Missy Higgins adds more shows to her 2024 Aussie The Second Act tour

After overwhelming pre-sale demand, Missy Higgins has added more shows to her massive Australian tour next year. See where and how you can get tickets.

Missy Higgins is set to have one of the biggest Australian artist tours of 2024 with eight shows added to her massive The Second Act run around the country.

There was overwhelming demand during the pre-sale on Monday for tickets to the shows to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her debut album The Sound of White.

She has now added extra shows at the Canberra Theatre on April 9, Sydney’s State Theatre on April 13 and 14, Perth’s Concert Hall on April 20, Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on May 5, Brisbane’s QPAC Concert Hall on May 23, Adelaide’s Her Majesty’s Theatre on May 30 and the Newcastle Civic Centre on June 16.

Tickets to all 30 concerts on the tour will be available on Wednesday with the times and box office details via https://www.frontiertouring.com/missyhiggins

INSIDE MISSY, HOFF’S VIRAL MOMENT

Missy Higgins launching herself to straddle David Hasselhoff when accepting the album of the year gong at the 2005 ARIA awards will forever remain the most viral moment of her illustrious career.

As Higgins reveals her plans for a massive 22-date tour in celebration of the 20th anniversary of her debut record The Sound of White, she revealed that unforgettable scene was inspired by her competitive streak.

Her mate Ben Lee had won the previous award for Single of the Year for Catch My Disease and his onstage antics challenged her to one-up him.

Missy Higgins massive debut album The Sound of White turns 20 next year. Picture: Tajette O'Halloran / Supplied.

“It came to me as soon as Ben Lee won the award before me, and he kissed the Hoff on the mouth and I was like ‘F … you Ben, I have to one-up that’ because it was the coolest thing anyone had done all night,” she said.

“So when I won, I thought ‘I’ve got to jump on him, I’ve got to straddle him!’ I remember when I got up there, he was so much taller than I expected.

“And then I remember thinking that my whole dress had come up and my arse was showing on live TV and luckily that hadn’t happened.

“I had no idea that it would become such a replayed moment over the years on all the highlight reels.”

The Sound of White is one of the highest selling Australian artist albums of all time with more than one million copies sold since its release in 2004, and continues to tick over on streaming platforms.

Higgins cut her hair off as she launched her career to defy pop industry attempts to sexualise her image. Picture: Supplied.

Higgins was 15 when she wrote her song All For Believing which her sister Nicola submitted to Triple J on a cassette for their Unearthed contest.

It won the competition and became wildly popular on the youth network, inciting a record label bidding war.

But major label bosses played the wrong card as they tried to sign the high school student, who wanted to be a singer songwriter in the vein of one of her inspirations Canadian artist Sarah McLachlan rather than a sexualised pop star.

“I didn’t want anyone to think of me in any sort of kind of romantic sense, I just wanted the music to speak for itself,” she said.

“Cutting off my hair (like McLachlan) felt like it was really quite rebellious thing to do, going against what all the record companies I had met up with were trying to tell me I needed to do, in order to be attractive and palatable for a wide audience.”

She eventually signed with the independent label Eleven, founded by her manager and music industry powerbroker John Watson, who then also steered the careers of Silverchair and Gotye, and later the third acts of Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil.

Watson agreed she should escape the hype surrounding the overnight success of her debut single and enjoy the same rites of passage as her schoolmates. So she went backpacking for a year.

When she returned, she was ready to write the songs for her debut album, timeless tracks like Scar, Ten Days and The Special Two.

Her next challenge when making the record in America was to maintain her distinctive Australian accent in the vocal booth.

“I didn’t want to betray my heritage because it just felt a bit icky and a bit wrong to sing in another accent and the people I admired like The Waifs and Something For Kate were singing in Australian accents,” she said.

Missy Higgins hugs David Hasselhoff after winning album of the year at the Aria Awards.

Higgins is still an Australian music mainstay 20 years later.

“I remember when I went over to America and recorded the album I was pretty adamant that I didn’t want to dull down my accent even when the producer was telling me that it was a little bit harsh sounding.

“I just thought ‘Screw you, I’m going to do it even harsher, it’s not harsh to me, it’s my accent.’”

Her accent is now the subject of a TikTok viral moment posted by an influencer Tanzync whose video shared a bit of Scar with “There’s something that tickles my brain when Australian singers actually sing in Australian accents.”

@tanzync

#missyhiggins

♬ Scar - Missy Higgins

The Second Act tour, which will run from March to June next year, will not only celebrate her past but share new songs from her upcoming next album, which she said feels like a sequel to The Sound of White.

Higgins she wasn’t able to return to the piano to write for a year, too overwhelmed by grief in the wake of her split from husband Dan Lee in 2022.

But she eventually made her way back to her craft, driven by the need for self therapy by expressing her pain through music and lyrics.

“I think when something this big happens, I instinctively need to find different ways to express myself and figure out what’s going on. But it took about a year to get enough distance from it, to get a little bit of objectivity,” she said.

“I started trying to have another relationship and that brought up a whole lot of stuff and I was like ‘Wow, I’m still really quite damaged from the separation.’

“So that was actually the impetus to start writing about it (because) I’m not going to be able to have another relationship until I sort through all that crap that I’m obviously still dealing with.”

The Frontier Member pre-sale for The Second Act tour opened on December 11, with the general sale on December 13, with all details via https://www.frontiertouring.com/missyhiggins