Macy Gray @ Hindley Street Music Hall, Adelaide 12/9/202
Macy Gray’s The Encore Tour wasn’t meant to open in Adelaide. Melbourne’s Hamer Hall was supposed to get that honour on September 11, but industrial strikes at Arts Centre Melbourne forced the show to be postponed. So instead, Hindley St Music Hall became the first stop on her Australian run, and Adelaide absolutely made the most of it.
The band walked out one by one, slowly building the sound piece by piece. Keys came first, then the rest of the band layered in until the groove was locked in. By the time Gray came out, the room was ready for her, and that unmistakable rasp cut through straight away. You know it the second you hear it.
The opener When We Are Together set the tone with upbeat, clap-along and full of crowd singalongs, with those warm, familiar hooks that had people in from the first chorus. Gray then pulled the audience into an improvised call-and-response solo battle, before handing the moment to her bass player to close it out. It was loose, playful and exactly the kind of thing that shows how much fun this band has together. From there, the show kept dipping and rising. Flirty, funny numbers gave way to darker, moodier ones including I’ve Committed Murder and Why Didn’t You Call Me among them.
That was really the throughline of the whole show for me: Gray’s energy on stage. She is playful, generous with the crowd and has this easy positivity that carried through almost every interaction. One minute she was teasing the audience, the next she was hyping everyone up, but she always found a way to steer the room back to warmth. Even the band introductions midway through the set gave keys, bass, drums and guitar their own moment, and felt less like a formality and more like her genuinely hyping up the people around her.
The middle stretch leaned into all those shifts in tempo and mood. There was a slow guitar interlude that brought the energy right down, a bit of reggae-tinged warmth, and then a soulful, almost unrecognisable cover of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters, which was one of the night’s genuine surprises. A musical interlude gave Gray time for a costume change, with a backup singer holding the stage until she returned for a run that built slowly before tipping into cheekier, more provocative territory. By the time she covered I’m Too Sexy, the whole room was grinning.
The back half of the set turned more emotional and reflective. After a soul-drenched cover, Gray asked the crowd to turn to the person next to them for a motivational moment and repeat that everything was going to be alright. It could have felt cheesy, but in the room it actually landed.
Her cover of Radiohead’s Creep was a proper goosebumps moment, followed by a stripped-back version of I Try, before going into the original sound. This is the 1999 single that made her a global name and still had the whole room singing every word. I did feel a little disappointed that it was not the finishing song, because it landed with so much enthusiasm and energy from the audience that it would have been a fitting final moment. Instead, she closed with a newer, unreleased-feeling track, which was a nice reminder that she is still making and building, not just touring the hits.
Throughout the show, it was also hard not to notice the crowd itself. There was hardly a phone in sight all night, just an older-skewing but genuinely engaged audience clapping, singing and actually watching the show instead of filming it. For a gig that was never meant to be the tour opener, Adelaide got a set that felt anything but like a warm-up. More than anything, it worked because Gray seemed genuinely happy to be there.
Live Review By Ilona Schultz