The dancing may be a bit cringe, but Katy Perry can still put on an electric show

Sydney Morning Herald

06-06-2025

And while her newest album 143 has been the subject of overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics, touching songs such as ALL THE LOVE – penned about her daughter – are a reminder of the poignancy and passion Perry can deliver both in her songs and on stage.
Seven years since her last visit to Australia, Katy Perry has returned with gusto. In her own words, she is 'a little rough around the edges' but she can still put on an electric show.
As five great philosophers of the late 20th century said, 'Baby, when the lights go out, I'll show you what it's all about'.
As the kaleidoscopic lights of the Vivid Festival danced on the outside of the Opera House, inside US indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast was plunged into darkness.
About half an hour into their ethereal set, Michelle Zauner and co suffered a technical failure that turned the Concert Hall into a black hole.
Zauner had been singing about obsessing in the dark during the oddly uplifting ode to introspection, Slide Tackle, then got to put it into practice.
For two songs, they battled on, lit with little more than a remote-controlled lantern and the dapple of some distant house lights. The Woman that Loves You and Picture Window shone anyway, as delicately crafted pieces of pop that would have had the audience transfixed even if Zauner had been strumming by a campfire.
After a 20-minute intermission to reset the lights failed, the band reappeared and battled on. Drummer Craig Hendrix was enlisted for his Jeff Bridges impression on the duet Men in Bars, but relief washed over everyone when the pink hues of stage lights mingled with smoke during the glistening Kokomo, IN.
While it provided the most interesting moments, it would be unfair to call the blackout the show's highlight. Zauner and the band did nothing wrong.
Their blissful, dreamy brand of pop is variously accented with woodwind, violins, saxophones and synthesisers, giving the guitar-led singer-songwriter tracks a warm, rounded quality that at times are a little too pretty for their own good.
The glitch distracted but did not detract from the quality of the music or the performance – and Zauner has a voice that clearly resonates with her fans – but the songs often wash over without sticking. Only during the encore did the joyous Be Sweet rouse the audience to their feet.
Zauner says she was jet-lagged, woke at 4.30am, had her dress on incorrectly for the early part of the set, forgot what an echidna was called and prattled about lesbian geese.
'Everything's going so well,' she joked at one point.
Chances are, she won't forget this show in a hurry.
'That's live music, baby.'
VIVID LIVE
BETH GIBBONS
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, May 30
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★
Here was a night which could be summarised with its beginning and its end, and yet to do so might also suggest something altogether different than what was experienced.
It began with middle eastern flavours, a drone and a hum and sinuous rhythms, and ended with a closed-eyed dance of limbs unfurled beneath rolling drums and chanting under-voices.
Within that was the fluidity and coiled spring of an eight-piece band of much more than a dozen parts (Howard Jacobs alone played flute, bass saxophone, tuned percussion and drums; Emma Smith tripled on violin, guitar and vocals; everyone did something extra). Through that was a physical release, almost joyfully so, of some kind of shadow dancing.
A sometimes queasy romantic current pulsed within those songs, Tell Me Who You Are Today and Reaching Out, one also evident in the more controlled movement and clearer, if still pock-marked, faith of Lost Changes, a mid-show moment whose refrain of 'time changes, life changes/Is what changes thing/We're all lost together' dispelled and invited darkness at the same time.
And how could we not ride the groovy baby groovy splendour of Tom The Model, a song that evoked a never-happened-but-should have '60s moment of Gene Pitney produced by Neil Diamond. All this was true.
And yet inside it all was the other story Beth Gibbons tells, of that darkness in shades of uncertainty, of a taut line holding rhythms close and emotions closer still, of drums as likely to be played with mallets as sticks, sonorous rather than sharp.
And most of all of the intensity that held, compelled through everything, broken only when at the end of each song Gibbons – whose voice is unchanged, and if anything even firmer – turned her back, retreated to the even darker space behind and broke from our gaze.
Within Mysteries' pastoral awakening (acoustic guitar only at the beginning, choral voices almost humming, before a siren-like woman's voice took us out) and the flute and comfort of Whispering Love's off-kilter dreaminess (which chose not to envelope but instead drape itself over us) was a sense of what might be lost.
Through the haunted land of creeping mood and incipient discordance that is Burden Of Life ('But all the times I've lost my way, crept inside, tried not to sway like pebbles on the shore') was the threat of what might be found.
And then there were those times when the unspoken did the work for us anyway, the encore's double Portishead surge-and-hold of Roads and Glory Box which settled like smoke and insinuated themselves. The former was a chilled atmosphere that sought warmth; the latter, a sultriness that contained an edge. The keyboards of Roads closed in behind us after the bass had led us in; the guitar solo of Glory Box refracted light, giving us a brief glimpse of mayhem inches away.