Grace Jones: Colston Hall

Monday 26th January 2009

This is a Crackerjack review of Grace Jones. Do you agree? Rate and review this event.

Crackerjack rating: 9 / 10.

Ahh, so this is what a proper pop star should look like...

All these years of being force-fed Simon Cowell-approved automatons with 15-octave ranges, it comes as a shock - and a welcome surprise - to encounter someone so other-worldly and frankly alien as Grace Jones.

Back on tour to promote her first album in 20 years, she's now 60, but could pass for a supermodel three decades her junior.

Some of Bristol's famous sons have played a vital part in her rebirth, too. Massive Attack invited Jones to play at their Meltdown Festival last summer which planted the seed for this surprise comeback - and Daddy G was in the crowd here last night - while Tricky appears on the title track of the new album, Hurricane.

She’s fashionably late - and I mean fashionably. I haven’t got a degree in houte couture, so you’ll have to bear with me. There's a costume change for every song and it's enough to give Gok Wan a migraine.

As a former muse of Andy Warhol, Jones remains the perfect example of the point at which art means pop. In typically understated fashion, she makes her entrance 30ft up in the Gods tottering on a platform for her dubby cover version of Iggy Pop’s Nightclubbing before returning with a metallic fin on her head for the electro reggae of This Is.

For Demolition Man, she wears only a black basque as she wields two giant cymbals, clattering them above her head as her seven-piece band worked up its first real head of steam of the night.

Another new song, the muscular Love You To Life, is right up there with any of the classics in her back catalogue. It's impressive stuff and clearly this was no nostalgia-fest for 80s romantics.

Meanwhile, her off-stage banter was a mixture of bonkers non-sequiturs and X-rated sauce as she fumbled around in the dark for her next get-up.

The Parisian shuffle of La Vie En Rose won a huge cheer and let Grace show off a great pair of lungs as well as legs - she even managed to share a glass of Champagne with a guy in the front row mid-song. Now that’s class.

In ever more ridiculous millinery - Jones by now sported a giant cheesy Quaver on her head - the band powered through another newie, William’s Blood, a tribute to her mother which also saw the singer perform a gyrating pole dance for good measure. Her old mum, would be proud.

Then it’s time for the really big guns. Disco funk monster Pull Up To The Bumper began with giant stageside canons shooting confetti over the crowd. By now it’s party time as Jones ushered as many people from the audience as she could up on to the stage. One punter bottled it. “You don’t know what you’re missing, you fool!” she chastises.

By encore time, she’s bouncing lasers off her glitterball top hat for the Roxy Music cover Love Is The Drug and then dressed in a golden cat mask, she hula-hoops her way through Slave To The Rhythm.

It’s genius stuff. The stuff legends were, and indeed are, made of. It's enough to make me dig out my DVD of A View To A Kill.

Steve Harnell

This is a Crackerjack review of Grace Jones. Do you agree? Rate and review this event.