Fans easily pleased by lip-synching Bieber
It seems to have been a quiet year for Justin Bieber. He may have a guest vocal on what is roundly agreed to be the song of the summer – Luis Fonsi’s Latino crossover smash Despacito – but the Canadian megastar has been keeping a fairly low profile, tales of crashed supercars and dubious fan altercations few and far between.
Has Bieber grown up, or has he just been busy touring an album that came out almost two years ago? Purpose, his most mature record to date, spawned a stage show that was already tired by August 2016, when he put on a one-star performance at V Festival.
At that show, he blamed his lack of interest, half-hearted dance moves and frequent obvious lip-synching on a hangover – and, while he was spotted out on the town with Brooklyn Beckham the night before his Hyde Park performance on Sunday, evidently it wasn’t such a messy night.
This performance – although phoned-in – was a vast improvement. Fans thrilled as he rattled through some of his biggest hits early on, the Edm-stylings of Where Are Ü Now and 2012 hit Boyfriend getting the 50,000-strong crowd in a party mood. The lip-synching and awkward dance moves were still a big part of the show, but Bieber seemed engaged and in good spirits, at one point pointing out the merry-go-round and quipping, “That looks like fun – said no one ever.” The puzzled British crowd, which didn’t really respond, was clearly more into fairground attractions than he was.
When he did sing, Bieber’s vocals rarely caught fire, except during his acoustic rendition of Ed Sheeranpenned megahit Love Yourself. His most genuinely impassioned moment came when he talked about having a cold and discussed the relative merits of Vicks Vaporub and Olbas Oil.
Bieber had tweeted that he had “something special” for us 10 days before the show, but what that special thing was remains a mystery: the daylight fireworks perhaps? The decongestant chat? The troupe of dancing children he brought out for Children? It didn’t seem to matter to the generous crowd of Beliebers who shouted along no matter what, happy just to hear his songs played loud and in the presence of the man himself.
“This is the best night of my life”, he shouted, as he left the stage after closing with a raucous rendition of Sorry. It can’t have been more than a three-star life.
‘Bieber had tweeted that he had something special for us, but what that thing was remains a mystery’