Diva bemoans lip-synching
News24.com
Sydney – Veteran diva Bette Midler labelled modern female pop singers characterless on Wednesday and criticised them for lip-synching during supposedly live performances.
The 59-year-old singer and actress, whose career spans four decades, said she found it difficult to relate to the rap-dominated chart music of recent years and expected many modern female pop stars to “fall by the wayside”.
“It’s a strange time, I don’t want to say it’s the dark ages for music but a lot of people have put that forward and said it’s not such a great time,” she told reporters at the start of her first Australian tour in 26 years.
“Certainly it’s not a great time for rock and roll and for popular music in general, it’s kinda hard to tell the characters apart.
“But then it’s hard to tell the characters apart in everything – maybe that’s a function of age, it probably is.”
Midler, who performs her latest show Kiss My Brass with a full horn section on stage, said she would never lip-synch her way through performances like many younger stars.
“I just can’t do that… I guess because I came up singing and dancing at the same time, to me it’s not so frightening, for a lot of kids it is, for the younger ones it’s scary,” she said.
Asked whether she was ready to end her career, Midler replied: “I’m not retiring and you can’t make me.”
Midler also dismissed reports she would co-star with Britney Spears in a comedy film called In the Pink.
“Oh, that’ll never happen,” she said, saying the project had disappeared in the “abyss” of project development and was unlikely to resurface.
The singer said she was still distressed at US President George W Bush’s election last November, after she backed Democrat candidate John Kerry.
She said it was a vicious election campaign marked by frightening media behaviour and uncalled for personal attacks on candidates.
