When you’ve got smoulderingly hot looks, a sexy singing voice and a heap of chart-topping pop hits with infections Latino rhythms, there is not much that can go wrong when you perform live, even if you wear a funny tea cosy on your head.
So, in all likelihood Enrique Iglesias could just have stood there, and the screaming fans would have gone wild anyway. But when the star performed at Johannesburg’s Dome on Sunday, he delivered much more than a seductive smile and a few lighter-in-the-air ballads.
He’s a chatty performer, building up an easy rapport with the audience in between performing those big singalong hits such as Escape, Addicted and, of course, Hero. And, because it was the last performance of his international tour, he said he wanted to make it a night to remember (although that’s probably what he tells all his audiences, the charmer that he is).
Iglesias cleverly combined his buddy routine with his I’m-a-sex-god act (not many singers push their hands down the pants of their seductive back-up singers) and certainly seemed to be putting his all into the show, backed up by a good band and a spectacular stage with a lighting design second to none. It wasn’t all perfect — he sang a tedious song he wrote when he was 18, and he certainly should not try to cover Purple Rain again — but it was a highly enjoyable event.
Iglesias has obviously mastered the art of playing to his fans, going so far as making a surprise appearance on a small platform in the middle of the audience for his complete encore performance, thrilling those poor souls in the cheap seats (who couldn’t have been too happy at the start of the concert, when some dubious camerawork meant that only by the third song did the big screens show more than — literally — Enrique’s elbow).
And speaking of those big screens, why couldn’t dance princess Tamara Dey, the support act for the night, be on them too? She did well — even though someone like Danny K would have been a better fit with Iglesias’s style — but technically, her sound levels were flat and she and her musicians got lost on the huge stage.
The screens would have helped a lot to deliver her music to what must be the biggest audience she has played to yet (at least now more people will know her: when she came on stage the teenage girls behind me whispered excitedly about the “kwaito singer” about to perform).
That said, it was a much more memorable night out than those served up by other highly commercial acts who have visited our shores, such as the tepid Westlife. Play on, Enrique, you sexy thing.