Whitney lives!

On the eve​ of the first lockdown, I made my way to the Hammersmith Apollo to attend a performance by Whitney Houston. It was a chill, ominous night and the people outside the venue were wide-eyed and excited about their forthcoming encounter with the undead. I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever believed that pop stars and movie stars actually die – death becomes them, and true legends have a tendency to ghost the future – but even so I was nervous that the certifiably snuffed-it Whitney might not be up to snuff. What if her famous vitality had ended with her life? Still, I’m always game for these sorts of investigation, so I bypassed the merchandise counter with its ectoplasmic T-shirts and made straight for the auditorium – or was it Valhalla, the hall of the slain?

The auditorium had an emptiness that could speak to us all. One shouldn’t really, in this context, use the phrase ‘warm-up act’, but there he was in a loud shirt, Rob Green from Nottingham. He played a guitar and had enough spontaneous patter to upset the basic notion of the evening, that delightfulness, even in a live setting, can come in a posthumous form. ‘You won’t take me seriously,’ he sang, and I asked the middle-aged woman beside me, who was weeping in advance, if she felt Mr Green might be at an obvious disadvantage, being alive and everything. ‘Poor lad,’ the woman said. ‘Who in the world would want to stand next to the legend that is Whitney Houston?’

Well, precisely. Not me. And, I suspect, not even Whitney, who is alleged to have died in the bathtub of Suite 343 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on 11 February 2012. Yet the red curtain behind her support act was quivering with activity. The audience rose to their feet. No one around me was thinking about 2012, when Whitney had spent her last day loading up on cocaine, Xanax and whatever else you can find before an awards show in LA. Those were details from a world that wasn’t believed to hold the truth. The force they admired was behind the red curtain, and solid flesh didn’t really come into it. ‘Are you ready for Whitney?’ Green shouted. Showbusiness is tough. I mean, it can’t feel invigorating to put on your bio that you once came second on the bill to someone without a pulse. ‘Are you ready?’ he said again.

‘Oh. My. God – yes!’ my neighbour offered. I know she was real because she stood on my foot and I stubbornly trust the link between cause and effect.

Like birds in Narnia, pairs of quote-marks came flapping into view. The huge speakers vibrated with ‘life’, then Whitney ‘came on’ wearing – or ‘wearing’ – a gold glittery dress and, in every sense that mattered, ‘being’ Whitney. The audience went completely wild and burst into tears. ‘Let’s pray for peace,’ Dead Whitney said, and everybody bowed their heads before throwing out their arms when the hologram went into a rousing rendition of ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’.

‘I wanna feel the heat with somebody,’ I murmured.

‘You sing up, son!’ my neighbour’s mother said.

Whitney was surrounded by real dancers and backing singers. They weren’t quite to scale, or the star wasn’t, because they made her look small. Unless virtual reality had already gone to the next level, I assumed she wouldn’t be complaining to her manager. The sense of half-church-half-rave only grew stronger. Whitney was living her best afterlife, and the swaying Undeadheads, torches aloft, thought she was beautiful. The pinnacle came when she began to sing ‘I Will Always Love You’ and the venue, well, it didn’t explode, it melted, and all the seating and all the walls became deliquescent. We had moved into a place where emotion and the fantasy of emotion were ecstatically mixed together, soaring to greet Whitney’s perfect vibrato, a sound that made the audience revel in the intoxicating certainty that life is inexplicable. In traditional societies, this is the sort of thing that leads people to speak in tongues or turn to God. But at the Hammersmith Apollo before the pandemic, people invested in the transubstantiating power of Whitney.

The universal suspension of disbelief began in earnest only a few weeks after Whitney died, promoted by Tupac Shakur. Holograms depend on an illusion of depth, and at one time, depth seemed to be whatever was happening in Elvis Presley’s eyes. It was Sylvia Plath’s poetry, David Bowie’s soulful space nonsense or the truths riding in on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s guitar feedback. But by the time Dead 2Pac appeared at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, deep had begun to signal something netherworldly. Those inconvenient processes of ageing and dying, common to us all, could suddenly be overcome. Today, bringing an artist back to life may well be a promoter’s most lucrative opportunity. The artist’s bones might be deep in Forest Lawn, but the audience expects and will pay for his presence. Michael Jackson Live? It’s a no-brainer, securing the singer a kind of higher existence – a freedom from quibbling reality – that the real Jackson tried to have all his life but could only dream of in a terrifying series of Neverlands.

Dead 2Pac appeared at Coachella on 15 April 2012, a Sunday. The night before, the stage had been occupied by human beings who were observably alive. The guys from Radiohead were a bit sleepy, but they were definitely breathing. Things got livelier with the reformed Buzzcocks, Noel Gallagher and the DJ David Guetta. But on the Sunday evening Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and – clear the neural pathways – a rather glistening 2Pac were live and in the house. Well, sort of. The late rap star was looking rather good on it (death, I mean): the six-pack more densely packed, the stride bouncier, the groin-gripping as ickily pronounced as ever. Allowing for the ontological difficulties, he was very much all there, looking in many respects a little more with it and a whole lot more luminous than his friend Snoop Dogg, popping and krumping beside him. The performance was met with amazement by the audience, and then 2Pac was gone in one of those puffs of smoke that are always more fun in pantomime than they are in real life, curling from the muzzle of a .40-calibre Glock.

These are complex times for reality. You can’t move for people demanding your attention from beyond the grave. Everywhere you look, there’s a disembodied force telling you who you are, or who you could be, in a world of eternals. It’s one thing not to die, and quite another to let your computer do your living for you – second-guessing your likes, directing your behaviour, constructing a character for you – and all of these things together are making it quite difficult to lay anything about yourself to rest. Don DeLillo warned us (and warnings are his thing) that the preservation of life might soon turn into the kind of death-in-life-policy that gave Coleridge nightmares. In Zero K, DeLillo’s long predictive text of 2016, we join a man called Jeffrey on his visit to a remote and secret compound where the aim is to avoid death. In one of the rooms, individuals are considering serious questions:

At some point in the future, death will become unacceptable even as the life of the planet becomes more fragile.

Does literal immortality compress our enduring artforms and cultural wonders into nothingness?

What happens to history? What happens to money? What happens to God?

Do we want to believe that every condition afflicting the mind and body will be curable in the context of our boundless longevity?

When do you stop being who you are?

For Peter Pan, death was an awfully big adventure. For Saul Bellow, it was the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.

‘Nothing good ever really dies,’ a middle-aged man told me in the drinks queue at Abba Voyage in Stratford. ‘It just comes back stronger.’ It was a Thursday night, almost five years to the day since my Whitney séance at the Hammersmith Apollo. The place was absolutely packed and rainbow colours seemed to draw the audience from every direction. The first time I saw Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad they were on TV in the corner of my mother’s living room – that’s right, living room – singing ‘Waterloo’ while my brothers and I wondered what life would be like if you were that clean. We were the first generation, I think, to live in a Britain replete with era-defining youth culture. Our parents were already married by the time of the Beatles’ first LP, and though they could have got into mods and rockers, they preferred Perry Como. For us, though, pop culture is unavoidable, seeming to exist in our minds as both an aspect of memory and an indicator of character. In my pre-adolescence, the whole thing felt like a space age experiment in personality. But it got under the skin, which possibly explains why shows like Abba Voyage are so wildly popular, offering people a piece of their sentimental essence back to themselves, a glimpse of an idealised self. Just as Freud believed dreams were picture puzzles, today it seems that songs and famous faces are now active elements of our subconscious, holding us – sometimes a whole generation of us – in uncanny thrall.

The programme for Abba Voyage could simply have detailed the five years of work – by digital artists, modellers, animators, ‘facial capture artists’ – that went into the show, but instead it reads like a scrapbook from somebody’s life, containing ticket stubs, reproduction Polaroids and newspaper clippings (‘Swedes Rock the World’). The stage production uses 870,000 watts of audio amplification, has 30,000 individually controllable light points, 291 separate speakers and is made up of 65 million pixels, the whole thing relying on more than 100 kilometres of cabling and 846 separate axes of theatrical automation, all of this requiring 120 TB of storage being pushed to the screen at 25 GB per second. ‘I’m not just a fan of ABBA,’ the director, Baillie Walsh, says. ‘They’re in my DNA. They’re part of who I am. So it makes me very emotional to talk about that … I saw them win the Eurovision Song Contest and they’ve been in my life since.’

After heading down a neon tunnel I reached an auditorium with three thousand people in it, some sitting in bleachers and others crowded onto a dancefloor. The screen was showing a Swedish forest filled with oak trees and falling snow. Now and then, a human form flashed through the forest. There were sonar pulses. People in glitter boots and blue eyeshadow were drinking from plastic tumblers. Some of them fixed their hair with acrylic fingernails and took selfies. When the group appeared, they were much realer than I remember them ever being. Their skin had never been that perfect. They were never really that well co-ordinated. The sound was crisper, the costumes sharper, the synchronicity of personnel, space, memory and music seeming not three-dimensional but more than that, crossing all manner of terrain to reach perfection. We see them at their 1970s peak. There are no failed lights, no missed cues. There are even shadows onstage: the figments now cast shadows.

‘Who would go on tour aged eighty,’ I said to the woman beside me, ‘when you could do this and take the door money?’

‘The Rolling Stones,’ she replied.

When the Northern Lights appeared after ‘Chiquitita’, the crowd lost its collective nut. The volume of the singalong was incredible and the emotion wasn’t normal, even by prevailing standards. Or not old normal, anyhow. Was it a political rally or the gathering of a cult? A sales conference or a revolution? ‘We’re just having a great time,’ said two women behind me in white Stetsons. Unable to escape the old ontological restrictions, I was struggling with the magnitude of the applause. Who were they clapping for? I mean, who was meant to hear it, or were they applauding themselves? Clapping for tonight’s performance would be like standing up and clapping Claudette Colbert at a BFI screening of It Happened One Night, before turning and clapping the other people in the cinema for their feelingful wisdom, the applause being not only for Colbert, Clark Gable and Frank Capra, but for common memory and oneself.

The people in Stratford behaved as if the past had always been like this, undead and never really gone. My Auntie Famie, who attended some hootenanny at the Eastmuir Masonic Hall in 1980, is framed on the fireplace mid-song. She’s here but not here. Perhaps all we’ve done is added deep animation and a live audience. Actual existence, it turns out, isn’t all it was cracked up to be, and the people who said Elvis wasn’t dead may have been right all along. Soon, there is likely to be a stadium near you with 30,000 individually controllable light points, offering you a seat at a cabaret table to see the King Live in Las Vegas, or the Beatles at Shea Stadium, or the Sex Pistols at Screen on the Green or Oasis at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut (though this summer’s tour makes Oasis seem more like the Rolling Stones). Soon there might be booths where you can see my Auntie Famie in her Glasgow social club, singing her heart out like her heart never stopped. Those of us who viewed the past mainly as the stuff of fiction might soon join an actual queue to see the Smiths ‘perform’ at the Manchester G-Mex, back again, for some of us, as if we had never changed, Andy Rourke hadn’t died and Morrissey and Marr didn’t despise each other. ‘We would never be those people again,’ I once wrote of that particular moment, but maybe I was a bit previous. Leopold Bloom thinks of his old life as if it featured only a ghost of himself passing a mirror. ‘I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I?’ Perhaps the future will be a place where we each get to repeat ourselves at our imagined best, on a loop, until someone hits the off switch after noticing that ‘life’ is too globally warming to go unconcluded.

I had an MRI the other day. ‘I had hoped to slip into something more comfortable,’ I said to the nurses. ‘Like unconsciousness.’

‘Well, we can’t offer you that, but you can have these,’ one of them replied, handing me a pair of yellow socks and the regulation scrubs.

A few minutes later, I lay on the table and one of the nurses inserted a cannula and prepared me for my time in the white tunnel. The other handed me a pair of headphones and asked me what I’d like to listen to. ‘Radiohead,’ I said. ‘The Bends.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. (She’d met middle-aged men before.)

Being in that machine is the best holiday in the world. No one can text you, pull your arm, pester you for a quote or blame you for being late. (I wanted to ask them if it was available for the whole of August.) Lying back, surrounded by that great rotundity of plastic, I felt sure it was the closest experience to death that medics can offer, while keeping you conscious. They ignored my request, and played in quick succession Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fontaines DC. When the nurse spoke through the earphones to see if I was okay, I told her I’d changed my mind. I wanted Whitney Houston. The track changed and the table moved deeper into the machine. It wasn’t Whitney: it was the Smiths, as ordained by the laws both of natural selection and absurdity. What the song was saying was true: I hadn’t had a dream in a long time, but maybe life was the dream, endlessly returning, just like the song.