The Weeknd tour breaks records

Canadian singer The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye) is on the European leg of the tour in support of the albums “After Hours” (2020) and “Dawn FM” (2022). After last year’s concerts in the USA, he redesigned the sets and costumes, replacing the gloomy post-apocalyptic heaviness with an upbeat rave-futurism. This summer it became known that his tour became the most profitable tour of a black artist in history, and the singer himself surpassed his idol Michael Jackson in concert earnings. At the concert of The Weeknd at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona visited Igor Gavrilov.

If in 2022 the main part of the scenery, in the development of which the Russian company Power of Light took part, was the flaming ruins of a metropolis and a video projection located behind them, then in the new version of the show, skyscrapers have become prettier – now it’s just a nickel-cast silhouette of a big city behind which there is no screen. The show has a longitudinal podium, which is also a runway, along which the singer moves from the stage towards the huge “moon” suspended on cables and the square “second stage”.

The show on this “After Hours Till Dawn Tour” differs from last year’s tour not only in terms of scenery. Now The Weeknd is on stage all in white. His image retains a touch of infernality through a mask that fans remember from the “How Do I Make You Love Me” video, which evokes chilling associations with the image of the late rapper MF Doom. The gloomy tension on the podium is added by the movements of extras from the “Bedouins” in loose clothes.

In the middle of the show, The Weeknd takes off his mask and remains until the very end in the form of a glorious and not at all dangerous mass entertainer, who not only dances, but waddles around the giant scenery, winding up one or the other part of the stadium, where there are only 70 thousand seats. If it suddenly occurs to someone to correlate today’s The Weeknd with his hero in the recent TV series “Idol” (see “Kommersant” on July 5), this will be a mistake. The character on stage is the exact opposite of both the demonic Tedros at the beginning of the series and his pathetic opposite at the end. On the After Hours Till Dawn Tour, The Weeknd is sweet and good-natured, like a teddy bear or a penguin from a children’s party.

At the same time, it should be noted that the singer’s audience is far from being for children and youth. The Kommersant correspondent saw many spectators over fifty at the stadium who sang along to every song. After all, The Weeknd is one of the most rotated artists on the radio. You could often catch yourself on the fact that songs such as “Can`t Feel My Face”, “Starboy”, “I Feel It Coming”, “Call Out My Name” and “Less Than Zero” pop up in your memory from the first notes, but are not immediately associated specifically with this person. You mentally ask yourself: “Is this also him?” The Weeknd’s hits are the fabric of the air, a universal pop product that meets both the requirements of radio stations and the tastes of different generations of listeners. They have very strong echoes of the music of the past.

Fashionable electro in the spirit of Daft Punk in the 2000s, with whom The Weeknd collaborated a lot, endless nods to Michael Jackson and Prince in vocal arrangements, ABBA’s carelessness in “Less Than Zero”, characteristic Eurodisco keyboard moves in “In Your Eyes” and, of course, the structure of the main hit “Blinding Lights” borrowed from a-ha – all this suggests that The Weeknd’s phenomenon is based on conquests of his idols.

In the most exciting elements of the scenography, he is also not original. The statue of a “gynoid” girl, which seems to be about to soar up, is not the first time show business has used the works of Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama. For The Weeknd, this image first appeared in the video for the song “Echoes Of Silence”, but before that, Sorayama’s motives were willingly used, for example, by Aerosmith (album “Just Push Play”, 2001), Alex Garland (film “Ex Machina”, 2014) and George Lucas (compilation “Star Wars Art Concept”, 2014).

Luminous pixel bracelets, which all spectators receive at the entrance to the stadium, become a powerful tool for universal unity when they begin to blink and shimmer in the right places in the songs. This technology is best known from Coldplay concerts, which became its main promoters.

Finally, the incomprehensible effect of spotlights breaking in the sky, a kind of “stopped light”, is a trick known to the author of these lines since the days of U2’s “PopMart Tour”.

The Weeknd, like a grown-up child, collected favorite toys in his show – neon pop soul of the 1980s, futuristic erotica from teenage dreams, rave with lights and space travel. Speaking in recent interviews about a possible departure from the scene, or at least the cessation of performances under the name The Weeknd, on stage Abel Tesfaye does not give a single hint of fatigue. Judging by the concerts, he was not at all tired of playing with the public.