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Dua Lipa Joins Tame Impala at London’s O2 for a Surprise ‘Houdini’ Duet
Dua Lipa surprised fans by joining Tame Impala at London’s O2 for a live rendition of 'Houdini'.
Dua Lipa turned up unannounced at Tame Impala’s headline show at London’s O2 on May 8, stepping into the set halfway through Kevin Parker’s performance of the 2025 track ‘After Thought’ from his most recent album, ‘Deadbeat’.
What followed was the kind of crossover moment that tends to travel fast. After Lipa came onstage, Parker told the crowd, “Let’s play a song that we made together!”, and the pair launched into ‘Houdini’, the lead track from Lipa’s 2024 album ‘Radical Optimism’, on which Parker served as producer. Lipa later described the appearance on X as “completely surreal + euphoric”, a neat enough summary of a collaboration that has now spilled from studio credit into live performance more than once.
The London duet is the latest in a small but increasingly familiar run of joint appearances between the two. Last year, Parker surfaced during Lipa’s Sydney show for ‘The Less I Know The Better’, and before that Lipa brought him out during her 2024 Glastonbury headline slot, where they performed the same song. In a later interview with The Guardian, Parker said that Glastonbury moment was “way more wild than I thought it was gonna be”. He added: “The nicest thing about it was that it was Dua headlining Glastonbury, which is something she has wanted to do since she was a kid. I felt like I had a seat in someone’s dream that they were living, I was just happy to be a part of it.”
There is a particular industry logic to the pairing, even if the fan reaction is what tends to dominate the timeline. Parker’s role on Radical Optimism was not just decorative; Lipa has credited him and Harle with helping create the album’s “eureka moment”, while Parker has described the process of making ‘Houdini’ as unusually exacting. “I’d kind of recoil in horror and go, ‘Oh, no, it’s a great verse!’” he remembered. “But then an hour later, we’d have something that I can’t imagine not being in the song.” That kind of back-and-forth points to Parker’s reputation as a meticulous collaborator, even when working inside pop’s tighter frame.
Lipa has long been open about how central Tame Impala has been to her own listening history. Speaking to Triple J, she said their 2015 album Currents “completely changed [her] life” and called it “the soundtrack to my life”, adding that it was “kind of like the gateway drug for me into Tame Impala.” It is the sort of statement that helps explain why the onstage link-up has felt less like a one-off gimmick than an extension of a shared musical language.
Tame Impala’s Deadbeat received a three-star review from NME when it was released last year, with the album noted for showing that “Parker has grown outside his comfort zone, only to strike a kind of lyrical inertia that becomes detrimental to his new vocabulary of music”. Even so, Parker’s recent run has remained busy beyond his own project. He has been confirmed for Thundercat’s first album in six years, Distracted, alongside A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Lil Yachty and others, and was recently seen in the studio with members of Geese, Pond and King Gizzard.
For Lipa, the London appearance arrived amid a wider stretch of cultural positioning beyond pop stages. The Southbank Centre has already announced that she will curate its 2026 London Literature Festival, another sign that her public profile is stretching further into the institutional side of culture. Still, on the night at the O2, the headline was simpler: two artists who have already crossed paths on record and onstage met again, this time in Parker’s home territory, for a song that now belongs to both of them.
