Dua Lipa is opening up about her friendship with one of her early teen idols, Katy Perry.
The 28-year-old singer–songwriter revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone published Tuesday that she once got a chance to dance on stage with the 39-year-old Teenage Dream singer when she was just 15.
But she had an even greater dream come true years later when she became friends with the pop superstar–turned–American Idol judge.
‘I love Katy! I am friends with Katy. I think she’s amazing,’ gushed the English and Albanian singer, who was seen looking cute with her boyfriend Callum Turner last week.
She added that it was an honor when Katy attended her concert at the Hollywood Palladium in 2018.
Dua Lipa, 28, revealed to Rolling Stone that she dance on stage with Katy Perry when she was 15, and she had a ‘full-circle moment’ when she later became friends with the 39-year-old singer; seen March 2 in London
‘I love Katy! I am friends with Katy. I think she’s amazing,’ gushed the English and Albanian singer, who noted that Katy came to see her 2018 Hollywood Palladium show; seen in May 2023 in Windsor, England
But an earlier concert Katy put on in London made an even bigger imprint on the Levitating singer.
‘That was a full-circle moment for me when she came to see my show at the Palladium because when I was 15 years old, I went to go see her at the Hammersmith Apollo in London,’ Dua said.
The future star got her chance to get close to the California Gurls singer during a segment of the show in which Katy covered I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me), which Whitney Houston made into a chart-topping hit in 1987.
While performing the song, Katy would invite members of the audience to dance with her on stage to suit the jubilant tune, and Dua got lucky at that concert.
‘It was her California Dreams Tour, and she was bringing fans onstage and I jumped onstage and I danced,’ she said.
The moment was even immortalized in a photo that fans have shared on social media in subsequent years.
‘There’s this embarrassing photo of me online, but I love her,’ Dua said.
Since then, she and Katy have become real friends, and she was delighted to get the hitmaker’s seal of approval.
Dua danced at Katy’s Hammersmith Apollo show in London when she covered Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody and invited fans on stage with her; seen February 4 in LA
‘It was her California Dreams Tour, and she was bringing fans onstage and I jumped onstage and I danced,’ she said
‘There’s this embarrassing photo of me online, but I love her,’ Dua (R) added
Since then, the two have become friends, and Katy has spoken admiringly of Dua. ‘To get the nod from someone like her, someone who I look up to, is really encouraging,’ the younger star admitted; seen in November in NYC
‘To get the nod from someone like her, someone who I look up to, is really encouraging,’ she admitted.
Last year, Katy also spoke about her admiration for Dua while chatting with Rolling Stone.
She remembered attending the younger star’s 2018 Palladium show and marveling at how she might become a star in her own right soon enough.
‘I remember even championing Dua because I was like, “Oh, this girl is going to be the next big girl pop star. She’s the it girl, and she’s coming,”‘ she said.
Katy joked about how she had to leave work early for the show, but none of her co-workers were familiar with Dua’s music at the time.
‘It was the first season of me doing American Idol. I was like, “I really need to get out of here by seven because I’m going to see this new artist Dua Lipa play at the Palladium,”‘ she recalled. ‘And my co-judge Luke Bryan was like, “Who’s that?” I was like, “Don’t worry, you’ll know her name.”‘
In a 2019 interview with ELLE, Dua shared a helpful piece of advice that that Katy passed on to her after they met again.
‘When I met Katy Perry, she was like, “I hope you don’t search your name,”‘ she recalled, via People.
Katy told Rolling Stone last year that she knew Dua had potential when she left an American Idol taping early to go see her 2018 concert at the Hollywood Palladium; seen March 2 in London
Katy joked that her fellow American Idol judge Luke Bryan had no idea who Dua was at the time; seen in May 2023 in Windsor, England
The wife of Orlando Bloom explained that she would also feel inadequate if she continued to track her popularity obsessively.
‘She was like, “That’s what I did at the beginning of my career, and I’d get upset about every tabloid that said something about me.” She said, “Do not have notifications on. Do not read that s***, because it will stop you from doing what you love,”‘ she said.
The pop star seems to have taken Katy’s advice to heart, and she’s now set to release her third album, Radical Optimism, on May 3.
‘A couple years ago, a friend introduced me to the term Radical Optimism. It’s a concept that resonated with me, and I became more curious as I started to play with it and weave it into my life,’ Dua explained in a statement announcing the LP. ‘It struck me — the idea of going through chaos gracefully and feeling like you can weather any storm.’
