The forth evening of this years events happened to fall on a Wednesday evening, and the England Football team had decided to make things more difficult than they needed to against DR Congo, but did get the job done towards the end of the support acts, so at least that didn't ruin the evening!
Bea opened up and did enough to hold the crowd's attention, even against the competition from the football. Mimi Webb followed, her comment on the surroundings - "Wow, what a beautiful place to be. Countryside. Well gorge." - probably saying what most people were thinking. Red Flags had the crowd animated, and by the time she came off the grounds were well warmed up.
The setting did a lot of work before Katy Perry had even appeared. Blenheim is hard to ignore, and there is something a bit absurd about an inflatable bottle being staged in the grounds of a Unesco world heritage site, more on that later. Perry made the same observation herself, welcoming everyone to "Winston Churchill's backyard," and it got the laugh it deserved.
The show opened with an Out of Office video, the running theme being some version of switch off and be here. Whether that lands as a message when the screen behind you is the size of a house is a fair question, but nobody seemed to be doing the maths. California Gurls straight into Teenage Dream followed up with Last Friday Night, and the crowd was in from the first chorus. They are big songs, and deserve to be heard in this wonderful setting. The set featured plenty of talking from Perry, including a mention of her trip into space.
The set moved fast and rarely settled. The better production choices included her full crew piling onto the stage for a Heads Will Roll cover, Jedward turning up on the giant laptop screen mid-game ("act sober, Jedward" was well-timed), and an extended AI bit where the on-stage computer started answering back. "Computer, you work for me," she told it, before the whole thing was eventually dismantled. It was chaotic, in a good way. A nice chance for the crew to celebrate the show together.
Thinking of You was done acoustic, with Perry out in the crowd on the end of the runway, and that was one of the quieter moments that actually cut through. A recorded phone call between Perry and her daughter Daisy, played out on screen towards the end, felt less staged than it sounds. She also told the crowd that the outfit she was wearing would be auctioned for her Firework Foundation. She rejected a string of calls from old partners on a giant phone, which the audience lapped up. Later she crowd-surfed through the audience inside a giant inflatable water bottle for I Kissed a Girl, which is not a sentence you expect to write, but accurately describes what happened. And the crowd loved getting that little bit closer!
The set closed with Firework for the encore, and the crowd was still singing along as the lights came up. The mix of spectacle, pop hits and a few quieter moments made for a show that felt like it was made for the space, and for the people there. Walking out through the grounds after the show, it was clear that the evening had hit all the right feels for the audience.
Photo credit: Russ Fujak
