Here’s what I knew about Michael Bublé before I went to see him in concert: he’s a good singer who’s always in a suit, he does covers, broke up with Emily Blunt (idiot), and my mother thinks he’s lovely.
Here’s what I didn’t know: how the hell he managed to sell 90,000 tickets to his Aviva Stadium gigs.
To open the show, Bublé swaggered onstage under a shower of sparks looking like the star of some upmarket James Bond musical, belting out the opening refrains of ‘Cry Me a River’; if the screams around the stadium were anything to go by, he had just induced multiple orgasms in every woman in attendance. I don’t understand the heights of their enthusiasm, but I’m jealous – the Aviva Stadium is incredible but bloody freezing, so a couple of climaxes might be my only chance to keep warm. And bless Bublé, he does try so very hard to make me fancy him. Crooning his way through ‘All Of Me’ and ‘Everything,’ he spends a lot of time flirting and shmoozing by bigging up Dublin, introducing his band, talking about his fiancé and then trying to seduce me with that co-depenedent national anthem, ‘You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You’. And, I have to admit, he does get me dancing during ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘I Just Haven’t Met You Yet’, though I still officially claim I was just keeping the circulation flowing to my toes to ward off frostbite.
By the end of the night I’ve heard every variety of ecstatic scream, seen two women in their mid-forties perform chair-dances the Pussycat Dolls would be proud of, and the enterprising single lads behind me have all picked up women. Forget Rihanna, this is easily the most sexually charged concert I’ve ever attended.
But I’m not buying it: it’s not even foreplay, it’s just a really really long chat-up line. The quality of Bublé’s voice is never in question, and he is funny and charming, but he’s too smooth to be affecting, failing to imbue any of the songs with real emotion.
Though he does reach me during one song: “May be surrounded by/ A million people I/ Still feel all alone/ I just wanna go home.”