Live Review | Katy Perry | Glasgow SSE Hydro

katy perry13000 fans. 24 songs. Five hair changes. One woman.

I turned to my friend while Icona Pop were jumping around the huge prism shaped stage, bursting with excitement.

“You know I got asked to go and see her in like 2010? It was only a fiver, wish I had now.”

We’d bought the cheap seats, which in Glasgow’s SSE Hydro are not very cheap at all.

I was about to see Katy Perry. And I will put it out there right now, I love Katy Perry and have done for a good five years. My tummy was squirming, my feet were twitching and my eyes were bubbling.

I might have been right at the back but the venue provided a brilliant view, I was about to get a full and undisturbed view of one of history’s most successful female pop artist.

The superstar emerged from a prism to present the boisterous crowd with just that, the prism segment of the show.

The first hair style was a slicked back pony tail with neon lights through it, with a matching crop top and skirt, trimmed with the neon. Opening with Roar, she didn’t just sing; she danced, she ran, she smiled and she was full of energy. She performed.

She padded this section out with two favourites that weren’t performed on her California Dreams tour, Wide Awake and Part of me. And then pulling it back to The Prismatic World Tour, she performed This Moment and Love Me, wrapped in one neat little package.

Then came the Cleopatra hair-do. She appeared on a golden horse, which moved around the stage with her on it. And of course, she emerged on this statue to Dark Horse. Then came ET, and an elevated wire cage which acrobats dangled and danced from without any harness. Katy was then lifted up (unfazed) with the set while she was still singing.

Kitty Purry had to make an appearance at some point… And she did. She performed a jazz version of Hot N Cold followed by International Smile on a giant ball of string while her backing dancers did their thing on giant cat toys.

By 10 O’clock it felt like an appropriate time for ‘story time’. Singing the likes of By the Grace of God, Unconditionally and The One That Got Away. I was taken back to the scenes of her documentary Part of Me, when she was going through her divorce. I could be assuming and be totally wrong, but the songs were so emotional that the base of my back was tingling and the hairs on my arm were standing on end and it just seemed like Katy was capable of time travel and she was taking the whole audience with her to the harder times in her life.

But reminding us we were in the presence of the California Candy Queen, she sipped on a beer and burped in to the microphone telling us all she had a gluten allergy, but she wasn’t even sure what gluten was. And I still don’t know. So she handed the beer to a guy in the audience who looked like he had, in her words, been dragged their ‘by his girlfriend.’

And suddenly the candy pink and blue waves changed to bright green bunches for a throw back. Which involved giant poo and taco shaped balloons. But then came the moment I had been waiting for since 2011, it was time for the fifth and final hair change. California Gurls and Teenage Dream were next on the set list.

For her first encore she performed current hit Birthday. And luckily for Matthew in the audience, it was his 21st birthday. He was pulled on-stage by the dancers, popped on to the brightest throw anyone has ever seen and sang to by the star of the show. I was green with envy. Especially when it turned out he thrown was on a platform that started defying gravity and was lifted mid-air.

Her final song was Firework, and she provided so many fireworks. Sparks were flying, fans were screaming and it was way passed my bed time.

It might have been a darker tour, with dashes of colour, sprinklings of sparkle and a lot of personality. But the thing about Katy Perry is that she encapsulates her world in a show. She dreams it up and shares it with you in the most extravagant manor imaginable. And it’s fabulous.




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