Carla Bruni, Union Chapel, review: 'a strange blend of whimsy and sultriness'
It is a very strange thing indeed to watch Carla Bruni, France’s former First Lady, standing in front of a church altar, singing a jazz-inflected rendition of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. Then again, last night’s performance at London’s Union Chapel was full of strange moments – for good and for bad.
Bruni has been making music for several decades now – not that it’s necessarily the first thing that springs to mind upon hearing her name. That might well be her marriage to France’s ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, or perhaps her hugely successful modelling career (in the Nineties, she worked for Chanel, Versace and Yves Saint Laurent and was among the 20 highest-paid fashion models). But it was thanks to her five albums of delicate French folk, and her soft, cigarette-steeped voice, that people filed into the chapel pews last night.
Unexpected covers were the order of the evening, and these were performed with an equally unexpected shift in tone – one that felt sometimes brave, at other times careless. Willie Nelson’s despairing, lovesick ballad Crazy was delivered with an odd, syncopated chirpiness, while she transformed Moon River, a wistful, lyrically obtuse classic from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, into a song of seduction.
Whether offering whimsy or sultriness, Bruni, dressed in black leather trousers and a cropped jacket, caressed the air and gently rippled her hips from side to side as she sang, though she added a handful of slightly awkward variations to that signature move. For one of her own songs, J’Arrive à Toi, she crouched down on one knee, while for that playfully blasphemous AC/DC cover she gently placed her foot up on the monitor. Carla Bruni: refined rocker.
“Words are meaningless,” she sang in a huskily reimagined version of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence, “and forgettable.” She clearly meant that last part – she had a red binder of lyrics in front of her, at which she would glance even during the songs she’d penned herself. It didn’t much detract from things, only jarring when her unfamiliarity with the lyrics tangled her intonation.
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On Lou Reed’s Perfect Day, which was given a brass band thrum, she leant on the wrong parts of each phrase, rendering the whole thing a little mangled, stripped of the original’s subtle mix of poignancy and foreboding. She seemed more at home with an affecting cover of ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All, on which she added her breathy French lilt but retained the original’s broken-hearted resignation.
After obliging the rapturous (perhaps an inappropriate choice of word, given the setting) applause with a three-song encore, Bruni ended with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, having now ascended – “I just can’t resist” – onto the altar. It might have been a mixed evening, but it certainly pleased her disciples.
