The opening gig by the curator of this year’s Meltdown festival begins in impressively grandstanding style. The lights in the Royal Festival Hall dim, the familiar intro of I Feel For You by rapper Melle Mel booms out, and an introductory film unspools. The cast of faces paying tribute to Chaka Khan is pretty extraordinary: Stevie Wonder, Michelle Obama, Grace Jones and Joni Mitchell appear alongside old clips of Whitney Houston and Prince singing Khan’s praises. And so is the archive footage: dog-eared copies of old albums by Rufus, the funk band she intermittently fronted from 1973 to 1983, are pictured next to images of her performing with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Ray Charles. It is all evidence of a strikingly varied career.
You hear her before you see her: a frankly extraordinary succession of pitch-perfect extempore wails from offstage precedes her arrival. Then here she is: a diminutive, big-haired figure in sparkling black, alternately complaining about the British weather (a recent rain-drenched festival appearance was “like a horror film”) and joking about her advanced years (age-related memory loss is apparently less of a problem when you’ve lived a life as tumultuous as Chaka Khan’s, because “if I could remember everything I’d done, I’d probably kill myself”).
