Griff

Princess Theatre (Brisbane)

13.08.2024

Fresh from supporting Taylor Swift on the London leg of her Era’s tour, Griff is 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, a striking visual, the singer began the show with Vertigo’s title track. 

From the opening bars the audience were immediately on board. The album might only be a month old, but there was a sense that most of the room knew the LP and the preceding EP’s. 

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 the latter – Griff is one of them. 

All first nights have a few hiccups, and that’s what makes  live music so special. Here, the stage lighting was too dark initially (it’s a Griff gig, not Ryan Adams). A musical clunker happened between Griff, the drummer and the keys player during ‘Head On Fire’, but everything found its way back to beautiful pop symmetry by the end. 

‘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 on the microphone, in her between song patter she 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. 

With almost forty dates in her calendar opening up for Sabrina Carpenter on her 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 much longer. 

Tour dates:

https://www.frontiertouring.com/griff

Words: Sean Sennett

Photos: Kelsey Doyle