Etihad Stadium, Manchester
With a fire-belching, robot-enhanced stage show and 33 songs dispatched in two hours, Abel Tesfaye turns his jaded libertine image inside out with good old-fashioned thrills
The Weeknd’s 2023 stadium tour – postponed so many times that its title features not just the name of his most recent album, Dawn FM, but its 2020 predecessor, After Hours – is nothing if not spectacular.
The set is a vast metallic cityscape, filled with ruined landmarks – St Paul’s Cathedral, Toronto’s CN Tower and the Empire State Building among them – which belch out fire or shoot violet-coloured lasers above the crowd at strategic moments. But most of the action takes place on a runway thatstretches nearly the full length of the Etihad Stadium’s pitch, which also belches out fire at strategic moments, and comes illuminated by dozens of spotlights that either point skywards or focus on the audience, illuminating huge sections of the stands, which are already illuminated by the crowd themselves, equipped with Coldplay-inspired flashing wristbands on arrival. The walkway is decorated with an immense moon dangling over its far end and an even more immense model of the Hajime Sorayama-designed robot featured in the video for 2011’s Echoes of Silence. The song doesn’t feature in the setlist, but no matter: the model slowly rotates, shoots coloured lights from its eyes, and provides a focal point around which dancers, clad in white robes and veils that look not unlike Tuareg tagelmusts, move in slow concentric circles.