Beyoncé, Stadium of Light, Sunderland, gig review: A disjointed barrage maybe, but she is still the master show-woman

Beyoncé: the cumulative energy and imagery can’t be denied

It’s a grey night in Brexit Central as Beyoncé begins her European tour. Sunderland’s football stadium is anyway a happy, welcoming place for a woman whose sixth solo album has raised her artistic game. Rough times with apparently errant husband Jay Z were ruthlessly converted into artistic opportunity on Lemonade, which treats Big Dog Jay Z as a stray dog she drags to heal. Beyoncé has asserted herself as the dominant creative partner. She now calls the tune.

And, by bringing in Jack White to collaborate over a Led Zeppelin sample, and duetting on the same album with James Blake over his chilly electronica, pop’s reigning queen has remembered how resonant and stimulating that kingdom can be.

The last time I saw her, she was swinging past me on some sort of trapeze in Birmingham. The spectacle this time is along Stanley Kubrick lines, as a giant blank cube starts to pulse, flickering to show Beyoncé as a red-lit, writhing, giantess. She was always the literal embodiment of her own kind of feminism, a physically remarkable, powerful woman who stared down the male gaze. Tonight, her image is all kinds of superhuman.

The music, too, has the cybernetic thrill of recent R&B – metallic future music, letting her hoover up rap, reggae toasting and straight dance music. “Hold Up”, by contrast, uses the lilting Sixties melody of “Can’t Get Used to Losing You” for surging soul uplift, as Beyoncé leads her troupe of dancers storming down the gantry to a mid-stadium stage. The Doors’ Vietnam-era provocation “Five to One” (also a Jay Z favourite) is deployed very differently, rock’s aggressive Sixties potency ramping up the cold rage of “Ring the Alarm” at another woman she’s sniffed in her husband’s bed.

“Me, Myself and I”, from her solo career’s start, half-avoids over-emoting Whitneyisms by gospel power with roots in her old Texan church. Those roots are even clearer when, in a move at odds with the shock and awe elsewhere, Beyoncé sings “Why Don’t You Love Me” a cappella, her voice natural and free in a way stadium regimentation normally precludes. Leading her fans in a fervent call and response, it’s a movingly simple display of star power, and musical community.

It was a righteously angry Beyoncé who surfaced at this year’s Superbowl, where she used the Black Panthers’ militant iconography to press the buttons of a huge American audience. Women matter, black lives matter. Lemonade’s theme tune to her Civil Rights push, the Kendrick Lamar collaboration “Freedom”, is sung barefoot in water tonight, protest momentarily abandoned for the paddling pool. There’s plenty to inspire and uplift, though, especially for the dancing young women scattered through the stadium.

There’s a moment where Beyoncé is walking in a red latex outfit through clouds of confetti which have just been shot from the blazing eyes of a massive video version of her. This is science-fiction showbiz, Cccil B De Mille spliced with the Harlem Apollo and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Beyonce wasn’t this woman when she was in Destiny’s Child. She wasn’t, either, when she hung gratefully on Jay Z’s arm. The master show-woman marshalling the endless changes of costume and mood tonight is, with her loyal phalanx of Amazon dancer-warriors behind her, also an R&B auteur. The relentless barrage of disparate songs is sometimes a sort of chaos, disjointed and scattershot. But the cumulative energy and imagery can’t be denied.