Belinda Carlisle review – heaven is a place in Wales

There’s something in the way Belinda Carlisle moves that seems to distort time. As the final notes of Do You Feel Like I Feel? fade, she turns with a pirouette and a flick of her bare feet from beneath the spangliest of skirts. Suddenly, we’re no longer in South Wales while a rugby international day reaches its puke-and-chips phase, but in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, watching as the singer of the Go-Go’s brings puckish, punk spirit to glittering major-label pop.

This synapse-triggering muscle memory is key to Carlisle’s lean, focused set, which shines a light on solo work that has at times been enveloped by the shadow cast by her band, who were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as recently as 2021. It’s an approach that’s welcomed with open arms. By the time the opening chord of (We Want) The Same Thing has been struck, the seated crowd is on its feet and, bar a few posterior-plantings during the night’s ballads, they stay there.

As befits an artist who has been releasing “best of” records for more than 30 years, Carlisle flies through a running order studded with singles, foregrounding both the melodic potency of her imperial phase and the relative paucity of options elsewhere. In footballing terms, she might not have the deepest bench but her starting side will give anyone a game.

Unsurprisingly, most of the evening’s songs come from prized solo albums Runaway Horses and Heaven on Earth, released a couple of years apart in the late 1980s. Carlisle crushes the opening “Take my hand…” of Leave a Light On, sending a surge of excitement through the audience. At each turn, her vocals are sharp and characterful, with her vibrato ticking over nicely and a pleasing raspiness added to the weepy Vision of You, a glossy confection that, all these years later, neatly splits the difference between Adele and Taylor Swift.

Carlisle plays the night’s one Go-Go’s song – Our Lips Are Sealed, introduced with a tribute to its late co-writer Terry Hall – in tandem with Mad About You, her first solo single. This is the only point when her band – two guitars, bass, drums and keys played with absolute competence by nondescript men in black – taps into the brittle hookiness of her new wave roots, imparting a welcome grit and allowing Carlisle to bounce into her higher register before pogoing off to one side.

From the outside there remains friction between Carlisle’s status as one of the pillars of Hollywood punk – she briefly played drums in a prototype line-up of the legendary hardcore band the Germs before the Go-Go’s broke out — and her later records, which studiously scrubbed any grime from the surface. But she doesn’t entertain it. Tonight she is all-in on Belinda Carlisle, solo artist. As the stage lighting explodes in the reds, blues, greens and yellows of a light-up dancefloor, the room raucously roars the chorus of Heaven Is a Place on Earth. They’re all in, too.