Whitney Houston: Five great performances

Memories (1982)
Although Whitney Houston had sung back-up on record (she appears on Chaka Khan's I'm Every Woman) and onstage, her first lead vocal was with a most unlikely set of collaborators – the New York experimentalists led by Bill Laswell who worked under the banner of Material. You'd never guess she was only 19 when it was recorded: she sounds absolutely unbothered by the fact she's acommpanied on sax by the great Archie Shepp. You'd also never guess the song was written by Soft Machine's Hugh Hopper, making this the only debut by a major R&B star with a connection to the Canterbury progressive rock scene. Houston's performance is as fresh and clear as a spring morning. There's no flashiness, no showboating – just a pure and true voice offering everything in service of the song. Not for nothing did the Village Voice's Robert Christgau call it "one of the most gorgeous ballads you've ever heard".

How Will I Know? (1985)
The Whitney Houston that became a superstar in 1985 was, in many ways, the creation of the legendary music mogul Clive Davis, who'd spotted her and groomed her and launched her upon the world as a chart-ready pop soul superstar. Saving All My Love For You was the colossal ballad, but this was the poptastic one, the song that positioned her as the clean-cut cutie (the cover of the single is, perhaps, the worst-styled photo in history, even by the standards of the 1980s). Even now, though. it's not hard to see why Houston became an instant sensation: Davis had an instinct for knowing how best to present her, and she responded with a performance that fizzes with life and vitality. The song tells a story as old as pop: does he fancy me? And yet it never feels hackneyed. The only quibble one might have would be: how can a woman this confident be in any way uncertain of her allure?

The Star Spangled Banner (1991)
To Britons, the notion that a performance of the national anthem could somehow be a defining moment is completely alien. It's simply impossible to imagine a nation being transfixed by, say, Michael Ball belting out God Save the Queen before the FA Cup final. But Britons have a different relationship to their anthem (and their country) than do Americans, and when Houston performed The Star Spangled Banner before the 1991 Super Bowl, she lifted herself from being a pop singer into an embodiment of national hopes: this was at the time of the Gulf War, remember, when patriotism mattered (not for nothing was her recording was reissued in the wake of the 9/11 attacks). This version is a piece of daring, a highwire act of soulfulness: the song is taken out of waltz time – at the suggestion of her musical director, Ricky Minor – to enable Houston to bring the full force of her voice to bear in an arrangement that highlights her gospel background. NFL officials were petrified, fearing it simply wasn't the national anthem as America knew it, and begged her to go for a more traditional reading. Not for the first time, sports adminstrators were completely out of touch with the mood of their country. Houston's version became a hit single in the US. Yes, a national anthem released as a single. Incredible.

I Have Nothing (1992)
If you were to pick one style of which Houston had absolute mastery, it would be the ballad. The soundtrack to her 1992 movie vehicle The Bodyguard offered a colossal worldwide hit in a version of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You, but this – a modest success by comparison, reaching No 4 in the US and No 3 in the UK – is the one that's secured an afterlife, as one of the favoured songs of talent show contestants. By this time, Houston had such command of balladry – and such power in her voice – that you suspect she could have flattened whole cities with a single sustained note, and I Have Nothing is all about her power, and her control of it. She refrains from the melismatic tricksiness of I Will Always Love You, choosing instead to communicate clearly and directly. And while there are many for whom the production styles of soul and R&B from the 80s onwards rob the music of simple sense of communion of the great soul ballads of previous generations, this is a performance and a song that is undeniable.

It's Not Right But It's Okay (1999)
By the end of the 1990s, Houston was no longer the epitome of wholesomeness she had been when her career was launched. Her marriage to Bobby Brown appeared to have introduced her to another side of life, and her behaviour became erratic as rumours about her lifestyle swirled around. When she needed to, though, she could still produce exactly what was needed, musically. As R&B changed, becoming by a distance the most sonically adventurous mainstream genre, Houston changed with it. It's Not Right But It's Okay – and though it's about infidelity, how hard was it not to read the title as a statement about her view of her own life? – was produced by hitmaker du jour Rodney Jerkins and remixed by Thunderpuss, and it repositioned Houston as someone with same command of the contemporary as Aaliyah, who was just about young enough to be her daughter. The voice is harder, coarser than it had been in 1985, but it suits the grittiness of the song – Houston is utterly believable as a woman who has suffered.