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Whitney in Nottingham...
The Observer: Whitney Houston, Trent FM Arena, Nottingham
Morwenna Ferrier, Sunday 18 April 2010
Wherever Whitney Houston goes, she sees
love: in God, in Michael Jackson, in shoes, in moisturiser, in "us". But boy
does she hate her ex, Bobby Brown. While 46-year-old Houston ploughs on with
the UK leg of her world tour, the notorious 80s rapper turned reality TV
star is preparing to go to court to reduce his child maintenance payments.
Not to Houston, but still. "Any single mothers out there? Coz there's one up
here!" shouts Houston, two songs in. "And why am I a single mom? Because
stuff happens!" The crowd, which evidently includes a surprising number of
single parents, whoops in unison. Satisfied, Houston grins wildly and
bellows: "Welcome to the Whitney show!" One-nil Houston.
There was a lot riding on Wednesday's Nottingham gig. The previous week,
Houston had postponed three UK shows because of an upper respiratory
infection. On Tuesday, playing her first UK show in over a decade, she was
booed by some of the Birmingham crowd after her voice strained and wavered.
She took long breaks for costume changes and behaved skittishly, giving her
backing singers a disproportionate amount of vocals.
The morning after Birmingham's baffling performance, Twitter feeds were
awash with amateur YouTube clips, expletives and OMGs. And while in
Nottingham the diehard, camera-wielding fans (mostly women in their mid-30s,
aka generation Bodyguard) chanted her name throughout, a handful of
unsavoury comments were being thrown from the cheaper seats at the back
where sat a clutch of ghoulish voyeurs here for the sport.
Houston looks well, if a little thin. Gone is the bleached bob and body-con,
and back is the crackled perm and sparkly garb. She even manages to perform
her familiar bunny hop dance in stilettos for the first half of the show
before stomping around the stage with unwavering authority.
She kicks off successfully with two ballads from her 2009 album, I Look to
You, "For the Lovers" and "Nothin' But Love" (love really is a theme with
Houston.) The crowd, now warmed up, begins rattling with joy as she struts
around all finger-clicky, black and proud during "It's Not Right". The songs
include moments of genuine bonkersness. During "Saving All My Love for You"
she stoops to moisturise her ankles and on several occasions appears to be
singing to her shoes. This leftfield informality is matched by an
understated stage set. Silver curtains, no hydraulics, and one screen behind
her which flitted sporadically between religious imagery, photographs of the
Iraq war (although it could have been any war), snow, emaciated children and
Mother Theresa.
What may baffle those indifferent to Houston is how staid her support group
is, despite the past tawdry decade. During "My Love Is Your Love" she is
flanked by her son and daughter. At one point, a sodden Houston flicked
sweat onto the stage. A drop landed on Big Bob, her bodyguard of 20-odd
years, who put down his iPhone to smear the liquid lovingly across his
cheek. Family, management, super-fans; to these people she can do little
wrong. Yes, there's schmaltz but her fans like schmaltz.
However, Houston's rendition of the ultimate schmaltz anthem "I Will Always
Love You" must have tested even her most loyal followers. It's a challenging
ballad, not least if you've been doing extraordinarily damaging things to
your upper body for several years. Her voice wheezes and grates through the
high notes. There are attempts to plaster over the cracks with octave
changes and smiles, but mid-song she stops, sighs and turns around to
compose herself. She does finish the number, in a way, but it isn't
spectacular and Houston, frozen, knows it. A momentary silence is pierced by
the sound of a child crying in the stalls. Quite why left this song to the
end is bewildering. Her Dyson lungs aren't what they used to be.
Houston, of course, is of gospel stock, a cousin of Dionne Warwick, and has
sold a gazillion albums worldwide. She is a mega-diva, in the positive
sense. Yet she has spent the best part of a decade falling apart, publicly,
vociferously denying drug addiction and waxing lyrical about the joys of
colonic irrigation.
But no one really wants to see Whitney Houston fall even further from grace.
All her stomping, shouting and Brown-jeering feels like a rebuke to her glut
of negative press. Whitney Houston is, after all, the voice of the
mainstream, of proposals, coitus and hen nights. And, as the old saying
goes, if you can survive an addiction to cocaine you can survive just about
anything, even if it does monstrous things to your voice.
NEWSFILE: 18 APRIL 2010
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