18 Apr 2010
So after much advance
controversy and volcanic ash dodging, the bould Whitney finally made it on to
the O2 stage last night, and long before she emerged in a metallic high-waisted
jacket that did nothing for her, the battle lines were drawn. On one side were
the cynics, armed with their YouTube clips and tales of of a cracked-out diva
trading on past glories, and on the other side, the mega-fans had circled their
wagons in an aggressive defensive manoeuvre around their heroine, iPhones at
the ready to launch Twitter flame attacks on anyone who dares to suggest she
was anything less than “amazing”, “incredible” and “brilliant”. Which explains
why I am writing this while wearing a suit I hastily fashioned from kitchen
foil, oven gloves, and gaffer tape.
In the interest of
full disclosure, I should probably lay my cards on the table first. I have
never been a huge Whitney fan. Yes, she’s had some great pop songs along the
way, and she was part of my gay growing up, so I’ve always had a soft spot for
her, and I’ve lost my gay mind on dance floors to I Wanna Dance With Somebody on more than one occasion. I’ve
drunkenly emoted my way through I Have
Nothing, and spilt beer all down myself at the key change, and recently
I’ve put my hands up while feeling like a Million Dollar Bill, Oh oh Oh oh oh!
But when she was at the height of her powers, what stopped me falling in love
with her, was that she was too perfect. I want my power-house diva voices to
have real emotion, and Whitney’s vocals were always so perfect that they struck
me as a bit cold. It’s through the cracks that the emotion escapes and Whitney
never had any cracks. Like her image, her vocals were polished and varnished to
a squeaky-clean, impenetrable high sheen. Self-cleaning glass that repelled
anything as dirty as emotion. Her recording of I Will Always Love You is the perfect case in point. It’s a
flawless vocal, but so flawless it feels fake, non-human. You feel like the
whole performance could be recreated with samples and a Casio keyboard.
So when the HMS
Whitney hit choppy drug-infested waters, she actually became more interesting
to me. Maybe the stormy weather would take some of the shine off her and, and a
slightly weather-beaten Whitney would reveal the kind of emotion I want in my
divas. Maybe now when she sings I Have
Nothing I could really believe her. And of course, everyone loves a good
come-back story, so I was going with a lot of love for Whitney. Come on Girl!
So I wasn’t expecting,
or wanting, Whitney circa 1992. And of course she’s not 29 anymore – she’s 47 –
and as someone who regularly goes to concerts that are mostly attended by gays
and women of a certain age, I’m well used to making small allowances and
trading in a little nostalgia. These kind of gigs are often as much about the
shared experience as they are about the music, and there’s nothing wrong with
that. Give me a pint in a plastic cup, a diva in a good frock telling us she
loves us, and bunch of women in feather boas having a girls night out and I can
get on board. All together now: “And I-iiiiiiiiiii-eeee-iiiiiiii-eeee-iiiiiii,
will always love youOuuuuUUUU!”
So how was it? It was
a mixed bag. (That sound you can hear is the sound of mega-fans turning their
Twitter guns on me. Shields up!)
Lets get The Voice out
of the way first before we get to the good stuff (the outfits, the rambling,
the make-up breaks…). The voice is shot. Totally shot, and only the most rabid
fan (or reviewer who was drunk or in the pocket of the promoter – ahem! The Guardian and others) who
refuses to accept the evidence of their own ears could possibly say
differently. When she’s not having to force it, the voice is recognisably
Whitney’s and there are moments when you can hear the voice that made her
famous, but the upper register is completely gone, and more devastatingly, so
is the lung power, so even when she manages to hit the bigger notes she can’t
hold them, and they quickly hit the floor, or simply crack and disappear
altogether. Even in the middle and lower register she’s breathless and
sometimes raspy, though vocally she pulls it off best in the numbers that don’t
require her lost big range, like in My
Love Is Your Love. It’s actually a little sad at times - you feel for her
because she ain’t deaf, she can hear it too – but she is a fantastic one-woman anti-drugs
campaign. A serious drug problem does serious damage and the evidence is right
there in front of you.
But fair play to our Whit: she does very little miming –
a little bit in the opening section, most obviously in the second number – but
for the most part she’s giving us her warts and all live performance. Though
for much of the hits, she lets the crowd do the singing – and they are only too
happy to – filling in the Whitney gaps. Though at one point, as she starts in
to I Will Always Love You and as the
crowd picks it up and runs with it she pulls them back, adding “Not that I
don’t appreciate the assistance” to much laughter as we all assume (rightly or
wrongly) that it’s a reference to the much discussed YouTube clips. Indeed she
does seem to be aware of the controversy surrounding her earlier gigs, because
at another point she asks the people filming with phones and cameras if they
watch them over again at home and then “Tweeter” them. (I have a clip of that
which I’ll post when it’s finished uploading).
The energy high-point of the
show comes when she does I Wanna Dance With Somebody/How Will I Know which has
the crowd leaping to their feet and even Whitney nearly gets her boogie on.
There is a lot of love in the room for Whitney, and at those moments all is
forgiven. Everyone is here for a good time, Whitney wants us to have a good
time, and God damn it, we’re going to have a good time!
I definitely wasn’t
bored. There’s lots to enjoy, even if not necessarily always for the right
reasons. I always want my performers to talk, to know there really there in the
room with you, and with Whitney, there’s no doubting she’s really there, in
body if not always in mind. She loves to ramble on, often quite nuttily, and I
always enjoy that. We got a rambling five-minute treatise on Michael Jackson, a
bit about the volcanic ash and the ferry trip to Dublin, plenty of diva-ish
name dropping (“a young man called Akon”…. “You know him as R Kelly, but I call him Robert”), lots of
reminders about how much she loves us, and indeed Jesus, and a whole five minute
one-way conversation with a shy young girl in the front row. Whitney got the
wrong end of the stick and thought the girl had been abandoned by her mother
(the mother was twenty yards away) and was full of addled concern for her, and
when the mother appeared she called her out on her parenting! “She doesn’t ever
have to be left alone again” she admonished, before calling on her assistant to
go and get “two tour books, some T-shirts, one of those charm bracelets… Get
everything!” and when she reappeared ten minutes later after changing into a
sequinned gown, she walked out singing and carrying two white plastic bags of
merchandise for the girl, looking like she’d just been out to Centra. Her
disjointed ramblings were entertaining for the most part, but whether the
result of medication or booze or just the permanently addled mind of the
recovered addict, was impossible to know for sure.
I know you gays want
to know how she looked, and she looked good for a regular 47 year old - but of
course she’s not a regular 47 year old. She’s Whitney Houston, the great
beauty, and it’s impossible not to compare her to the Whitney of our memories.
Her face is a little puffy, but most notable is her oddly swollen,
pregnant-looking belly. She thin as a rake, and spends the middle section of
the show poured into a figure hugging sequined number which accentuates her own
middle section. The dress is crying out for a corset, but I guess a corset is
out of the question when you’re doing your best to belt out the hits. She has
three outfits. She starts in an uncomfortable looking jacket and pants that are not her friend, disappears for a long
ten minutes while her older brother sings an unremarkable number (though he has
a good voice) to a totally disinterested crowd and then the backing singers
belt out Queen Of The Night to a
video montage before she finally reappears in the sequinned number. The encore
is Million Dollar Bill and is when
she looks best, and most comfortable, dressed down in jeans and a leather
jacket. However she wants to look her best for us, and so on a number of
occasions she entertainingly and diva-ishly turns her back to us and picks up a
hand mirror and compact and dramatically powders her visage. Not that she’s
working up a sweat from dancing because Whitney doesn’t dance. She is not a
graceful mover – in fact she kind of clomps around the stage looking like she’d
much rather be in her PJ’s and slippers while a quartet of hot boys do all the
dancing for her – and that’s fine. They’re fine!
And Whitney? Well,
she’s not fine. But she’s there, and she’s giving it her all, and we were on
her side.
All together now!
“Yeahhhh I wanna dance with somebody! I wanna feel the HEAT with somebody!”
UPDATE: Here's my clip of I Will Always Love You, and her "tweeter" comment etc. Apologies for the poor video quality - I stupidly forgot my camera so it's shot with my phone - but the sound is OK so you can make up your own mind.
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