Janet Jackson arrives in London with the glow of her Together Again world tour overshadowed by controversy. Buried deep in a Guardian interview were her thoughts on the coming US election. Alas, she chose to repeat a lie perpetuated by Donald Trump about Kamala Harris’s racial identity, with inevitable results. Events then took a turn for the weird, as is the wont of events in the Jackson family. A retraction was subsequently issued, then the retraction was retracted – the “manager” who issued it apparently having nothing to do with Jackson. Within 48 hours the US press was talking about a “PR nightmare”.
It’s not a situation that seems to be bothering tonight’s audience – largely, but not exclusively, old enough to recall Jackson’s 1980s and 90s purple patch first-hand – but it’s a little unfortunate nonetheless, because her tour is presumably supposed to be about reframing a career held to have slumped because you couldn’t hear her music over the noise of controversy, following her infamous appearance at the 2004 Super Bowl. Whether her subsequent commercial decline might also have had something to do with a dip in the quality and consistency of her albums in the 00s is an interesting question, but Jackson herself clearly thinks they’re worth reassessing. The opening of her show is daringly light on hits and heavy on tracks from the 21st century: one house-influenced track segues into another, as if a DJ were mixing a set of tunes you can’t quite place.
Performing in a coat so vast and puffy it could function as a king-sized duvet, she lets eight songs go by before she starts breaking out the smashes, with the Joni Mitchell-sampling Got ’Til It’s Gone and That’s the Way Love Goes. You’ve got to admire her determination to reclaim her lesser works and the degree of high camp hauteur with which she does it, but you can’t miss a surge in audience excitement that feels close to gratitude when she cries “I know everybody in the building knows this one!” and starts clobbering them with the stuff that sold millions. A couple of verses and choruses each of What Have You Done for Me Lately, Nasty, The Pleasure Principle, When I Think of You and The Best Things in Life Are Free follow in quick succession – if anything, too quick. These are exquisitely turned pop songs and you can’t help feeling she might be better served by giving them more room to breathe rather than truncating and jamming them together, a feeling that’s magnified when she shifts to ballads: Let’s Wait Awhile, Again, Runaway. But a hint of the flip-book approach of a Vegas residency (she undertook one in 2019, and starts another at the end of this year) hangs over proceedings: plenty of choreography and costume changes, 40 songs in well under two hours.
Still, it represents a certain kind of value for money. If the point is to underline how many hits Jackson had, then it fulfils its brief. She does a version of Scream with the video of her and her late brother blasting out of the big screens, a reminder that it was the last truly great song Michael Jackson recorded, and also that there was a time when Janet Jackson was so commercially imperious even the self-styled King of Pop called upon her assistance to temporarily pull back together a career going haywire.
Whether she will ever be so commercially imperious again is a moot point – even without today’s furore to contend with, she hasn’t released a new album for the best part of a decade – but tonight, in short bursts, you can see why she was.
• At Co-op Live, Manchester, on 1 October, and Ovo Hydro, Glasgow, on 13 October
