Grimly compelling: The Whitney Houston Hologram Tour reviewed

‘No matter what they take from me,’ sang Whitney Houston towards the end of a peculiar evening in Hammersmith, ‘they can’t take away my dignity.’ You want a bet on that? Eight years after she died, here was Houston — in holographic form — treading the boards once more. In death, as in life, she continues to be an object for others to make money from.The Houston on stage was not, of course, the addict who crumpled towards the end of her life; nor the one who couldn’t hit the high notes of ‘I Will Always Love You’ on her final tours. It was the beautiful young woman with the staggering voice. The voice was piped in; the hologram made the occasional lateral movement, but mostly stood centre stage, a perfectly functional backing band behind her working their way through the greatest hits.

The voice, a thing of wonder, floated oddly on top of the live music, a little shrill and echoey. The production values — some lit geometric shapes and four dancers — were more seaside special than arena tour. But the whole thing was grimly compelling. The hologram appeared to have been made with only a handful of gestures, one of them being pointing towards the stage-left front rows, where someone must have felt very unsettled indeed. That was one oddity. Another was that ‘Whitney’ held her mic a good foot away from her mouth. It’s not as if there were any musical reason for a holographic singer to hold her holographic mic closer, but it’s just not how Houston did it, as ten seconds on YouTube will show.