You have never seen so many pink cowboy hats in your life. Nor white cowboy boots, nor sequinned mini skirts, nor sparkling beaming faces. It’s the end of August, it’s just stopped raining, we’re in a field next to Edinburgh Airport (you can literally see the EasyJet flights coming in to land): and Chappell Roan is about to perform.
Chappell Roan, world-famous viral megastar celebrity powerhouse etc. etc., is embarking on her Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things tour — it’s her first show in Scotland since 2024’s Glasgow Academy outing. Back then she was no more than a global name: now, in summer 2025, she is still a global name. The intervening year has only seen Chappell upscale her success, all whilst releasing only TWO further singles post-The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (‘The Giver’, and ‘The Subway’).
And so, the audience at Edinburgh’s third “Summer Session” this evening are primed and ready for “the best show of their lives”, as opener JADE promises during her set. JADE is a wonderful choice of opener, her Roan-esque pipes and matching locks making her a kind of twin version of Chappell herself, if she was from South Shields and had spent a lot of time recovering from the Simon Cowell Industrial Complex.
The Little Mix alumnus is on incredible form, thrusting herself around the silver stage with a litany of Grade-A bangers: the rageful RAYE-penned ‘FUFN (Fuck You For Now)’, the slinky disco-y ‘Fantasy’, and — of course — the uncategorisable-y brilliant ‘Angel Of My Dreams’. The crowd goes most mental for, however, the Little Mix medley at the midway point: perhaps the best single they ever released ‘Wasabi’, followed by pure crowd-pleasers ‘Touch’, ‘Shout Out To My Ex’, ‘Sweet Melody’. ‘Woman Like Me’ in particular is transformed live, performed by Jade alone: a solidly secondary Little Mix effort elevated into something much more in the hands of our performer.
Then, the hour-long wait of anticipation and pained knees for the headliner herself. Chappell’s elaborate staging of a literal castle gets painstakingly constructed before our very eyes, and soon enough it’s time for the Midwest Princess to take the Midlothian Stage. The gigsinscotland dot com ads are pulled from the screens (Jessie J @ the SEC Armadillo, Oct 15th), the stage lights up a villainous green, and some scary music plays. 1, 2, 3, and… he was wearing these FUGLY jeans! ‘Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl’ blasts out, as Chappell bounces into view in full jester get-up — “the crowd goes wild” and thus begins one of the most invigorating, enthralling, and love-filled sets of our lives.
The setlist is the entirety of 2024’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (bar ‘Kaleidoscope’ — would maybe not have kept these good vibes going?). There’s also the ear-wormy ‘Love Me Anyway’ of Chappell’s forgotten and largely irrelevant first EP (although, included on the Various Artists album 100 Greatest 2020 Songs); a transcendental cover of Heart’s ‘Barracuda’ during which she sheds her joker fit and emerges from the castle door in a bejeweled two piece; and newest release ‘The Subway’ (of “she’s got, she’s got away” fame).
It’s hard to convey just how perfect Chappell’s live vocals are: they are lip-sync good, they are so utterly indistinguishable from the studio versions. ‘The Subway’’s manic outro of pained but pitch-perfect wailing is hit with complete precision during tonight’s performance: the crowd join her in every syllable, and every rise and fall. It’s powerful stuff, 60,000 people having memorised the same words and beats and inflections to a piece of music; each having their own personal interpretations and responses and emotional crises.
This mass emotional sing-along femininomenon occurred most noticeably during Chappell’s closing songs: ‘Good Luck, Babe!’, paradigm shift that it was, sparks a fanatic and feverish chant throughout the crowd at its seminal bridge — “when you wake up next to him in the middle of the night / with your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his WIFE”.
And finally, the closing track to close all competition with all closing tracks, ‘Pink Pony Club’. The song that launched a thousand Etsy merchandisers’ careers, a thousand TikTok edits of ostensibly heterosexual TV characters, and a thousand tears in the Royal Highland Showgrounds on August 27th 2025. The tiny cartoon dragons on the stage graphics behind Chappell dance their tails off, the 60,000 fans on the ground in front of her dance their pink cowboy hats off, and the artist herself sings her absolute lungs out.
“God, what have you done?” — a cry for the ages, and a beautiful end to a beautiful performance. Viva la Chappell!
Image Credit to Tamsin Dunlop