Midway through the London leg of his greatest hits tour, Enrique Iglesias asks for a member of the audience to join him on stage. Ignoring the desperate pleas of his female fans, he alights on a man called Dan. Dan is offered a swig from the bottle of booze that Iglesias is apparently keeping to hand for medicinal purposes (“I’m just having a gargle,” he explains), before Iglesias enquires who he’s here with. Dan, it transpires, is here with his girlfriend. Iglesias looks momentarily crestfallen. “She made you come to this show, didn’t she?” he sighs.
Dan assures him otherwise, but it was an educated guess. With his career now into its third decade, the gender imbalance in Iglesias’s audience seems every bit as pronounced as it did when he played the Royal Albert Hall 16 years ago and felt obliged to congratulate the handful of gentlemen present on their fortitude: “A lotta guys won’t come to see Enrique because they think it’s cissy, and there’s a word for that – insecurity.” Clearly, the capital’s male population are still racked with self-doubt when it comes to Iglesias Jr, who continues to be unnecessarily handsome in his 40s. If Dan is indeed here entirely of his own volition, one suspects he is in a minority. The crowd definitely skews female, the air is rent with screams from the moment Iglesias appears on stage through a trapdoor and they only get louder as the evening wears on.
He doesn’t do a great deal to dissuade them. He hams up the breathy ballads until they’re a riot of pained expressions and pregnant pauses, reacts to gifts thrown on stage by kissing them and returning them to their owner, as if blessing them with a dose of his Latin sexiness, and he does a routine with a backing singer during Taking Back My Love that makes it look as if he’s about to cop off with her.
Latin pop is currently having a moment, as underlined by the pre-show DJ, who plays Despacito and Camila Cabello’s Havana. The surge of interest has served Iglesias well and he has recently piloted a string of Spanish-language tracks to multi-platinum status. But the current tour serves to underline that he did it first; that he was crossing over to the pop charts from a world where hits were usually made by careful placement on telenovelas while Camila Cabello was busy being born. He did it largely by singing in English and belting out AOR ballads – Hero, Could I Have This Kiss Forever – that played on his leading-man looks. But, watching him tonight, what is really striking is Iglesias’ adaptability. His career has clearly lasted thanks to an ability to surf whatever musical style is in vogue.
Iglesias’s most recent single, Move to Miami, is an agreeably preposterous bit of reggaeton-fuelled latterday Latin pop. Heartbeat audibly hails from an era when Coldplay were the biggest band in the world, and, amping up its stadium rock credentials, tonight’s version comes complete with a lengthy guitar intro that is equal parts Wicked Game by Chris Isaak and Shine on You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd. I’m a Freak bears the mark of EDM. The quality of these songs varies from well-turned to worryingly vaporous, but you’d be hard-pushed to say he doesn’t sell them: he is an incredibly charming performer, whether talking self-deprecatingly about his age, serenading game old Dan with a cover of Coldplay’s Yellow, or plunging into the crowd to plant kisses on his admirers’ cheeks. The last one causes pandemonium: up in the bleachers, Iglesias vanishes amid a sea of imploring hands, nothing if not a master of giving them what they want.
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