Music / Reviews
Review: Ronnie Spector, Colston Hall
Stage-right, five sharp-suited men strike up familiar, piano-led chords. Stage-left, three women in flowing scarlet begin to shimmy behind their microphones. The voice of a fourth woman is heard from the wings. “Woa-oh!” it declares. “Woa-oh-oh-oh!”
The singer appears. She is clad in black blouse and trousers, and about to dispatch the opening lines to one of the greatest pop songs ever written: “ Have I ever told you / How good it feels to hold you?” And yet, such is Ronnie Spector’s back catalogue, Baby, I Love You doesn’t even make top three songs of the night.
Instead, it simply acts as prologue to a night of two Ronnies: older Ronnie on stage, petite, half her bodyweight in her hair; and young, heavy-lidded, dancing-like-a-banshee Ronnie, on the screen over her shoulder. Between songs, the former sits to recount the biography of the latter.
“We just happened to be dressed for excess,” she says of the night she, sister Estelle and cousin Nedra caught their break, standing outside New York’s Peppermint Lounge, happy to play along when someone mistook them for a dance troupe. Inside, someone handed Ronnie a mic, she began to sing Ray Charles’ What’d I Say, and a lifelong career began to unfurl. The song is reprised for our benefit.
Talk of a love of doo-wop begets The Students’ I’m So Young. Time is on my Side is accompanied by a slide showing a 1964 poster of the Stones and Ronettes playing Shrewsbury, just in case you had forgotten that baby boomers remain the most fortunate generation in history. Walking in the Rain is heart-meltingly glorious, drawing smiles from sessioneers of a “Can you believe we get paid for this?” hue.
“Life was rough, I had to start all over again,” she says, simply, of her seven years in California with her abusive, ultimately murderous, husband. Back gigging in New York, she recalls “This guy sat crying all through my set. His name was Johnny Thunders.” Cue towering cover of You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory. The almost-present day hoves into view with “Amy Winehouse made me feel that what I did, mattered”, and an uncannily familiar Back to Black.
It has been quite the most wonderful, life-affirming show, even before she tears into her – anyone’s? – greatest hit of all, Be my Baby. Cue an encore of Frosty the Snowman and the Ronettes’ final single, I Can Hear Music. Open hearted, self-deprecating, almost certainly more crotch-grabby than you might have supposed, the 72-year old singer presents a future for the younger self over her shoulder to feel immeasurably proud.
Photographs by Tony Benjamin