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Christina Aguilera denied stage time in New Orleans bar

By | Published on Wednesday 14 November 2018

Christina Aguilera

The house band in a bar in New Orleans turned down the opportunity to perform with Christina Aguilera last week, it has emerged. Band leader Claude Bryant seemingly mistook her for some drunk idiot, while she assumed that she doesn’t need to introduce herself properly to anyone.

Someone who did recognise her posted a video of Aguilera’s exchange with Bryant on Twitter. Leaning over to ask if she can get on the mic, she can be heard in the video saying, “You don’t want that? Oh, it’s OK. I don’t have to sing”. Bryant then ends the conversation by breaking into Dawn Penn’s ‘You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)’.

Aguilera had been in New Orleans ahead of a show the next night, and recounted the incident in front of that audience.

“I go to this little bar and there’s this live band playing”, she recalled. “I was with a couple of my dancers and I was just like, ‘Let me just get up on stage and jam with this guy. Maybe I’ll sing a song or whatever and be fun’. But, I don’t know if he didn’t know the song, but he would not give me the mic. He was, like, a little older and he was just not feeling it. He was not gonna give up his mic. I was like, ‘Oh, I just want to come just let me come up’, and he just said, ‘What, are you gonna dance for me?’ I was like, ‘No, I just want to sing a song with you'”.

“So I was like, ‘OK I’ll just save it for tomorrow, then. It’s alright. It’s all good'”, she continued. “He was like, ‘Don’t hurt yourself!’ I was like, ‘OK, you’re not feeling me. It’s OK. I’m just gonna depart ways. Be on my little merry way. Find somewhere else to go'”.

So, as framed by her, she basically went up and offered to entertain the bar for free using her celebrity lungs, and Bryant was all like, “No way, Christina Aguilera. We don’t need you here with your terrible pop star ways”.

Although, to be fair to him, she didn’t look much like a pop star at the time. Dressed in a baggy football shirt and a baseball cap, she looks a lot more like an annoying drunk tourist who thinks it’ll be helpful to warble out a few numbers. Which I’d imagine is the sort of person he’s more used to dealing with.

Speaking to WGNO, Bryant said as much, explaining: “I’m sorry, Christina. I just didn’t recognise you! I didn’t recognise her because she had a cap over her head and over her eyes. She was in a jersey. She didn’t introduce herself to me. I asked her if she wanted to dance and she said that she wanted to sing. I started playing the beginning riff of the song, ‘No, No, No’ by Bob Marley, but then her bodyguard picked her up off the stage and she left”.

OK, so most drunk tourists probably don’t have bodyguards. And that song isn’t by Bob Marley. Still, I hope this doesn’t set a trend where he and other bar bands start letting anyone up on stage just in case.



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