Kelis, Wilton’s Music Hall - music review

Having perceptively noted that her milkshake brought all the boys to the yard, Kelis Wilson promptly went the whole hog and trained as a Cordon Bleu chef. Now the singer once best known for charging fans for her autograph has returned with a sparkling album appropriately entitled Food (the menu includes Jerk Ribs, Biscuits N’ Gravy and Friday Fish Fry) and a new, non-stroppy attitude which involved her chatting to fans between songs, acknowledging every painful drunken heckle with a smile and even sitting on stage afterwards signing autographs. For free.

Other than turning up half an hour late and complaining about being too hot (now I’m no body temperature expert but perhaps wearing a jumper wasn’t the way forward here), her diva tendencies were no more.

Instead, her brass duo complemented her DJ/electro drummer and the all-smiling Kelis magnificently merged old-style soul with new technology. She started, finished and marked the evening’s halfway point with snippets of the evergreen Feeling Good, which recalled Nina Simone’s version and covered Labi Siffre’s Bless The Telephone with gorgeous restraint. Yet she transformed Milkshake into a speeded-up electro clatterfest; thundered her way through 4th of July (Fireworks) and suggested Minnie Riperton’s classic Les Fleurs on the uplifting Acapella. Best of all, old and new met to spectacular effect on Biscuits N’ Gravy, which began as a simple ballad and ended as a kitchen-sink spectacular.

Kelis is in a strange place. Her moment has passed, her alternative career suggesting she knows it, but at last night’s rapturously received sell-out, it neither looked nor sounded like that. Food for thought, indeed.