Cyndi Lauper at Hammersmith Apollo

Cyndi Lauper
Matt Henry
Hammersmith Apollo, 30 June 2016

I confess, although my first music love was Madonna, I haven't seen that many pop shows over the years but Cyndi Lauper, while every inch a superstar pop star especially back in the 1980s, has always felt a little bit more punk rock to me. I wasn't really keen to see her live for the first time when she was doing her dance music and blues excursions but when she announced she was releasing a country album I knew this finally was the tour for me.

First up though came Matt Henry, the star of Kinky Boots, which of course is the show that Lauper wrote the songs for. It turns out that aside from starring in West End musicals Henry has also released a soul album (funded through Pledge Music). Henry seems like a very nice, amicable chap with a big powerful voice and there was obviously quite a few people in the audience who were fans because of Kinky Boots (it got a cheer every time it was mentioned) but obviously, while pleasant enough, it wasn't really my kind of thing. I did really enjoy his cover of Love Is A Battlefield though, dedicated to the Orlando gay nightclub victims, and proved to be a fitting anthem.

Soon it was Cyndi's turn and she made her entrance silhouetted behind a screen singing the classic Wanda Jackson rockabilly number Funnel Of Love. It was country but it seemed quite fitting too since Lauper started out in a rockabilly band, Blue Angel. When she finally emerged from behind the screen with a shock of pink hair beneath a huge wedding guest hat, she looked every bit the legend she is and, although 63, amazingly youthful in her black leather and chiffon coat. "How the hell are ya?" she asked in her thick Queens accent, making it clear, there was no doubt this was Cyndi herself greeting us all like old friends.

She then quickly launched into one of my absolute favourite, if not favourite of all time, Lauper songs, She Bop and it sounded so fresh, spunky and cool, it felt like we could have been seeing her singing it back in 1983. Of course this went down a storm with the nostalgic crowd  and by the time she wandered to the edge of the stage to powerfully belt out I Drove All Night, the ladies next to me were on their feet waving their arms and excitedly hopping around (annoyingly, but I'm an old grump). The country material didn't go down quite as well with these ladies (I think they were more greatest hits, parents-night-out kinda gals - not that there's anything wrong with that) but I thought the show was a nice mix of songs from her new country album Detour and older tracks, mainly culled from her first and biggest album, She's So Unusual.

Maybe it was just my country-loving heart speaking for me, but I thought the Detour stuff sounded fantastic and although she admitted this album was something of a journey of discovery for her (aided by Seymour Stein, head of her new label Sire Records, which she says tonight was a dream come true for her), Lauper's voice sounded a perfect fit on fantastic tracks like Ray Price's Heartaches By The Number, Patsy Cline's Walking After Midnight and, maybe best of all, Skeeter Davis' The End Of The World, which she performed on top of a revolving platform. There was also a hugely enjoyable cover of I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart, which she sang while riding a stick pony around the stage. 

Lauper also talked in between songs. A lot. There were stories about watching the old serial Western shows on early morning TV with her siblings (a brother called Butch and a sister "who was also a little butch"), her grandmother who loved an old TV show called "Queen For A Day" where a housewife was treated like royalty for 24 hours and given a washing machine ("I'd be f**king upset if I was queen and they expected me to do the washing!") and a rather eloquent and moving tribute to Prince, which she then followed up with an incredible When You Were Mine, her Prince cover from her first album.

Elsewhere there was two tracks from her 1996 album Sisters Of Avalon (You Don't Know and Fearless, played by Cyndi alone on her dulcimer), a fantastic version of The Goonies 'R' Good Enough (which wasn't on the setlist and thrown in last minute), which she spent the entirety of shaking hands with the whole front row, and a storming Springsteen-esque Money Changes Everything, which ended the main part of the show.

The first encore saw her return to the stage to sing a plaintive Misty Blue which she theatrically sang into the receiver of an old-style American payphone and then take out her dulcimer to sing a rather beautiful Time After Time (she began the song on a mistake and joked "why oh why was I cursed with this dulcimer talent" but truthfully she was pretty good on it). I wasn't that bothered to hear Girls Just Want To Have Fun (which this time she sang as a duet with Matt Henry) but there's no doubt that it was a huge crowd pleaser and got everyone on their feet and singing along. She even threw in snippets of I Know What Boys Like and although it was more like the 1983 original, there was also elements of the 1994 reworked version complete with all the "hey now"s. 

At this point I was a little disappointed there was no True Colors, one of her most famous and meaningful hits, but she delivered this too in a second encore again playing her dulcimer and to a chorus of the whole audience singing along with every word, in fact the crowd even took over at the very end for the "like a rainbow" part. It was all and all rather uplifting and wonderful.

Last year I read Cyndi's autobiography and kind of fell in love with her as a person, as well as a musician, and tonight just confirmed everything I thought about her. She's definitely a pop star in every sense of the word but she's so much more too: she's a comedian, an artist, a storyteller, an amazing genre-hopper and of course, one hell of a singer.