Olivia Dean review – a powerful, affirming night with a pop star at the height of her powers

‘There’s something addictive about her rich, treacly voice’: Olivia Dean. Photograph: Lola MansellView image in fullscreen‘There’s something addictive about her rich, treacly voice’: Olivia Dean. Photograph: Lola MansellReviewOlivia Dean review – a powerful, affirming night with a pop star at the height of her powersRod Laver Arena, MelbourneThe singer’s first stop on her Australia and New Zealand tour is a fun but sincere demonstration of the power of pop to get at what love’s all about

It’s so easy to fall in love with Olivia Dean. It seems as if she has been everywhere this past year: performing on Saturday Night Live, winning best new artist at the Grammys and an armful of Brits, on the soundtrack to the latest Bridget Jones movie. Even before I had pressed play on her smash album, The Art of Loving, I’d heard so many of its songs – the No 1 single Man I Need, the multi-platinum-selling Nice to Each Other and So Easy (To Fall in Love) – in coffee shops, on TikTok videos of girls cleaning their houses and Instagram stories of newlyweds doing their first dance.

There’s something addictive about her rich, treacly voice. It’s universal, the kind of rare substance you want to give your grandma a bump of because you know she’d enjoy it just as much. It’s the reason she has sold out two nights at Rod Laver arena (capacity 14,000), the first stop on the Australian leg of her world tour, just one year after her last Melbourne show at the 2,000-cap Forum.

Read moreDean convincingly slips into the role of big band leader throughout the 90-minute spectacle. Backlit and silhouetted against a gauzy, ceiling-high curtain as she arrives for Nice to Each Other, she appears every bit the diva. Backed by a nine-piece band complete with horn section and her very own Dreamgirls, her bouncy curls take a starring role as pink lights reflect off disco balls and the sequins on her dress.

As well as giving the impression we’re cocooned somewhere between a living room and a very glamorous casino ballroom, the vanilla curtain is the literal backdrop for Dean’s theatrical vision. “The Art of Loving, a performance by Olivia Dean” projects on to it as the lights go down. At show’s end, it has cinema-style credits, naming all the people who worked on the tour; a lovely touch.

Every pop star might write about yearning, romance, infatuation and heartbreak, but what Dean has dedicated her career to is excavating the very concept of love and all its messy effects. Don’t get me wrong – she’s well-versed in the break-up anthem too. I don’t wish heartbreak on any 27-year-old, but if it might inspire more songs like A Couple Minutes, I might be tempted to send every toxic fuckboy her way.

The Art of Loving was inspired by a show by the Black American artist Mickalene Thomas that in turn was a reflection on bell hooks’ All About Love. “This album was about me trying to understand what love really means to me,” Dean tells the crowd in Melbourne, paraphrasing a passage from hooks: to love another person is to want them to be the best version of themselves. Love them outside of who they are to you, she urges the crowd.

But don’t stop there. Giving that gift to a lover made her “realise that [she] deserve[s] that too”. The keys kick in for Let Alone the One You Love, the song Dean says she wrote the moment that idea clicked: “If you knew me at all / You wouldn’t try to keep me small / You wouldn’t do that to a friend / Let alone the one you love.”

I’m not all that interested in chat about artists as role models and good examples, mostly because of the way they imply young fans are so blinded by idolatry they can’t think for themselves. But this is one of the many times during the show I’m struck by the power of one of pop’s biggest names proselytising to more than 10,000 (mostly) young women about the vital need to not give yourself over to another person, to pour the same effort and attention into friends and family and yourself and to not let romantic affection twist you into something unrecognisable.

There’s a very legitimate feminist undercurrent to Dean’s work that is woven through this show. Her mother, the daughter of a Jamaican Guyanese immigrant, gave her the middle name Lauryn – as in Hill – and is the former deputy leader of the Women’s Equality party. You get the sense Dean’s feminism is sure enough to withstand follow-up questions.

It also ensures her show, for all its modern reinterpretations of soul, jazz and R&B, doesn’t slip into pastiche or surface-level retro winks. It’s as affirming as it is fun, and she’s just as silly as she is sincere and clever. If this isn’t an artist at the height of her powers, we all better duck for cover.

Olivia Dean’s Australia and New Zealand tour continues until 17 October