Lauryn Hill and the Fugees
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
The 1998 LP The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sold north of 20 million copies and took home the Grammy for album of the year, the first hip-hop record, if you can call it that, to do so. Critics who need classifications labelled it neo soul: classic 1970s grooves (Marvin Gaye, Ann Peebles, Curtis Mayfield) mixed with hip-hop, funk and reggae. At the centre of it all was that incredible voice that could both make you cry and make you want to kick something over. The Fugees, the hip-hop trio that Lauryn Hill formed with Wyclef Jean and Pras Michél, had hit big a few years earlier, with their album The Score, driven by their cover of Killing Me Softly, but Miseducation dwarfed even that.
Hill hasn’t released much since then apart from the odd soundtrack contribution, but she has toured regularly, especially in the past few years. Surprisingly, the US leg of this hotly anticipated jaunt was cancelled a week before it was due to start. Hill blamed media sensationalism and “clickbait headlines” for affecting ticket sales.
It wasn’t the first controversy about her concerts. Hill has developed a reputation to rival that of the late country singer George “No Show” Jones over the years. Here at 3Arena in 2018 she took her time coming on stage, and a year later a show at Musgrave Park in Cork was cut to a paltry hour (a proportion of which she spent giving out about both the sound and her band). On top of all that, Michél is suing her for breach of contract over cancelled dates. The suit also claims that The Fugees lost out on a $5 million fee for Coachella because Hill wasn’t happy about being second on the bill.
But, after a video intro that combines images of the civil-rights struggle and shots of the young artist herself with blasts of Stevie Wonder and The Last Poets, she arrives on stage in Dublin on Monday night a mere half-hour later than advertised. Striking in silver eye shadow and eye-catching jewellery, multicoloured beaded dreads and the sort of snow-camouflage leisure suit one might sport when fighting a war in Norway, she asks Dublin how it’s doing – and the place explodes.
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The first section concentrates on Miseducation. The stop-start rhythm of Everything Is Everything (“I wrote this for Ireland”) finds her voice needing to warm up, but there’s a sublime vocal break aided by her three backing singers, and her marvellous band are right in the pocket from the off. She hits some proper high notes during When It Hurts So Bad, then pulls some real grit out of the bag for an incendiary Final Hour.
Ex-Factor is an expected highlight; Hill’s voice is fighting fit by the time she reaches the “this is crazy” refrain. To Zion is nearly as good again, especially when the band drop out and leave just their boss’s voice, the guitar and those beautiful congas.
There’s a considerable dip when Zion Marley, Hill’s son with Bob Marley’s son Rohan, arrives on stage. A run at his grandfather’s War is passable enough, but three of his own distinctly average reggae numbers is pushing it. When Hill takes over again she sets the arena on fire with perhaps her greatest song, Doo Wop (That Thing). If you want to be critical you might say she’s shouting when she should be singing, but it doesn’t matter, as the crowd take the song off her and sing it to the rafters.
The energy goes all the way into the red when Hill asks the audience to welcome Wyclef Jean on stage. In a fur coat and hat, and carrying a Stratocaster, he exudes cool. Their best of The Fugees set is ferocious. He’s a ball of energy during How Many Mics. Hill seems to draw strength from her old partner, spitting out lyrics as if she’s running out of change. Zealots, with samples from The Flamingos and Willie Williams, changes its last tango from Paris to Dublin and Jean keeps it going, throwing out a blast of U2′s Sunday Bloody Sunday and doing a handstand during The Score. Then he puts his Strat back on for a sped-up No Woman, No Cry (before falling over a monitor). Whatever Hill’s paying him, it isn’t enough.
Hill takes over again for a mass singalong to Killing Me Softly, followed by Ready or Not, with its kiss-off to all those tiresome gangster rappers – “While you’re imitating Al Capone I’ll be Nina Simone” – and a room-levelling Fu-Gee-La, which is worth leaving the house for all on its own.
Perhaps she was determined to stick it her critics after the cancelled dates. Perhaps it has been the presence of Jean, performing as if his life depended on it. But Hill has silenced all naysayers, delivering a great show that has combined soul and power. It’s everything we could have hoped for and possibly more than we were expecting.
