LONDON-Blackpink have made history by becoming the first ever Korean band to headline a major UK music festival. The K-pop girl group played an electrifying set at London’s BST Hyde Park to a sold-out crowd of 65,000 fans, some of whom travelled half way across the world to see them perform. “We’ve been waiting for this since last year,” said Jeangil Pagunsan, who had come to the UK from the Philippines. “No words can explain the joy we feel right now. This night was so insane.”  “We love everything about them,” said her friend Rick Mae Vaporoso. “Everything was so hype.” “Their songs are great, their personality is great, they’re really energising,” agreed Adrian and Jess Chan, who’d set off from Nottingham at 06:00 to make sure they secured a prime spot in the audience. Mother and daughter Michelle and Yazmin Glackin had a trickier journey - their early morning plane from Northern Ireland was cancelled. After an agonising wait, they finally grabbed the last two seats on the 15:30 flight, arriving at the concert with all of their luggage to make sure they didn’t miss the show. “It’s been a long day, but it was all worth it. We’d do it all over again,” said Michelle, whose daughter is “absolutely besotted” by the quartet. “But I’ve seen nothing, ‘cos she was on my shoulders the whole time,” she said. Blackpink aren’t just one of the biggest K-pop bands in the world - they’re one of the world’s biggest bands full stop.

 Formed in an intense, six-year-long bootcamp, they’re comprised of Lisa (real name Lalisa Manobal), 26, from Thailand; Rosé (Roseanne Chaeyoung Park), also 26, who was born in New Zealand and raised in Australia; Jennie Kim, 27, who grew up in South Korea; and Jisoo Kim, 28, from Gunpo, about 20 miles south of Seoul.
Since the release of their debut single Whistle in 2016, they’ve become the most followed act on YouTube and the first K-pop girl band to sell a million albums. Their most recent record, Born Pink, entered the UK charts at number one, and the group have a combined 356 million Instagram followers. So while they might have seemed an outlier on the UK festival circuit, where this year’s headliners are largely safe, tried-and-tested acts like Arctic Monkeys, The Killers and The Strokes, Blackpink were a smart choice for the more adventurous BST line-up.
The band are currently in the middle of a world tour, with a finely-tuned show that combines their bombastic, confident pop songs with the sort of choreography that would make Strictly’s professional dancers break into a cold sweat. They burst onto the stage with two of their hardest-hitting anthems, Pink Venom and How You Like That, bathed in pink lights against a video wall covered in sharp, black thorns. That’s a dichotomy that’s burned into the band’s identity, from their name to their musical output. Every sweetly-sung melody and pop hook is juxtaposed with a sinister EDM riff, or a frenetic rap breakdown; and their songs often end in a military style “rum-pa-pum” chant. All of which works perfectly when you want to send an audience into a complete frenzy on a Sunday night.