In the city she now calls home, Chaka Khan played an undisciplined but broadly enjoyable show on Tuesday. Unleashing her still-mighty voice with impressive ease, the 55-year-old Chicago-born diva served up a sloppy, syrupy mix that combined 35 years of hits with tracks from her latest album, Funk This. A voluptuous, feline beauty with an obligatory soul queen’s history of heartbreak behind her, Khan summoned an instant party mood with the funk-pop classics I Feel for You and Ain’t Nobody.

Aside from her casually dressed guitarist, Khan’s tightly drilled backing band all wore pristine white outfits, lending them the appearance of funky medical orderlies. The diva herself was a symphony in purple.

Khan introduced the slushy ballad Angel by linking her past drug problems with those of Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse. She developed this theme with Through the Fire, which was part self-help sermon and part survivor’s confessional. Both reflected her embrace of Christianity in later life, although she wore a lascivious smile when she recalled being a “bad, bad, bad, bad girl”.

Times Archive, 1985: Chaka Khan live at the GLC Festival of Black Music

With her hair resembling a clump of seaweed, Miss Khan looked like Tina Turner gone wrong

Declaring “church is over now”, Khan revved up the party again in the show’s final stages, building a steady crescendo of hysteria with a run of classic tracks. On Tell Me Something Good, she handed the stage to her “British sister”, the soul singer Beverley Knight. Knight returned shortly afterwards to duet on a lush cover of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and the inevitable climactic airing of I’m Every Woman, the 1978 solo hit that became Khan’s signature tune and an evergreen feminist anthem. By this point the singer was barely enunciating words at all, but channelling raw emotion into random, incoherent, scat-rap gurgles.

This was a messy, rambling show, drowning in schmaltz in places. But it also radiated pure pleasure and rousing melodrama in the best soul tradition. Even if the effect sometimes felt like being showered in warm treacle by a woman in very expensive pyjamas.

Read the Times review from 1985 of Chaka Khan at the GLC Festival of Black Music

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