Sabrina Carpenter plays her biggest show yet at BST Hyde Park
The pop star helped curate two days at the festival with women only.
Photo: Jordan Hughes and Alfredo Flores
Keeping with the theme of the past two weeks, Sabrina Carpenter is the next artist to join previous headliners Olivia Rodrigo and Noah Kahan in telling the audience this is her “biggest show to date”. I mean, there were 60,000 people in attendance. You’d do well to beat that. Deservedly so, of course — anyone who headlines BST Hyde Park truly deserves to be here.
The thing about Sabrina is that she’s a hit machine; you’d be hard-pressed to find a dull moment throughout her set. Even in slower tracks, because i liked a boy or Couldn’t Make It Any Harder, she still shines like the huge pop star she has so rightfully become. It’s difficult to imagine that there once was a time when she was playing Maya Hart on Disney’s Girl Meets World and not performing to thousands in a sequinned number with ‘Sabrina’ aptly splayed across her chest.
Before the main event, Sabrina had chosen beabadoobee and Clairo to warm up the stage before her, with both of them no strangers to a British crowd.
Despite having one of the best albums of 2024 with Charm, Clairo’s soft, sultry sounds weren’t massively well-received by the audience dressed in babydoll dresses, cowboy hats, bows and sequins — clearly here to see a pop extravaganza, and not here for Clairo’s slow-tempo sonics calming us all down before the theatrics. I could blame it on their age — put it down to immaturity — but the number of adults sat talking through someone’s set shows it truly is universal.
With an hour between Clairo and Sabrina, it’s clear why: Sabrina’s stage set-up is so intricate and well thought out that they really do need that long to set it all up, with an ‘SC’ hung from above and white platforms rolled onto the stage.
Ten minutes late, naturally, Sabrina bursts onto stage in a puff of smoke to kick things off with Busy Woman, a track taken from the deluxe version of Short n’ Sweet, released this year alongside four other tracks, including a new version of Please Please Please with none other than Country icon Dolly Parton.
Photo: Jordan Hughes and Alfredo Flores
Taste follows, and the crowd react exactly how you expect, before the catchy Good Graces leaves us wanting more, but Slim Pickins arrives to slow us down and give us time to get our breaths back.
It’s time for the new single, Manchild, that ushers in a new era, with another album due out in August (are album cycles getting a lot shorter now or is it just me?).
One of the best on Short n’ Sweet, Coincidence is the perfect choice to follow into Sabrina changing up Sharpest Tool and performing it acoustically instead.
Tracks from 2022 album emails i can’t send, such as because i liked a boy, Nonsense and Feather have their own shining moments, despite the lack of Read Your Mind, which would’ve translated effortlessly live.
She introduces a cover with, “The first thing I do when I come to London is check the Weather app,” before bursting into It’s Raining Men by The Weather Girls, with it not being the first time she’s made the song her own.
Fan favourites Juno and Please Please Please lead to the pop star climbing into a moving crane for the penultimate track Don’t Smile, the lyrics, “Don’t smile because it happened, baby, cry because it’s over,” seeming even more poignant now as she waves at fans while hovering above the audience. She’s brave, I’ll give her that.
When it came down to the last song, we all knew what to expect, and the night was left on the right note with an energetic performance of the song of Summer 2024: Espresso.
Long may she reign.
Setlist:
Busy Woman
Taste
Good Graces
Slim Pickins
Manchild
Coincidence
Sharpest Tool
because i liked a boy
It’s Raining Men (cover)
Nonsense
Couldn’t Make It Any Harder
Feather
Bed Chem
Juno
Please Please Please
Don’t Smile
Espresso
