Skip to main content

Natasha Bedingfield review – noughties pop revamp is more karaoke than killer

Islington Assembly Hall, London
The hit affirmation-as-song purveyor of Unwritten turns Linda-Perry rocker, but it’s more mild than wild

The late-noughties reality phenomenon The Hills is back, and so is the woman who wrote its theme song: Natasha Bedingfield. Back then, Haywards Heath’s least offensive musical scion struck commercial gold with a smattering of breezily uncynical self-affirmations-as-songs. At the end of music’s lucrative CD era, that was enough to rack up a startling 10m album sales, as well as a Grammy nomination for her wide-eyed gap year anthem Unwritten.

Bedingfield has teamed up with Linda Perry for her first album in eight years, Roll With Me. Going by Bedingfield’s live return, the influence of Perry, who’s made rockers out of Christina Aguilera and Pink, has stuck. It’s a decisive left-turn from the Radio 2-friendly sound perhaps expected of Bedingfield, and one she seems to relish. Backed by a five-piece band, she wears a black velvet jumpsuit and spiked boots, a Boohoo Chrissie Hynde. She goes hell for leather on phones-aloft rock ballad Wishful Thinking and shows off her vocal grit in Real Love. There’s a whiff of the jukebox musical to Bedingfield’s headbanging and hair-tossing, though. She talks of her “crazy idea” to spin a microphone in her hand; as far as rock’n’roll misdemeanours go, it’s not quite pounding an 8-ball and trashing your hotel room.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/32aMnSZ
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more