Anastasia at the London Palladium review: Spades full of smoky glamour and camp humour

“I like to have bass in my face!” declares Anastacia on stage at the London Palladium, as the bow-chic-a-wow-wow porn licks of ‘Made for Lovin’ You’ hit us full pelt. Serving camp humour in spades, the ‘Left Outside Alone’ singer’s between-songs banter alone is worth the admission price, and her warm, conversational intimacy with both the audience and her band (crucially, the latter adore her) is more authentically healing than the phoney empowerment offered by many of today’s newer stars.

Her voice, meanwhile, remains untouchable: she wisely reins it in for the most part, but during one climactic, earth-shattering note, when most vocalists would be clenching their faces in abject concentration, Anastacia is a picture of pure, deadpan unbotheredness, swishing her mic around to create an in-and-out effect. It’s just that easy for her: less showboating, more pissing around. It’s delightfully fun.

That bombastic vocal, turbocharged by multiple instruments and back-up singers, did create a wall of sound that was at times unrelenting. This is a pretty tiny venue after all – how it contained Madonna’s star power during the Madame X Tour, we’ll never know. But such is the Anastacia standard: so ubiquitous a presence was she on radio and in TV in the ‘00s that every song, every force of nature chorus, is instantly familiar, even if you haven’t heard it before. This means the non-singles on the setlist are always a pleasure, although the choice to do a remixed version of ‘Not That Kind’, a song so signature that it inspired the name of her first album, and indeed this 25-year anniversary tour, is disappointing. So too an inexplicable Simpsons theme-tune intro and multiple costume changes into broadly similar outfits.

But these are minor gripes when the energy in the room is so extra. People in the front rows are on their feet from the word go, and by the full throttle ending of ‘I’m Outta Love’, have arms fervently outstretched akin to the gays and Judy Garland at Judy at Carnegie Halle in 1961. People evidently love this woman, and she deserves it.