As anyone who’s seen it will attest, Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour is not your typical pop show. Sure, there are costume changes, bright lights and dancers, but there’s also a live band that plays loud. Or, to put it another way, Guts rocks.
As the tour draws to a close - aside from some rearranged shows in Manchester next year, that is - Rodrigo and her team have been telling Billboard how they created one of the most popular and best-received live experiences of 2024, and it turns out that the woman at the centre of was planning it even as she wrote the album that gave it its name.
“I actually made Guts with the concert in mind,” she says. “It’s so much fun to play songs that are more driving and heavy. I had a great time performing that aspect of the show every night.”
Describing the Guts live experience as “my own spin on a rock show,” Rodrigo says that “my dream was for people to jump and scream and be all sweaty by the end.” Tickets were kept more affordable than for some arena shows so as not to price out Rodrigo’s young fanbase, and the choreography remained relatively simple so as not to overpower the music.
However, this isn’t to say that there weren’t standout visual moments. “My personal favourite moment is probably Obsessed,” says Tarik Mikou, the show’s creative director. “She gets on the plexiglass and starts to look at her audience, but with the camera below, it’s just such a strong image. That’s Olivia 2.0: so rock’n’roll, so much guitar, so much attitude.”
Others talk of Rodrigo’s professionalism on the tour and her willingness to put the work in. She was also closely involved in choosing the opening acts, which included Chappell Roan (now ready for an arena tour of her own, we imagine) and 10 shows with The Breeders.
“[Olivia] has talked about how, you know, ‘The Breeders broke my mind - there was pre-‘Cannonball’ and there was post-‘Cannonball,’” says the band’s singer-guitarist, Kim Deal. “And I think she likes loud guitars - in this day and age! She finds loud guitars exciting and wants to be around them.”
Rodrigo’s next stops, you suspect, will be stadiums, but before that she has a Guts World Tour Netflix Special dropping on 29 October, and there are rumours of a headline slot at Glastonbury next year.
