Photo: Kylie Keene

Thanks to the outstanding skills of our new bartender friend, we are totally jacked on vodka and red cordial as we roll into BEC to catch Anthony Callea, who is as strongly-voiced and adorably pocket-sized as ever. A few clearly cranky teenagers aside, we are the youngest people here by a fairly large margin … accordingly, we are on our best kids-table-at-the-wedding behaviour when a blindingly sparkly Celine Dion takes the stage to a shock-and-awe rendition of Roy Orbison’s I Drove All Night. Let’s be totally honest here … we came tonight so Ms Dion could blast us into submission with five-octave bad-taste classics like The Power Of Love and It’s All Coming Back To Me Now, and the Canadian diva does not disappoint. Though we colonials don’t get the full jizz-banging glitter-all-over-your-face Las Vegas experience, we DO get costume changes, flamenco dancers, goofy monologues about turning forty and other awesome things like that. If you were a spoilsport like my friend, you might point out the airbrushed and weirdly sexless quality of tonight’s performance, or the way that Dion sucks the soul out of successive Ike & Tina and James Brown covers … but any sensible person knows that the theme song from Titanic trumps all those things. She plays it last. And it’s fucking rad. As we roll into the night, drunkenly howling ‘CUZ I’M YOUR LAY-DEEEEEEEEHHHH!!!’ at anyone who will listen, I’m pretty confident that, having had our Celine Dion-inity tenderly ripped away from us, we have been a part of something magical.

ALASDAIR DUNCAN

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