Pop music is in a weird place right now. Well, at least a lot weirder than when Justin Timberlake was last on Australian shores seven years ago. In a contemporary landscape where the biggest female names in the game are spitting rhymes about their derrières, males are singing predominately about their dicks and boy bands are being caught out for sending naked Snapchats to fans, the return of Timberlake’s sugary smooth R&B after an elongated stint in Hollywood couldn’t feel any more refreshing – a sentiment forced home tenfold from experiencing the man in a live setting.
Bookending the performance with Pusher Love Girl and Mirrors and trimming all but the finest cuts from his recent double album The 20/20 Experience, Timberlake treated fans to a career-spanning, wall-to-wall hit fest served up alongside highly enthusiastic and humble banter and a rendition of Happy Birthday for a front-row fan (not to mention dance routines that put my white-boy flailing in the club to horrendous shame).
It wasn’t all knock-out blows, however. Acoustic versions of My Love and What Goes Around were received in a lukewarm fashion, while covers of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel and Michael Jackson’s Human Nature divided the vastly age-ranging crowd. But these falters were quickly forgotten when he’d return to his immense back-catalogue of mega-hits, with cuts such as Señorita, SexyBack, FutureSex, LoveStoned, Like I Love You and Cry Me A River eliciting responses akin to the decibel levels of the Tunguska meteorite.
As the clock hit two hours and he finally departed from the stage, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that they had just witnessed a true showman, a bona fide pop superstar and one of the finest performing all-rounders in the world still at the top of his game.
BY TYSTIN WRAYBERLAKE
Photos Charles Newbury
Loved: Señorita, I feel for youuuuuuu.
Hated: The deafening squeal of my gig buddy when the fucking stage elevated into the crowd.
Drank: Enough to shave away another three years off my life expectancy.
