Lulu and Guests: Royal Albert Hall June 1

Before I start, just a brief update on where I'm at with the podcast currently. Over the weekend I'll be recording two bonuses for Patreon backers – a normal bonus episode on Tim Buckley, and a Q&A – both of which should go live very early next week. I expect to have the main episodes for songs 184 and 185 recorded by the end of next week – I've finished researching them and am now in the process of writing them. The script for 184 is currently at about 5000 words, and 185 at 6500 words (both will be about 15-20,000 words when done). I've also been working on song 186 at the same time (all three tie together) and so that will be up after much less of a break.

Anyway, on with the review.

I go to a lot of different gigs, of a lot of different types, and they're on a wide spectrum from the purely artistic and "serious" with very few concessions to pleasing the audience at one end, to pure populism and entertainment on the other. My most recent post here, about the Paul Simon gig, was about a show that was towards the far end of the artistic, so I thought I'd write about a gig that's as far to the other end – Lulu's show last week at the Royal Albert Hall.

I've only seen Lulu once before, supporting the Beach Boys last year at an all-day festival event (along with two other support acts – a fairly poor Buddy Holly tribute act and David Essex) and I'd been blown away by how good she actually was – as I mentioned in my Patreon bonus episode on her, I was with my friend the comedy writer Sara Gibbs (with whom I've been collaborating on a side project which will be announced soon) who at the start said "I'm not that bothered about seeing Lulu, I'll probably get bored and just go and look around the stalls" but then three songs in turned to me and said "I am now a Lulu superfan and I want her to adopt me".

I didn't go quite that far, but I was more impressed than I'd expected to be by the sheer range of her career, and how many of her songs I actually knew and enjoyed, and by her charisma and vocal ability. I decided then that I'd go and see her if she toured again – but she also announced in that show that she had retired from touring and was only planning on doing the odd special show from that point on.

So when I saw that she had announced one of those special shows at the Royal Albert Hall, a big charity show with then-unnamed special celebrity guests, I obviously bought tickets. They were expensive, but it's for charity, and she wasn't touring any more, so...

Of course, about a week later she announced a couple of other shows the same week, one of them at Stockport Plaza, which is a lovely venue (which sadly only puts on anything worth watching maybe once every two years) a ten-minute bus ride from my house, rather than requiring a multi-hour train journey and an overnight stay, and with far more reasonably priced tickets. But I'd already bought the tickets, and Sara was coming again (she lives relatively close to London, and we were getting together for work that weekend anyway), so London it was. Plus, she'd announced there would be "special guests" at the Albert Hall show, which might be interesting.

During the support act I was mostly people-watching, and so when I was discussing the gig with a friend afterwards and he said "I bet you were the only straight man there" I was able to correct him – I think I was the only straight man there willingly. There were three major contingents of audience members. There were a lot of middle-aged very obviously gay men, who made up about a quarter of the audience (obviously I can't know anyone's sexuality for sure and one can't judge a book by its cover, but these were so obvious that even my non-functioning gaydar pinged a fair bit). Much of the rest of the audience was made up of women of a certain age, many dressed up as if they were going to a costume party – full head-to-toe sequins and similar. And then there were the bored husbands – about half the women had come with a man who clearly did not particularly want to be there, was not going to go to any effort with his appearance, and looked significantly less happy than his partner.

Interestingly, the music played during the interval was all Lulu's own music, rather than the normal thing of having some other music of a similar style playing – but obviously they didn't play anything that Lulu was going to perform in the show itself, and so it was mostly songs from her arty, experimental, early seventies period, when she was at a commercial low (and which obviously I love, because I'm me) – things like her version of the Bee Gees' "Melody Fair".

Then, after a montage of footage from throughout her career – Lulu with Lennon and McCartney, Lulu duetting with her ex-husband Maurice Gibb, Lulu with Mama Cass and Dudley Moore, Lulu with Elton John, Lulu with Jimi Hendrix – Lulu herself came on and launched into "Shout!", the record that had launched her career as a teenager sixty-three years ago.

(As I don't expect most of my audience to be ultrafamiliar with Lulu's work, and those outside the UK might be even less familiar with her special guests' work, I've put together a streaming playlist of her setlist at https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/M5bFbASdq3 for those who want to listen along – you might be surprised how many of the songs you know, though.)

Sadly her current live arrangement of "Shout!" is a bit too much of a foursquare rock song, rather than the more swinging pop-R&B arrangement she had on the record (copied from the Isley Brothers' original), and it loses a little as a result, but her voice is still spectacular – another way in which this show is the polar opposite of Paul Simon's is that Lulu's voice is miraculously well preserved – and the audience roared its approval.

For the most part – with exceptions that will be obvious later – the show was structured almost identically to the show from last year. Like many legacy acts with a huge number of hits behind them, and who are more concerned with giving the audience what they want than with their own artistic expression, like the Beach Boys or the Temptations, she has a very set show structure which she varies very little, and because her career has been so varied the genre and quality of the songs swings wildly, inducing vertigo in anyone who comes to the show with expectations built around artists who have stuck to narrower niches. 

So the next song, as in the show I saw a year ago, was a cover version of Martha and the Vandellas' "Heat Wave" done as a duet with her younger sister Edwina, who is a backing vocalist in her band and whose voice is spookily similar to Lulu's (I suspect that one reason she's there is as a sort of vocal understudy to help out Lulu on bad days, but if so she wasn't needed this time – I was close enough to the stage that I could tell that Lulu was singing all the leads herself.)

At this point in Lulu's typical setlist she performs "Boom-Bang-A-Bang", her Eurovision entry, introducing it with an anecdote about how she disliked the song when she was given it, and wished the public , who voted on the songs for the contest, would vote for another song, but that her taste was proved wrong when the song won the contest. She did that this time, but then brought out Delta Goodrem, who I had never heard of before the show but who was apparently a star of the Australian soap opera Neighbours who has had a successful pop career, including being this year's Eurovision entrant for Australia.

Goodrem duetted with Lulu on "Boom-Bang-a-Bang" (a song about which, sadly, I share Lulu's original opinion – it's really not very good) and then Lulu left the stage for Goodrem to perform her own Eurovision song, which was apparently called "Eclipse". I remember little about the song except that it was a bit bombastic and overlong for my tastes. (I'm sure I'll give it a listen when I put together the accompanying playlist for this post) (and listening to that playlist as I do my final edits, it is a bit bombastic for me, but not overlong at only three minutes). Sara, who is a few years younger than me and a longstanding Neighbours fan, called it a teenage dream fulfilled, though. 

Lulu then returned to the stage and performed a song which is apparently titled "I'm in Love Again" and is from her soon-to-be-released new album, her first in a decade. It made little impression on me (and hasn't been released yet so I can't relisten) but as I recall it was a rather decent piece of dance-pop.

And speaking of dancing I have to express just how impressive Lulu is as a performer, not just a singer. She moves like a woman less than half her age, and while some of her between-songs banter and interaction with her band members is clearly scripted (there were some moments that I remembered from the show a year ago, like Edwina doing an impression of Lulu during the band introductions and Lulu saying "she thinks she's funny") she's also spontaneous enough, and varies this enough, that it doesn't feel like someone going through the motions, but like genuine communication with the audience.

The new song was followed with "We've Got Tonight", her version of the Bob Seger song, which she'd recorded as a duet with the ex-boyband singer Ronan Keating and which had made the top five in 2002. Keating was not one of the star guests for this event, and so her duet partner was her musical director and keyboardist Rick Krive, who frankly sounded far better to me than Keating – he has a gruff white-soul voice that worked well on the song, though that will never be a favourite of mine.

If it sounds like I'm being overly critical of the music to this point, I'm not. There were several songs in the show that aren't to my personal taste, but that's almost beside the point. What Lulu did throughout the show was to give the audience what they want – if something was a hit for her, it was getting played, and it didn't matter if it was in a style I'm not keen on (like the big Seger ballad or the Eurovision ditty) or one I love (like much of the rest of the show) and nor did it matter if the style was completely different to the previous song. Part of the point of a show like this is to show off the sheer range of the performer, and if you don't like one style, another will be along in a minute, and that's something you have to accept going in.

And the next song was a case in point. In the seventies Lulu collaborated with David Bowie briefly (and the two had a brief fling), and Bowie produced, played sax, and sung backing vocals on a version of his "The Man Who Sold The World" for her which became a massive hit (actually bigger than almost all of Bowie's own seventies singles). After talking about this a little, Lulu launched into the song, in an arrangement which was closer to Bowie's guitar-heavy original than to the saxophone-driven version she'd recorded. The reason for this became clear when halfway through it turned into a virtual duet, with live footage of Bowie at Glastonbury synched to Lulu's live band.

I'm not generally a fan of this kind of virtual duet, whether it's Paul McCartney duetting with John Lennon on "I've Got a Feeling" or the touring Beach Boys backing Carl Wilson on "God Only Knows", but leaving my squeamishness about it aside, from a purely musical perspective it worked. The best thing about Lulu's single was the combination of her voice and Bowie's, and the guitar-riff arrangement of Bowie's original is better than the arrangement on Lulu's version, so this did actually capture the best elements of both.
By this point in the show it had also become obvious that part of Lulu's intention with the show is to let everyone know just how much she's achieved and how many crucial moments in entertainment history she's actually been involved with. As I said in my Patreon bonus on her, she's someone who most people will think of as a one-hit wonder, but who has done a lot, and she seems determined to make that clear. 

After the song she worked on with David Bowie, she talked about "another man I was involved with" – James Bond – and performed her Bond theme "The Man With The Golden Gun". Rather astonishingly, that was I believe the only Bond theme not to chart, but it's actually one of the very best (and seems to be thought of as such now – recently on Bluesky there was a music challenge going round for people to name their favourite Bond themes, and it turned up a lot) and she belted it out in style, her voice not having aged a day in the fifty-plus years since she recorded it.

And she followed that with one of her two Grammy-nominated songs – "Who's Foolin' Who", a minor hit for her from 1981 which got nominated for the best rock vocal award. It's not one of her better-known tracks but is an excellent showcase for her voice – a slow electric blues of the kind that B.B. King or somebody might have recorded in that period.
And again, note the sheer stylistic range of this performance. That's a blues track coming after a Bond theme coming after a glam-era Bowie song coming after a power ballad. None of these songs sounded incongruous or in any way out of place, and she was equally great singing all of them. (And, I should note, her band were equally able to switch gears between these vastly different styles without sounding leaden or out of their depth).

Another switch of gears, another achievement for her to point out, as she dedicated "To Sir With Love" to Sidney Poitier, her co-star in the film it came from, and pointed out that the song, which wasn't especially big over here, was the biggest selling single of 1967 in the USA.

At this point she introduced her next special guest, Boy George, who she introduced as "an LGBTQ+ icon". I was a bit wary of that phrasing when she used it, because Boy George is someone I remember as having made some controversial transphobic remarks a few years ago. However, to give him credit, when I looked this up to see what he'd said, I've found a lot of quotes from more recent years where he has vocally and explicitly stood up for trans rights. Clearly there has been some growth there.

I've heard reports from other people that George's voice has sounded poor in recent Culture Club shows, and given that I wasn't expecting much from him, but his performance of "Karma Chameleon" was absolutely spectacular and his voice, like Lulu's, barely sounded like it had aged a day. There was also a huge amount of chemistry and clear affection between him and Lulu, with both of them cracking each other up repeatedly during the song (partly because George seemed to keep forgetting that it was actually meant to be a duet, and just powering through verses that Lulu was meant to be taking, leading her to scold him at least twice "that's my line!").

Sadly, what was a musical highlight up to this point was a low point in other ways. Just across the aisle from me were a group of those obviously gay men I mentioned earlier, and they were clearly particularly excited to see Boy George, and stood up and danced all the way through the song, Unfortunately this earned the wrath of one of the women of a certain age, who was sat behind them and objected vociferously to people having fun and dancing at a pop music concert (I strongly suspect she was motivated by homophobia). She actually went and got the security people to try to make the dancers sit down, but after the dancers flirted a little with one of the security guards, they were allowed to keep dancing and the angry woman was left disappointed.

Both before and after Boy George's performance, Lulu gave one of several short speeches where she talked about how the show was to raise money for "mental health, a cause which affects all of us" – but Sara and I both found it funny how nonspecific this was. The funds apparently go to Lulu's own charity, Lulu's Mental Health Trust, which in turn apparently funds other charities which work in the area, but quite which charities those are is not very clear. We joked that it was literally for Lulu's mental health – "I'll be a lot less depressed if I have a couple of million more" – but I'm sure it actually does good work, really. It was very amusing though how vague she was about the details.

After "Karma Chameleon", Boy George left the stage and Lulu thanked her own fans in the LGBTQ+ community before performing her nineties comeback dance hit, "Independence", which was apparently a huge hit in queer clubs at the time. 

We then got another reminder of her myriad achievements, as she introduced her other Grammy-nominated song – this time, one where she was nominated for songwriting rather than singing, and for the very first song she ever wrote. "I Don't Wanna Fight" was co-written by Lulu, her brother, and composer Steve DuBerry about the breakdown of her second marriage, and while Lulu recorded it as a B-side later, it was originally recorded by Tina Turner for the soundtrack of What's Love Got To Do With It?, and it received two Grammy nominations (one for the song and one for Turner's performance) and a BMI Song Award, and became an international hit and Turner's final US top ten.

Lulu performs this song as another virtual duet like the one with Bowie, using TV footage of Turner singing the song, and while again I'm not the world's greatest fan of this kind of thing, it takes a special type of talent – and indeed self-belief – to subject oneself to a direct comparison to Tina Turner, one of the great rock vocalists of all time, and not look like an absolute fool. But Lulu is good enough (and has duetted in reality with enough true greats) that she is not embarrassed by the comparison.

She followed with another of her own songs, another co-write with her brother, "Where The Poor Boys Dance", a song about her childhood in Glasgow which was a minor hit in 2000, and which she considers one of her most personal.

And then the show moved into its final stage, and the one which most excited a huge chunk of the audience. In the early nineties, Lulu had had a hit with the boyband Take That, with a cover version of "Relight My Fire". Take That are largely unknown in the US (and were never favourites of mine), but in the UK they've had twelve number-one singles and nine number-one albums, and were far and away the biggest act of the early nineties (and second of the nineties overall after the Spice Girls). 

Lulu first brought on Gary Barlow, the group's main songwriter and lead singer on most of their hits, along with a saxophone player whose name I didn't catch. Barlow was wearing a sparkly black shirt, but otherwise had, as Sara pointed out, a disconcerting resemblance to Keir Starmer (current UK Prime Minister as I write this, but possibly forgotten to history if you're reading this in more than two weeks' time). The audience went utterly berserk when he came out, and he and Lulu performed a very creditable duet on the nineties Take That hit "A Million Love Songs" – a song that was ubiquitous in the early nineties but which it's probably been thirty years since I'd heard.

I was a teenage boy and an immense music snob when that song was a hit and so obviously I'd viscerally hated it, but several decades on it's not a bad song at all – not something to my particular tastes, but not something it was possible to actually dislike, especially when I could see the reaction the audience were having to it. It's very hard actually to dislike something when you can see and hear it making several thousand people have the time of their lives, and it would take a greater curmudgeon even than I to do so.

The audience were already rapturous when Barlow performed, but then he left the stage and Lulu introduced his ex-bandmate Robbie Williams, saying he was "someone I've known since he was a teenager". Now, both Barlow and Williams are household names in the UK, but most American readers won't have a clue who either man is, and about the long history between them (and I have no idea at all about all the other countries my readers may come from). So a brief explanation is possibly in order.

Gary Barlow was and is the star of Take That. He sang most of the leads and wrote all their original material, and by 1995 he was clearly angling for a big solo career and patterning his career trajectory after that of George Michael. Williams, who was essentially a backing singer who got the occasional lead line, but was the most charismatic member, got annoyed specifically with Barlow and with being in the band at all, and quit. The band carried on as a four-piece for another year, and then split up, and the assumption was that Gary Barlow would be a megastar in his own right.

Barlow released one successful solo album, which went to number one in the UK, but his second solo album didn't get any further than number thirty-five and he was dropped by his record label, and didn't release anything else as a performer until Take That's successful reunion (without Williams) in 2006, seven years later.

Williams, meanwhile, was written off as a talentless joke who had been hanging on Barlow's coattails, a buffoonish party animal, a has-been at twenty. And then he released his solo albums. Counting compilations, he has had sixteen UK number one albums as a solo artist (and two at number two), overtaking Elvis to have the most number one albums of any solo artist, and with only the Beatles beating him as a band.

Williams briefly rejoined Take That for a couple of years in the 2010s, but for the most part has stayed distant from his old band – and particularly from Barlow. There's no love lost between the two men by all accounts, because Williams always resented Barlow for being the only one their old management cared about, while Barlow resented Williams for having the solo career that should by rights have been his.

Williams came out and the first chords of his hit "Angels" started up, and the entire audience screamed in a way that I can only compare to Beatlemania. Again, Americans mostly won't be aware of this, but "Angels" – Williams' fifth solo single, and the one that cemented him as Britain's biggest solo star – is one of the most well-known and beloved singles ever released in the UK. In 2005, eight years after it came out, it was voted the best single of the previous twenty-five years, and it regularly tops lists of songs most played at funerals. It holds a position in the British musical culture somewhere in that rarefied space where "Imagine" and "Hey Jude" also live, where it's completely impervious to criticism – it's a song that literally everyone knows and which is pretty much universally beloved.

Even though she'd known in advance that Williams was going to perform, when the song started Sara still jumped out of her seat and screamed "Oh my God, it's Robbie Williams singing 'Angels'!" and she was not the only one – that was pretty much the universal reaction. I stayed in my seat, partly because I've never particularly been a fan of Williams, but mostly because I find standing quite difficult – I was having a bad arthritis day. I was, I think, literally the only person in the entire sold-out Albert Hall not standing up from the instant the opening chords to the song started. Even I, though, couldn't help singing along with every single word of the song.

I have a certain amount of visceral distrust of great communal everyone-sing-along moments. I always identify with the character in Monty Python's Life of Brian who, when the entire crowd chants in unison "yes, we are all individuals" says "I'm not!" But even I, as analytical and intellectual and cerebral as I am about everything, couldn't help being moved a little bit by Williams and Lulu duetting on this song that is beyond criticism now, just a part of the culture to be accepted for what it is. 

And then after that, Barlow came back out to join Williams. The two hadn't shared a stage in a decade (at least according to news reports I saw afterwards) and from the relatively recent Netflix documentary series about Williams' career it seems there is still some enmity between them, but they joined together with Lulu to sing "Relight My Fire", the song she'd performed with Take That in the early nineties which had been a huge hit for them. And the two men walked off after the song, together, holding hands.

After this finale, reuniting two people who almost nobody in the audience had believed would ever be on stage together again, there was nothing else that could be done except to finish where we started, and so sans special guests Lulu closed the show with a second rendition of "Shout!"

As I said at the start, this Lulu show was in almost every way the polar opposite of Paul Simon's show a couple of weeks earlier – brash where his was subdued, crowd-pleasing where Simon's was uncompromising. On a purely musical basis I would choose Simon's show every single time, but while Simon's audience was appreciative, it was nothing like the utter ecstasy in the audience when Lulu and Robbie Williams duetted on "Angels", or even the joy when she first came on stage and sang "Shout!"

The kind of criticism I do – the kind of person I am – tends to value performances of the kind that allow one to make clever comments on deep intellectual themes and references, and to prize them over the kind of performance that just... makes several thousand people ecstatically happy while they sing along to some of their favourite songs. And there's nothing wrong with liking that first kind of art, and I would never want to be the kind of anti-intellectual who calls that kind of work pretentious. But I sometimes forget that there's nothing wrong with pure entertainment, with making a massive crowd laugh, or sing along, or dance. 

Some of the greatest music ever made was made by people, like James Brown or Ray Charles, who described themselves not as artists but as entertainers. And on the evidence of her performance on June the first, Lulu is one of the greatest entertainers ever to do it.