What do you get when you fall in love? You get the map to the mountains of pop music. Decades of little discs brightly spring a new vividness of meaning for you and suddenly, the melodies and the lyrics come to life in a richer, deeper way - and so do the voices singing (the only other time this happens to such a degree, of course, is when you break up, the B side of falling in love).
So, pop music is best not taken on an empty heart. It is the stuff of life and in Dionne Warwick's new show, quite literally so. My Music and Me is not quite a straight ahead concert, but segmented by intermittently engaging anecdotes, addressed as a third person narrative and strung into supposed chronological order - but she definitely cheated that.
This structure took us from a gospel version of what I at least believed to be a Peter, Paul and Mary song, sung in Dionne's childhood; on through the melodious profligacy of invention and wonder to be found in her collaborations with Bacharach and David; later to her collaborations with Barries Manilow and Gibb; and, inevitably, some less exciting detours along the way. A programme of Bacharach and David only would be more consistently thrilling, but would miss out the Barries and at least two of Dionne's best known, best loved and just plain best numbers.
I can't truthfully judge Dionne's singing. I mean, honestly. There she was, on stage, in the flesh, singing to me. I can hardly believe it was real let alone dissect it. It would take a couple of goes through the show for me to even approach that; like dinner with Da Vinci, Gilliam, Shakespeare or Newton - we'd be on dessert before I could even form a full sentence. Dionne. Warwick. Is. Singing. Heartbreaker. Wow. Blimey. O. Riley.
From that major major to a minor minor: Dionne's musical accompaniment was lacking. Lacking a guitar, for one thing, often lacking in much real feeling. Many instruments were simply replaced by Korg mimicry and I could swear that I heard Robocop playing the Harmonica on That's What Friends Are For. But of course, most of the songwriting was bulletproof. Even if the only recordings of these songs were by Chico or The Smurfs, I'd still have scrobbled them all by bedtime.
So, pop music is best not taken on an empty heart. It is the stuff of life and in Dionne Warwick's new show, quite literally so. My Music and Me is not quite a straight ahead concert, but segmented by intermittently engaging anecdotes, addressed as a third person narrative and strung into supposed chronological order - but she definitely cheated that.
This structure took us from a gospel version of what I at least believed to be a Peter, Paul and Mary song, sung in Dionne's childhood; on through the melodious profligacy of invention and wonder to be found in her collaborations with Bacharach and David; later to her collaborations with Barries Manilow and Gibb; and, inevitably, some less exciting detours along the way. A programme of Bacharach and David only would be more consistently thrilling, but would miss out the Barries and at least two of Dionne's best known, best loved and just plain best numbers.
I can't truthfully judge Dionne's singing. I mean, honestly. There she was, on stage, in the flesh, singing to me. I can hardly believe it was real let alone dissect it. It would take a couple of goes through the show for me to even approach that; like dinner with Da Vinci, Gilliam, Shakespeare or Newton - we'd be on dessert before I could even form a full sentence. Dionne. Warwick. Is. Singing. Heartbreaker. Wow. Blimey. O. Riley.
From that major major to a minor minor: Dionne's musical accompaniment was lacking. Lacking a guitar, for one thing, often lacking in much real feeling. Many instruments were simply replaced by Korg mimicry and I could swear that I heard Robocop playing the Harmonica on That's What Friends Are For. But of course, most of the songwriting was bulletproof. Even if the only recordings of these songs were by Chico or The Smurfs, I'd still have scrobbled them all by bedtime.