Mojo - The Music Magazine

Grace Jones playing Massive Attack’s Meltdown at the Royal Festival Hall was always going to be an event and the patrons in the foyer were dressed accordingly, bringing out their finest all-in-one jump-suits, with one group of slim young fans of indeterminate gender even going all Ascot and accessorising their S&M bellboy look with Ladies Day fascinators.

Given that Ms Jones hasn’t released an album of new material since 1989 initial expectations were mixed, with many muttering at the bar about how they’d be happy if she mimed, or sang to backing tapes; the point being that tonight the merest glimpse of this 60 year old, former Amazonian model, James Bond villain, and terrifying queen of avant-garde 80s dub disco will be enough.

Fittingly, our first sighting of Jones is on a giant screen, in the promo for sinister forthcoming single Corporate Cannibal, her face morphing and stretching into demonic death masks and screams as she hisses such genius lines of 21st century capitalist violation, as “I’ll make you scrounge/In my executive lounge.”

When the screen finally rises it reveals, a full six-piece band tapping out the minimalist spook disco smears of her 1981 hit Nightclubbing and the real-life Jones leaning against the bar of a raised hydraulic platform, attired in black suit jacket, tight corset, black leggings, and a black alien eye mask affixed with giant white feather and glowing insect antennae. At first she moves stiffly, robotically, like a she’s just been revived from cryogenic slumber.

This would, at least, explain how bogglingly well preserved she looks, displaying a toned, sharpened physique that would be astonishing on someone even half her age. But as she walks down the stairs, she stumbles and falls, before tackling the steps bum first, announcing that this is “My new way of walking.”

After a brief backstage interlude and costume change she emerges in four-inch stilettos and a ‘hat’ that resembles a deflated monster-truck inner tube, for a vicious scour through Private Life. Then she’s off again, muttering and cackling backstage (“Wine, a glass of wine… hahahahaha!”) before re-emerging in giant corn-yellow witches’ titfer and short billowing waistcoat, standing in the gust of a giant wind machine to skank, hiccup and lilt through a joyous version of My Jamaican Guy.

However, after vanishing again and announcing "I'm going to come out naked." she re-emerges in black basque, stockings and four inch heels, sporting a no-nonsense skin head hair cut. Complaining that she can’t read her lyrics, Jones proceeds to improvise and rap her way through driving new track, This Is, before launching herself into a breathless motorik version of 1981 single Demolition Man, crouching at the edge of the stage to violently punch the air to the relentless rhythm. After her somewhat stiff arrival the effect is akin to Gene Wilder’s entrance in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the aged legend turning a geriatric fall into a fluidly gymnastic forward roll.

Following a brace of her faultless cover versions – Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose and Roxy Music’s Love Is The Drug (for which she runs on the spot sporting a mirror-ball bowler hat that showers the audience with flecks of green laser light) The Festival Hall is on its feet for her terrifying take on The Normal’s Warm Leatherette, the song’s nightmarish post-Ballard S&M tension made all the more explicit by the vicious force with which Jones encourages her audience to “sing along”. The evening’s mix of abandon and control is finally summed up when Jones decides there should be a stage invasion for her graphically instructive slink through Pull Up To The Bumper. Some fifty audience members groove with Jones as a shower of glitter rains down: tops are removed, bums are gyrated, saucy kissing is to the fore but an invisible forcefield around Grace Jones remains. As she says herself, sticking out her bum and slapping it with great force, “Nobody touches me, but me!” There really was no arguing.