KATY PERRY RIDES AN ENORMOUS BUTTERFLY IN A CHAOTIC, WACKY SPECTACLE
Katy Perry has had her work cut out for her rebuilding her reputation as a blockbusting pop star. After a year of spectacularly bad press – from releasing scorned single Woman’s World and its accompanying clumsy album 143 to her tone-deaf trip into space on Bezos’s rocket – she has pulled out all the stops for her new tour, putting on a show that is sky-high in ambition and budget if unnecessarily chaotic.
The 40-year-old didn’t spend much of her performance in Manchester on terra firma either, instead dangling in a series of increasingly impressive flying props above an arena-long runway shaped like the infinity symbol. An eye-wateringly bright screen set up a video game storyline – something about butterflies and AI baddies – before Perry rose from beneath the stage, suspended in a tube of wires looking like a half-dressed C-3PO.
By the second song, Chained To The Rhythm from 2017, she was surrounded by dancers and at her high camp best. The crowd did not appear to share the critical disdain for Woman’s World, which kicked off a second act stuffed with glittering hits from her first two albums: California Gurls, Teenage Dream, Hot N Cold, Last Friday Night, and her 2008 breakthrough I Kissed A Girl. But this section was medley-fied, the tracks unfairly shortened after such a lengthy show preamble.
To rush through such a strong run of hits so early in the night seemed an odd decision. The rest of the show unfolded like a children’s cartoon: overstuffed plot, distracting elements (such as a giant inflatable woman) and the sensory overwhelm of a video game arcade – which kept the numerous young children in the crowd awake, and their parents bewildered.
Perry worked overtime as the main character: sprinting, planking, doing the splits, hanging upside-down from various contraptions, tumbling high above the stage in a harness, fighting giant tentacles with a lightsaber, and shooting smoke from a bionic hand. But it all felt a bit frantic, the audience visibly exhausted by the time Perry entered the stage atop an enormous flapping butterfly – which malfunctioned at one of her US shows in July – for the ear-ringing empowerment of encore songs Roar and Firework.
“No matter what the internet says, this is what’s real,” she declared after disembarking the butterfly, gesturing at the sold-out arena. This tour alone is reported to have made at least $80m so far, and no amount of bad press can detract from the fact that Perry is one of the wealthiest and most successful artists in the world. She doesn’t need stage frippery or space travel to prove that – just better songs.
Touring worldwide until December; katyperry.com
2025-10-09T15:55:46Z