Gig review: Enrique Iglesias - Glasgow

A MATTER of weeks after he performed at the MTV Europe Music Awards on this very stage, Enrique Iglesias was back for more from a packed-out Glaswegian crowd which clearly hadn’t had enough the first time round.

Enrique Iglesias is a superstar elsewhere, but in Britain he is known for only a few pop songs. Picture: Getty

Enrique Iglesias

Hydro, Glasgow

***

There was no question this was a show of international superstar proportions, by a performer whose manner suggests he’s comfortable playing to an audience of thousands, although perhaps the adoration levels don’t stretch quite as far on this side of the Atlantic as they do on the other. In America he’s a monolithic crossover success whose every utterance is lapped up by a loyal, Spanish-speaking, Latin American audience.

Here, he’s known for a clutch of hits which don’t stray too far from the modern pop dynamic and his smooth good looks. So bouncy part-synthesised pop was the order of the show, with a certain live energy added during signature sounds like I’m a Freak, Bailando, and I Like It by the full band and Iglesias’s interactions with his male/female backing vocal duo.

Dressed in jeans, T-shirt and a baseball cap, he swaggered around a dazzling set featuring winged gantries, huge screens and a catwalk leading into the centre of the crowd, from where he orchestrated a synchronised show of phones from the audience during the power ballad Hero, easily his most well-known song in these parts. Apart from the awkward “will he, won’t he?” silence before committing to an encore of Takin’ Back My Love, this was a display of frisky professionalism which offered little that was new.

Seen on 25.11.14