The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Why our love for Céline goes on
Céline Dion, Queen of Kitsch, is having a pop renaissance. Her raw emotion is exactly what we need, says Isabel Mohan
You’re very iconic,” Drake, one of the coolest and most successful pop stars of the moment, told Céline Dion at last month’s Billboard Music Awards. “We love you.”
A few years ago, no one with an ounce of credibility would admit to a soft spot for Céline Dion. She epitomised all that was naff, her songs suitable only as filler material for cheesy Valentine’s Day compilations. Now, in the middle of a seemingly endless Nineties revival – SaltN-Pepa, Coolio and Vanilla Ice are currently touring together, Craig David is performing at Glastonbury – the FrenchCanadian singer most famous for My Heart Will Go On, the theme song to the film Titanic, is suddenly popular again.
In Las Vegas, where she has a residency at Caesars Palace, she has clocked up more than 1,000 shows. When tickets went on sale for her UK tour (which starts on Tuesday) they sold out within minutes, despite costing upwards of £100 a piece. And her epic turn at the Billboard awards – during which she appeared from behind a jewelled curtain hanging from an enormous chandelier and wore one of the most preposterous dresses ever to grace a stage – put the night’s other performances, by current stars such as Miley Cyrus, to shame. It was, to quote one critic, among “the most memorable Billboard performances in history”. What is going on?
The shift is partly down to Dion herself and partly down to the mysterious way in which popular tastes change. To start with Dion: the singer, long derided for her earnestness, seems to have stopped taking herself so seriously.
Her behaviour at last month’s Met Gala in New York was a case in point: appearing at the annual fashion celebration for the first time, Dion swanned around in Versace, did a tongue-in-cheek photo shoot for Vogue (which involved crawling on the floor and holding her shoe up to her ear like a phone) and then proudly Instagrammed her stop-off on the way home: a common or garden hot dog stand.
While many guests far less famous than Dion spent the night pouting, posing and playing it cool, she was clearly just beyond excited to be invited. She showed off more of her personality and humour in one night than she had in her previous 49 years, and, in the process, upstaged younger stars like Rihanna, Katy Perry and professional headline-stealer Kim Kardashian.
“With the Met Gala, you never know if or when you’ll be invited next,” said Vanity Fair writer Erika Harwood. “Céline Dion seemed aware of that and lived her first to the fullest.”
This change in attitude actually has a sad provenance. Back in January 2016, Dion lost two people who were incredibly close to her: her husband, manager and father of her three sons, René Angélil – 25 years her senior and apparently the only man she’d ever kissed – and, just two days later, her brother Daniel, who had, like Angélil, been battling cancer.
Suddenly, Dion – mocked for singing in multiple languages, derided for her love of yodel-y high notes and regarded as something of a cold fish, since she always, despite the soppiness of her songs, seemed so composed – was human.
“Before he died it was very, very difficult for all of us,” she said a few months after his death. “To see the man of my life die a little bit more every day. And when he left, it was kind of a relief for me.”
Those huge, overblown ballads, almost all of them about heartbreak (her biggest hits internationally have been My Heart Will Go On, Think Twice and Because You Loved Me), now felt meaningful. And Dion’s decision to carry on performing within a few weeks of becoming a widow felt brave and bold, especially since she wept openly on stage, with no attempts to hide her grief. In today’s world, where people crave authenticity – in everything from politics to pop music – such public displays of emotion matter. Clips of Dion’s crying went viral.
The other aspect to Dion that has fans buzzing is the unabashed showiness of her performances. While in the Nineties, she was normally seen in jeans and crisp white T-shirts, little black dresses or terrible beige trouser suits, these days Dion wears edgy couture and belts out her hits while being showered with gold confetti, or alongside holograms of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
It’s not just her performances that are fabulously OTT either – the ostentatious Florida mansion she lived in with Angélil has a water park, complete with multiple flumes, in the garden. What seemed so uncool for years in the era of WAGs and Eurotrash now feels worth celebrating. In a time when many pop stars go to great pains to show how “normal” they are, the ridiculousness of Dion actually feels more authentic. After all, if you were the bestselling Canadian artist of all time and the winner of five Grammy awards, wouldn’t you consider transforming your home into your own personal Center Parcs, too? In her own words, “Some people do drugs and go out every weekend. I build a water park”.
Perhaps Dion’s surprising rise to icon status is also part of the natural cycle of the music industry. The young pop stars of 2017 grew up with their mums listening to Dion’s ballads. Her hits are talent show favourites, with numerous wannabes warbling their way through them to varying degrees of success. These singers don’t remember that Dion used to be so supremely uncool – to them, she’s just as influential as the other artists they heard growing up, like Whitney Houston and even Madonna.
Meanwhile, the cool indie kids of the Nineties, who scoffed at Dion’s success, are now 30 and 40-somethings whose social lives consist largely of weddings and occasional office karaoke outings – two environments where the back catalogue of Dion