Piled into Hyde Park are 65,000 fans (or Blinks, if you’re a purist) decked out in black and pink outfits, ranging from teenagers diligently lining up at the barriers all day to secure their spot, to young girls heading to their first festival, to the parents in tow carrying a pink box after reluctantly parting ways with £65 for a pink heart-shaped hammer, now swinging around in their daughter’s hand.
But they won’t be reluctant for much longer. When BLACKPINK finally take to the stage, it’s slightly later than scheduled but immediately worth the wait. Emerging to the siren call of “Blaaaaack Piiiiiink” from last year’s ‘Pink Venom’, Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa kick in the door, and we’re off. A supercharged run through turbo-banger ‘How You Like That’ and the unmistakably sultry ‘Pretty Savage’, performed on chairs at the end of a runway, signal that the group did not come to play.
As is the norm with BLACKPINK shows, a solos portion shows what each member brings to the table. For Jennie, that’s the good-girl-gone-bad electro-pop of unreleased ‘You & Me’ and 2018’s ‘SOLO’; for Jisoo, it’s the hypnotic, plucky swirl of recent single ‘Flower’.
In an alternative universe, Rosé is a beloved indie-pop starlet with a penchant for the confessional; Lisa, a viral rapper peddling boss bitch anthems. Tonight, those realisations come to life on a stadium-sized scale as they perform their tracks perched on a beam and basking in smoke (Rosé for ‘Gone’) and down the runway with hoards of backing dancers and her own dance break (Lisa for ‘MONEY’).
But it’s when they come together that the magic really happens. Performing both tracks from their double A-side debut – the cheeky, breezy ‘WHISTLE’ and the edgier, braggadocious ‘BOOMBAYAH’ – serves as a reminder BLACKPINK have always had something special, and the hits to match.
K-pop headlining a UK festival has been a long time coming, and there’s no one more up to the task than BLACKPINK. A Korean girl group with a global outlook, the EDM-fuelled tracks that fill the second half of the show and prompt choral chants like ‘Lovesick Girls’ and ‘Playing With Fire’ were built for enormous stages like these and go down a treat now the sun has set.
There’s also the significant effort put into beefing up the already huge tracks for a live performance, playing with a live band and extending intros, outros and dance breaks to allow for costume changes, ensures there’s not even a second of boredom throughout.
By the end of the show, there’s no doubt that BLACKPINK deserve their accolades and the World’s Biggest Girl Group title. An explosive finale of ‘DDU-DU DDU-DU’ and ‘FOREVER YOUNG’ concludes a night of relentless smash hits, and above all, relentless fun. As the final track proclaims, “BLACKPINK is the revolution”, it’s hard to dispute the phrase as the girls break yet another record and tread new ground for K-pop on these shores.
