It was a Tuesday night in the packed O2 arena; later, Michael Bublé would pretend to think it was a Saturday and ask the audience to join him in thinking that – and we were all good for it. But he was yet to come on, a timer projected on to a billowing canopy showed 90 seconds, and a massive, as-yet invisible orchestra was playing some ominous strings. It reminded me of something the composer of the Succession theme said: “How can I make this feel as if something’s wrong?”
That was exactly the sound he was going for, he told me the next day in the Café Royal, possibly the plushest hotel suite I’ve ever laid eyes on, let alone been allowed inside. “I said to [composer and arranger] Nicholas Jacobson-Larson, I need you to build an earthquake. I want people to think perhaps there’s something wrong.” But there’s nothing wrong, people. Michael’s arrived on stage. He’s singing Feeling Good with the gusto of a man who believes he’s speaking for every one of the 15,000-strong crowd, and really, who wouldn’t be? With his trademark tight black suit, a shtick that alternates between Puck and Lothario, a load of sweet, self-deprecating, easy wit, a total disregard for whether he’s cool or not, he puts you in a good mood – he cannot help it.
He knows that his live shows are his secret weapon. “I will continue, one at a time, to turn people and get them on my side.” It’s more like thousands at a time, otherwise he would have struggled to sell 75m records. “Many times, unfortunately or fortunately for me, that doesn’t happen until someone decides purposely to buy a ticket or is accidentally dragged along to come and see me in a show. For so many years, that has been the turning point, from someone saying: ‘Fuck you, bootleg Sinatra-wannabe! Who is this cheat?’ to: ‘OK, he’s real. We get it now.”
It’s harsh, but you take the point: when his eponymous major-label debut was released in 2003, Bublé definitely wasn’t seen as cool and it took him ages to become at all famous. It was a circuitous route, via the Philippines and South Africa, the first places to really take to him. And he’s grateful for that now. “I was 28. I believe that fame can stunt your growth, I really do. So I wasn’t 21, I was 28. I was a man. OK, definitely not perfect. But I had become who I would become.”
It was fine to be a pop star, but critics made careful distinctions between people who wrote their own material, had it written for them, or jumped on existing classics, which was and maybe still is viewed as a form of freeloading. So Michael Bublé, who writes his own songs, too (though it may take him six months a pop, he’s had a long career and 27 or 28 hits now), was hard to categorise, and that wasn’t cool either. “I used to feel quite lonely,” he says. “Not needy – it was just a very strange place to be within the business. I would show up on a red carpet and what was I? Was I a pop star? Was I a songwriter? Was I crooner? I never seemed to fit in with anyone. I would see all these acts that I admired and I never fit in. I still don’t fit in.”
A critical snootiness settled over him, and it was fashionable to call him Mickey Bubbles, which was the name he used as a children’s entertainer – I was about to say “before he got famous”, but he still has a lot of time for children’s entertainment. There is as often as not a Muppet on his Christmas specials, and he does an amazing Kermit impression. But some combination of time, musicality and showmanship has burned off the cynicism and now, I think, if you saw him in the street and didn’t mob him, you would look like the killjoy.
But only if he was in his crooner uniform: “It’s like Clark Kent and Superman,” he says. “His idiot friends see him with his glasses on, and there’s no possible way this could be Superman. A pair of glasses is enough to fool them. If I walked outside with you right now on to Piccadilly Circus, it would be chaos. If I put on cargo pants and my hat, no one would give a shit.”
Bublé, 47, grew up in the Vancouver area, in a blue-collar family. His dad was a fisher, his maternal grandfather a plumber, who broke his grandson into singing in nightclubs when he was a teenager by exchanging plumbing services for stage time. Bublé had a dyed-in-the-wool love of music. “I really genuinely loved it. I had deep reverence for it, not because I was nostalgic about a certain time. I just thought these were incredibly well-crafted songs. I’m not weird. I’m not unique. If people aren’t hearing what I’m hearing, then that shit is on them.”
On stage, he sings Cry Me a River, first recorded by Julie London in 1955, and he sings Fever, made famous by Peggy Lee in 1958: he sounds great, but the audience, seemingly as a collective courtesy decided in advance, saves its enthusiasm for his original compositions, such as Haven’t Met You Yet, the first single off his 2009 album Crazy Love. At the end of the song, the house lights flood the audience, as if he’s genuinely searching the crowd for the lovely he hasn’t met yet. Of course it’s a joke – everybody knows it’s a joke! The guy’s married to the Argentinian model and actor Luisana Lopilato and has been for 12 years; they have four children.
He skates this line between panto and passion, concert and royal visit, joke and sincerity, and it works because, whatever it is, he really means it. “I’m the storyteller. Even when I write my own songs, I always try to stay out of the way of the listener. I never wanted to say who it was about; I wanted you to hear the song and for you to be the main character in that story.” One to one, he’s always making eye contact, always leaning forward, and prefaces everything: “I’m going to be honest …” or: “I’m going be totally honest” and projects his feelings on to you to build rapport. “What happens is as you get older, and you probably agree with me, you start to care less about what other people think of you. I know who I am. I worry a lot less about what people say or what people think.” I actually don’t agree – when I was young I didn’t even notice what people thought. But sure, what the hell, I nod furiously.
On stage and in person, Bublé talks a lot about the pandemic and prefaces a lot of songs about love with: “After what we’ve all just been through …” He doesn’t think things are yet back to normal. “I have so many friends who are still dealing with the effects of that pandemic,” he says. “A lot of my friends have young kids, teenagers, and the mental health issues are real. It’s only now that we’re starting to see some of those effects. It was a really very scary thing for a lot of people. I was so lucky. Listen, I wasn’t worried about how I was going to pay my rent or where was the next meal going to come from. But a lot of friends have lost businesses; we’re still seeing the effects, economically.”
I would normally take that with a pinch of salt, since wealth finds its own level and it’s hard to imagine someone so internationally celebrated having regular friends. But his kids go to the same state school that he went to. “There’s this smell of all the hallways, I remember everything. Same teachers, the kids that I went to school with are the same people I walk my kids to school with now. The first time was probably a strange moment for them, and for me, too. You don’t want to act like you think you’re something special, you don’t want to be too aloof. Now we’re drinking at the pub. We’re going golfing. It’s funny how quickly that happens. They’re not impressed. They might say: ‘Hey, you got the Grammy – good for you.’ [He has won four Grammys now, the most recent this year, for his 2022 album, Higher]. But they’re not impressed. It’s a really cool life.”
It is a cool life, but it hasn’t been without its tribulations, and I wonder whether the global health emergency struck him so keenly because of his son’s brush with cancer in 2016. Noah was three; he has now fully recovered. “Many of us have had to deal with loss and suffering and fear,” he says. “When you suffer, there’s two different ways you go. One of them takes us to bitterness and anger, and another takes us to forgiveness and acceptance and love. It’s hard to take the right road, because we’re human and we’re flawed and we’re complicated, complicated beasts.” He doesn’t dwell on what happened now it’s over – he just empathises with others because “I had a loving mommy and daddy who taught us empathy. There was a lot of unconditional love in our house and a lot of general acceptance.”
And then, out of nowhere – I swear I didn’t ask – he comes out full trans ally and pro gun control. Maybe he’s thinking about the recent school shooting in Nashville. “I’m not a politician. I don’t want to be a politician. But I see all these people talking about the LGBTQ+ community, and we’ve got bigger problems. Those are not problems. Just accept it. How does it change your life? Just love people. Mental health is a big issue in places like America. Gun control is a big issue. Identify how you want to identify, and God bless you.”
It’s part of his legend that he used to sleep with his Bible as a teenager, and pray to become a singer. Often, when he comes across as naive – a little bit too loving, a little bit too trusting – it’s tempting to fill in the blanks with Christianity. This isn’t just me being hard-bitten: even Noah said to him in the van home from the gig last night: “‘Poppy, do you really love those people?’ And I said: ‘Noah, you’ll never hear me call them fans. Fan is a word short for “fanatical”. It’s not a good word. They’re not fans. Those people are the reason we have everything we have. They’re the reason we’re travelling in this beautiful van together, coming from that incredible night. They’re why we pray every night, they’re who prayed for us when we’ve gone through our very worst moments. It may seem to you that these are strangers in the dark, but they’re an extension of our family and our friends.’”
He resists the labels of faith, though: “I wouldn’t call myself a God-fearing Christian,” he says. “I wouldn’t classify myself as a religious person. I am not afraid of it. I have a really wonderful and personal relationship with my faith. But it’s not a heavy thing, I’m just not that guy. I don’t want to pretend that I am.”
I know: it all sounds a bit cheesy – a guy who loves to be loved and is; a guy who sees the best in people and has it reflected straight back at him; a guy who would be singing all day anyway and just happens to have this stadium-filling voice – but he’s not without his worries. He ruminates a lot about the world today, a “splintered and shattered” place, where the default is not always “having a kind word, or being accepting of something that’s different”. Sometimes, the default is being a “bitter, sarcastic, cynical asshole”. But he puts a disarming amount of faith in music. “The world is divided by ideology, race, masks, no masks, sexuality. That’s why I love what I do, by the way. When I looked out at that audience last night, I did not see black or white or gay or straight or rich or poor or young or old. I did not see any divide. I didn’t see people who were vaccinated or unvaccinated, people who were for or against a war. I saw 15,000 people singing together and laughing together and living life and celebrating life together. How could that not be the pinnacle of greatness? This is the best of us.”
Do I get it? Not completely, no. To have such a sweet heart, such a sunny disposition, take such a lot of pleasure in melody: it’s hard to fathom. But I’ve seen him live, and yeah, I do think he’s real, and I think, good luck to you, you beautiful cheeseball.
Michael Bublé is on tour until June.
