It's showtime!; Ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to

Dionne Warwick

THERE are two great ways to be an R'n'B diva, and one of them is to be like Dionne Warwick. The other is to be like Aretha Franklin. Look at any of the current crop of black female superstars and you can see them raiding and fusing each style. Where Aretha leads it from the piano, legs apart and wailing, Dionne is elegantly swaying from a cradled mike. Where Aretha's voice explodes with sex and raw desire, ripping anyone's melody to bleeding shreds, Dionne sings like a cross between a gospel choir and a French horn, perfectly mediating whatever song's before her.

All the major divas of today know when to switch into each mode. Look at the videos of Beyonce, or Mary J Blige, or Mariah Carey. One minute they're shaking boo-tay and wailing out, associating with bad boys, demanding everything from the world: that's Aretha. The next it's satin evening dresses and candlelit dinners, poised in anguish before the string section, smoothly pleading for no more drama in their heartbroken lives. That's Dionne.

When we get to see Madame Warwick in Edinburgh tonight, we won't be seeing some faded self-pastiche of a Sixties and Seventies superstar. Perhaps because of the economy and self-restraint at the heart of her talent, she still has the chops to deliver her classics; and going by her performance on Top of the Pops 2 last year, she's also been to a style consultant too. Bleached blonde and closely cropped hair, long black leather dress, and those cheekbones still high and unlined. Singing with her son David, she looked like a reborn icon.

With stellar contemporary talents like Pharrell Williams and Stephanie McKay name-checking her voice and records as inspiration, it's worth reminding ourselves just what an exquisite contribution Dionne Warwick has made to pop history. Everyone associates her with some of the definitive versions of the Hal David and Burt Bacharach songs of the Sixties - so much so that it's impossible to imagine anyone else singing them without cringing.

Indeed, when Dionne was recently asked about Cilla Black's rendition of Anyone Who Had A Heart - which spiked her version in the UK - her put down was typically elegant: "Yes, I have seen Blind Date. She is well-suited for that. She is quite a hoot. I met her and we get along very well. I could have killed her when she did the song in the beginning, of course, but time has a wonderful way of putting everything in perspective."

Indeed it does. The Bacharach and David years have been justly eulogised, both of them have readily admitting that there was only one singer who could ever do their songs justice. Listen to Walk on By or Do You Know The Way to San Jose; the way her voice flips and sails through the ornate arrangements is a timeless joy. But she's still from where she's from - a child of the black gospel church. When she draws out lines like "I just can't get over losing you", or "LA is a great big freeway", there's as much urban sassiness there as in any hip hop pretender of the moment.

Yet before and after her contractual breakup with Bacharach and David in the early seventies, Dionne's brilliantine sheen was taking on some strange stains. There was the fact that a celebrity astrologer or numerologist (the record is unclear) convinced her she should put an "e" on to the end of her name. The hits began to dry up until she collided with the teeth and hair of the Bee Gees, who wrote the boom-chick supper-in-a-basket Heartbreaker (all the soul greats seem to have one fatal karaoke classic in them: remember Stevie Wonder's I Just Called To Say I Love You?) Then after that, the charity work; but as far as this goes, Dionne's political instincts have been sound. She reunited with Bacharach and David in the single That's What Friends Are For - schmaltzy and flaccid as all hell, but at least promoting a message of sympathy to Aids sufferers, featuring Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder. Her current project is to try and establish an African-American History Museum in Washington DC. "We have so many black heroes in the history of this country that we simply don't talk about," she said in a recent interview. "I think it's time we built a place to show that history of how we helped to built America."

She has lived in Brazil for 13 years; she calls it her "stress- free country. I don't feel any need to be anything other than who I am and what I am there. And of course I love the music." There is something very pleasing about the idea that a black singer of such beautifully latin-tinged hits as You'll Never Get to Heaven should end up thriving in a culture of ethnic blending and bossa nova.

As pop eats itself, and movie soundtracks constantly mine the archive for mood-setting classics, it seems obvious that Dionne would have her day again. The scene from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the family bonds over her performance of I Say A Little Prayer, gave her career a new boost. She's listening around, and knows her R'n'B territory very well: Usher is a current favourite, as are India Arie and Jill Scott, and of course Destiny's Child; "They remind me of the Supremes, they have the ability and the quality." And she even has some cachet for the stoner generation, having been arrested for cannabis possession at Miami International Airport last year, with 12 joints found in a lipstick container in her bag.

Although all charges were subsequently dropped, the incident suggests that Warwick is not so controlled or passion-muted after all. Yet compare Aretha's and Dionne's versions of I Say A Little Prayer, and the diva dualities become acutely audible. Dionne is reverential, measured, accurate; the everyday details of riding on a bus, and making up in the morning, become a framework for a steady love. But Aretha's humdrum life can barely contain what she wants to do to, and for, her man: on the closing chorus, she lets out a hormonal shriek that's given the cue to every soul star since, trying to put exaltation and transcendence on to a three-minute record.

We don't come to Dionne Warwick for all that sweaty catharsis. But what we do come to her for - beauty and grace and effortless stability - is what we sometimes need as well.

Dionne Warwick is at the Ross Theatre, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, tonight, (pounds) 25 (seated), (pounds) 15 (standing), 0131 228 1155/ 0131 467 5200

KElly osbourne

BACK in the mid-Nineties, when reality TV was something only security guards watched on their closed-circuit monitors, I pitched an idea for a series in which a teen pop group was auditioned, trained and packaged, with the help of famous managers and the audience itself. At the end of the series the band would release a single. The channel - ITV - responded that while they found the idea interesting it was too much of a gamble, as there was "no guarantee" that the single would be a hit.

Ah, innocent days.

Since then everyone has grown overfamiliar with the evil pop clout of TV, Gareth Gates and Will Young going from Pop Idol to the top of the charts with consummate ease.

Building a pop career on a reality TV show that isn't based on music is a different story; you're more likely to see Cliff Richard grabbing his crotch at the Royal Variety Performance. Take Craig Phillips, winner of the first series of Big Brother. His Christmas ballad was bought by no one but his mam. Part of the problem is that Reality TV, by its very nature, tends to produce boring, lowest common denominator characters. It is democratic in the worst sense of the word: dull.

But this was before The Osbournes, the MTV smash-hit family docusoap which is perhaps best described as The Simpsons meets The Partridge Family, but with more hair and dog dirt. More particularly, this was before Kelly Osbourne, Ozzy's sulky, feisty, spiky daughter became the runaway star of the show.

At 18, she looks like Monica Lewinsky's punky younger sister, and her greatest Osbournes hits include stopping her eccentric mother Sharon from peeing in a whisky bottle she found in Jack's room, and responding to her dad's persistent questioning with the immortal line: "My teeth, my car, my vagina, my business." Her first single, Papa Don't Preach, a rawk cover of Madonna's 1986 hit, was effectively a novelty record, but one which succeeded in sounding rather less cynically contrived than the original.

In fact, Kelly's pop career, if we can call it that yet, is self- consciously a reaction to the plastic pop of the shiny Britneybots - after all, Kelly looks and acts rather more like most people's experience of teen girls. Hence the early importance, in publicity terms, of the feud with Christina Aguilera, whose car she reportedly spat upon.

Kelly's album Shut Up released by Sony last autumn, consisting of that kind of American college rock that would like to think it's punk was a fairly entertaining continuation of this theme and suggested that she might be more than a novelty act. Of course, Kelly could afford to offer non-aspirational pop because she came from rock aristocracy. She doesn't care partly because she doesn't need to. "When you're a little kid, you always say, 'I'm going to be a pop star when I grow up,' but I never really thought much of it," she said recently. "The opportunity came my way, and I kind of took it. It was never something that I've been struggling to do my whole entire life. I consider myself lucky."

Mind, Kelly's somewhat entitled, lackadaisical approach is downright refreshing compared to the calculating mentality of the career creeps the industry is full of these days. At its best, pop music was always about a kind of aristocratic anarchy and vanity.

However, Kelly's unprofessional approach appears not to have impressed Sony who dropped her in May, after her album reportedly sold less than 150,000 copies. Oddly, they appear not to have taken into account the fierce and now famous family loyalty of the Osbournes - her father has since also quit the label, his home since 1980, taking with him his lucrative back-catalogue. He has taken to touring with Kelly and has recorded a duet with her, declaring: "I know our music is different, but if anyone throws one thing at our Kelly on stage I'll f**king kill 'em."

After all, the family's loyalty, in addition to their bizarre habits, is a key ingredient in the success of the TV series. Kelly's younger brother Jack was recently in rehab for his near-fatal addiction to the painkiller OxyContin ("hillbilly heroin" according to Ozzy). This prompted an attack by former Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole who asked "does Hollywood still think the Osbournes are funny now?" Kelly, rushed to her family's defence, calling Dole "a twat".

In other Osbourne news, Mother Sharon's colon cancer is now in remission and she is being paid $4 million to front a US chat show. Meanwhile Kelly's older sister Aimee who, ironically, refused to appear in the TV series because she was busy with her pop career, is still trying to get it off the ground.

Kelly claims not to be phased by the parting of the ways with Sony and says she has already written some songs for a second album which will be more mature. "When I wrote Shut Up I was 16, and how much you change from when your 16 to 17 is a lot," she says. "From 16 to 19 is a huge difference."

She turns 19 in October, but let's hope the second album doesn't forsake too much of her adolescent snottiness. She is also moving from the small screen to the supersized one, landing a part in Malice In Sunderland a movie described as a "contemporary reworking" of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, set in England's north east.

Kelly has already had more success with her pop career than most reality TV stars, perhaps because she has more star quality, more genuine attitude, if not much more actual vocal talent. But it remains to be seen if, even with the musical clout of her dad, she can convert this into a sustained career. To do that she might have to face reality and become as bland as those pop clones she currently offers an alternative tou Kelly Osbourne is at the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh, August 12, (pounds) 15, 0870 169 0100

Copyright 2003 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.