grace jones delivered chaotic, costume-heavy concerts on Saturday at the Sydney Opera House Forecourt and on Monday night at the Palace Foreshore in St Kilda; both nights turned into raucous performance-art parties. The 77-year-old performer mixed hula-hooping, sit-ups, momentary nudity and endless costume changes with a revelation of a rich, redolent singing voice. The shows staged across major Australian venues felt improvised, theatrical and deliberately unpredictable, driven by Jones’s onstage pronouncements that she wanted to “have more than fun. ”
Grace Jones in Sydney: a high-wire spectacle
At the Sydney Opera House Forecourt the set ran as a roughly 90-minute, high-wire act that leaned into spectacle and shock. Jones executed sit-ups from a gold throne, hula-hooped through the final bars of Slave to the Rhythm and at one point disrobed down to reveal the legs immortalized in the Island Life artwork by Jean-Paul Goude. The performance threaded classics like Private Life and Pull Up to the Bumper with theatrical interludes: Jones paused for a staged cup of tea, demanded a wine glass and downed multiple glasses of red she called her “communion wine. ” She teased the crowd—“Freedom! No pants! Can we take off some more?”—and momentarily flashed from beneath a black corset while switching headpieces by Philip Treacy.
St Kilda: fashion, weather and an unflappable voice
The Palace Foreshore stage in St Kilda hosted a different snapshot of the same myth: Jones weathered humid, rainy conditions and arrived fashionably late, then delivered roughly an hour-and-a-half set that refused to stop on schedule. She blended Libertango and Love Is the Drug with a new track, The Key to Funky, presented as from a yet-to-be-announced forthcoming record. Despite the show’s deliberate shambolic energy, observers found her singing unexpectedly strong—described in the set as a revelation—while the visual pageant of masks, hats and swift outfit changes kept the momentum urgent and carnival-like.
Immediate reactions: Jones’s own words and the night’s takeaways
Grace Jones, performer, Sydney Opera House Forecourt, said onstage: “I just wanna have some fun, honey. I wanna have more than fun. ” Grace Jones, performer, Palace Foreshore stage, opened her Melbourne set with a pointed claim: “This is my voice. My weapon of choice (!). ” Those remarks framed both nights—less a tidy concert than a willful collision of music, fashion and provocation. Audience-facing theatrics—security-carried processions, tambourines, church-lady hats used during Amazing Grace and a gospel outro to Williams’ Blood—kept the show alternately devotional and irreverent.
Key facts from the nights are anchored to named elements of the productions: the Sydney Opera House Forecourt and the Palace Foreshore stage supplied the venues; Jean-Paul Goude’s Island Life artwork was referenced in costume choices; Philip Treacy headpieces punctuated the visual shifts.
Quick context and what comes next
Jones’s arc—from island childhood in Spanish Town, Jamaica, to New York art scenes and a towering, androgynous stage persona—was threaded through set moments that mixed roots and reinvention. The performer’s career-long appetite for spectacle and boundary-pushing performance held firm across both Australian nights.
The set included The Key to Funky, identified as from a yet-to-be-announced forthcoming record; no release timetable or further details for that record were provided in these accounts. For now, grace jones leaves audiences with a clear message: expect the unexpected and prepare for more theatrical turns when she next appears.
