Review from Times online of The Alesha Show, Reading
She has suddenly been thrust into the spotlight thanks to her role as one of the judges on Strictly Come Dancing. But Alesha Dixon had booked her current British tour before that unexpected boost to her profile. Indeed, the album she is promoting, The Alesha Show, was released almost a year ago and has quietly achieved the curious feat of being certified platinum (for sales of 300,000 copies) without ever having reached the Top Ten.
Even so, there was an air of mild hysteria among the family audience at the Hexagon, confirming the recently acquired household-name status that prompted Gordon Brown to declare Dixon a “national treasure” after she had visited Downing Street. To shrieks from the stalls, an MC made a circus-like introduction, and the curtain opened to reveal the 31-year-old singer sitting on a swing on a stage that was a vision of sparkling pink. Wearing a glittering gold hotpants ensemble, she opened with a brief burst of Welcome to the Alesha Show that segued seamlessly into Fired Up. The song was choreographed to within an inch of its life as Dixon, with the assistance of two well-toned male dancers, demonstrated the hoofing skills that enabled her to win Strictly Come Dancing two years ago.
While Dixon has emerged as an all-round entertainer and overnight success story, it has been a long time coming, and although relentlessly upbeat, the show reflected the fact that she is a performer who has endured her fair share of heartaches and hard graft. Accompanied by a credible, four-man R&B backing band and two backing singers, she sang with fiery determination and a throaty resonance, and turned in a brilliant passage of rapping on a medley of songs. She sang Lipstick, a rambunctious soul-rock song from her first solo album, which wasn’t even released in this country thanks to a failure of nerve by her record company at the time. The show ended on a positive note with a huge power ballad, To Love Again, which she wrote with Gary Barlow — one of her childhood heroes — and a sizzling encore of her biggest hit, The Boy Does Nothing. Alesha, meanwhile, continues to do everything.
