Grace Jones appears on stage at the Royal Festival Hall in silhouette: a long, impossibly lean figure in an enormous hat, framed in an oblong of white light at the top of a flight of stairs. It could be an image from A One Man Show, the 1981 tour and subsequent “video album” that was the dernier cri in arty pop cool 40 years ago: a series of beautifully staged, strikingly lit vignettes with the besuited Jones a perfectly poised figure at their centre.
As she descends the stairs to the strains of Nightclubbing, opening the Meltdown festival she is curating, Jones seems impossibly stylish and eerily unchanged. She is clad once again in a suit and heels, and the enormous hat eventually comes off to reveal precisely the kind of flat-top haircut she sported in the early 80s, while her sprechgesang voice remains as commanding as ever. But a few weeks after her 74th birthday, Jones feels less an icily remote figure than a gleeful agent of total chaos.
