Mavis Staples, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
"Goodness evening Manchester!" begins Mavis Staples, for the second time this week. Seemingly she said the sami thing in Liverpool. "You forget where you are on these long tours," she explains. Still, if anyone tin can be forgiven such a geographical howler, it is her - the last touring Staple Isaac M. Singer and veteran soldier civil-rights candidate, wHO launches into Eyes On the Award by promising "enough inspiration and vibrations to last you sextet months". The voice once described as "pleasure and roar" is a first, throaty gurgle now, but when her 68-year-old chops soar into the choruses, her ample bosom swells with so practically passion and outrage that you fear for the front rows.
These days, Staples is as much a walking cyclopaedia of the contend as a singer, and when she trots out the story of joseph Black children beingness spat on and stoned patch trying to board an AR schoolbus in 1960, it's hush as haunting and disturbing as Why Am I Treated So Bad?, the Staples Singers birdsong inspired by the event, which she reveals was Martin Martin Luther King's favourite. A break for the band to twang away allows her to take a breath, though Deference Yourself sounds sluggish and I'll Take You There loses something as a clap-along. With to the highest degree songs and anecdotes dating from the sixties, there could maybe be more made of struggles continuing today. Only yet though We Shall Not Be Moved - once song dynasty in defiance of the policemen glade joseph Black people from restaurants - seems to last as long as 1964, when she says she'll continue to Mar Up Freedom's Highway "until Dr King's ambition is realised", it is hard non to feel humbled as her charge carries on.· At Colston Asaph Hall, Bristol, tonight. Box office: 0117-922 3686. Then touring.
