Hilary Duff at the O2 Arena, review – This is actually what dreams are made of

To witness Hilary Duff selling out London’s O2 Arena in 2026, twice, is a bit like witnessing a flash mob on your way to work, or somebody eating a pack of 3D Doritos. What time machine have you inadvertently gained access to? What century is this? But Duff’s resurgence is as much to do with cultural nostalgia as it is the power of clean living.

An artist who has – to her credit, really – never once set foot outside her lane of soft, beachy, featherlight pop, Duff carries a spotless rap sheet and the same grinning radiance that made her a star in the first place. Duff definitely exhibited snippets of bite in her heyday (remember her funny if now quietly tragic love triangle with Aaron Carter and Lindsay Lohan, or her feud with Faye Dunaway?), but she was more or less strictly PG: the Y2K Disney queen that parents actually wanted their daughters to turn out like.

That explains why her show tonight – the first of two London dates on her first major tour since 2008 – feels like such a love-in. The crowd is a mix of thirtysomething girls and gays and it’s-wine-o-clock mums, all seemingly with rich emotional ties to the now 38-year-old actor-slash-pop star. So the uninitiated will likely be baffled by much of it, from the wand Duff produces to draw Mickey Mouse ears in mid-air (a throwback to her old Disney Channel ads), to the gasps that greet a fan who takes to the stage wearing a version of Duff’s white ballgown and distractingly tiny mask from her cult 2004 romcom A Cinderella Story.

It all conjures a sometimes strange mix of sincerity and wink-wink irony, with Duff gamely going along with the lightly withering memes and fashion throwback TikToks that have helped propel her into the spotlight again. “What Dreams Are Made Of” from The Lizzie McGuire Movie – which she sang in that film with her own Italian doppelganger – is more of a gag than a serious banger, yet it serves as the grand finale here. And at one point she invites 10 fans up on stage to recreate a particularly listless and robotic bit of choreography from one of her old live performances that went viral a few years ago. When life gives you lemons, I suppose.

Still, Duff is such a preternaturally upbeat performer that it’d be tricky to not be won over by all of the above. She speaks eloquently of her LGTBQ+ fans at one point, and appears misty-eyed upon first seeing the sheer number of people here tonight. Her voice is limited but pretty, and she can still authentically sell the plucky naivety of early bubblegum singles “Anywhere But Here”, “Wake Up” and “So Yesterday”, all of which produce the night’s most plainly pleasurable moments.

Lovely, too, are the melancholy if undeniably Swiftian cuts from her recent album Luck… or Something, like the older-boyfriend kiss-off “Mature”, and the sombre seven-year-itch number “Roommates”. That much of the crowd sings along to both suggests that, despite appearances to the contrary, this isn’t a purely “2003 or nothing” affair.

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