EXCLUSIVE: Missy Higgins Takes You Backstage On Ed Sheeran's Australian Stadium Tour
Read Higgins' exclusive tour diary.
After playing to over one million people on a record-breaking Australian tour, Missy Higgins' special guest performances on Ed Sheeran's stadium tour have come to an end.
In this exclusive tour diary, the multiple ARIA Award-winning songwriter takes you behind the scenes on what has been the biggest tour Australia has seen in recent memory.
So here I am on the first night of the Ed Sheeran tour. We were the first musical act to play the brand new Optus Stadium in Perth. Everybody was freaking out because they didn’t know if the place would collapse into chaos and riots when 63,000 Ed Sheeran fans tried to get into the venue for the first time. But it went off without a hitch. I, on the other hand, freaked out about playing to that many people for the first time and completely lost my voice on the fourth or fifth song. I think I was subconsciously trying to sing to the people in the very back row of the stadium!
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
Soundcheck was fairly easy every day as we had in-ear monitors. I don’t know how you’d do it without them because the echo in these venues was so ginormous, you’d hear the snare drums bounce off the back of the venue three seconds after it was hit!!!
I loved our custom drum skin. It uses a picture taken by Cybele Malinowski during our shoot for the album cover. It was taken at the Murray River salt harvest site in Mildura. As my new album has a strong apocalyptic theme running through it, I wanted the photos to reflect this: desolated beauty.
This was a cute moment in Adelaide where a mother and her beyond-excited daughter were waiting for me on the other side of the (locked) gate. Unfortunately there was no way for me to open the gate to see her but she didn’t seem to mind, we took an oddly prison-like photo with her and me behind bars!
I love this photo, I’m walking up into the abyss with my daggy water bottle in hand. By this time I was much less nervous and had figured out how to sing at an appropriate volume and intensity so as not to lose my voice!
A beautiful gift of a children’s book from one of the Tradional Owners who did the Welcome To Country before the show. Those are gum leaves sticking out the top and that is my hubby Dan emerging from them like a bald eagle.
This is Maddy, my good friend who sung back-up for us on this tour. She was so much fun to have on the road and especially to perform with because she is the most enthusiastic happy person you’ll ever meet. Every night i would look over at her on stage and she would be dancing like a lunatic and grinning ear-to-ear and it made me so happy! She got the biggest applause at the end of every show and I'm not at all surprised!
Here’s me taking a selfie of my earrings. I’m a bit obsessed with earrings at the moment and seeing as though a couple of labels (Gorman, Bianca Mavrick) had given me some beautiful freebies I thought best to share the love. We were also lucky enough to get some dresses from some amazing Aussie designers: Alpha 60, Bul, Kuwaii to wear for the tour. Styling by Benjamin Bates. I’ve never had so much fun dressing up in my life!
This was the view of ANZ Stadium in Sydney during sound check. It’s strange to get used to sound checking - and then playing - these kinds of venues every day! The band and I were on a constant high, it was just such an amazing feeling.
At some point I decided to announce my pregnancy to the crowd. My bump was getting to the point where it was the elephant in the room/stadium! But it was a nice moment. I’d tell them every night right before singing Futon Couch, which is the story of how my partner and I met.
I can’t over-emphasise how excited we all were about eating Ed Sheeran’s five-star catering every night. It was by a catering company called Bayleaf, and it was the best food we’d ever eaten. There were endless options and piles of gourmet salads and desserts to choose from. Dinner was 5:30pm-8:30pm every night, and from 5pm onwards we would start the countdown: “It’s 5:16 guys, only fourteen minutes to go!!!!!” “Guys it’s twenty-three minutes past… ONLY SEVEN MINUTES LEFT!!!!!! Shall we just start walking now?” Ah, you’d think we were starving street urchins before this tour.
This is mum and dad. I told them they should come backstage and eat with us at catering before the show, but as they were running late i piled some food on some plates and snuck it back to our dressing room for them, ready for when they arrived. I then proceeded to wait on them like they were in a five-star restaurant, wine and all, which they found delightfully amusing.
My husband also came to join us for a few shows. He looks much more comfortable in front of the camera here than I do. I love having him on the road. Cuddles after coming off stage feel good. He liked it when I told the story of Futon Couch to the crowd every night. He’d begged me for years for a love song about him and he finally got it!! He said when he was in the crowd watching me sing that song, he came so close every time to turning to the young girls beside him and yelping “This is about me!! It’s about me!!!!
For the last show in Brisbane I wanted to wear my #STOPADANI earrings as it’s something I feel passionately about. I mean, build the world’s biggest coal mine in the middle of a climate change crisis? Seriously, WTF??? I know jobs are important, but killing our children’s future isn’t the way to go about it.
So we finally got a group photo with Ed and once again our drummer Leigh wasn’t there! Anyway, it was so darn lovely being on this tour. Ed is a complete gentleman, as nice as they come. I even got to sing his Perfect song with him on stage for the last show, which was a huge highlight for me (even if the pressure of following in Beyonce’s footsteps was unbearable!!). It’s going to be hard down-grading my venue size and catering quality after this one. Something to aspire to!
Higgins is heading out on tour next month in support of her forthcoming album, Solastalgia (due out 4 May); for more details, click on theGuide.
More From Our Network
