Troye Sivan review – a performance as heartwarming as it is hot | Troye Sivan

eown in the capital, Taylor Swift slays Wembley with songs about insecurities, coming of age and the emotional upheavals of dating men. But up in Manchester, another artist with the same initials is being prompted to do the same. With an album from 2023 Something to give to each other, Troye Sivan’s production is far riskier than Swift’s. But what the Aussie singer-songwriter lacks in chart ubiquity, he more than makes up for in self-realization, delivering a queer-oriented performance that’s as jarring as it is hot.

With the opening, Get Me Started set a high choreographic bar. Sensual and athletic, his group of six dancers are almost k-pop worthy in their precision, creating moments of tenderness amidst all the swagger. Many fans have already seen footage of Sivan singing into a microphone suspended phallicly between one dancer’s legs, but may have missed the deep, trusting eye contact that remains between the pair.

As Sivan later explains, Something to Give Each Other was written with the live experience in mind, wanting to capture the shared feelings of sweat and bodies and release. The space he carves out in the setlist for his collaboration with Ariana Grande felt particularly poignant in Manchester, while Still Got It, a depressingly slow jam about the struggle to get over someone, saw many courting couples in the audience reclaiming it as their personal anthem.

But where there’s schmaltz, Sivan seems to prefer sauce. “Our bus call tonight is quite late; where do we all go out?” he teased, introducing the rainbow-lit 1999 series, Honey and Rush. “Are we going to have a meeting on Canal Street? I like it there – I feel like we’re going to be arrested for inciting a gay riot, but that would be kind of chic, wouldn’t it?’

When the house lights come on, it’s a very unpleasant 21:48, but the early finish leaves plenty of time to descend on Manchester’s iconic gay village, maybe even fulfill Sivan’s suggestion that we all “find someone to take home this evening”. Even if he’s not throwing an afterparty, Sivan can sleep easy knowing he’s got everything he needs to get the pulse racing.