The real greatest showman
Witnesses the return of at the O2 Arena in London and is spellbound
It’s been a long time, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say there’s a lot of nerves,” announced Michael Bublé, standing on a platform extending into the centre of the O2 Arena, a tiny figure surrounded by 20,000 faces. It was the first of three nights at a venue the Canadian singer has performed at 17 times before, so the assumption might be that he would be used to its scale. But Bublé has been off the road since his eldest child, Noah, was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, aged three. Although Noah has recovered, last year it was widely reported that an emotional Bublé was quitting music “after two years of hell”. Yet here he was, sighing deeply as he looked out into the crowd, muttering about nerves. Then he perked up. “But really you don’t have to be nervous. It’s gonna be OK, guys.”
The eruption of laughter that filled the cavernous venue was a very effective demonstration of how to defuse tension. “I know what it’s like to be in a big audience like this,” Bublé continued in an extended jokey routine about his comeback. “Especially watching a guy like me. I just want you to know I believe in you.”
The feeling was clearly reciprocated. Bublé is a supreme entertainer. If you have never actually seen him live, you might be forgiven for dismissing him as a karaoke swing impersonator trading in nostalgia. But actually what he does is put a rocket up the backside of nostalgia, reinvigorating a dated musical form with his personal enthusiasm.
Like the very greatest showmen, he has the gift of intimacy, filling even the biggest and most soulless spaces with human warmth. He was aided by a 40-piece orchestra (at the far end of the long platform stage). “It honestly costs so much money to have them all, Ed Sheeran’s looking at me thinking ‘you idiot’,” Bublé
joked. It may be true that, with effects and technology, you don’t actually need any musicians to make a big bang these days, but it was glorious to experience horns and strings stirring depths and dimensions of musicality and tone all too rarely heard in the digital pop age. And if anything goes in the pick-and-mix internet era, why not the great American songbook?
Despite his suit, tie and Rat Pack styling, Bublé exhibits little of his hero Frank Sinatra’s world-weariness. Bublé’s performing style is full of goofy exuberance. He is not a particularly subtle interpreter, intent on uncovering new emotional depths within classic material. He really just shakes the dust off these fantastic songs and whips them back into shape, adding jokes and joie de vivre.
Although he introduced My Funny Valentine as “the most romantic song ever written”, he performed it with the melodramatic gusto of a Bond theme, the arrangement overwrought with brooding John Barry-style horns and explosive percussion. “I think I oversold that,” Bublé conceded. “I said it was romantic, but it was more killy: ‘I love you but I’m going to stab you!’”
In a two-hour show that included nearly half-an-hour of amusing between-song banter, it was only during a stripped-back section of gloopy pop ballads that Bublé really seemed emotionally stirred, tears glistening in his eyes as he sang about family and home. His original material lacked the lustre of classic covers, yet Bublé’s conviction made them spellbinding. Indeed, the whole show might fairly be accused of being unoriginal, unadventurous and essentially trite. But that would be doing a terrible injustice to the warmth, energy and love Bublé brought into the O2 Arena, reminding us that great songs are great songs whenever they were written, and that all they need is a great performer to make them live again.