Olivia Rodrigo live at Co-op Live review – post-Glasto victory lap is a teenage dream

Inexhaustible despite an exceptionally busy few days, the American pop phenom’s Manchester set felt every bit like a showcase from one of present-day pop’s greatest stars. Don’t be fooled by her early Disney career or the adoring audience of young girls – Rodrigo’s music is thoughtful, sophisticated, and surprisingly grungy.

Newly seated in Co-op Live’s staggering interior – capacity 23,500, the largest indoor arena in the UK, and third largest in the world – me and my friend Becka look up and debate whether the light fittings would hit us if they were to come loose from the roof. It isn’t a completely ludicrous worry. After buying my ticket for a personal record of £122 (or in other words, 10 jasmine.4.t gigs), Olivia Rodrigo’s original Co-op Live date in May 2024 was postponed when an air conditioning unit fell from the ceiling just days before she was due to play, in what was an opening week so utterly shambolic for the flashy new venue it was almost impressive.

It was a shame because that date would have coincided with the peak of Rodrigo-mania. The former Disney child actress’s 2021 debut album Sour had revealed a precocious songwriter equally capable of rousing ballads and raucous pop punk, but 2023’s follow-up Guts was even better in all departments – smarter, wittier, fiercer, and inescapable on TikTok. The summer that followed Rodrigo’s doomed trip to Manchester turned out to be a transformative one for pop, and amidst all the justified excitement about the new holy trinity of solo female pop (which is of course Charli xcx, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter) it was easy to forget just how much of a phenomenon Rodrigo’s rise to fame was – she hadn’t even released her debut single pre-pandemic.

It wasn’t until Rodrigo’s recent Glastonbury headliner – something of a coup for her when there was a certain Charli also on the bill – that she could wrest back some of the limelight for herself. Two albums in, she’s yet to write a bad song, and on her eventual trip to Co-op Live the numerous hits sound as vital as when they first came out. The lyrical focus on the struggles of teenagerdom, from social awkwardness to low self esteem, is reflected in the crowd tonight, two thirds of whom appear to be girls in their early teens. Perhaps more so than any other singer today, Rodrigo is the voice of this generation, expressing their hopes, fears and anxieties in cathartic anthems, and no doubt giving countless adolescent girls a sense of feeling seen.

As a straight man in attendance without even a girlfriend or daughter as an excuse, I feel somewhat conspicuous, but the truth is Rodrigo offers far more than superficial pop fodder pandering to the youngsters. For starters, her music is often bracingly punky. Tonight she kicks off by ripping through Guts B-side Obsessed, a raging three-chorder that, like several tracks tonight, resurrects the appeal of Avril Lavigne’s bratty yet melodically gifted pop punk. Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl, a vulnerable song about being socially inept written by a woman who literally performed to 60,000 people at the weekend, maintains the boisterous energy. “Each time I step outside, it’s social suicide,” she belts on an exquisitely slowed-down bridge, and the screaming fans are a sign of how much this sentiment resonates with a generation that came of age during a global lockdown.

If there’s a flaw in this concert’s opening 30 minutes, it’s that each song feels so momentous you begin to worry that Rodrigo is blitzing through all her biggest hitters too soon. The Beatles-esque opening chords of her magnum opus Vampire are unleashed as early as song three, and the deafening, fresh-voiced singalong is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Rodrigo is known for her two distinct operating modes – heartbreaking piano ballads or up-tempo rock anthems – but on Vampire she somehow does both, those piano chords eventually giving way to a galloping, breathlessly anthemic middle eight that duly tears the roof off Co-op Live. There’s barely time to catch your breath before a spine-tingling rendition of breakout hit Drivers License, its famously monumental bridge now beefed up with some gutsy distorted power chords. At the climax when she sings “I still fucking love you, babe!” even the parents are singing and pointing along, swept away by the glorious melodrama of it all.

Inevitably, all these exhilarating stadium rock songs can only last so long, but this concert’s soft centre of tasteful ballads is no less delicious. Traitor gets the biggest singalong, but more interesting is the luscious, technicolour production of Lacy, or the vocal theatrics of The Grudge, in which Rodrigo somehow makes the soaring finale look easy to sing. She is clearly playing up to the crowd when she promises some “extra songs just for you” with false spontaneity, but no one is complaining when All I Want kicks into gear with its jubilant chorus melody and rousing strings section. A song written for Disney’s High School Musical TV spin-off which Rodrigo starred in, it’s certainly got a distinct HSM flavour to it – which is to say, of course, it’s a total banger.

Deja Vu with its ingenious lopsided drum groove closes out the main set, but there are still plenty of treats left for the encore. All-American Bitch is Rodrigo’s finest slice of Lavigne pastiche, and in Manchester that bruising first chorus takes off like a rocket. “I know my age and I act like it,” Rodrigo yelps, leaping across her huge stage before encouraging everyone to scream as loud as they can as the band go quiet for 30 seconds. It’s a typically polished and effective piece of crowd work that proves Rodrigo is just as capable an entertainer as she is singer and songwriter. After headlining Glasto on Sunday and playing another Manchester gig the following night, it’s easy to be sceptical when she claims between songs that she’s not totally knackered, but still “riding the high” from her big weekend. Only by the time she’s climbing some scaffolding and gleefully singing into a mock megaphone during a euphoric closing rendition of Get Him Back! do you begin to believe that her busy schedule really has done nothing to dull the exuberance of her live show.

Perhaps as a small mitigation for the epic wait for this concert (I booked my tickets nearly two years ago), we receive free cardboard posters on the way out, as well as free soft drinks. If Rodrigo continues her current artistic trajectory, this will be a night to brag about to the grandkids in the distant future: “I saw Olivia Rodrigo back in the day, you know!”. It all makes the eye-watering ticket price seem worth it. Well, almost.