes to her last London show (Leonie was there, however, and knows that this isn’t so). Happily, she was only 10 minutes late — the strings came out first, then the dancers, the chorus and musicians, then the star, who sang the first song from the porch of her house.
From here the show was terrific: at times I was fairly spaced out from the noise and dehydration and the flashing lights, but the vocals were great and she seemed confident. I didn’t know many of the lyrics so I let Leonie do the singing and rocked from side to side while she stood on my shoes, trying to keep a few inches of space around us.
My favourite numbers were a cover of “Stand by Your Man” (🚩🚩🚩), an unreleased country song called “Quiet in the South”, and “Young and Beautiful”. London got special treatment; she sang “Venice Bitch” which was apparently what everyone hoped for, and sung some released and unreleased songs with Addison Rae.
Midway through, an middle-aged woman fainted in the middle of the crowd; the people around her started screaming “stop the show, stop the show!”. The security team quickly pulled her out. My first reaction was concern; then I had one thought too many and remembered the philosopher Tim Scanlon’s counterexample to consequentialism:
Jones has suffered an accident in the transmitter room of a television station. Electrical equipment has fallen on his arm. and we cannot rescue him without turning off the transmitter for fifteen minutes. A World Cup match is in progress, watched by many people, and it will not be over for an hour. Jones's injury will not get any worse if we wait, but his hand has been mashed and he is receiving extremely painful electrical shocks. Should we rescue him now or wait until the match is over? Does the right thing to do depend on how many people are watching... ?
When it ended, everyone was happy. Everyone except Ricardo, who didn’t make it to the barricade for the first time since 2012. The crowds turned into traffic, but we were first on an early Tube.
I hope Ricardo is alive.
I read this whole thing wondering “when is this going to become about Wimbledon” only to realise I’d misread the title :P
Took me way too long to realize the picture isn't you and Lana del Rey lol