Billie Eilish LIVE 'Where Do We Go' Livestream Event - 25th October 2020
It’s 2AM in mid-October and my neighbours are playing FIFA, or Hide-The-Sausage or whatever greasy, nocturnal indie-boys who were never taught that they don’t need to scream at the top of their lungs every time they get excited do for fun in the early hours of the morning. To drown this out I am listening to Billie Eilish’s legendary When We Fall Asleep Where Do We Go album, and I can’t help but feel a little excited to find out how her livestream will convey her mixture of evil, floor-destroying bass tones and subtle, soul-crunching relatable relationship vocal flutters in a high-production, live format. Even if it is going to be viewed on our bass-phobic living-room TV.
Fast forward two days and it’s 9PM on Saturday night; Nando’s new vegan stuff has been appreciated, Jack Daniels fills the air and, along with god knows how many people from all over the world, three of us are cosied down in the living room ready to watch Billie Eilish live from the US. I had previously reviewed Boston Manors livestream show, which was great by all means, but I don’t think anything could have prepared us for what one of the top artists in the world had in store.
And speaking of; the livestream was accessed from a special version of her online store which had blown my mind before anything had even started. The in-browser webpage featured a virtual reality window that allows the user to look around and browse her merch items that were rendered in 3D to look as though they were on shelves, and that the user was in a shop looking at them. If this isn’t a revolutionary (and slightly dystopian) way of bringing people together in an isolation crisis then the pre-show, when it finally started at 10PM BST, was enough to question yet again whether this might in-fact be the future of ‘live’ music.
There were some small complaints floating around as we sat for yet another hour watching Billie’s various sponsors and advertisements pop up – is this the £30 premium fan experience? But these were interlaced with various different forms of pre-recorded media such as messages from other famous artists (Lizzo, Alicia Keys to name a couple), advertisements encouraging the US audience to go and vote in their upcoming election, and a Billie Eilish trivia quiz that looked as though it had been done quickly to fill time while they had been rehearsing during the day. If you follow my personal account on Instagram you will have seen us shouting the answers to this on my story, and I thought it amusing how this contrasted with the incredibly high budget live set up they had organised. It was very quaint and goes a step further to show that Billie Eilish is a young artist packed with positive energy and is an excellent role model for her younger fans.
The countdown finally started and, shouting at Mark to get his chicken dippers and hit the lights, I banished all external distractions from my mind and settled into the dark room. She opened with Bury A Friend – an obvious choice as it does a great job of building tension, and the stage set-up was revealed to us, even though I had caught a glimpse of it earlier throughout the pre-show and an Instagram Live story that she had aired a couple of hours before. She had brought FINNEAS (her brother and producer) equipped with some very expensive looking keyboards/MIDI controllers, drum pads, a guitar and bass. And on house left/stage right she was flanked by her touring drummer, Andrew Marshall, who played an interesting construction that used parts from both an acoustic and an electric kit.
The audio was phenomenal, their stage presence was wonderful, but I truly have no buzzwords left that fit the description of the stage aesthetics. The stage was large, surrounded from behind by huge screens, and was shot in what looked to be a high-tech studio in Hollywood. The kind of place that top-of-the-line music videos might be shot, potentially meaning CGI.
The 3D imagery of a giant spider that stamped around behind the trio during You Should See Me In A Crown was unbelievably creepy and real looking, but I couldn’t help squeaking a little when the spider’s legs moved in-front of the group, stabbing into the ground between Billie and the camera. And immediately any questions that I had had about the price of the tickets were erased. The band were good, but the production behind the sequence was on another level. As more and more scenes popped up with Billie being suspended up in the night sky, under the sea, in a magical forest - we could only theorise excitedly how they had managed to pull off these digital landscapes, and how they had gotten them so, so good.
The most likely suggestion was that they were using AR (augmented reality) to create virtual scenes that looked real. VR (virtual reality) and AR are both very modern technologies that are used a lot in video games, but to see this come to live in a live setting was, frankly, shocking. Even now as I write this I can feel the chills that I had got in awe of how f*cking good the production was. It was genuinely like something straight out of a high-fiction sci-fi future film. There must have been an enormous amount of work and effort put into the pre-production and holy sh*t did it pay off. It was even good enough to make me forget to cringe at the scene where about forty or fifty videos of her fans floated down from the ceiling, waving from their bedrooms. It was kinda’ wholesome.
The band’s performance was flawless as expected. Their movements looked natural and fluid. Their interactions were fun and light-hearted. One of my favourite moments was when FINNEAS took centre stage and performed a groovy bass solo towards the end of one song. Keeping with the theme of being a woke teen, Billie took a few opportunities to talk about the greater issues that we face. For a young artist wearing baggy Gucci pyjamas she did a stellar job of getting down to the audience’s level and begging her US fans to vote Trump out, adding “he’s the worst”.
Billie’s music is modern art in the purest form, but her kind, fun-loving and goofy personality will likely take her even further, as we allowed her every word to sink into our hearts we laughed, cried and yelled in all the right places. I could easily go through her setlist, talking about every song, but I don’t think I would be able to do the show justice. This performance was so much more incredible than any of us had expected and I definitely appreciate Billie Eilish in a way that I couldn’t have before, without having seen this more personal side to her. From her commercial success with awe-inspiring tracks like Bad Guy and No Time To Die from her sober, heart-wrenching love songs such as My Future and I Love You, she is the perfect missing cog - the modern success story – that the mainstream music industry has needed for years but didn’t see coming.
