CYNDI LAUPER: A CHAOTICALLY FUN FAREWELL – BUT NOT ENOUGH HITS TO SUSTAIN AN ARENA TOUR
“As I’ve said before, if I was going out, I was going out big,” said Cyndi Lauper, 71, from the stage at the start of this “farewell” concert at London’s flagship O2 arena. Wearing a black and grey futuristic outfit beneath a tousled mane of white hair, the New Yorker looked like Tina Turner moonlighting as Cruella de Vil.
As multicoloured confetti rained down, Lauper deployed her signature dance move – legs apart, knees in, Elvis hips, wild robotic arms – and played the recorder before plugging her Kinky Boots and (imminent) Working Girl musicals and breaking into her theme song to the 1985 adventure comedy The Goonies as a seven-piece band grooved behind her. “I’ve never been a church mouse anyway,” she said. You think?
Lauper and her great 1980s rival Madonna shared the brassy ambition that seems to be in the DNA of East Coast female pop stars from Catholic families of Italian descent (see also Lady Gaga). They’re whirlwinds of energy and invention, all three. But Lauper always had more of an art school sensibility than Madonna, who was – by some distance – the more successful of the two.
When a young Lauper fled her family home to escape an abusive stepfather, one of the few possessions she took with her was a copy of Yoko Ono’s book of drawings and instructions, Grapefruit. This sensibility was reflected in the show through polka dot costumes designed by Yayoi Kusama, the 95-year-old conceptual artist, and a general air of haphazardness (a dodgy spotlight and Lauper leaving out a song by mistake). But what was missing here – sadly – were hits. Lauper only ever had three top 10 singles in the UK (eight in the US), and it showed.
Songs were interspersed with long monologues that took in everything from men with comb-overs to Banksy. Lauper’s farewell tour is her first arena tour since 1986 and, even so, it was noticeable that the entire top tier of seats at the O2 were curtained off. If this wasn’t an “adieu”, I wonder whether such big venues would have been booked. (Her performance at last year’s Glastonbury certainly wasn’t met with universal acclaim.)
Still, the hits were rapturously received. I Drove All Night throbbed with neon-gothic propulsion, Lauper deploying its octave-spanning vocal gymnastics with aplomb. The highlight was Time After Time, her delicate 1984 ballad with wonderfully elastic bassline.
There were moments of theatrical kitsch, such as when Lauper appeared in a flamboyant red and yellow costume through a trapdoor. You were reminded that Lauper yoked her early stardom to WWF professional wrestling, a curious partnership for a second-wave feminist to forge. But her manufactured feud with “sexist” male wrestlers ended up in a televised fight, via proxy female wrestlers. Lauper’s team won and the bout broke MTV viewing records. She was a canny marketeer.
Inclusive anthem True Colours contained a dig at President Trump (“You can write diversity out of the books but you can’t write it out of who we are,” she said). For the finale of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun she was joined by Boy George. Two 1980s icon for the price of one. The stage looked like a Smash Hits spread from 1984. The duet was a qualified success – I did wonder if the bewildered-looking George had ever heard the song at one point – but it was a suitably colourful end to Lauper’s warmly chaotic victory lap.
Until Feb 16. Tickets: cyndilauper.com
2025-02-12T15:17:09Z
