Christina Aguilera performs on stage at the O2 Arena
(Picture: Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP)“You’re an icon,” Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander beamed at Christina Aguilera half way through her gig at the O2 on Friday night, having just joined her on stage to perform Say Something. Judging by the screams throughout, plenty inside the Greenwich venue agreed with him.
The enthusiasm and vigour with which Alexander attacked his parts of the song clearly rubbed off on Aguilera as they rose together to a glorious finale, but it was just a shame that the duet was one of the only times it felt like the Nineties veteran was truly in the room with us.
It’s hard to fail at an arena show when you’ve got Dirrrty, Fighter, Beautiful and more in your back pocket, but the gig often felt messy, not helped by muddy sound that saw Aguilera’s muscular live band and pop track struggle to integrate.
While the ubiquitous likes of Genie in a Bottle and What a Girl Wants could rise above the sound issues due to their pure strength as generational anthems, others like Bionic and Vanity struggled, even with the help of lasers and confetti cannons.
After an early run of hits from across her career, a VT then played featuring interview clips of Aguilera explaining her desire to make her new Spanish language album, Aguilera, which came out earlier this year.
In a speech that followed on stage, she revealed how she was pressured into changing her surname at the start of her career, with record executives telling her it was too hard to pronounce. “That’s who I am, this is me,” she said of her decision to ignore the calls.
When she subsequently played three tracks from Aguilera, it was the most engaged and invigorated the singer seemed across the entire show, attacking renditions of Santo, Sueltame and Pa’ mis muchachas with all she had.
In a show that sometimes made it feel like Aguilera was settling on her legacy, this section showed a determination and fight to keep exploring and creating. It’s what made the tepid, uninterested covers of Pitbull’s Feel This Moment and Maroon 5’s Moves Like Jagger that followed so frustrating.
She also wasn’t served well by the excruciating stop-start nature of the stage show. The gig lasted for 80 minutes – on the short side for a gig of this scale – and Aguilera herself was on stage for around half of that. After almost every song, she exited stage left for a few minutes, with a video playing or atmospheric extended intro to the next song awaiting her return.
But just as you think the gig is beyond repair, she throws out a one-two of Ain’t No Other Man and Candyman with her generation-defining voice and all is largely forgiven. This was a show that was hard to love but impossible to give up on.
