Dua Lipa champions Australian music at spectacular live shows

Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism tour has kicked off in Australia with eight shows across Melbourne and Sydney.
The pop megastar has been showcasing local Australian artists by either covering their songs or bringing them out to perform with her.
AC/DC, Vance Joy, Kylie Minogue and Angus Stone are just some of the Aussie artists featuring in Dua Lipa’s shows.
READ MORE: These are all the gigs coming to Sydney this year.

One of the world’s biggest pop stars, Dua Lipa, is clearly a fan of Australian music, incorporating some of our best homegrown artists into her sold-out live shows across eight dates—five in Melbourne, three in Sydney—with crowd-pleasing surprises each night.

The Houdini hitmaker just finished launching her current Radical Optimism tour in Australia, kickstarting a massive 55-date tour that’s just about to touch down in New Zealand.

With brilliant, varied staging, big dance numbers and a stadium-worthy production, Dua Lipa’s concerts have been pulling in four and five star reviews across the board. And a big part of this is her choice to localise segments of the show to inject a bit of dynamism and excitement into the set.

Dua Lipa’s set list for this Radical Optimism Tour is split into four “acts”—each with four or five songs—as well as a seamless encore featuring her monster hits Dance the Night Away, New Rules, Don’t Start Now and Houdini.

But what’s really got fans whispering in excitement is the “surprise” bit of the show, where Dua pays homage to some of her favourite local artists. For Australia, that includes everyone from AC/DC and Vance Joy to Natalie Imbruglia and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker.

For Act II, eight songs into the show, Dua has pencilled in a local tribute, either by covering an artist’s song or by actually bringing the artist out to perform with her. It’s got fans around the world speculating who Dua has in mind for the remainder of her tour, which will wrap Stateside as she struts across Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

Who did Dua Lipa bring out in Australia?

For the very first show on her Radical Optimism Tour, Dua Lipa expressed her love for the late Bon Scott and AC/DC with a fiery cover of Highway to Hell, kickstarting the Aussie love-in.

Then she took a hard-left turn towards Natalie Imbruglia by covering her version of Ednaswap’s Torn on the second night. Kylie came next with a cover of Can’t Get You Out of My Head on night 3 while the fourth and fifth nights saw her actually bring out the artists to duet with, with Troy Sivan coming out for Rush and Vance Joy for Riptide, respectively.

While Sydney drew the short-stick with only three sold-out shows at Qudos Bank Arena, the Harbour City arguably got the better deal when it came to seeing Dua perform with big-name local artists. INXS was, of course, not able to join Dua for her cover of their classic Never Tears Us Apart, but the pop megastar did manage to grab some time with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker for a riveting duet of the band’s monster hit, The Less I Know the Better.

The final night in Sydney saw Dua bring Angus Stone to the stage, showing off her more intimate vocal chops as she performed a stunning duet of Big Jet Plane.

Ten years ago you could get away claiming the Australian music scene was being largely ignored on the global stage. This was a great reminder that things have most definitely changed in the ever-changing music industry.