Olivia Dean's first stop on her Australian and New Zealand tour at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne was a powerful, affirming demonstration of pop's ability to get at what love is all about. The 90-minute spectacle, backed by a nine-piece band with a horn section, saw the singer slip into the role of big band leader, arriving backlit and silhouetted against a gauzy, ceiling-high curtain.
A year of milestones
Dean has seemed to be everywhere over the past year: performing on Saturday Night Live, winning best new artist at the Grammys and an armful of Brits, and featuring on the soundtrack to the latest Bridget Jones movie. Her album, The Art of Loving, has produced the No 1 single Man I Need, the multi-platinum-selling Nice to Each Other and So Easy (To Fall in Love), heard in coffee shops, on TikTok videos and Instagram stories of newlyweds.
Her rich, treacly voice has an addictive quality, described as universal and rare. It is the reason she sold out two nights at Rod Laver arena (capacity 14,000), just one year after her last Melbourne show at the 2,000-cap Forum.
Love as a concept
The vanilla curtain served as the literal backdrop for Dean's theatrical vision, with “The Art of Loving, a performance by Olivia Dean” projected on to it as the lights went down. At the show's end, it displayed cinema-style credits naming all the people who worked on the tour.
Dean's career has been dedicated to excavating the concept of love and all its messy effects. The Art of Loving was inspired by a show by the Black American artist Mickalene Thomas, which in turn reflected on bell hooks' All About Love. “This album was about me trying to understand what love really means to me,” Dean told the crowd, paraphrasing hooks: to love another person is to want them to be the best version of themselves.
She urged the crowd to love others outside of who they are to you, and said giving that gift to a lover made her “realise that [she] deserve[s] that too”. The keys kicked in for Let Alone the One You Love, the song she said she wrote the moment that idea clicked: “If you knew me at all / You wouldn't try to keep me small / You wouldn't do that to a friend / Let alone the one you love.”
Feminist undercurrent
The show carried a legitimate feminist undercurrent woven through Dean's work. Her mother, the daughter of a Jamaican-Guyanese immigrant, gave her the middle name Lauryn – as in Hill – and is the former deputy leader of the Women's Equality Party.
Dean's show, for all its modern reinterpretations of soul, jazz and R&B, did not slip into pastiche or surface-level retro winks. It was as affirming as it was fun, and she was as silly as she was sincere and clever. Olivia Dean's Australia and New Zealand tour continues until 17 October.
