Beyoncé at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London review: Overwhelming and masterful

The Beyoncé Cowboy Carter rodeo pulled into London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium last night – but Attitude began mulling over our review days ago. Having previously caught her unforgettable Glastonbury set in 2011, and witnessed her famed perfectionism and high standards up close, we wanted this article to be as close to perfect as possible in tribute.

Now it’s time to actually write it, however, and we are faced with an uncomfortable reality: there are only so many hours in the day. So, how does she do it? How does she never compromise on quality? More to the point, how does she raise the stakes with every album, era and tour? Even after pop culture-saturating performances like Coachella, the Super Bowl and the 2008 X Factor final with Alexandra Burke (we’re serious), how does she keep one-upping herself? Hell, we were even reminded of Destiny’s Child‘s then-unprecedented ring of fire moment at the 2001 Brit Awards, when last night a piano by which Bey was singing caught fire: a pyrotechnic trick all the more impactful for its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity.

In the case of the Cowboy Carter Tour, specifically, it’s actually eye-watering to imagine the hours of planning from Beyoncé’s team – all under her watchful eye, of course – that must’ve gone into a show of this scale, length and creativity. Your average ticket to an A-list pop concert in 2025 is often excruciatingly expensive, but when you get such a technical spectacle as this in return – a 40-song, seven-act, almost two-and-a-half-hour odyssey – it’s arguably logical. Last night we saw the star straddling a golden mechanical bull (most would be terrified of falling, but she didn’t lose her composure for a second); later, she soared around the stadium atop a floating horseshoe and then, a flying vintage convertible. These are gobsmacking feats of performance.

What sets this Album of the Year Grammy Award-winning era apart from its predecessors, of course, is the depth of its intention: the album it stems from pointedly reclaims the Black roots of the Country and Western genre, a statement underlined tenfold by every element of last night’s production, which is like a Wild West movie on steroids. (Even the audience sections are themed, with names like ‘Sweet Honey Pit’ and ‘Club Ho Down’.) As such, she performs the LP extensively, with many of her blockbuster greatest hits of yore on ice – ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)’, ‘Irreplaceable’ and a slowed down ‘Crazy In Love’ are notable exceptions – but the setlist is entirely as it should be: for one thing, the music feels current, not least last year’s epic return to the top of the charts, the Billboard Hot 100 number one ‘TEXAS HOLD ‘EM’, and secondly, why dilute the message of the album? When she dives deeper into her singles discography – like on attitude-laden renditions of ‘Formation’ from 2016’s Lemonade and ‘Diva’ from 2008’s I Am… Sasha Fierce – it reminds you that her best work always means something. (Mind you, she’s not above serving fizzy pop euphoria, as she does on ‘Love On Top’.) All that said, it’s actually ‘America Has a Problem’ from 2022’s Renaissance, which she performs in a costume emblazoned with newsprint headlines, from a podium like a politician, that gets her commentary about the sorry state of the world across most potently.

A word on costumes, from the thousands of rhinestones and sequins on chaps, dresses and bodysuits alike to the flayed sleeves of a denim ensemble complementing brief rainfall (“the rain feels so good!” she declares, instantly saving everyone’s vibe.) And what about that jaw-dropping electronic dress that changed patterns every few seconds? She’s probably never looked better, with every flick of her gargantuan-length hair seen across the 62,850-capacity stadium.

On choreography, it’s no exaggeration to say Beyoncé moved more last night than this writer has in the last month. She presumably has the world’s best dancers in her troupe, and it shows: these routines are exhaustingly elaborate and performed with utter passion and precision, with movements so pronounced you could see them from space. It would be easier to balk at Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy’s presence amongst them were she not so technically gifted a dancer herself: absolutely on point alongside the adults around her, and exuding confidence and charisma when commanding the stage by herself. It must be innate.

Beyoncé’s voice, meanwhile, effortlessly fills the stadium, whether growling on ‘AMERIICAN REQUIEM’ or ‘JOLENE’, the latter a Dolly Parton cover that replaces pleading vulnerability with a warning shot, or warbling at full volume on ‘If I Were A Boy’, or killing an aria on ‘Daughter’, which includes an excerpt from the 18th-century Italian song ‘Caro Mio Ben’. She reliably sounds exactly as she does on record, except for when she doesn’t want to.

Finally, the big-screen visuals, which are the tour’s secret weapon. Amidst concerns that the music video as an art form is dying, the high production values and attention to detail here are unsurpassed. From arresting imagery (Beyoncé’s reclining atop an alligator before they both turn to gold) to outlandish narratives (a segment about a 400ft cowboy striding across the world’s cities; drama in a desert strip club leading to a high noon standoff), these are essentially short films you can’t officially see anywhere but the show.

There’s so much storytelling happening at every moment, and so many more details to dissect – at the end of ‘Oh Louisiana’, for instance, a robotic arm serves her a glass of her own-brand SirDavis whiskey, before she descends beneath the stage, as if to gather strength, as a satirical news montage lambasts her genre-defying daring, before she returns all guns blazing for ‘PROPAGANDA’ and ‘AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM’ – but we simply have to stop somewhere. We’re not Beyoncé after all. But this show has at least inspired us to try and get our lives together!