Desperate, erotic and Stomp: Billie Eilish sets Bologna

On “Therefore I AM” gigantic flames sprout behind Billie Eilish, directly from the two holes where the musicians of his band play, who no longer put the pens, on the two sides of the rectangular stage. Framed by the cameras, which show the first floor live on the giant screens that surmount the structure, the US pop star has an almost luciferino look, as a the hooligan one: that of those who have just combined something serious, and know it. Do you know “Disaster Girl”, the meme of that little girl who smiles at the camera lens while behind her a whole house goes on fire? Here, Billie seems more or less like that. The show at the Unipolarena in Bologna, the only Italian date of the “Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour” that is seeing the singer -songwriter Losangelina presenting all over the world the homonymous album released last year, started from a handful of minutes, but the atmosphere is already very hot. Like her. And as well as his audience, who was waiting for the return of the voice of “Bad Guy” to Italy for six years.

The last time he passed to our country with one of his tour was 2019. The tour was the one linked to the debut album, “When We all Fall Asleep, where do we go?”, Which had come out a few months before that performance on the stage of the Milan Rocks festival at the Expo area during which I danced he was injured in an ankle, he stopped the concert, he was brought to the backstage, Except then return to the fans and finish the session show. In 15 thousand they sent sold out in three minutes the tickets for the Bolognese appointment when they were put on sale, in May last year, and now they are finally ready to embrace their darling: many of them slept for four days in the tent, outside the Palasport, to be the first to run under the stage at the time of opening the gates. When Eilish, which opens the show by sprouting from a platform hidden inside a cube placed in the center of the stage at 360 degrees, designed to allow everyone to fully enjoy the show thanks to an “immersive scenography” regardless of where they were sitting, it finishes singing “Therefore i”, from the parterre thousands of sheets rise. It is written “We miss you”, “we missed”. “Hi Guys, I love you so much”, “Hello guys, I love you very much”, she smiles, tank top and basketball shoes, shorts, socks to the knees and a hat on your head with “Yankee” written. He explains to the boys what he is about to do: he will sing some chapel melodies that he will then sample using a loop station, creating the base on which to perform with the next song in the lineup, that “When the party’s over” which was one of the strong pieces of “When we all fall asleep, where do we go?”, The dazzling record debut of 2019: he asks the fans of the fans. Delicate task of autocampiona, before lying on stage and thus venting his wicks.

Self -confident, after all, he was also at the time: he would not survive otherwise. But at 23 years of age the star who redefined pop, influencing those raw, li-fi, bedroom productions, an entire generation of colleagues and colleagues, proves to have even more mastery than their vehicles. On the stage of the Unipolana in Bologna it shows all its facets. There is the most desperate billie of “The Greatest”, “Your Power” (he makes it in acoustic, accompanying himself to the guitar, while the ground of the stage comes alive with a visual of a snake, the same that in the video of the song contained in the second album “Happier Than Ever” it strangled it), “Ocean Eyes” and that “What Was I Made for?” With which last year he played Barbie’s existential crisis in the film by Greta Gerwig, who basically was also a bit his, winning the second Oscar at the “Best Song” after the one conquered with “No Time to Die”. There is the most erotic billie, the one that in “Lunch” says she wants to “eat a girl” and to want to make her dance on her language (there is little to interpret) and “Bad Guy”. And then there is the Billie STOMP version, the one that unleashes and unleashes on pressing rhythms and heavy beats, such as on “Ilomilo”, “bury a friend” and of the virtual duet with charli xcx on “Guess”, with laser rays that color the Bolognese Palasport of that acid green that became the symbolic color of the “Brat era”: it pays homage to the colleague, Jump, from under a trap door directly on a small stage detached from the central one, where he then returns, enjoying the crowd bath, escorted properly from safety.

It remains stunned when the audience dedicates the inevitable “you are beautiful” by Loredana Berté – will not take it out this time again, like last year with Taylor Swift? – If only because he does not understand what is happening, but despite this he refers the melody with his vowels, or at least tries. On “Happier Than Ever” he smears the electric guitar and while vented in a scream – in unison with 15 thousand – the anger linked to the love disappointment that inspired the song of the gigantic flames return to overheat the space around her and her musicians. The show lasts an hour and a half: “Singing for three hours is by psychopaths,” she said recently, and who knows that her ears are not whistled in Bruce Springsteen. He takes leave with that “Birds of a feather” who has become fully became one of his greatest hits and while an explosion of confetti displaces the fans she sends kisses here and there and says: “See you next time”.

Scaletta:
“Chihiro”
“Lunch”
“NDA”
“Therefore I am”
“Wildflower”
“When the party’s over”
“The Diner”
“Ilomilo”
“Bad Guy”
“The Greatest”
“Your Power”
“Skinny”
“Halley’s Comet”
“Bittersuite Transition”
“Bury a friend”
“Oxyctin”
“Guess”
“Everything I Wanted”
“Blue/Lovely/Blue Verse/Ocean Eyes”
“L’amour de ma vie”
“What was i made for”
“Happier Than Ever”
“Birds of a feather”