dodie live at O2 Apollo review – a beautiful pop extravaganza

Artist	dodie
Venue	O2 Apollo, Manchester
Date	19 September 2021
Opener	Air So Sweet then Cool Girl
Closer	Hate Myself
Highlight	Sorry
Undertone rating	5/5

Two years after last hitting the road, dodie returned with a technically ambitious and intensely emotional opening night in Manchester that surely deserves recognition as the creative pinnacle of her now well-established musical career.

“I was meant to do a dance just then but I couldn’t stop crying” were much-adored English pop songstress dodie’s first words as her grand post-lockdown UK tour got underway last night in Manchester. It is true that dodie possesses an uncanny ability to make a listener (and inadvertently herself) dance and cry with the gentle strum of the two lowest strings of a ukulele and delicate, often exceptionally soft vocals. That said, it’s certainly emotional breakdowns rather than dance-pop breakdowns that most define dodie’s sound, and recent album Build a Problem had a knack for beautifully rendered acoustic ballads, all of which were to make their big stage debut in Manchester. If teary dodie needed company at the start of the show, she wouldn’t have to wait long.

In some ways I found myself in the Apollo feeling a little out of place. dodie’s magnetic social media presence has steadily built up an audience overwhelmingly made up of young LGBTQ women and others who related to dodie’s well-documented struggles with derealisation and depression. The hairstyles rivalled the technicolour of the various pride flags that decorated concert-goers in a queue that stretched a staggeringly long way through Ardwick hours before their idol would at last take the stage. As my part of the queue passed the official tour bus towards the end of the kilometre-long procession, there came a strange realisation that the characters that had lived for so long on my phone in the Instagram app really were in the building next to me. We’d all seen clips of dodie exploring the bus in the days leading up to the gig, having fun with familiar faces like best friend and outstanding musician in her own right Orla Gartland, as well as bassist Pete Daynes and drummer Ross Craib. That they’d be in front of us – in the flesh after all this time – was a bizarre notion.

In truth, I wasn’t particularly incongruous once I’d found a spot as close to the stage as was politely possible given the dense mass of fans. I’d shown up in the team colours of sage green and white and wore my branded dodie mask somewhat unnecessarily (four gigs in, being in a packed room with no masks is still rather jarring to me). I may not always love her music, but I do love dodie, and 19th September had long been ringed out as one of the most thrilling events in my increasingly busy calendar of autumn gigs. I’d consumed the online teasers with fervour and learnt all the words – even to the not-insubstantial number of songs I didn’t like so much. I knew it was simply a question of whether the gig would turn out to be five-star-worthy or not.

You can imagine the spine-tingling delirium in the room as dodie delivered the lyric “This is what I’m living for” on intro song Air So Sweet, queuing a rumble of bass and a warm breath of a gorgeous live strings section. The elated singing from the crowd started from there and didn’t stop, with Cool Girl supplying a particularly enchanting melody for the powerful chorus of 3,000 to latch on to. Soon after, I Kissed Someone (It Wasn’t You) was granted a new sense of urgency by Craib’s pulsating kick drum. Quieter songs like When and Four Tequilas Down suddenly made sense when performed to a crowd of stunned fans. The melodies twisted and turned over intricately written backings made positively cinematic by some luscious strings arrangements that amply demonstrated dodie’s ability as a musician first and foremost, rather than just an ex-Youtuber.

Special Girl, unique for a dodie song in its sense of unreserved joy and self-acceptance, was an inevitable pivot point of night. Over the crackle of Gartland’s clapping and a bumbling pizzicato bassline, dodie bounced across the stage, beaming from ear to ear and nearly kissing both Daynes and Gartland in choreographed skits mid-song. A clarinet solo performed by dodie herself was barely audible over the screams of the disbelieving audience, before a full-size bed and a rustic upright piano were wheeled onto stage – not intent on simply playing the songs, it became clear that dodie was here to perform a show in every sense of the word.

With Special Girl as a springboard, the performance went from great to transcendental with tracks like the brooding Before the Line, which saw dodie perform a dramatic contemporary dance routine to the sound of a brand new sinister rock outro that gave the song even more of an edge. As dodie flung her body on and off the bed in front of the smoky, dark red background, there was a possibility the evening would become some sort of conceptual performance piece had dodie not started the next song quipping “that was a little dramatic wasn’t it?”.

Even beyond the bed and smoke, the lighting was stunning. Dozens of bare, golden bulbs hung above the stage, spectacularly kicking in on the chorus of Guiltless, filling the room with the aura of a perfect sunset. The most awe-inspiring moment of the night, however, came when dodie took to the piano for Sorry, a soaring, strings-led ballad. Just as the violins reached the apex of their melody, a dense stream of petals fell down onto dodie, glistening in the spotlight and nestling in her hair like snow. Visually, it was an unbelievably beautiful surprise. As a match for Sorry, it was an inspired decision from dodie and her team.

And still, there were more delights in store. Rainbow and She – dodie’s two songs about accepting her bisexuality – were of course rapturously received, with pauses in the vocals routinely being filled by random shouts of “gay rights!” and “I’m so gay!” from the crowd. Later, a man would take it upon himself to blurt out the absent strings lines in the first half of If I’m Being Honest, much to the amusement of both the performers and the rest of the audience. By the time the concert finale began to come into view, the overwhelming feeling in the room was one of heart-warming inclusivity and love. I’ve never felt such a sense of all-encompassing unity from a gig crowd before.

“What do we do after we cry?” was dodie’s prompt to the crowd as driving up-tempo number Boys Like You kicked into gear. Dance, of course, was the answer, and so we did, with singularly brilliant funk-pop belter In the Middle sending the crowd into a frenzy. As dodie’s sidekicks, Gartland and Daynes did their part in summoning the pandemonium, spinning around with their guitars and charging to the front of the stage with an eagerly accepted request for more dancing and more screaming. To top it all off, after a quick change dodie returned to the stage in her wonderfully silly postwoman outfit for Hate Myself, one of the real highlights from the latest album and a well-recieved closer.

With a camp yet earnest salute to the crowd, dodie was done. There were a variety of reactions to the roar and standing ovation that followed. Daynes leaped around the stage, throwing his arms up in the hopes of an even louder din. Gartland keeled over, beaming from ear to ear before screaming at the crowd in delight. dodie took a moment to take it all in before hugging her friends and reluctantly leading the bows. The crowd loved her and she loved us back. It had been a perfect return to the stage.

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