“If you’re looking for a saviour, that’s not me,” Lorde sings, wide-eyed and solemn. She clutches her microphone to her chest like a bridal bouquet. A sharp-suited band stand behind her, fanned out like a veil. Conspiratorially, she cracks a grin.
The New Zealand pop star spends much of her strikingly theatrical two-hour show protesting that she’s not, in fact, “the leader of a new regime”. Edinburgh’s smitten audience doesn’t believe her. Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s fans have been fervent since her pithy, precocious debut, 2013’s Pure Heroine; 2017’s bruising, vivid Melodrama only deepened that devotion.
