★★★☆☆
It takes a special kind of person to appear before 1,400 people in a fishnet catsuit with very little underneath it. Especially in London in January. JoJo’s repertoire of bombastic pop and power ballads may be unremarkable, but she performed it with raunchy élan.
The 26-year-old from Massachusetts isn’t a big name on this side of the Atlantic, but she is in America — since she was 13, when she became the youngest solo artist to have a US No 1 single, with Leave (Get Out) in 2004. She has been singing for even longer than that, having been offered a record deal when she was six (which she wisely turned down).
Like Miley Cyrus, that other child-turned-adult star, JoJo (real name Joanna Levesque) appears to have learnt one lesson most strongly in her two decades in the business — the one about sex selling. She gyrated with attitude throughout this raucously supported show, stroking her crotch, rubbing the shoulders of a security guard and treating a member of the audience to a pretty sizzling lap dance on a chair in the middle of the stage. He said his boyfriend wouldn’t mind a bit.
Such salacious stagecraft, and Levesque’s strong, lucid voice, almost disguised the fact that much of her material is a bit pedestrian. Music was marred by histrionic high-register warbles, her cover of SWV’s Weak was a sub-Mariah slushy soul ballad and Vibe sounded like the kind of thing that gets nul points at Eurovision.
It was only when she moved away from the cheesy stuff that she really shone. There was a lilting hip-hip swing to Like This, while her voice melted into an imperious purr on the jazzy We Get By, and the rockier FAB imagined a Joan Jett for the Instagram generation. If Levesque gets herself some decent songwriters, we might start talking less about the catsuit and more about the music.
Heaven, London W1, February 1