First night: Dolly Parton strips away the camp to reveal a vulnerable soul
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Version 0 of 1. Dolly Parton sashays onstage, silver high heels sparkling, to an orchestral medley of her signature tunes, a vision in garish pink, hair that she warns a roadie not to "break" and so many rhinestones she's probably singlehandedly supporting the industry. "Why'd you come here lookin' like that?" she sings. This is, if anything, a slightly toned-down version of the image – modelled on a prostitute in her Smokey Mountain hometown – that the 68-year-old has honed since moving to Nashville aged just 18. However, behind the glitz and the quips is a seriously strong woman who took on the country music establishment, wrote her own songs and demanded respect for women singers. Along the way, she has clocked up 42 top 10 albums and shifted 100m records. Even Jolene – the apparently true story of how she begged a woman not to take her husband – is now a victory march. "Without Jolene, I wouldn't have made all that money from the song," she shrieks. She indeed owns many properties, but still describes herself as the "simple country girl" from a deprived childhood who never forgot her roots – and fairly recently expanded her Imagination Library scheme to give free books to poor children in hardly glitzy Rotherham. This combination of glam and down-home is crucial to her appeal, although here she's less high camp than usual, with more religious and devotional material and few of the trademark saucy clips. Even an unlikely gospel makeover of Bon Jovi's Lay Your Hands On Me escapes the expected double entendre. The singer recently admitted she finds stardom wearying and her new album, Blue Smoke, seems to contain a lot of songs about farewells. She hardly looks or sounds ready to pack the pink Stetsons up yet, though, dashing around and playing a variety of instruments from dulcimer to saxophone. However, there's a sense that she's exposing slightly more of her soul: the vulnerable woman who had a hysterectomy, was denied the experience of motherhood, has "sad songs engrained in my DNA" and talks so emotionally about her parents that you suspect somebody will start to cry. A stunning a capella Little Sparrow survives shouts of "Dolll-eee", but this is not quite the party that Liverpool had in mind, and a set list containing baffling covers of a Fine Young Cannibals oldie and the Benny Hill theme might need emergency surgery in time for Glastonbury later this month. It's not until the 24th song – Islands in the Stream, her last whopping British hit – that the crowd get on their feet, but they stay there for a riotous, arm-waving 9 to 5, helpfully illustrated by a cartoon of an alarm clock. "I can't sing this as well as Whitney," she says of I Will Always Love You, the song which provided an international hit for Whitney Houston, as the audience yell their disagreement. Parton sings it beautifully. This isn't her best show, but one of her more human. As she once put it, "I may look fake, but I'm real where it counts." |