For the first time in her 3-decade career, the Australian superstar Olivia Newton-John, 59 performed in Malaysia on the 29th of April and give a one-night-only treat at the Arena of Stars, Genting Highlands in front of 4,000 fans. The Malaysian concert is the fourth and last leg of her Asia Tour Spring 2007. Before that, she performed in Hong Kong (15th April), Taiwan (21st and 22nd April) and Singapore (27th April).
To me, she proved that you don’t have to have elabourate costumes with many changes, impressive props, or even do a lot of dancing to entertain the crowd. You just need that most important of ingredients: good songs; and good publicity.
In my opinion, Malaysians, particularly the older generation have a soft spot for beautiful melodies, because among the songs that received the best reception at Genting was my personal favourites “Let me be there” and “If you love me (let me know)”. At the Hong Kong concert, someone took bootleg videos of part of these 2 songs. Check these out:
Let me be there (written by John Rostill, first recorded by Olivia in 1973. This was her first top 10 single in the US and won her a Grammy for best female country vocalist)
If you love me (let me know)
Some excerpts of her Taiwan concert
Let’s go back in time. Here’s “let me be there” performed live in Japan, apparently in 1976. That’s 31 years years ago, when she was 28 years old and before starring in Grease.
As S Indramalar wrote in his review of the concert, Malaysia concert goers are surely among the most passive in the world, there was close to no response from the audience. Frustrating to the singer definitely. Of course there were some lively fans, screaming and moving along, but most of the audience were unresponsive. The more upbeat songs from the movie Grease should’ve gotten the crowd on their feet, especially since Olivia herself urged them to dance along, but no such luck, even from the people sitting at the front who paid RM480! They did not even move a little bit, let alone scream.
The cheapest ticket was RM168, hence at the very least, Olivia’s turnover Rm168 x 4,000 = RM672,000. If all 5 concerts pocketed the same amount, she would’ve made RM3.3 million from this tour. In fact, as can be read from her fanclub website, it seems that she’s been on tour for almost 9 years now!
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