Susan Boyle
A SuBo concert isn’t everyone’s first choice for mid-week entertainment.
Show tunes and big ballads, sobbing fans and schmaltz? Yeah, I’d have rather been doing Orange Wednesdays.
But you can’t write Susan Boyle off – she just makes people so happy.
The Scottish singer broke into public consciousness in 2009 after braving the Britain’s Got Talent judges and nailing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables, much to the general shock of absolutely everyone.
A hop, skip and a Cowell driven makeover later, she was beaten by Diversity in the final, but nabbed a record deal and a worldwide following anyway.
Five years on she’s tackling her debut nationwide tour, and while there have been charity concerts, American X Factor appearances and performances for the Queen, this is the first time the tabloid darling has actually schlepped round the UK night after night.
So far she appears to be bearing up under the pressure… and is seemingly only faintly out of tune with the tightly orchestrated strings being not-so invisibly tugged and twisted behind the scenes.
Strictly Come Dancing’s slick suited vocalist Lance Ellington warmed up the sold out Cambridge Corn Exchange crowd (mums, daughters and sweet old couples holding hands that were enough to start you blubbering before Boyle even turned up), he was a good choice; the guy has a nerve-settling charm about him.
Then the lights fizzed out and a silhouetted Boyle arched and wiggled as the opening introduction of her BGT audition blared, Cowell’s excruciating scepticism fading into a slip of cocooning light.
Shiny haired and all a-glitter, she launched into the emotional vice of Irene Cara’s Out Here On My Own, momentarily stilling a Bambi-ish vulnerability and tentativeness that has you worried she might cut and run (Boyle’s stage fright and nerves are well documented). Swaddling her in sequins – however glamorously – and making it difficult to totter about properly doesn’t exactly help her look comfortable.
Her voice though, it’s practically faultless. Slinking powerfully from Somewhere Over the Rainbow into ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All, she nearly lost me, but blame that on personal taste; clawing it back magnificently with a booming rendition of Wild Horses.
You forget she’s funny too, flirting with her pianist “Lucifer”, shimmying at the front rows, blowing kisses, chuckling at wolf whistles and joking that “the doors are locked!”
It was enough to make you forgive the limp, wavering song choices in the second half, which featured tracks backed by the very enthusiastic Cambridge Show Choir that muddled the distinction between epic/goose bump inducing and just plain shouty. Attempts at dancier tracks really did not work, no matter how brilliant Susan’s jazz hands: Boyle can sing, she cannot do funk.
The odd faltering moments were swallowed up in the thrum and overwhelming feeling that every single person in that auditorium was willing her to do well though. Her voice suffusing you with a strange warmth and hope, needling tear ducts and nudging smiles., she is brilliantly likeable and loved, so loved, properly, whole heartedly adored. That’s hard to dismiss however much a non-fan you are.
Those string pullers just need to let her loose a bit more, let her soar. She’s more than got it in her.
First published by Cambridge News.
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