Live Review: Grace Jones

On paper, a Grace Jones concert could sound like a train wreck waiting to happen, a 67-year-old parading around a stage, tribal paint in exchange for clothes, singing a back catalogue comprised largely of ‘80s disco ‘bangers’.

Except that the night didn’t come across as a weird, geriatric one-woman talent show at all. It was fantastic. All hail the wonder that is Grace Jones.

Jones focused on style and seduction to get her through the blander, more questionable tracks of the night (she debuted a new, unnamed track that could likely be the worst song of 2015, but distracted everyone with a costume change and some hypnotic stage sashaying). Our own Vanda & Young, or Flash & The Pan, Walking In The Rain and her cover of Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose were also both given the same treatment – entertaining and well sung songs in their own right, but they were made just that much more enjoyable by Jones’ onstage flair and dramatics. 

Halfway through the concert she kicked it up a notch, with a trail of songs that put her set of pipes and her vast backing band to good use, with Williams’ Blood into a great rendition of Roxy Music’s Love Is The Drug and on to an extended, funk-filled Pull Up To The Bumper and then a smoldering Slave To The Rhythm, in which Jones inexplicably, no magically, hula-hooped for the entire song. 
Ending with an encore of Hurricane in which she play-battled the elements on stage, suited up in black cape and eccentric black headpiece, Jones reinforced one last time that she is a force to be reckoned with. 

There isn’t a musician that comes close to the wacky dramatics of Grace Jones, despite some attempts, and this show was evidence of that: an unforgettable experience, full of energy and life and weirdness too from a one-of-a-kind performer. All hail the wonder that is Grace Jones.