Truly the teenage girls of Britain are enjoying a golden period of pop festivity. As Justin Bieber is still precipitating a squally front amongst his tweenie fans across UK arenas, their older sisters are getting their share of caffeinated screaming in to salute the arrival of Katy Perry. Yet, while the Canadian heart-throb is filling arenas with his mere pint-size presence, kooky American Perry is giving infinitely more bang for her fans’ bucks.
Her California Dreams tour is less of a pop concert and more of a megawatt jukebox musical. Aesthetically borrowing from Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Perry performs on a stage littered with giant fairy cakes and lollipops and threads her songs together with a film story that involves ogreish butchers, lost cats, dodgy brownies and the quest for a handsome baker boy. Along the way Perry changes costumes more often than Mr Benn, often on stage, and sometimes several times during the course of one song. The effect is dazzling but strangely exhausting – I haven’t felt this tired since watching the musical version of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
The David LaChapelle high-kitsch aesthetic is perfect for Perry whose doe-eyed cuteness makes her look like a Japanese anime character come-to-life and as a performer, she seems to share more in common with old-style comic actresses like Lucille Ball rather than street-cool pop contemporaries like Rihanna. The 26-year-old has a solid, muscular voice, well suited to the soft-rock operatics of her breakthrough hit I Kissed a Girl but exposed on a cover of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody as lacking delicacy or suppleness.
Perry is a charming hostess though, sharing her love of British TV like My Big Fat Gipsy Wedding and The Only Way is Essex, picked up from her husband, comedian Russell Brand, and even extorting the audience to listen to Morrissey and the Cure. But just as Perry comes across as more Barbara Windsor than Betty Page, so her adoring audience, when invited to invade the stage, turn out to be much younger than the tone of Perry’s more adult references suggest.
The glitz and glamour of her show does however, paper over the lack of range in Perry’s songs, with most of her latest hits rammed into the finale. Belting out her biggest song with a chorus line of high-kicking ginger bread men, Firework seems to sum up Perry pretty well- colourfully entertaining in the moment but doesn’t leave much of a trace.