Lauryn Hill, O2 Brixton Academy - gig review: 'the booing crowd found Lauryn Hill guilty of back catalogue butchery'

Lauryn Hill's mistreatment of her old classics was tantamount to musical self-harm. The crowd booed during her take on The Fugees’ How Many Mics, and swiftly formed a conga line to the exit
Late: ex-Fugees singer Lauryn Hill at the gig (Picture: Angela Lubrano/Livepix)
Rick Pearson25 September 2014

Lauryn Hill was jailed in 2013 for tax evasion but her only crime last night was committed against her audience.

If ever there was a lesson in how to alienate a crowd, this was it. Not renowned for her punctuality, the former Fugees singer, 39, turned up an hour late and proceeded to butcher her beloved back catalogue.

Aided and abetted by a heavy-handed band, she rendered songs from 1998’s Grammy-winning The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill nearly unrecognisable. Everything Is Everything became a fidgety funk number, Final Hour was rap-filled reggae and To Zion morphed into shouty prog-rock.

Hill is not the only artist to rejig her back catalogue, of course; Bob Dylan does this kind of thing and gets heralded as a genius. But there was so little to recommend about these new arrangements that it effectively amounted to musical self-harming.

Mercifully, a couple of songs did emerge unscathed. Mr Intentional and I Get Out — both from Hill’s MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 album — were performed solo on acoustic guitar and were showcases for her still-wonderful voice.

However, it wasn’t long before the band plugged in and she resumed the task of killing us not so softly. The nadir came during a take on The Fugees’ How Many Mics, which saw Hill rap while her musical cohorts played The Police’s Can’t Stand Losing You. The boos began and a conga formed to the exit. If the performance was difficult to listen to, it was also difficult to watch. Once the embodiment of effortless cool, Hill now cuts a nervous, frantic figure. Previous tours have been cancelled due to “health reasons”; you wonder whether this one should’ve been too.

Leaving the venue, the air was full of disgruntled voices. What could have been a masterpiece turned out to be the most frustrating gig of the year.

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