In 1998, Lauryn Hill looked like the future of hip-hop soul. The former Fugees singer’s debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, was an agenda-setting masterpiece, a fervent personal, political and spiritual testimony that appeared set to establish her as a defining figure of contemporary R&B.
It never panned out that way. Though Hill had seemed to be a mature performer, she turned out to be the loosest of cannons. Overwhelmed and unimpressed by fame and celebrity, she dropped off the radar and busied herself raising six children, five of them by Bob Marley’s son Rohan.
Her brief, sporadic returns to music have been quixotic and baffling. There was a poorly received 2001 MTV Unplugged album that saw her eschew Miseducation material in favour of strumming an acoustic guitar and rambling between-song ruminations. Then there was a whole lot of silence. Hill reportedly spent the early 2000s in thrall to a personal spiritual guru, as well as flogging overpriced merchandise from her website. On a soon-aborted Fugees reunion tour, her diva behaviour included demanding being addressed as Ms Hill or, ideally, Empress. A solo European tour was pulled after two dates for “health reasons”. Last year, she spent three months in prison in the US for tax evasion.
Expectations for this first show of a rare short UK tour are thus understandably mixed with trepidation, not allayed when there is still no sign of Hill an hour after showtime, leading to boos from the crowd. When she finally appears, still girlish at 39 in a baseball cap and zebra-effect, knee-length coat, the cheers that greet her are as much of relief as of delight.
Backed by a full band, animated and bouncing on the balls of her feet like a psyched-up boxer, she ricochets into an early clutch of Miseducation of Lauryn Hill material like a woman on a mission and a deadline. Everything Is Everything – a slyslice of sensual soul on the album – becomes a taut, upbeat exercise in breathless James Brown funk.
It sets the tone for a intriguing but often challenging evening that sees Hill abandon the subtleties and nuances of her neo-soul in favour of old-school hardcore hip-hop. Gesticulating to the soundman to turn everything up to 11, she spits the reflective poetry of Final Hours as a rapid-fire rap. To Zion, her gentle paean to her eldest son, is rendered as a blare of freeform jazz.
It’s invigorating, but it lacks light and shade. Ex-Factor, her soulful dissing of former Fugee and ex-lover Wyclef Jean, deserves better than to be reduced to a funk-metal workout. When Hill dons an acoustic guitar for relatively sensitive readings of MTV album songs such as Mr Intentional, you wish she’d apply the same courtesy to her better material.
She has reportedly been working on her next album for 10 years, but we hear no new material tonight. Instead, the second half of the set is an uneven mix of Fugees songs and Bob Marley covers. Fu-Gee-La, originally all honeyed, measured cool, becomes a dancehall reggae roustabout; Ready or Not is reimagined as pulverising rap-metal.
Having growled I Only Have Eyes for You at a volume that would elicit admiring nods from Shirley Bassey, Hill plays the doe-eyed ingenue on Cher’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), subverting its cooing submissiveness by whipping off her cap to reveal a shaven head, then closes by strafing her melodious biggest hit, Doo Wop (That Thing), with eardrum-shredding bass. The big attitude that Lauryn Hill exhibits all night can’t obliterate the impression that she remains an object lesson in wasted potential.
• At O2 Academy, Birmingham, on 23 September. Box office: 0844 477 2000. Then touring.
This article was amended on 23 September 2014 because the original referred to Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). This song was first released by Cher.
