After a punishing two years for the live music industry, pop shows returned with full force in 2022, with many of the world’s top-tier stars jostling to see their fans in a live setting once again. Punters have been faced with an embarrassment of riches, from Harry Styles’ multi-night US arena residencies to Charli XCX’s Grecian rave fantasia to Dua Lipa’s Studio 54-esque disco spectacular.
But even if you couldn’t afford the higher-than-ever price tags for big pop shows – the result of a significant labour shortage and the need for artists to recoup losses after two years without touring – it was also easier than ever, in 2022, to experience shows from afar. The year’s most-talked about tours – Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball, Lorde’s Solar Power tour, Rosalía for Motomami and the 1975’s At Their Very Best – felt as though they were designed to be shared on social media, with clips from each show proving inescapable on TikTok and Twitter.
Each night of Gaga’s tour trended on Twitter; each new 1975 show has led to a flood of new footage of frontman Matty Healy doing all manner of outrageous things from kissing fans to eating raw meat. For fans watching online, the beats of each show became as indelible as the actual hits.
Tobias Rylander, who designed the 1975’s tour, says he’s always trying to put together “a show that reads well on social media”. Over his time working with the band over the past decade, he says, his designs have become increasingly “Instagram-ready” – the band’s previous tour, for example, featured vertical screens, “so people could actually hold their phone the way they wanted to and take pretty pictures.” Rylander even says that he tries to design shows “so that any fans googling or YouTubing the show will be able to tell, by the colour of the thumbnail, what year it was and what song it was”.
For the 1975 At Their Very Best tour, Rylander and the band wanted to highlight the performers onstage – a shift from the bright LED screens and coloured lights of past shows – so he instead conceptualised a house set lit in white, like a theatre production. Part of this was due to Covid: Rylander says that because lighting technology, trucks and crews are “twice, if not three times” more expensive than pre-pandemic, “we couldn’t afford the big, expensive tech lights”. Rylander and the band were also conscious of their environmental impact, and the house set allowed them to build a show with few bespoke parts that would have to be shipped from continent to continent. Instead, the set is largely built of steel and aluminium, and has created “minimal landfill waste”. Still, one thing didn’t change: “We wanted the set to read well on camera, both moving image and still.”
Rylander isn’t the only designer keeping fan footage in mind when working with pop stars. LeRoy Bennett, a lighting and production designer who works extensively with Lady Gaga, as well as Paul McCartney, Ariana Grande and the Weeknd, says that he and Gaga were “absolutely” thinking about social media when designing the Chromatica Ball. “I take that approach quite a bit because social media has become such a big part of the world,” he says.
When conceptualising the Chromatica Ball, Bennett was drawn to the “stark, strong, harsh” world of brutalist architecture; the resulting show featured a dramatic grey set bright enough to be perfectly captured for social media and neutral enough for Gaga’s outlandish outfits to stand in stark relief. “The people way at the back have to see the artist – so when you light an artist, you have to pretty much do what you would do for a television show,” he says. “It’s a combination of theatre and TV, and a rock show and a pop show. It lends itself to that social media-friendly atmosphere.”
The clean, dynamic design of the Chromatica Ball is mirrored in the sets of Rosalía, the 1975 and Lorde. Rosalía performs on a brightly lit white backdrop against which she and her dancers dance and scoot around the stage. Lorde’s show is architectural and geometric – and plainly striking enough for one fan to get a tattoo of the show’s bold centrepiece.
All four shows look great on TikTok. In Rosalía’s, the gigantic vertical screens on each side the stage outright mimic the video-sharing app’s interface. Phones are situated around the stage for her musicians and dancers to broadcast to the screens throughout the show, with certain moments – selfie videos with fans taken from high-up, a spare ballad with a phone propped against the piano lid as she plays – echoing the familiar visual formatting and intimacy of popular videos on the platform.
Chiara Stephenson, a stage designer who has worked with Björk and the xx, and who worked on Lorde’s tour, describes herself as a “theatre creature” – she trained under Michael Grandage and Christopher Oram – and says she wanted to bring a “theatrical sensibility” to the Solar Power shows. Unlike Bennett and Rylander, Stephenson says that she wasn’t thinking about social media when working on the tour, despite the telegenic setup. “With the amount of people coming to see the show over the months, you can’t get away with it just being aesthetic,” she says. “What [Lorde] is doing is so rooted and grounded in the music that the law for us was: what’s enhancing the music? What’s telling a story?”
Lorde’s intention, she says, was to step away from the gargantuan LED screens that are often standard in pop shows and return to something more analogue, but still distinctive. “I’m most excited, when you’re in an arena or theatre, feeling the three-dimensionality of the light coming through whatever the sculpture or design is on stage,” Stephenson says. “That’s something you can’t ever really capture – I’m delighted that it photographed well, but that wasn’t the guiding reason.”
Even so, it’s undeniable that many of the year’s most viral moments on TikTok were derived from live shows this year: Rosalía elaborately chewing gum during her song Bizcochito, Healy relentlessly touching his crotch, Gaga belting a power ballad while wearing an Edward Scissorhands-style claw and standing on a flaming stage.
Perhaps these moments are reverse-engineered to go viral or, perhaps, fans are just sharing more content than they used to, thrilled to be back in arenas and metres away from their heroes. “Doing shows after all this time, it’s a joyous moment for the audience,” says Bennett. “People always want to go to see live entertainment. I mean – you can only watch so much TV.”