[ No. 23 ]

Hurricane Jones

by Ishmael

Well, spank my ass and call me Charlie, if I'm not gob smacked! Didn't I predict a Grace Jones renaissance in these very virtual pages only a few months ago?

She of the cannon-ball arse and menacing glare is back. Well, at least she was in Melbourne for an appearance at a gay New Years Eve Party, followed by a performance two nights later at the Metro nightclub. But not only that, she also has a new album in the pipeline, produced by Tricky. It's tentatively called "Force Of Nature" -- what else? But not only that, she also has a startling new song on "The Avengers" soundtrack. And that's called "Storm". I say 'startling' because this is a new kind of song for Grace. She's backed up by The Radio Science Orchestra. It's got a big sound. Think of "Slave To The Rhythm", and you've almost got it. Grace is declamatory, operatic, singing about an overwhelming passion. She almost sounds like Shirley Bassey. The song begins with a crow cawing in the wilderness and ends with Grace cackling like witch. It's something else. It recognises that she is a diva and plays up on it. Is this song the future for Grace?

But, horror of horrors, she butchered the song during her performance at the Metro. She made a cat's meal out of it. In fact, she screwed two or her best songs during the course of the night. The other one was the laid-back reggae tune, "My Jamaican Guy". It was so frenetic, she appeared to be out of control. What illegal substance was she on? What the hell was she thinking of?

You remember Grace's smash hit One Man Show tour in the early eighties? Well, put that aside. Forget it for the time being. That was a minimalist, carefully designed and choreographed theatrical piece. It was ground-breaking music theatre. The essence of it was stillness. Grace hardly moved. She was like a cross between a statue and a robot. She stood still and struck poses. Her movements were minimal, deliberate and stylised. She turned that mask-like face of hers this way and that as thunder growled and lightning struck around her. The songs were delivered in a carefully modulated contralto, and a bass half way between a growl and a purr. We hadn't seen anything like her.

The one hour nightclub performances that she does around the world are in a different league altogether. Don't get me wrong. They're still enjoyable. I and hundreds of revellers had the time of our lives as she pranced on stage, but it wasn't the Grace Jones we remembered. And, I guess, those too young to remember wouldn't have any expectations. And that's good, I suppose. You don't want artists to just keep churning out the same old stuff over and over again. You don't want them coasting along.

What Grace did at the Metro was mix her timeless tunes with more recent releases. The songs we know and love were remixed, faster and more dance oriented. They were reinterpreted, looser, less structured. She improvised a great deal. She had fun with the lyrics in ways she was probably not allowed to do in the past. Basically, she's going back to her dance roots. Most times that worked very well and other times it just fell flat. Thanks to the clack-clack of the castanets Grace was playing, "Walking In The Rain", for example, had an infectious beat you could shimmy to. And she's still the only one who can do justice to the oft-sampled "Pull Up To The Bumper". But the haunting strains of "I've Seen That Face Before" almost disappeared under camp posing and parody. "Warm Leatherette" almost, but not quite, lost the apocalyptic psycho-sexual drama it has in her classic rendition. It was a hit-and-miss affair. You were aware that she was a hair-breadth away from complete self-parody, sometimes relying too much on growls and snarls and not enough on vocal definition to carry a song. But, thankfully, she kept the frenzy in check and never tipped over the edge.

The song of the night, however, was "Sex Drive". When this Sheep On Drugs produced aggressively electro-dance ditty was first released in 1993, a reviewer called it 'The best fuck song' he'd heard in ages. Not surprisingly, it brought the house down. Everyone was screaming, dancing and waving their arms in their air. The dance floor was a pagan sweat pit. And you can't expect any more than that from the original Black Venus.

But singing is only half of what Grace Jones is about. The rest is spectacle. At the end of every song, she would leave the stage and reappear in some outrageous new get up. We were treated to an endless array of different coloured wigs, capes, masks, bustiers, gloves, transparent little dresses. When she first appeared she looked like a cross between a peacock and an Aztec priestess. While singing "I've Seen That Face Before", she looked like an exotic black bird. For "My Jamaican Guy" she dressed up in a parody of a hugga-bugga Rastafarian, complete with plaited long hair and tasselled camel-coloured jacket. And what about that edible arse sheathed in black net stockings? She never tired of wiggling it at the audience. And that tongue! Jesus, I've got uses for that tongue!

Oh, and we learned a couple of things about Grace that were previously unknown. First of all she can't dance to save her black arse. She moves like Fozzie the Bear -- very inelegant. She's living proof that not all black people have rhythm. Secondly, her Turkish husband, Atila, is a shy one, and refused to come on stage during her big encore. Come to think of it, even her brother, Chris, looked a bit ill-at-ease. Maybe they were intimidated. I would be.

Grace Jones maybe forty-five, but, baby, this girl has more charisma, energy and talent than any of the current crop of bland, grungy windbags. Grace is all woman. A force of nature, all right.