Houston's Back...

Guardian: Houston, I'm Back From Space
Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 19 July 2009

The Voice, as she is also known, makes an exclusive London appearance to premiere her comeback album. Tim Adams sneaks past the limo to get a listen

On Tuesday evening in a chandeliered conference room at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Knightsbridge in London, a gathering from the music industry was packed in, sipping champagne, waiting to hear The Voice. The Voice had been silent for five years and the crowd was here for a reason: could The Voice, after all it had been through, still do its thing?

I was outside on the pavement, late, having failed to gain entry because The Voice was due to arrive "imminently". A different crowd had gathered around a rug-sized red carpet. There were doormen with earpieces. Everyone looked down the street, alert for signs of The Voice's approach. When it appeared it was in a limo with blacked-out windows, and it was hustled quickly inside amid bodyguards. A few among the small crowd shouted out to The Voice, but The Voice just smiled, and said nothing.

Inside, the man who discovered The Voice, took to the stage. This was Clive Davis the former boss of Arista Records. Mr Davis was not slow to tell the room that he had discovered many other voices in his time, including those of Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen, but none of those voices were The Voice. The Voice was something different. He had first heard it in a nightclub, when Whitney Houston, the owner of The Voice, was only 17. After that he had nurtured The Voice, chosen songs for it, placed it in a pantheon of voices that included those of Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald, The Voices of earlier times.

As Mr Davis spoke, some images of The Voice in action appeared on TV screens set up around the room. Words accompanied the images: "She will always love you," the words said, and "She's every woman". When the words appeared everyone in the room could hear The Voice inside their heads.

For a long time it had appeared that was where The Voice was going to stay, Davis suggested. But three or four years ago, he had phoned and told The Voice what it secretly wanted to hear: that people really wanted to listen to it again. Whitney Houston took some persuading, though; she had gone through a lot of "what life can bring", sometimes she had not looked after The Voice as well as she might have done. She had thought perhaps it was time for her and her daughter to forget about The Voice, "and open a fruit stall on some island". But eventually she agreed.

After a while, Clive Davis played a track from the album they had made, written by Alicia Keys, who had been inspired by The Voice. It was a poppy song called "Million Dollar Bill", and The Voice, though recognisable, sounded unremarkable. Other tracks followed, an "island" song, in which The Voice is swamped by the voice of the rapper Akon, a "God" song written by R Kelly, "I Look To You". The more tracks Davis played, the more The Voice seemed slowly to come to life again. In The Voice's finest hour Houston was singing, we learn, to her unborn child: "I will always love you … ". For her new track "I Don't Know My Own Strength" she had in mind facing up to life "as a single mum for the first time": "I crashed out and stumbled/But I didn't crumble … ".

To a standing ovation Whitney then appeared on the stage, looking buffed and polished, like a statuette on her stork legs. She air-kissed Clive, she did an arms outstretched seal clap to London, and London (or at least the part of it that was in this ballroom) clapped back. "I couldn't be more honoured and more humbled," she said, in a voice that so excruciatingly sincere that it suggested she was neither. Nobody minded. The Voice was making a comeback.
 

NEWSFILE: 19 JULY 2009