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I1962, 21 years old Dion Warwick sang Don’t Make Me Over, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, to launch a career spanning six Grammy Awards and 100 million sales. More than six decades later, the soul legend opens with him here – although at 83 her voice understandably sounds more frail and vulnerable, giving new and exciting meaning to the line ‘take me as I am’.
Two years after her “farewell tour,” this musical and spoken word excursion — also called Don’t Drive Me — serves in part as a companion to a 2021 documentary of the same name. Sitting next to her on the couch, director Dave Woolley’s questions are mostly excerpts from the documentary. It’s a useful biography – Warwick sings gospel, got an MA in music – but he’s doing a lot of hard work when tour tickets are £40 and up and the documentary is free on BBC iPlayer. The first half carries just one more song: a jazzier arrangement of I Say a Little Prayer, performed as a duet with her son, drummer David Elliott.
Thankfully, the second half delves deeper into her struggles, humanity and strength and brings some jaw-dropping moments. She explains how she bridged the gap between pop and what is called “race music” (R&B) in the US, and reveals that her first record in France was released with a white woman on the cover, so in Paris “when I was walking down the a gasp was heard from the scene”. She recalls confronting Ronald Reagan about his inaction on AIDS in the 1980s: “If his eyes could kill, I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now.” There’s also a funny section when Snoop Dogg (in the film) reveals that he is “out of the gangster” when she takes his crew to her mansion in the 1990s to ask, “What gives you the right to call women bitches?”
It feels like it’ll be a long time before she gets up to sing again: just four more numbers, but Walk on By, the Bee Gees-penned Heartbreaker and the rest all carry glimpses of the old magic of a singer who could justifiably admits, “I’m so proud I was so good.”
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