Hula-hooping topless at 74, Grace Jones launches Meltdown with a thrilling sense of danger

“Bring the hula!” commanded Grace Jones, standing imperiously on a podium in an explosively feathery headpiece and vertiginous heels, her open coat exposing bare breasts. Even the 25 musicians stirring up the sinuous, funky groove of Slave to the Rhythm were gazing at their leader with expressions of open-mouthed bemusement. Sights I never thought I’d see: a topless 74-year-old spinning a hula hoop for 15 minutes, all the while singing and grinning fiercely, eventually descending to strut around the polished catwalk stage with the hoop still gyrating around her slender waist, while a dancing crowd roared “Keep it up! Keep it up!”

The Jamaican diva was everything you could have wished her to be on the opening night of the Meltdown Festival she has curated for London’s Southbank Centre: supremely stylish, magnificently musical, kookily charismatic and apparently tuned to a different frequency to the rest of us mere mortals. “Gimme some drugs, man!” the septuagenarian supermodel roared at one point, whilst rolling around the floor, kicking her long legs in the air. A loyal stagehand eventually brought her a glass of “Jesus Blood”, apparently a mix of honey and red wine, which she sipped through a straw as she performed.

Jones was an hour and a half late taking the stage for her first concert in two and half years, but her audience seemed to cheerfully accept that as par for the course. A huge, welcoming roar went up as a figure finally appeared at the top of a staircase in a slender suit and warped top hat, throwing geometric shapes with her body whilst delivering a deep, sensuous vocal on her throbbing version of Iggy Pop’s Nightclubbing. “It’s been a long time,” Jones announced as she slowly descended with feline grace, “and it’s like no time at all.”

Indeed, it is 56 years since she began her modelling career, 45 since she diversified into music, but Jones seems not so much untouched by the passing decades but to have grown in stature whilst apparently not aging at all. She really is a unique figure in her blend of wild fashion and atmospheric dance music, concocting something so distinctive even her classic 80s hits still seem completely modern.

This opening show was billed as Up Close & Orchestral, and it genuinely succeeded in delivering both personal intimacy and epic musical scale. Every song was staged with imagination and panache. Jones transformed into a living disco mirror ball on a driving version of Roxy Music’s Love is the Drug, and mimed battling fierce winds as her cape blew behind her on 1997 single Hurricane. A superb 9-piece band weaved a blend of supple rhythms and melodies, occasionally augmented by a choir, string section, accordion player and guest guitarist Dave Okumu of jazz rock adventurers The Invisible. Front and centre of the action, Jones’s voice has actually improved with age, retaining its authoritative quasi-talking tones but gaining added suppleness and melodiousness. She remained completely unfazed when she apparently forgot lyrics and kept improvising lines, singing “I haven’t rehearsed.”

For a production so superbly staged, it was riven with a thrillingly precarious sense of danger. “I haven’t done my homework,” Jones admitted with guilty glee as she bluffed her way through two intriguing new songs, sang commands to her stage crew in Jamaican patois, and at times babbled so eccentrically it was hard to tell who she was addressing. Every time she disappeared into the wings for costume changes, she would keep talking and singing, her disembodied voice filling the 2,700 capacity Royal Festival Hall. “Are we there, as we say in Jamaica? We’re f---ing here so let’s f---ing party! Don’t p--- me off. Maybe you get to see some t-t!”

The set eventually ran out of time, the house lights went up and all her musicians left the stage, but Jones was enjoying herself too much to leave, lingering behind to deliver a spontaneous a capella rendition of 1981 classic Pull Up to the Bumper with an impressively tuneful crowd. If the rest of her Meltdown festival is as gloriously unhinged as this, it is going to be a good one.

Meltdown continues at the Southbank Centre until June 19; southbankcentre.co.uk