Sky Ferreira live review: Do we really want our pop stars to be punctual?
In her first Australian live performance in a decade, the American pop star arrived on stage 80-minutes late and was backlit so intensely you could hardly see her. It was thrilling.
The anxiety was palpable among the thousand-plus bright young things who flocked to the Sydney Opera House on Sunday night to see cult pop star Sky Ferreira in her first Australian performance in a decade.
Ferreira, the 31-year-old Los Angeles musician with only one album to her name, 2013’s Night Time, My Time, has an infamously spotty history with live shows — late starts, sound issues, and performing in the pitch black, sets cut short after just a handful of songs.
The show was scheduled to start at 7:30pm, according to the Sydney Opera House website. No one expected punctuality — it is, as they say, “the Sky Ferreira experience,” to be kept waiting in the dark. Still, we diligently piled into the Joan Sutherland Theatre, nervously chatting with strangers about whether the artist we had gathered to see would make it to the stage.
7:30 passed. Then 8pm. At 8:46pm, the prerecorded Welcome to Country message played — a promising sign, a collective sigh of relief, and an inappropriate level of applause. Then, bizarrely, it was back to the pre-show playlist. Confusion.
At 8:52, Ferreira and her band finally stepped out. The audience leapt to their feet — a rarity at a Sydney Opera House show — and stood bewitched as the backlit stage filled with great belches of blue smoke. It was so smog-bound you could hardly make out a silhouette, but if you strained your eyes, there she was — pint-sized, shades on, consumed by an oversized black leather trench coat, platinum mop teased to the high heavens.
From the opening salvo of the school bell trill introduction of ‘Boys,’ the show was off with a bang. You couldn’t see her, but holy mother, you could hear her, and that booming voice, somehow both guttural and crystalline.
The crowd thumped their chests in devotion as she made her way through the fan-favourite “hits” like ‘24 Hours,’ and ‘I Blame Myself’ and were stunned to silence by the ghostly swirl of ‘Downhill Lullaby,’ the first single from her long-delayed second album, Masochism. The songs sounded massive, brutal, a cacophonous wall of noise you could feel in your bones.
Save for a few muffled “thank you’s” and “sorry’s” and a rambling apology about having to restart her scuzzy cover of ‘Til Tuesday’s ‘Voices Carry’, there was no banter.
By the time she got around to playing her 2013 “hit” — the downer-pop anthem ‘Everything is Embarrassing,’ all sins had been forgiven — there were a group of boys, standing on the balcony, dancing with such ferocity and reckless abandon that you feared for their safety.
Ferreira is a startling beauty, incontestably so — she funded her first album with money she earned modelling. It’s interesting then, in a music culture that prizes image and vanity, here is a pop-star that seems to have no interest in being seen.
While some fans were, understandably, miffed about being kept waiting for so long — for those of us that can deal with a little tardiness, it was an exhilarating alternative to music landscape that often feels too preened, too perfect, and too organised to allow for the truly idiosyncratic or the unconventional. Isn’t it nice to be surprised?
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout