Royal Festival Hall, London
The influential R&B singer bends past hits into fresh shapes and throws down covers in dizzying variety at the Southbank to celebrate 25 years since her debut
There’s a collective sharp intake of breath in the Royal Festival Hall, as a voice comes out of the speakers. “Erykah will be joining us as soon as possible.” In Badu World – or “Badubotron”, the singer has been calling it of late – time is elastic. Irrelevant. It could mean waiting hours for her to go on stage. Even hours and hours. In recent years, she has perhaps become known as much for her loose time-keeping – and letting loose some unpopular opinions – as for being the bohemian soul sage who changed the sound of R&B in the late-90s and whose influence is everywhere in modern music.
But not tonight. The first of two shows billed to celebrate a quarter-century of her debut album, Baduizm, the Dallas native swaggers into view, 15 minutes shy of her allotted start time. Her excellent players, all nine of them, have tantalised the audience with a ripple of dialtones from Caint Use My Phone, which riffs on one of her best-loved tracks, Tyrone. And now she is under the spotlights, poised to shoot, wearing a hat within her signature Holy Mountain hat, fur jacket and extreme leg warmers by Myah Hasbany that look like floofy sea anemones. They swoosh hypnotically. It speaks to her current mode as a front-row fashionista but it also seems to suggest “outlaw”.