The clean cut Canadian singer regularly upsets some members of his audiences with his onstage banter between songs, which apparently often prompts fuming fans to demand ticket refunds.
Buble told the Daily Telegraph “I think something is funny and I go over the edge, I know. Almost every night when I’m on stage, my manager will say to me, ‘Well, kid, 30 people wanted their money back.’ Our office gets people sending T-shirts back; they send their CDs back. I get letters saying, ‘I really liked you but you were crude, you were rude, you used foul language, you were suggestive.’
“At first it was a real worry for my agents. They kept saying, ‘Mike, you’re losing the audience.’ Especially when I wasn’t playing to that many people. I remember my American agent saying, ‘Tonight, it was huge. Seventy people wanted their money back.’ And I said, ‘Give them their money back. I don’t want them at my show. I don’t want some stuck-up prude so up their own a** they can’t laugh at themselves,’ I said. ‘Give me my kind of people, and we’ll be fine.'”
The singer also complained about Auto-Tune studio techniques for correcting errors and bum notes, saying “We’ve been ruined by Auto-Tune. Our ears have become far more sensitive to pitch and to perfection”. However, any keen listener would be able to hear a clearly mechanical influence in Buble’s own vocal recordings.
His new album of seasonal songs ‘Christmas’ is currently riding high in the charts, at number 1 in the US Billboard album chart and claiming the number 2 slot here in the UK, beaten only by Amy Winehouse’s posthumous release Lioness: Hidden Treasures.
Main photograph: Getty images
