Sweet Sweet Music at the Union

Last week when I was asked to go to a ‘gig’ at 5 o’ clock on a rainy afternoon at the Union hosted by a bejowled David Gest and some fading motown stars; I could hardly have been more reluctant.

Admittedly, my experience began unpromisingly. Gest and the twelve ‘Motown legends’ were half an hour late, so I decided to pay a visit to the ladies.

On my way up the stairs matters got worse, when I heard noises that sounded like several cats being clubbed to death and calling out for help.

But bursting in, I was met by Gest himself, powdering his nose furiously, who said, with a sultry cross-eyed look, “Darling, I know. But the light is just better in here”.

As he began painting his fishy pouters with lip gloss, I turned round to see two quite big ladies come out of the loo: these were the dying cats. I had planned an innocent wee, but faced with these three prancing around my cubicle I thought I might get stage fright, so I decided to interview them instead:

Me: David, how would you describe yourself in three words?

Gest: A unique person

Who isn’t? He was too busy getting his slap on to answer any more questions, so I retreated back to the debating chamber.

Keyboards and speakers had been trussed up all around, and the first few pews removed to fashion a dance floor – I felt like a parent at a year six birthday party that was about to start.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a stampede of crooners in wigs, lip liner and drapey black outfits strutted in, with a couple of wizened men wearing bowler hats in tow.

Gest peeked out between the army of huge thighs around him and clambered on stage. He threatened to speak about his charity for “Chinese girls with Herpes”, but then went on a name-dropping spree instead.

But as Jim Morrison, Michael Jackson (“we grew up together”), Macaulay Culkin, Whitney Houston (“like my sister”), The Prodigy (“we’re good friends”) were pedalled out, the audience began to question why Gest was actually there.

After a long detour of increasingly irrelevant names, he finally arrived at the reason for his visit, “whether you’re 19, 20 or 60, soul music just gets into your soul and you just eat it up”, and he had with him, he claimed, “probably the best line-up of soul and Motown artists in the world”. And as far as I was concerned, he was right.

As soon as the music began, the pucker faced Oxford audience didn’t know what had hit them. Candi Staton sang her hit ‘You Got the Love’ from 1986,while waltzing up and down the aisle, sitting on confused laps as she went.

Billy Paul cracked out his ‘Me and Mrs Jones’, and the room went wild. By the time Percy Sledge jumped up to sing his equally huge, ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ there was hardly a dry eye in the house. Everyone in the room looked like they’d had a conversion.

Afterwards, the good feeling seemed to be carrying on in my chat with Peabo Bryson, whose big break was a duet with Celine Dion on the soundtrack of Beauty and the Beast:

He signed the Union visitor’s book with ‘Love is the song that every heart should sing’, and was oozing with good feeling for music and people alike.

That is, until we got on to Justin Beiber, where Peabo didn’t have a good word to say, “He’s a brat that needs a good ass whipping”, and his fame will be short-lived, Peabo thinks, “the sun don’t shine from the same dog’s ass every day”. That may be true, but they still got the sun shining at the Union.