Rihanna took over the centre of Cardiff to begin the British leg of her Diamonds world tour.

 The Millennium Stadium’s retractable roof had been closed and there was a feverish atmosphere as gangs of women in tight skirts and towering heels made their way along closed-off streets into the gloom of the vast enclosure. The crowd, estimated at 65,000, was rewarded with a show not short of big pop hits and blockbuster routines, but which still managed to seem quite grimy and edgy at times.
Rihanna, 25, is touring to promote her latest multimillion-selling album Unapologetic, and if ever a title summed up the ethos of an artist this is it.
The Barbadian superstar’s style of presentation has become so casually lascivious that the outcome of the performance seemed to depend as much on the flexibility of her pelvis as her larynx.
She wore a succession of revealing outfits, including one which on first glance looked like white trousers, but turned out to be white boots which ended in the upper thigh region. In another skintight ensemble, it looked under the lights as if she was wearing nothing but some strategically placed strips of gaffer tape.
Along with the grinding pole-dance moves and the self-fondling, which has turned into something of a nervous tic these days, she sang songs of brash self-assertion. “She may be the queen of hearts/But I’m-a-be the queen of your body parts,” she explained to a lover in Cockiness (Love it), a song with a dark, sleazy, hip-hop groove cranked out with a combination of boom and swagger by her versatile band and backing vocalists. There were dancers and the odd pyrotechnic effect here and there, but very little that succeeded in wrenching attention away from the star of the show.
Her voice combined sexual yearning with pneumatic certainty, and whatever else you might say about Rihanna or her music it was not bland. She hid some of her hits, including an unusually subdued Umbrella, in the middle of the show or strung them together in a cathartic burst towards the end. As the band unleashed the tumultuous house groove of We Found Love, Rihanna descended to the floor and glad-handed fans pressed against the barriers at the front. She ended with two of her biggest and most recent hits: a strikingly soulful version of Stay followed. 

Categories: