Fandom isn’t a good look on a critic; we’re supposed to be sober and impartial, analytical and measured. What to do, then, when called upon to review your favourite idol, the singer who first turned you on to the power of pop? Judicious rumination or tinny screams of delight?
There’s room for both in this swan song from 80s pop eccentric Cyndi Lauper, as irrepressible here as when I saw her as a teenager, then touring her new album True Colours. She’s had an illustrious career, including a side gig composing musicals – Kinky Boots, and soon an adaptation of 80s workplace comedy Working Girl – but the bulk of her hits are drawn from her first two albums, including the astonishing debut She’s So Unusual.
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – the song that gives this farewell tour its name – is also by far Lauper’s most famous – though the audience has to wait till the very end for it, in a riot of colour and light directly inspired by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. In the buildup, we get a pockmarked history of Lauper’s roots and musical inclinations. Those less familiar with her are likely to be shocked by her power and versatility, her voice ranging across blues, jazz, rock and country without ever losing its bright pop sensibility.
The night opens with the quirky, infectious She Bop, followed quickly by The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough – a song she refused to play live for many years until she was badgered by Australian fans into including it. Both are performed with elan and vigour, Lauper’s signature jittery moves and syncopated inflections demonstrating the idiosyncrasy of her talent. I Drove All Night comes soon after, sultry and looping, her voice still carrying plenty of heft and texture.
Throughout, the show is peppered with numbers from later albums in a retrospective of Lauper’s outre career. We get an excellent rendition of Who Let In the Rain, from her 1993 record Hatful of Stars, the LED screens providing a torrential background to the sweetly melancholic ballad. Sally’s Pigeons, also from that album, is supported by a vivid recollection of her childhood in blue-collar Queens, including a video essay of memories and associations.
A massive part of Lauper’s appeal as a live performer, apart from the sheer virtuosity of her voice, is the rambling, discursive monologues that bookend many of the songs. They give a sense not only of the warmth and humility of the woman but the audacity and authenticity of the artist, who shot like a strange comet from the working-class Italian-American family of her youth. There is something endearingly homespun about the show, like an extremely well-resourced slide night.
Some of the biggest hits are, conversely, the biggest disappointments. On Time after Time, Lauper is joined by Tones and I – a welcome addition, as the artist’s voice compliments and augments Lauper’s own – but the delivery is halting and under-rehearsed. The finale, with the band joined onstage by support act The Veronicas (excellent), is likewise a little too shaggy for its own good, with missed cues and false starts nibbling away at the momentum.
When the nostalgia hits the sweet spot, however, something wondrous alchemises, transplanting the audience back whole generations while managing to feel vivid and contemporary. When You Were Mine is an early triumph, as is Change of Heart – both minor hits from her first two albums that strike me as quintessential Lauper songs, driving and soulful, shimmering and optimistic even in their wretchedness.
Best of all, for my money, is Money Changes Everything, Lauper’s cover of a Brains song that – like I Drove All Night, which was written for and eventually recorded by Roy Orbison – she totally makes her own. Those ringing guitar chords and persistent beat perfectly demonstrate Lauper’s rockabilly roots and punk leanings, the song building to a rage-fuelled scream as multiple versions of the singer loom in screens, concertina-like, behind her.
A stroll into the centre of the cavernous arena for a rendition of Shine – the eponymous song from her eighth studio album and one of her finest late career numbers – allows a shift in intimacy and engagement. For her penultimate act, Lauper follows with True Colours as a multi-coloured piece of cloth floats evocatively above her head. Written at the height of the Aids epidemic, the song is simple and anthemic, the despair under the surface threatening to emerge throughout. It’s honest and moving.
Honesty is Lauper’s superpower, a stark contrast to the slick corporatism of Madonna, with whom she’s often unfairly compared. This is a big, bold, highly visual arena show, but it also highlights something essential about Lauper: she’s first and foremost a musician, supple and savvy but ultimately joyous. Her feminism is collective rather than self-aggrandising, her allyship earnest rather than performative. It’s truly heartening to see how little she’s changed.
Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour continues across Australia in April before heading to Japan and the US
