First Direct Arena, Leeds
The 84-year-old Jersey Boy delivers a two-hour show stocked with hits and laced with a bone-dry wit
The 77-year-old singer-songwriter David Crosby’s argument that performing keeps musicians youthful certainly applies to Frankie Valli. The legendary New Jersey singer is 84, yet pulls off a two-hour show with more than two dozen songs, many of them standards, delivering a joyous celebration of pop music at its sweetest and purest. Valli doesn’t need new material when his catalogue of smashes ranges from the doo-wop days to the disco era and – with the original Four Seasons long disbanded – a new, youthful band and harmony singers can render them to perfection. The hit Four Seasons musical Jersey Boys has given him a much younger audience, who respond to hits such as Rag Doll, Walk Like a Man, Sherry, Let’s Hang On and the rest with rapturous chants of, “There’s only one Frankie Valli.”
This is so true. His piercing falsetto is one of the most extraordinary sounds in pop, and its power belies the decades. Valli is mortal, though. He’s less nimble on his feet nowadays and this is a farewell tour, but the black-suited singer who was born Francesco Castelluccio still radiates Italian-American cool – there’s something of Al Pacino about him – and bone-dry wit. “We’re gonna slow things down a little,” he says. “Because I need to.” A sublime Silence Is Golden is drily dedicated to “all the politicians in the world”.
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