Lauryn Hill is late. An hour and 40 minutes late. She limply offers a late sound-check as an excuse before launching into (Doo Wop) That Thing whose irresistible jerk and roll is lost in a sound so muddy you wonder what the band spent that sound-check doing. The next few songs struggle through a thudding murk compounded by a worryingly ragged performance; ludicrously, there are 17 people on stage, including five percussionists.
That she is a star is irrefutable. She has one of the best soul voices since Gladys Knight, with much of Knight's aching mahogany-hued timbre. Hill was the sole member of multi platinum hip-hop trio the Fugees worth caring about, but it is over seven years since her solo debut and the interim brought only a wilfully anti-pop, rambling solo live acoustic album followed by silence. Now, oddly given their reported mutual antipathy, a Fugees reunion is on the cards, but there is also a rumour Hill has been dropped by Sony, who aren't even doing the press for this one-off show.
Suddenly the murk clears and a handful of new songs played solo, at last, let that gorgeous voice take flight - some consolation for the realisation that two of them smear shaky melodies over the same ascending chromatic chords. There are readings of convoluted, brutally political new poems/raps, one of which contains so many similar isms it might be a page from a radical thesaurus. Finally, busting the Coliseum's curfew, she rallies with some "old stuff", including the Fugees' Ready or Not, which is rapturously received. So much talent, so little focus; the unanswerable question is how long Hill expects the world to wait.
