Barry Egan: Billie Eilish redefines superstardom at Electric Picnic

They chanted ‘Ole! Ole! Ole!’ to her. Born in Los Angeles as Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell, she gave what can only be described as an extraordinary performance last night.

It was a sublime, sometimes subversive show - dark and bright, feel-good and feel-bad in equal measure.

“Are you guys ready to have some fun?” she asked. It was a question, of course, she knew the answer to already.

At one point in proceedings, she ordered everyone in the audience to go as low to the ground as they could to the beat of the music and then jump up again, hip-hop style.

She even demonstrated how to do it. Then had 50,000 people do it themselves. It was a giant dance class in Stradbally as only Ms Eilish could put on.

There was more to it than hip-hop class.

Under a moonlit sky in a very big field in county Laois, the 21-year-old sang songs that were hyper-personal – and yet everyone in the audience at the Electric Picnic last night felt a profound connection with those hyper-personal lyrics.

And her.

She asked everyone to turn to the person next to them and give them a hug. Like she was talking to someone she’d met at the counter of a coffee shop. She sat down on the side of the stage.

She said it was cold and the stage was damp and wet and that she had slipped twenty times already. Nonetheless, she danced across the stage like an electro version of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

At one point, she slid down the stage on her back. At one she appeared to dance between giant flames shooting up from the stage. She seems embarrassed by all the love coming from the crowd in her direction. She smiles nervously, like Sinead O’Connor used to.

Like Sinead, Billie is relatable. Like most human beings, she is bursting with vulnerability, self-doubt and chronic ennui – to say nothing of depression and anxiety. And that comes across on the haunting if sometimes unconventional electro-pop of her best songs which had the 50,000 dancing through the gloom.

From the opening song of Bury A Friend (“What do you want from me?/Why don't you run from me?”) she quickly establishes an intimacy with the crowd that continues until the last note of the last song, Happier Than Ever (“When I'm away from you, I'm happier than ever/ I wish it wasn't true.”)

Her elder brother Finneas was playing guitar in her band .

“We made my first album [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?] in our childhood bedrooms,” she once said.

“My brother’s room is tiny, there’s not that much equipment and we didn’t have a vocal booth or soundproofing, and that’s how we made everything up until working on Happier Than Ever. And for that record my brother built this home studio in the basement of the house, so we’ve been recording down there.

"It’s a step up because it’s actually a studio even though it’s still also at home. But the problem was always that it was home. It was hard to switch from being at home and feeling lazy to trying to work and be creative.

"But I also hate proper recording studios. They are dark and sad and the days go by and time goes by. Studios make me depressed.”

She is not only relatable, but she has good taste. On My Strange Addiction, the second song she played last night, she used a sample from an episode of her favourite TV show, The Office: “No Billie, I haven’t done that dance since my wife died.”

She has apparently watched every episode of The Office over twelve times. Last night the audience could have watched Eilish do her show as many times. She was that good.

I’ve been to every Electric Picnic since the first in 2004 and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a headline show as powerful. Her sometimes spooky voice is beguiling with its power to engage you.

She performed What Was I Made For, her beautifully depressing song from the Barbie soundtrack, and everyone lapped it up.

And what’s not to lap up? Not least when she sang those words: “When did it end? All the enjoyment/I'm sad again, don't tell my boyfriend.”

She is a Grammy-winning superstar who doesn’t give a feck. She has redefined superstardom. She’s hugely success and world famous but she is clearly doesn’t care for either.

She sang, “And I don't get along with anyone/Maybe I'm the problem”, and they sang it back to her like it was a badge of honour.

“I love you so much,” she told the crowd. This wasn’t showbiz patter.

She referred to having played this festival before – in 2019 - and how it was the best festival she has ever played.

That is some praise for Electric Picnic when she was also played Coachella and Glastonbury. “It’s good to see you again. How are you doing everybody?”

Billie, it transpired, wasn’t doing great at all. Before the show she posted on her social media channels: "Ireland, I’m really, really sick and really suffering. You know me and you know I wouldn’t cancel a show even if I was literally like dying. This does feel pretty close though …lol.) I will see you tonight but please keep in mind that trying my best and I’m gonna need your help tonight. Go hard for me.”

During the show she told the crowd, “I’m as sick as balls. I can’t give it everything,” she said sniffling and clearly under the weather. (This had echoes of her show in Milan, August 2019, when she sprained her ankle during in her performance of opening song Bad Guy and told the crowd: “I can’t give you the show I wanna give you.”)

In fact, she gave it everything anyway. She’s that kind of self-sacrificing person.

Her woolie hat had the word ‘DANGER’ emblazoned across it in red – and her 70 minute show was anything but safe.

She look a giant crowd down the rabbit hole of her own imagination, and into something that bordered on radical.

This is nothing especially surprising for such a revered icon of female empowerment.

In white baggy Nike top over baggy black shorts and black socks and white sneakers she is the anti pop-star. Amanda Petrusich in New Yorker wrote that “it feels fair to describe Eilish’s aesthetic “as both an antidote to and a queering of the hyper-feminized pop-star archetype”, while Savina Petkova in The Quietus theorized that Eilish’s persona has “testified her resistance to the surface-level aestheticisation of the female body not only with her choice of clothes (concealing rather than revealing), style (neon green and black hair).”

Hard to imagine a megastar discussing self-harm as a teenager as Billie Eilish did on RJ Cutler's Apple documentary about her in 2021.

“I love you so much,” she said to the crowd with the shy-ish smile you’ve ever seen. “Thanks for having me .. I will see you again. But for now are you ready to go crazy to these songs,” she said before performing the haunting banger, Bad Guy.

She put her two hands against her chest – to indicate love for the crowd. She blew endless kisses. She seemed genuinely sad to be leaving the stage. The feeling was mutual from the audience at seeing her go.

The Electric Picnic will never be the same again after last night.