Never mind the songs, feel the spectacle

As Kylie's latest extravaganza tours Britain, Elisa Bray looks at the different ways that the stars put on a show

The spectacular

There could be no more stunning spectacular than Kylie's current Aphrodite: Les Folies tour. Themed around Greek mythology, Kylie's biggest and most expensive world tour to date is reported to have cost £15m and features around 200 costume changes, including those designed by Dolce & Gabbana. In two hours of ornate stage sets, each song seems to be awarded a different set or dance routine, from the pop princess's emergence on a giant gold shell, to her perching on a Pegasus surrounded by scantily clad Centurion dancers. Complete with dancers suspended on a trapeze, and an impressive water-jet finale, the show is a spectacular to match the singer's glossy pop. Such extravagant shows justify the steep price tag that means Kylie fans shell out upward of £65. U2 raised the bar for the stadium rock spectacular with their current 360 Degrees tour, named after its 360-degree staging, and featuring a massive four-legged supporting rig, nicknamed The Claw, which has set a record for largest concert-stage structure, contributing to the tour's £75m cost since it went on the road in 2009.

The shy folk/acoustic performance

Graduates of stage school would have been alarmed to see the shy Laura Marling take to the stage armed with an acoustic guitar, eyes cast down in awkwardness, especially when she started out a few years ago. It may sound like an ill-advised method of performing, but Marling's audiences have never been anything other than enraptured. Her confidence might be felt more today, now that she has two Mercury-nominated albums and a Brit award, but the 21-year-old still favours the understated approach – and to powerful effect. In the acoustic and folk world, a gig is all about the music, captivating a crowd with just the presence on stage with no stage show to serve as a distraction from the delicate finger-picked guitar and focused vocals. When Mercury-nominated singer-songwriter Fionn Regan performed solo, before he veered into rock, whole crowds were spellbound into silence.

Guest stars

No rap or hip-hop show is complete without special guests. Hip-hop heavyweights Jay-Z and Kanye West frequently appear at each other's shows – at Kanye West's SXSW show, his pal and collaborator Jay-Z joined him on stage and the two performed their single "H.A.M.", effortlessly drumming up the crowd's enthusiasm. Dance production duo of the moment Chase and Status are known for frenzied live performances that see the starry vocalist contributors of their albums, including Plan B, Clare Maguire and Tinie Tempah, join them on stage. Gorillaz, too, brought an array of stars on stage when they headlined Glastonbury last year, with Snoop Dogg, Kano, Lou Reed and Shaun Ryder and Mark E Smith. The right choice of special guest is guaranteed to thrill an audience. Kylie's guest appearance was the highlight of the Scissor Sisters' set at last year's Glastonbury, and it has been a regular live favourite when Mumford and Sons bring Laura Marling on stage.

The orchestra and choir collaboration

As record sales continued to drop and live shows became the main source of revenue for bands, we saw a trend for bands doing something more interesting musically live. Cue several rock bands performing alongside orchestras and choirs in classical venues, both crossing genres and bringing their music to a wider concert-going audience. In recent years Elbow have played gigs with the Hallé Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra, both Antony and the Johnsons and Grizzly Bear have performed with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, Efterklang has teamed up with the Britten Sinfonia Orchestra at the Barbican, while Ray Davies has often been backed by the Crouch End Festival Chorus, as he will at the finale of this year's Davies-curated Meltdown festival. It's a trend that seems set to continue, with Owen Pallett announcing a performance of his whole album Heartland with full orchestral accompaniment from the Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican next month.

Theatrics, visuals, film and art

Few bands lend themselves to cinematics as much as Sigur Ros, and Jonsi's solo tour, for his album Go, featured a show that combined theatrical staging and film screening. In collaboration with 59 Productions, he created the dramatic set of a burnt-out taxidermy shop in Paris, with animals coming to life via animated film screenings, throughout the duration of the show. As Jonsi is a man of few words at his shows, it was a clever way of keeping a set interesting and dramatic. In the same way, most electronic dance acts use visuals of some kind to cover for the lack of interest in a guy on stage behind a laptop or twiddling the knobs of a synthesiser. Chemical Brothers make use of films as an attractive backdrop to their performance. Other inventive alternatives are the LED hula-hoop dancers that Four Tet's Kieran Hebden chose for his gig at Green Man, the pretty installation of lit glass jars on Grizzly Bear's last tour, while Feist had two people creating live illustrations onto a projector to describe the narrative of her songs.

The one-man band

Unlike the understated acoustic performance, the one-man-band prefers to perform with an amalgam of effects pedals and astound the audience by recreating the sound of a band all by themselves. DM Stith, Andrew Bird, Tune-Yards and Magic Arm are all artists to have performed with the aid of minimal instrumentation and a looping box to layer the instrumentation and vocals. Not that playing solo is usually out of choice, though. For most artists, even those with a lo-fi, DIY edge, becoming better known is the natural pathway to being able to afford an accompanying band. Nevertheless, one performer notorious for his impressive live show despite it being just him at a table full of electronics is Dan Deacon, who tends to play from the dance-floor rather than from the stage. Tune-Yards, the 4AD-signed Brooklyn musician otherwise known as Merrill Garbus, creates drum loops on the spot, layering these with ukulele and vocals, accompanied by just a bassist, although she later added a saxophone section to her tour. Meanwhile, multi-instrumentalist Magic Arm creates his playful folk-tronica through looping and layering the instrumentation.