Larger-than-life Macy getting away with it

North Shore Events Centre

Review: Russell Baillie


The Laugh! Festival might have been cranking south of the bridge but the largely brilliant performance of Macy Gray offered plenty that risked a roll in the aisles.

Not that we were necessarily laughing at the Los Angeles nouveau soul gal with the raspy voice who has sold rather a lot of her debut album On How Life Is since its release late last year. No, more laughing with her - the main joke being: Would ya just look at what I'm getting away with?

That's whether it was her entrance, all porthole sunglasses, high-decibel fur coat and red lips (on a grand mouth that risks the Rolling Stones suing for breach of trademark), or her merciless working of the room that endeared her neatly to the 2000-plus crowd.

Or when Macy got, er, racy with a microphone stand on Sex-O-Matic Venus Freak, a fabulous piece of boudoir funk early in her two-hour show.

But no, one album does not a two-hour show make. If there was a problem, it was Gray and band's tendency towards occasional tangential indulgences. A bit energy-sapping were a brace of covers (including With a Little Help from My Friends, Melanie's Brand New Key, and Sly and the Family Stone's version of Que Sera).

But at the same time some of the extras to Gray's own tracks - whether it was the gospel ending to I Can't Wait to Meechu, the swerve into No Woman No Cry on predictable show-ender I Try - helped keep it as nicely surprising as Gray's next costume change (whoah, nice boa!).

Gray's 11-piece band were tight in a loose sort of way and in on the joke, reminding of both Beck's stage backers and Prince's Revolution.

It might be a pity that Gray got so popular so fast so that her first visit here wasn't somewhere smaller. But as she implored us with "I want everybody to shake your booty" without a hint of irony, it was clear that her larger-than-life presence requires a big show to go with it.

It got one last night. A great colourful funk-soul shebang that will have some of us giggling to ourselves for days.