Chappell Roan’s Reading Festival Headline Set: Best Moments

Roan’s album is a sleeper hit filled with sleeper hits: “Pink Pony Club” reached No. 1 on the U.K.’s Official Singles Chart this March, nearly five years after its initial release. At this point, it should feel as though The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess has been fully mined, but somehow the album still contains semi-buried treasure. During her set, the vampy dance-pop banger “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” and sleek neo-disco heater “After Midnight” sounded like hits in waiting. Given Roan’s unique career trajectory, don’t be surprised if either ends up getting a belated chart moment.

Since Roan’s chart breakthrough with last year’s “Good Luck, Babe!,” a shimmering synth-pop gem that doesn’t appear on her album, she has released two further new songs: the rambunctious country-pop stomper “The Giver” and regretful dream-pop ballad “The Subway.” Each was a highlight — no surprise given they’re already regulars in her live set and “The Subway” debuted at No.1 on the U.K.’s Official Singles Chart just two weeks ago. In a recent interview with Vogue, Roan said her “second [album] project doesn’t exist yet” and warned fans to expect a wait: “It took me five years to write the first one, and it’s probably going to take at least five to write the next.” On this very early evidence, it’ll be worth it.

“We’re gonna teach you a dance,” Roan announced midway through her set. “We’re gonna spell ‘Hot to Go!’” The song’s “Y.M.C.A.”-style armography is hardly complicated, but it still presented a challenge to 90,000 Brits who’d been partying in the sun all day. Still, watching crowd members trying to keep in time was an unexpectedly touching moment that captured the giddy sense of fun that Roan encourages. In her hands, even a show of this scale felt like a playful safe space.

Roan has branded her summer festival run the Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things Tour a title reflected in its gothic fairytale visuals — at this show, the singer was literally the queen of her own stage-filling castle. Her often theatrical performance reached a surreal high point when Roan sang “Coffee” sitting on a giant throne while clutching a gremlin-style toy. At Primavera Sound festival in June, Roan introduced this cute critter as her new “pet,” who is named Shigella. This time, she didn’t explain why little Shigella shares its name with a bacteria that can cause severe stomach upsets. The mystery deepens…

As her all-female band blasted out the opening chords of “Red Wine Supernova,” a song Roan has called her “gay girl version” of Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova,” she gave the crowd an instruction: “If you have something pink, put it in the air!” They obliged by turning the Reading field into a sea of pink cowboy hats, a galvanising moment that highlighted the campy femme energy of a Roan brings to the stage. For early adopters, it was a reminder of previous U.K. live shows where she set dress-up themes such as “Midwest Princess” and “Naked in Manhattan.”

Chappell ended her 85-minute set with a sort of deep cut sandwich: two of her biggest hits, “Good Luck, Babe!” and “Pink Pony Club,” with a slightly less familiar song in the middle: the vengeful midtempo “My Kink Is Karma.” It was a surprising sequencing choice that paid off when portions of the crowd began pogoing to its explosive chorus. It surely helped that Roan set the tone by dedicating the song to “my ex who is in the crowd tonight.” Ouch.

Ending with “Pink Pony Club” was a masterstroke, not least because Roan had the stage bathed in dazzling magenta light for the occasion. This transcendent power-pop banger captured everything that made her such a compelling presence tonight: rock dynamics, a starburst pop chorus, soaring vocals, and distinctive lyrics drawn from her queer coming-of-age story. Roan was dropped by her first record label in August 2020, four months after “Pink Pony Club” dropped and failed to take off. Now, five years later, the same song was being hollered back to her by 90,000 wildly excited fans.