Someone must have slipped her a little woo-woo powder or at
least some kind of mild sedative. Why else would Grace Jones
consent to filling the warm-up slot for Jarvis Cocker and his
freshly re-formed band, Pulp? I'm not dissing the bespectacled
national treasure who has thankfully taken the 'easy' out of Sunday
morning radio. It's just that I somewhat bashfully believe that
it's Grace's world; we just live in it. That said, making Grace
Cocker's aural fluffer meant that I did get home to a cup of
steaming Horlicks well before nightfall. And at the ripe old age of
40-and-a-bit, that means a lot to me.
The second surprise of the evening is the fact that our Grace
arrives on stage a mere five minutes later than the scheduled time.
No messing. And what an entrance. To a booming introduction by a
voice that sounds like the chap who reads the retro menus on Sue
Perkins' Supersizers, she rises like a genie on a mini steel stage
(part industrial crane, part Stannah Stairlift) to the now
well-rehearsed strains of her 80s hit Nightclubbing. I've been
bemoaning the plethora of female singers who this year seem to be
sporting little more than swimsuits on festival stages across
Europe. I'd like to see some of the blokes doing the same. Oh, wait
a minute, actually I don't. But somehow, because Grace is, well, a
woman in the autumn of her life and able to sing Slave to the
rhythm after 40 minutes of cavorting around, whilst simultaneously
hula-hooping and because she has body that looks like black marble,
she gets away with it in my book. As she gyrates round the pole to
La Vie En Rose wearing a red sash-like ensemble that looks like
someone's dropped red ink into the eye of a tornado, I notice her
son, the drummer Paulo look askance. I wonder what it might be like
to have fierce Grace Jones for a mum. Characteristically,
throughout her set, she ends each song with a trip backstage for a
head-gear change (Philip Treacy, of course) chattering away and I
can't help feeling as though she really is a voice from on high,
commanding us to sing with her, dance and clap. And, like the
devotional disciples that we now are, everyone does.
