Fresh from supporting Taylor Swift on the London leg of her Eras tour, Griff was back in Australia.
The UK singer-songwriter started her Vertigo world tour on a wet Tuesday night in Brisbane.
Playing to a full house at the Princess Theatre, Griff began the show atop a ladder with a can of spray paint in hand.
It was a striking visual as she began the show with Vertigo’s title track.
New album
From the opening bars, the audience were immediately on board. The album may only be a month old, but there was a sense that most of the room knew the LP and preceding EPs.
Early highlights included ‘Pillow In My Arms’, ‘Into The Walls’ and ‘19th Hour’.
In a handful of tunes, the singer skipped between standing solo at the microphone, playing keyboards, messing with a cool vocoder effect, creating samples and moving to electric guitar.
Some people just look good armed with an electric guitar and Griff is one of those people.
Minor glitches
All first nights have a few hiccups and that’s what makes live music so special.
Here, the stage lighting was initially too dark (it’s a Griff gig, not Ryan Adams).
There was a musical clunker between Griff, the drummer and the keys player during ‘Head On Fire’, but everything found its way back to beautiful pop symmetry.
‘Walk’ impressed, as did ‘Hiding Alone’ and ‘One Night’ which led to a big audience sing-a-long.
Griff somehow mixes the opposing personas of ‘How did I get here … this is amazing’ with the chops of a seasoned pro.
Charming patter
Charming on the microphone, her between song patter explained the genesis of the album, highlighting how central both the question ‘where did you go?’ and the song of the same name are to her process.
She also said how great it was to be ‘playing in the Motherland of break dancing’.
By this stage, hearts and feet were well and truly won.
IMAGE: Kelsey Doyle
With almost forty dates in her calendar opening up for Sabrina Carpenter’s US tour to follow, there was a feeling at the Princess that this was a great time in Griff’s career to be seeing her.
She simply won’t be playing rooms this intimate for much longer.
IMAGE of Griff at top of story: Kelsey Doyle
