Hundreds in the audience walked out of Whitney Houston's comeback concert here Sunday as the singer once dubbed "The Voice" missed high notes, cut short her songs and apologized for her shortcomings.
"She don't want to come, my soprano friend," Houston crooned after stumbling through a gravelly version of signature song I Will Always Love You. She blamed the air conditioning in The O2 arena, whose 20,000 seats had sold out for her first London performance since 1999.
"Sometimes the old girl sings, but not tonight," she said of her voice. "I want to do it, but she doesn't want to. ... She's getting a little ... temperamental, even."
Houston sang just one or two verses of hits such as Greatest Love of All. She paused during songs to catch her breath and panted heavily in between. In many songs, her backup singers carried the melody, Houston chiming in with lines here and there.
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Oprah Winfrey says her no-holds-barred chat with Whitney Houston was “the best interview I’ve ever done”.
The talk show titan says she connected with Houston — who is returning to the limelight with her first album in six years — more than any of her other guests.
“I think it’s the best interview I’ve ever done,” Oprah told US TV show Access Hollywood. “But I guess you’re supposed to let other people say that about yourself. I can’t think of a moment, ever, when I had a stronger connection to the person I was interviewing.
“My approach to this interview was to not be judgmental in any way, and not to go in trying to get her to say things to make a ‘moment’. I just wanted to be able to have an honest conversation with her.
“One woman to another woman. And the day of the interview I literally prayed about that all day long. I just wanted a connection between the two of us. And that is what happened.”
The interview will air on September 14.
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- Oprah Winfrey to interview Whitney Houston
Winfrey called the visit "the most anticipated music interview of the decade." She's not lying. Houston, once one of the biggest stars in music who also made a foray into acting, has been plagued by tabloid tales and a troubled marriage to Bobby Brown.
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WITH an ex-husband like Bobby Brown, Whitney Houston doesn't need enemies.
In his upcoming autobiography, Brown blows the lid on his wildly dysfunctional marriage to the troubled, Grammy-winning diva, suggesting that she drove him into a nightmare of drug addiction.
"I never used cocaine until after I met Whitney. Before then, I had experimented with other drugs, but marijuana was my drug of choice," Brown writes in "Bobby Brown: The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But," out next month. "At one point in my life, I used drugs uncontrollably. I was using everything I could get my hands on, from cocaine to heroin, weed and cooked cocaine."
As far as his 15-year marriage to Houston is concerned, it "was doomed from the very beginning. Within the first year we separated, with several more to follow," Brown writes. "I think we got married for all the wrong reasons. Now, I realize Whitney had a different agenda than I did when we got married . . . I believe her agenda was to clean up her image, while mine was to be loved and have children."
Whitney, he alleges, had been under "a lot of pressure. The media was accusing her of having a bisexual relationship with her assistant, Robin Crawford. Since she was the American Sweetheart and all, that didn't go too well with her image . . . In Whitney's situation, the only solution was to get married and have kids. That would kill all speculation, whether it was true or not. In the short, I think I got caught up in the politics and ended up marrying one of the biggest stars in the world."
But Brown notes that he was no saint in their relationship, confessing in his book, "I am guilty of sleeping with other women . . . Women are always throwing themselves at you. I'm only human, so I would make the mistake and bite the hook sometimes . . . I let the testosterone take over."
One of his most public indiscretions was an affair with former exotic dancer Karrine "Superhead" Steffans. "Yes, I've slept with her," he confesses. "Yes, I've spent several nights at her house. But she was only good for what her nickname stood for."
Reps for Houston, who divorced Brown a year ago, did not return our call for comment. - source
