“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.
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.
“It’s been a long time,” Jones announced as she slowly descended with feline grace, “and it’s like no time at all.”
Credit: yahoo.com
