Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston’s voice was built for the ages. Fittingly, her success spanned a long period in a time when pop changed at a rapid rate. When presented with a fizzy 80s dance track, she sang the hell out of it and lifted you as high as her upper register. When an enormous ballad was required, she was emotive and controlled, and so when big movie tie-in ballads were big, she was bigger still. Despite the seas of taste shifting after that, she moved to R&B with consummate ease and added another stack of platinum to her already-impressive resume. Her ability to adapt to seemingly any point on the spectrum of contemporary pop music is testament to her gifts as a singer.

Sadly, while voices on record last, those who own them cannot. At 48, it’s easy to say “too young” and indeed, some of her recent output suggested that her voice had much to give, even as false reports of her death, drug convictions and wildly inconsistent concert performances may have suggested otherwise. But even as she transformed from pop heroine to tragedienne, there was never any question that her life would detract from her records’ many virtues: sometimes emotive, danceable or slinky but always technically stunning. People may have giggled and emailed links to news stories about her troubled life every time they were published, but I’m sure a large proportion of them then immediately went to Youtube or their CD rack for a fix of one of her many hits.

And that’s what we did this weekend.