MANCHESTER   -  What is it called when an artist’s first album is already a greatest hits collection? That’s the question I kept asking during Chappell Roan’s first UK show of 2024 on Friday. Normally, concerts ebb and flow, but the audience at the Manchester Academy knew more than just the singles. They sang every word, every ad lib, of every song - some with mascara running, others with hands clasped to their chests. At times, Chappell herself was drowned out. At others, she simply stopped and listened, as the fans chanted her lyrics back at her. It’s a phenomenon - or, to use Chappell’s terminology, a Femininomenon - that only occurs once in a blue moon. I saw it when Olivia Rodrigo played her first UK dates in 2022. I saw it when One Direction hit Wembley Stadium. And I saw it on the first leg of Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black tour, before excitement turned to concern. It happens when an artist speaks directly to their fans. More accurately, it happens when fans feel like an artist is speaking on their behalf. For Chappell’s audience, the devotion is particularly potent because of what she represents. The 26-year-old is the first pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer person, rather than coming out as part of their post-fame narrative.

Her debut album, The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess, is a real-life coming of age story, full of messy, complex relationships and tentative sexual experimentation.

She made the first half of it while dating a man, but the lyrics betrayed her true feelings.

“I wrote a lot of queer songs while I was dating him, even though I had never even kissed a girl,” she told the Q with Tom Power podcast last year..

“It was something I wanted so bad, but I didn’t know how to make it real,” she added, in a BBC interview this April.

In those songs, Roan draws on the power-pop sounds of Lady Gaga and Britney Spears, skewing them with campy cheerleader chants and bawdy sexual asides.

Her calling card is Pink Pony Club, the semi-autobiographical story of a small-town girl’s transformation into a go-go dancer, written after her first visit to a Los Angeles gay club in her early 20s.

But her break-out hit was this year’s Good Luck Babe, about a fling with a girl who insists she’s not gay.

‘She’s killing it’

At first, the song is one big eye-roll: Just shut up and admit the truth, Chappell insists, before you get trapped in a loveless, heterosexual marriage of convenience.

Then, in the closing bars, the song slows down like a toy whose batteries have run out. It’s the end of the argument. Chappell has screamed her case to the point of exhaustion. She drops an octave and sings, “you’d have to stop the world just to stop this feeling”, and her voice is quietly resigned. This is one last plea, and she knows it will fall on deaf ears.

It’s superb songwriting - pointed and specific, full of meaning.

Fans in Manchester said lyrics like those make her more important than other pop stars.

“Being a big, mainstream queer artist is really important,” said Manchester fan Sarah. “She’s what we’ve been waiting for in pop music for a long time.”

“When I first heard her, I looked her up and I was like, ‘She looks like me, she’s queer like me and she’s killing it’,” agreed Bethan, who had travelled to the show from Bristol.

“I was like, that’s my girl.”

“If I was a younger, like a teenager, looking up to Chappell Roan, that would have been really inspiring,” added Kim, a Newcastle fan who was at the gig to celebrate her third wedding anniversary with her wife, Jules.

“It’s something I would have really gripped onto. It would have helped us through the coming out phase.”