Olivia performs at the Grandstand, Toronto Aug 26 1982
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN AT THE GRANDSTAND
Inspiration to get physical
By WILDER PENFIELD III
I wonder if Olivia Newton-John is thinking about the thousands of couples who got Physical last night as a direct result of her inspiration.
The song, her fifth #1 hit, holds the rock-era record for time (10 weeks) in the top spot, so it obviously turned people on, and “Let me hear your body talk” can be taken in different ways.
Last night, for her all-ages audience of 21,000 at the Grandstand, she acted out some of the lyrics’ less suggestive implications - delivering one chorus, for example, while skipping rope. (I’m waiting for her fitness program to appear on videodiscs.)
But other things besides beauty are in the eye of the beholder. And with Olivia being such a tiny bit of beauty in the eyes of most beholders (“Rockstars should be bigger,” someone near to me said), many romantics were focussing on the foreground.
She clinched it with I Honestly Love You. She has more of a lived-in womanliness about her now than when she last played the Ex seven years ago (to the day), and the song seems more sincere somehow, but much of her charm is still innocent, girlish. No question about it: people were fond of what they thought they could see. But from the whispering-along I could hear as I made my exit, I know she was also making people feel fond of what they knew they could feel.
Enough. Romance was only part of what this versatile Australian ambassadress was purveying. Olivia goes back a long way with a lot of us; the next album number 13 will be her Greatest Hits Volume II, and as she said with a disarmingly easy laugh before a medley of country hits from Volume I, “Here are some songs that are going to date you.”
There was real showmanship - and a stellar session band led by sax ace Tom Scott backing her up. They gave people what they expected in ways they could only have hoped for. She also gave them a lot of extras, a lot of things that made the show more than a montage of album tracks heard at a distance: A simultaneously bluesy and new-wavey rendition of Dolly Parton’s Jolene; some vocal breaks that were harder-edged than on the older records; some dancing - not far removed from the Maggie Muggins school of childlike-hood, perhaps, but full of personality; some attractive uses of mirrors and fog; five vivid costumes; and a couple of movie shorts (one recapping her most successful media exposures, the other capturing “one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had” - riding dolphins).
Scott opened with some fine custom LA-MOR dub, the aural equivalent of wallpaper flocked in ermine. Aside from one vigorous rocker from a new album called Desire, which grabbed our consciousnesses like the hands in the walls of Repulsion, he was softening us up for the Newton-John celebration of pair-bonding that would follow.