As Usher himself knows, when the chips are down, the best course is to accentuate the positive. With his last album underperforming, the new one delayed and a track given away in a cross-promotion with Honey Nut Cheerios, the R&B A-lister perhaps has cause to take stock – but tonight he plays it like a winner. The final show of his URX (Usher Raymond Experience) tour finds his self-esteem in excellent shape. A moment during the single Climax, voted the second-best track of 2012 by Guardian critics, says it all: rising on a hydraulic platform, he flings his arms upward as a back-screen shifts from storm clouds to born-again blue sky. Cheerios? What Cheerios?
As he reminds us, he’s been doing this for 23 years – that’s two decades of body-popping, moonwalking, and adapting contemporary styles, like Yeah!’s smouldering mix of crunk and R&B, to fit his warm-bath croon. Arenas are his natural habitat: his 20 musicians and dancers need the stage room, but so does he, given his propensity for big gestures. Usher baits-and-switches, getting fans to bawl along to the much-loved Pop Ya Collar, only to cut it off as they reach a high-pitched crescendo and slip in a medley of other people’s less worthy hits that he’s featured on, including Diddy’s I Need a Girl and Chris Brown’s New Flame. Nobody minds; he’s on form, a masterful all-rounder who surrounds himself with talent on stage.
He knows the value of the long pause: midway through U Remind Me, he eyes the breathless audience and slowly puts on sunglasses, transforming himself into a rock star. That’s trumped, though, by an immense falsetto delivery of the woebegone Burn, and – inevitably – by his fluid dancing. It says much about his footwork that two dancers can’t upstage him even as they twerk while standing on their heads. He’s still a star. Don’t believe him? Just watch.
