Belinda Carlisle at the London Palladium: like being waterboarded with pink icing sugar
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Skipping nimbly around the London Palladium stage like a woman half her age, dressed in a black turtle-neck jumper and sparkly gold skirt, one of the biggest-selling female singers of the 1980s was on the comeback trail. In her heyday, Belinda Carlisle was perhaps her era’s most representative star, touting consummately sculpted pop, drained of all complication and angst for maximum marketability.
Like Madonna without the aggressive sexual jousting, and Fleetwood Mac without the real-life drama, Carlisle presented an immaculate hyper-melodic surface to sell to America, and 1987 album Heaven On Earth duly eased her into the multi-platinum league.
For troubled teenagers like myself, fretting over our Smiths lyrics, she was the squeaky-clean devil incarnate. It transpires that she was a problem child too, though, growing up peripatetically around an alcoholic stepfather, bingeing on cocaine to numb accusations of being chubby while fronting all-girl LA New Wave band The Go-Go’s, then enjoying solo success until the mid-90s, when addiction got the better of her and she abandoned the career that caused it.
As she sings angelically, leading umpteen overhead clap-alongs with nary a discernible pant nor bead of sweat, you’d have to concede that, at 64, Carlisle makes a pretty good advert for snorting your way around the world for 30 years, then purging it all via Buddhism and Kundalini yoga.
Introducing a 1989 album track called Deep Deep Ocean, she casually noted that George Harrison played on the recorded version. The barrage of hits that surrounded it – grandstanding opener (We Want) The Same Thing, sultry desert shuffle Circle in the Sand, bouncy Summer Rain – were uniformly classy, written for her, if not exactly by Burt Bacharach, then the cream of California’s jobbing songwriters.
After 45 minutes, the all-smiling sequence was interrupted by Our Lips are Sealed, a co-write between Go-Go Jane Wiedlin and Terry Hall of The Specials, whom the band supported circa 1980. Rendered here in an oddly discofied tribute to Hall, who passed away before Christmas, its stony words of paranoia and dark artistry jarred totally with the evening’s more two-dimensional craftsmanship.
Doe-eyed meditations on romance and freedom piled up thereafter, at times becoming so sickly it felt rather like being waterboarded with pink icing sugar.
When biggie Heaven is a Place On Earth finally resounded, it didn’t quite raise the roof as it should’ve. Perhaps our heroine just needed a little less schmaltz and a little more depths to get her comeback really moving.
Belinda Carlisle’s Decades tour continues in Nottingham (tonight, 11 Feb), Southend (Mon 13), Exeter (Wed 15), Manchester (Fri 17), Edinburgh (Sat 18), York (Mon 20). Tickets
