"I didn’t know I was this geeky until I discovered the online world through my office’s 2400 baud modem back in ’93." Grace Jones bares her teeth
My first concert of the year was a bloody great one.
She’s 60 years old and her body puts the rest of us to shame. Fashionably late, fabulously wearing a different Philip Treacy hat for every song and – mostly miniscule – threads over her fishnet panty hose. In between songs she’d disappear to the side of the stage, all the while making lewd comments to entertain us: ‘Give me something to suck…’
Ms Jones played a lot of songs from her surprisingly good new album ‘Hurricane’, but she didn’t forget her greatest hits: ‘La Vie en Rose’, ‘Pull up to the bumper’ (with on stage audience participation), ‘Nightclubbing’ and of course, ‘Slave to the Rhythm’, which she performed while gyrating a hula hoop.
It was the newer, more personal songs that touched me. The autobiographical ‘Williams Blood’ in particular, in which she channelled her mother talking to her daughter disapprovingly: “Why don’t you be a Jones like your Sister and your brother Noel?” But amazing Grace is blessed with the blood of her musician granddad Williams. She’s “wicked”, she says: “You can’t save a wretch like me…”
She closed the set with ‘Hurricane’ dressed in a flowing black robe, while a wind machine of giant proportions blew us and herself away.
View my Grace Jones photos on Flickr
