'CRACK is cheap," Whitney Houston once joked (at least I think it was a joke). "I make too much money to ever smoke crack." She was certainly great crack performing on the X Factor last week with a wardrobe malfunction. ("I sang myself out of my clothes," she joked afterward.)

Notwithstanding a generally out-of-it air that night, Whitney Houston is still probably the greatest female voice in popular entertainment bar none. With Cissy Houston as a mother and Dionne Warwick as a cousin you wouldn't expect anything less.

It is that and not the expectation of a freak show that has sold out two shows at the 02 in Dublin and quickly added another, which is likely to sell out before you can say 'Bobby Brown'.

It is because of her voice and songs like Saving All My Love For You, I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) and I Will Always Love You (which held the number 1 spot on Billboard's Hot 100 for 14 weeks in 1993). Whitney, born August 9, 1963, Newark, New Jersey, was honoured as the first artist in history to ever have seven consecutive Billboard number 1 singles.

Vibe Magazine voted I Will Always Love You the greatest love song of all time.

"Is there a person who hasn't wailed along in heartbroken empathy with the climactic closing chorus of the song?" they wrote, adding with marvellous insight and flair: "Some experiences are just undeniably universal. It started from a moment so soft and painfully intimate that it was as if Miss Whitney was thinking, not singing, the lines, "If I should stay, I will only be in your way". As David Foster's meticulous, almost orchestral arrangement unfolded, these inner thoughts took on a more tangible, relatable shape. Even if you'd never been a fan of Houston's signature histrionics, you were resting in the palm of her hand as her remarkable measured performance blossomed with the aching words: "But above all this/I wish you love." In a masterfully manipulative move, she forced you to relive a moment of loss and then handsomely repaid you by providing a flash of cleansing catharsis."

Whitney has needed plenty of catharsis in her often sad life. Diane Sawyer asked her in the early 1990s can anyone (ie her mother Cissy) prepare you for fame. "They can't," the star answered. "And all they ever say to me is: 'So you wanted to be a star?' And I go: 'But it wasn't like I wanted to be a star, I just wanted to sing, I wanted to do what was in my soul and in my heart.' This other madness, they say that comes with the territory. . . It's a hell of a territory!" she said with no exaggeration.

Part of the territory before her disastrous marriage to Bobby Brown was media allegations that Whitney was gay. Back in the late Seventies and early Eighties, a big female star like Whitney being thought of as -- quelle horror -- a non-heterosexual would not have been good commercially. In 1991, in an explosive interview with Playboy magazine, she was asked about her sex life: primarily that she and Robyn Crawford, her executive assistant, were lovers. When asked why she thought people were saying that about her, she laughed: "How the hell do I know? What people really see is the closeness between Robyn and me. Even when we were kids growing up, people thought we were gay. I think it had a lot to do with Robyn's being athletic and playing basketball and being very much into fitness. Then she got me into it. That has followed us.

"People were like, 'Yeah. Yeah. They're gay. They're lesbos.' But I know part of the reason is that most men who say that want to jump into my pants. So they just think, 'Well, she's gay. She don't want to be bothered. So she must be gay.' It's something that happens to people in my position. I don't know why. You're either gay or on drugs."

Hopefully Whitney Houston is not the latter. The velvet-voiced chanteuse raised on gospel music has the most commanding pipes in the business. Sadly, she has been her own worst enemy over the years. "The biggest devil is me," Whitney once said, "I'm either my best friend or my worst enemy."

Marrying Bobby Brown in 1992 on the grounds of her New Jersey mansion was perhaps not the greatest career move she ever made.

The constant rumours of drug abuse didn't help. The 2005 reality show, Being Bobby Brown, showed the world a marriage that was bizarre in the extreme. In January 2000 Hawaiian security guards found almost half an ounce of marijuana in baggage being carried by Whitney and Bobby.

In May, 2006, after a tabloid alleged that Houston was abusing drugs and that their marriage was in trouble, Brown told People magazine thus: "We are happily married. . . We are going to stand for each other for as long we live. I adore that woman. She helps me see God. I look in her eyes and I see God."

I don't know what most of us saw when we looked into her eyes on the X Factor, but it wasn't a Goddess. Whitney and Bobby split in September 2006 and were divorced the following year. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Houston recalled a fight they once had.

She says, 'He cursed me all the way home in front of his parents and he spit on me. . . I was horrified. He spit on me, in my face. . ."

"I think whether you liked or loved Whitney Houston before you will certainly have a deeper appreciation for what she has been through as a human being," Oprah Winfrey said after the show. "And I mean, the fans are just going to love her even more."

Whitney Houston is live at the O2, Dublin on April 17, 18 and 20, 2010.

Sunday Independent