Meeting the Queen.

As you may have noticed by now, this film/footballer/food/whatever it is that I actually blog about blogger has an insane girlcrush on Miss Lana del Rey. I just adore her, I think she’s flawless, and her songs incredibally haunting and beautiful. I was fortunate enough to win tickets to Lovebox, held last weekend, of which she performed on the Sunday gig. And my my, she was incredible.

Lana has been criticized for being a poor performer live in the flesh, and from her rocky start on Blue Jeans, I can now see that 90% of that comes from nerves. As she first came on looking beautiful in a simple but effective combination of apricot blouse and skirt and converse trainers, you could tell she was panic stricken. But the trendy east London crowd in Victoria Park, rife with hipsters for whom Lana del Rey is exactly their cuppa tea, adored her, and we enthusiastically chanted her name throughout, which you could see totally built up her confidence. As such, her rendition of Born to Die was better than that of Blue Jeans and she truly reached her zenith on her most famous Video Games, which she sang beautifully. Furthermore, I detected a cheeky smirk on her face as she sang “I’m in his favourite sundress, watching me get undressed, take that body downturn”, so it’s not unlikely that she was having a fleeting moment of nostalgia at the man and the moment that inspired that lyric.

Disappointingly for me, she didn’t perform Off to the Races or This is What Makes us Girls, which are my two favourite songs from her, and I would have loved to see her deliver live. However, her performances of Summertime Sadness and Million Dollar Man more than made up for it. In the former, she belted it out with gusto as well as giving a truly melodic rendition of the “think I’ll miss you forever” refrain, which I never appreciated before but now cannot get enough of, and when she sang Million Dollar Man, she transformed into an incredible sultry jazz singer and gave the song such a blues vibe that it wouldn’t be out of place in a downturn club in Brooklyn somewhere. Overall, having watched my goddess reach glacial heights up close and personal, I can safely say that she is no fraud. She has satisfied my thirst, and then some. Lana del Rey IS my Rey. <3

(Lovebox was an incredible experience, other highs included the Goddess Grace Jones hula hooping as she sang, and Patrick Woolf's sublime energy. T'riffic times.)