Concert review: Cyndi Lauper – She’s So Unusual 30th Anniversary Tour

There is something almost magical about seeing a music artist you have loved and admired for thirty years in concert for the first time.

Suddenly the transcendentally powerful voice that was only heard through stereo speakers, and the locks of wild hair that only ever made an appearance in music videos, are live in front of you, mere metres from your seat.

And the larger than life personality, housed in a endlessly moving pocket dynamo of a body is bounding across the stage, straddling speakers, barefoot, and having the time of their life.

It’s enough to make you feel like a giddy teenager all over again.

Which is exactly how I felt as I stood in the Sydney’s Enmore Theatre last night, feeling like it was 1983 all over again.

Cyndi Lauper, thick tresses of kinky russet-coloured hair falling to her glittery black feather carpeted jacket, stood almost right before me on the intimate stage, her longstanding band arrayed behind her, lookig every bit as much the creative force of nature as I remember from my youth.

And from the first perfectly pitched note – she is one of the few artists I have seen who remains absolutely on note throughout a two hour show; Michael Stipe of REM, P!NK, and Annie Lennox of The Eurythmics are among the select few who keep her company in this group – and her first delightfully rambling monologue, she was pretty much everything you would expect an artist of her calibre and longevity to be in concert.

Albeit a concert with a specific purpose – to showcase the full album, song by song in order of their appearance, She’s So Unusual, which kicked off the ambitious singer from Queens musical career way back in 1983.

Along with impressively energetic renditions of songs like “Money Changes Everything”, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, and the bittersweet “Time After Time” which never fails to move me deeply, we were treated to ten minute long fascinating recollections of the recording of the album.

While some disrespectful fans actually slow clapped or called on her to “sing a song darl.” – these unexpectedly rude interruptions from people who you must assume are true fans given the nature of the tour were responded to in the sort of ballsy, straight forward way you’d expect from an artist who admitted she “hates being told what to do” – everyone else sat in rapt silence.

As she pointed out, where else are you going to hear about the bridge for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” being recorded in a stairwell with Ellie Greenwich, who along with husband Jeff Barry wrote “Leader of the Pack” or “Time After Time” being inspired by an off the cuff remark by one of the album’s producers about their watch going backwards?

Or the fact that they used KISS’s rehearsal space at Record Plant, where the album was recorded in the northern summer of 1983, while the band was away on tour, a space filled with boxes and rugs to dampen the sound, much like any musician’s rehearsal space.

While many of the anecdotes have found their way into her memoir, Cyndi Lauper (co-authored with Jancee Dunn), there was something powerfully authentic, and profoundly intimate about Lauper’s recounting of this special time, memories retold as if they happened yesterday.

But Cyndi Lauper, unlike many of her contemporaries, is not a prisoner of her musical past, and treated the enthusiastic audience to other notable songs from her still flourishing career in the second half of the concert.

These included “Good Enough” (from The Goonies, 1985), a breathtakingly beautiful a cappella rendition of “Sally’s Pigeons” from her 1993 album Hat Full of Stars, “True Colors” (1986), “Shine” from the 2001 album of the same name which was an “internet hit before there was an internet”, and the more recent “Sex is in the Heel” from the musical Kinky Boots, which won her a Tony Award just this year.

She was at pains to point out that Shine particularly was a milestone album for her, being the first time that this famously independent artist went officially “indie” and stopped listening to the “suits” who she admitted with chagrin were more interested in getting her to make “disposable pop” than anything approaching the true art she wanted to make.

She fought them as much as she could, famously altering what she considered misogynistic lyrics to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” so it was more of a declaration of female empowerment, reasoning that if she was going to sing these songs for a lifetime, they had to be worth keeping around.

And after two hours in the warm embrace of this amazingly frank, down to earth artist, who hasn’t lost the broad Queens accent she uses with pride even a lifetime of mixing with the who’s who of the entertainment industry, it becomes patently obvious that she’s succeeded in this quest.

The She’s So Unusual 30th Anniversary Tour is all the proof you need that Cyndi Lauper is one of the greats, a woman who started out with considerable talent and raw ambition by the truckload, parlaying them in the succeeding years into the sort of career that more than ably stands the test of time.

FULL SET LIST

“Money Changes Everything”

“Girls Just Want to Have Fun”

“When You Were Mine”

“Time After Time”

“She Bop”

“All Thru the Night”

“Witness”

“I’ll Kiss You”

“She’s So Unusual”

“Yeah Yeah”

“Good Enough”

“Shine”

“Sex is in the Heel”

“Sally’s Pigeons”

“True Colors”