- Music
- 20 May 04
Cher is a genuine star, a showbiz icon who revels in schlock – and her fans, mostly women over 30 on the night, as it happens, love her for it.
Cher is a genuine star, a showbiz icon who revels in schlock – and her fans, mostly women over 30 on the night, as it happens, love her for it.
She made a dramatic entrance, being lowered from the ceiling, wearing an elaborate silver gown with white fur trimmings, singing U2’s ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. It wasn’t a bad version, either, of one of U2’s great songs.
It didn’t take her long to strip down to a tinsel bikini – tasteful, that – in which she regaled us with ‘We’ve Got To Love One Another’. Another costume change and she was into a red coat and top hat, brandishing a whip to complete the homely look – her “talking outfit” as she called it!
Unassuming she ain’t. Happily describing the show to come as “sleazy”, she had some tender words for rival younger divas like Britney and Beyonce: “Follow this, you bitches!”
The hits and the big numbers flowed – her ‘60s smash with then-husband Sonny Bono, ‘Bang, Bang’, ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves’, ‘Love Hurts’, ‘Walking In Memphis’, ‘It’s In His Kiss’, ‘Strong Enough’, ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ and more.
In case anyone was unaware of her Hollywood pedigree, a short show of clips from the movies she’s been in over the years was included, covering Mask, Mussolini, Witches of Eastwick, Suspect, Mermaids, Stuck on You, Silkwood and Moonstruck. In a single stroke, any notion that Cher could be dismissed as a lightweight was comprehensively blown out of the water.
She finished with ‘Do You Believe In Life After Love?’ – and, well, looking at Cher you couldn’t but. Personally, she’s known some good times and some hard. In her career, she’s handled enormous success, dismal failure – and just about everything in between. But this much is certain: she has chutzpah, and attitude in abundance, as well as talent.
It shone through in a show that was glitzy, bombastic, cheesy and hugely entertaining. One up for the girls…