Gig review: Cyndi Lauper, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Cyndi Lauper was best sticking to her own songs. Picture: Getty

The latest chapter in Cyndi Lauper’s eclectic, ever-evolving career turns out to be an unexpected country covers album – a curveball result, it seems, of her desire to work with record exec Seymour Stein, which has been framed as a return to her roots in rockabilly band Blue Angel.

Lauper has always had that cry/yelp in her voice and she was able to call on it in a set which drew heavily on her new/old direction, dappled with warming pedal steel but dampened by synthesised fiddle.

She camped up the cutesy western swing of I Want To Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart, performed astride a hobby horse, and was later found hanging on the telephone prop during Misty Blue.

For all the theatricality of the performance, Lauper still mined the vulnerability in Skeeter Davis’s The End Of The World but there was not much she could add to Walking After Midnight, apart from her thoughts on the impact of watching the legendary Patsy Cline on television as a pre-schooler.

Her Prince tribute was likewise heartfelt but inevitably not as effective a vehicle for her idiosyncratic personality as her own songs, including the  DayGlo new wave weirdness of She Bop, melodramatic pop of I Drove All Night, winsome Time After Time, tender True Colors and the perennially happy hit Girls Just Want To Have Fun, for which support act Matt Henry, currently  starring in Lauper’s musical theatre adaptation of the hit film Kinky Boots, provided a gospelised introduction.