Beninese-French singer songwriter Angélique Kidjo is celebrating 40 years as a working musician, and her glittering solo career was represented during the evening, though most were from her more recent releases, Mother Nature (2021). The opener, Crosseyed and Painless, a track on Angelique’s reconstruction of Talking Heads Remain in Light, gave a lively, upbeat start, with some serious dance moves around the stage and a mid-song rap, exemplifying how she makes other artists’ songs entirely her own. Africa, One Of A Kind maintained the danceable tempo, celebrating her native continent within a mix of three languages: Bambara, English, and Yoruba.
Angelique reprised her tribute to Cuba’s salsa queen Celia Cruz with two contrasting songs: the percussion-driven Bemba colorá which emphasises the connection between African and Caribbean rhythms, and Sahara, which slowed things down with a languid, jazzy feel and enveloping vocal. Her brilliant reinterpretation of Talking Heads Once In A Lifetime followed, the audience instantly accepting an invitation to dance; not that you could sit down during such a joyous number. When it came to both Agolo, a 30-year-old song sung in Yoruba about the need to care for the planet, and Meant For Me, the audience didn’t wait for an invitation to get on their feet again, joining in the catchy choruses. More organised vocal participation came with Afirika (from her excellent 2002 album Black Ivory Soul), Angelique patiently teaching the audience the chorus line ‘Ashè é Maman, ashè é Maman Afirika, Maman Afirika’.
A trio of songs from Mother Nature – Choose Love, the title song and Free And Equal – highlighted Angelique’s social issue concerns. Choose Love was sung with evident passion, perhaps given the lyric’s very immediate relevance: ‘Hey, we’ve been here before, All the world’s up in flames, That don’t fix anything, Must be some other way’. On Mother Nature, the band’s percussionist and drummer played a perfectly synced groove while Angelique implored us to look after mother earth. The last song before the encore was an outstanding version of Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata, making sure the audience kept on dancing. The reflective Flying High and lastly Batonga – a song from 1991, celebrating African culture – completed a concert that was exhilarating and uplfting; Angélique Kidjo a force of nature and powerful stage presence throughout, gripping, insistent vocals and almost always a beat that had to be danced to.