Cyndi Lauper, Royal Albert Hall: She still wants to have fun – and the sold-out crowd went with her
The 71-year-old star Cyndi Lauper - CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images
“Those were always my seats,” said Cyndi Lauper, gesturing up towards the gods at the Royal Albert Hall. “And then I got a different job.” That job? Becoming an era-defining popstar of the 1980s, hi-kicking her way through the streets of New York City in a chain-adorned ballgown and marmalade mullet in the music video for Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Forty years on, she has recently announced a farewell arena tour and released a retrospective documentary. It would seem the 71-year-old is gearing up to retire.
Not that you would have guessed as much from her one-off, sold-out show on Wednesday night. Despite a faltering start and an issue with too-quiet vocals that wasn’t fixed until halfway through, Lauper and her seven-piece band electrified the Hall right from the off.
Lauper prepares for her live shows like an athlete, and remains a highly physical performer, whirling and leaping from one side of the stage to the other. Sporting spiky hair and exaggerated shoulder pads, she appeared almost cartoonishly 80s – until you remembered that she helped invent that look, a more-is-more approach that began with her 1983 debut album She’s So Unusual and involved corsets, fingerless gloves and flamboyant amounts of jewellery.
“I tried to get dressed up, but I’m dishevelled,” she apologised, as hair extensions floated about the stage. The show was as delightfully ramshackle as it ought to be for a pop star with outsider appeal, whose blend of scrappy theatricality, goofy humour and punk attitude continues to influence artists today, from Kate Nash to Nicki Minaj (who recently invited Lauper on stage in Brooklyn) and recent phenomenon Chappell Roan, oft-dubbed “the Gen-Z Cyndi Lauper”.
Although her image has always been steeped in originality, Lauper is a deft interpreter of other people’s songs. She transformed Roy Orbison’s I Drove All Night from creepy to triumphant, while her version of Prince’s When You Were Mine was, unsurprisingly, a highlight of the night. Finally unshackled from those earlier sound issues, she moved from an a cappella rendition of the 1996 song Fearless – proof that her voice is still in astonishingly good nick – into the full-band thrill of Money Changes Everything, her 1984 cover of forgotten Atlanta band The Brains.
And though her definitive hit Girls Just Wanna Have Fun has the potential to suffer from being overplayed, on Wednesday night it sounded fresh and full of joy. The song has been recently reaffirmed as an anthem of liberation: in 2022, Lauper set up the Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Rights fund in response to the US Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v Wade ruling, a move that denies women the right to an abortion.
But a second version of the song – performed to close out the night after her 1986 hit True Colors – felt unnecessary, especially given the short setlist and absence of stand-out tracks such as All Through The Night and I Don’t Want To Be Your Friend. Nevertheless, if the energy in the Royal Albert Hall was anything to go by, Lauper’s upcoming farewell tour will feel like anything but.
Touring the UK in early 2025; cyndilauper.com
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