Kylie weaves her spell
Source: Evening Standard UK 28.07.08
Concert Rating: 4 out of 5
With the most supportive will in the world, it is difficult to see where Kylie Minogue’s talent lies, beyond simply Being Kylie. She’s not a great singer, she’s not a songwriter; she moves adequately at best and, for all her china doll prettiness, she is utterly, utterly without sex appeal, no matter how hard she tries.
After last night’s triumph, it’s still hard to pinpoint the exact nature of her gifts. Certainly, though, pop’s great survivor makes a little go an awfully long way. Indeed, the 40-year-old got much wrong, not least the day of the week when she exclaimed “it’s Saturday night in London!” to bemused giggles from an audience comprised of gay men, children, Barry Humphreys and Catherine Tate. Her cover of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana (At The Copa) was spectacularly ill-judged and the tiny, hopelessly inadequate screens (no close-ups allowed) must have made the whole experience seem rather like watching a flickering television in the corner of a neighbour’s lounge to the poor souls at the back.
Thinking up her myriad outfits (Napoleon Kylie, bondage Kylie, Melanie Griffith Kylie, American football-Kylie, Japanese Kylie, et-predictable-cetera) must have taken, ooh, a whole couple of minutes.
Yet, she was terrific and not in a camp or ironic way. The production was lavish and sprinkled with moments of glorious madness, such as singing Like A Drug perched precariously atop a giant skull 20 feet above stage. With a band mostly lurking guiltily stage left and right, and a platoon of dancers mostly alongside her, Minogue turned the O2 into an electro disco, stomping her way through the tub-thumping Shocked, Can”t Get You Out Of My Head (bravely, the evening’s second song) and Kids with exactly the level of controlled abandon these anthems demanded.
Surprisingly there was innovation and not least in her showcasing unreleased material such as the epic Flower. The hitherto unremarkable I Believe In You was reworked as a goosebumpy ballad; Step Back In Time began with a finger-clicking a cappella section, On A Night Like This finally made perfect sense and, as a special treat, she bid farewell with a rousing canter through that pop masterpiece, I Should Be So Lucky.
“In a word: ‘wow’,” she gushed at one point. In two words: fabulously enjoyable.
Kylie Minogue plays the 02 Arena tomorrow and Wednesday and 1, 2, 4 August. 0870 534 4444
(Yazzi: is it just me or is the review quite negative and a tad confusing!? She still gets a 4 out of 5 and it was ‘fabulously enjoyable’… Glad you liked it John?!)
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