JB HiFi: Sophie B. Hawkins 2005 Tour
FRIDAY 22 April 2005
Venue: JB Hi-Fi (instore), Sydney
Setlist
California Here I Come
As I Lay Me Down
I Need Nothing Else
Beautiful Girl
Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover
I got completely lost! Sydney has a rich tapestry of interwoven shopping centres. At first, I had found the right shopping centre (the one in which JB was, apparently, located) but then I managed to take a wrong turn somewhere and end up in another connected complex. But I found it…
Sophie herself was late (I got there at 12 midday, she was set to start at 1pm, but it was probably closer to 2 before anything happened.) I hung around the little stage area waiting hopefully. Honestly it was a bit.. confronting, waiting for her to arrive. The suspense was making me shakey, and nervous, and at one moment I thought I was gone… I decided I wanted to be memorable, not pass out and fortunately I didn’t pass out. (LOL) She arrived. I spotted her long before most others did. She was on the phone to Gigi Gaston (her manager / roadie / backing singer, and director of THE CREAM WILL RISE documentary!). She was quite frantic. It turned out that while the band was there, most of the equipment wasn’t. Sophie pleaded with some of the audience. “If you wait it’ll be a better show… We’ve only got percussion at the moment.” (The percussion, incidentally, for the instore consisted of one very cute snare drum.) Sophie started signing CDs, although I was still a bit too shy to say anything. I just stood and watched. Infact I watched Gigi as intently as I watched Sophie. (Sophie had an older woman with her, and I think until I spoke to her and Sophie after the Basement show, she was genuinely a bit wary of me. I suppose I have a quiet menancing presence.. lol) A keyboard materialised, and then an acoustic guitar. JB Hi-Fi employees and Gigi were madly setting up equipment.
Eventually Gigi told the drummer (Dave Foley) and the keyboardist (Ed Roth) to start playing, that Sophie would just come in and join them. (She actually told them the setlist before hand, although I didn’t take most of it in at that time.) Gigi disappeared somewhere toward the back of the shop. Dave and Ed were playing a wonderful introduction to California Here I Come. They seemed a little tense at first; you could see they were looking out into the audience, wondering when Sophie would arrive. But arrive she did.
Sophie’s performance (of course!) was amazing. It was so surreal to see her, and even better to see her in the well lit environment. She closed her eyes, and put it her hands together to pray during California Here I Come. She then played a gorgeous version of As I Lay Me Down, during which she removed her green thongs and left them on the side of the stage. (Later she managed to knock them off the stage altogether). She said she wanted to do some of the more provocative songs, but that they weren’t necessarily appropriate for an instore – but that she would have an amazing show at the basement that night, and there were “only ten tickets left.” She then did one of the more provocative songs, “I Need Nothing Else.” During this song, she did a wonderful call and response routine on her Djembe with Dave’s snare drum. (I don’t think many people in any of the audiences were very intimate with the lyrics to that song. It contains some of the most potent lyrics of Hawkins’ repetoire: “Jesus when I feel what you mean to me, I wanna meet you on a dirt road and walk with you endlessly. Oh Lord, My God, when you get hard… How can I stop? How can I not…”)
She then continued to Beautiful Girl and ended the set with Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover. There were at least five professional photographers present at the event. Sophie took moments out in the middle of songs to play toward the photographers’ viewfinders. I was so touched when she did the same for me! She looked straight at me… Here were all these photographers, and me with my little Kodak camera… It was so cute and so sweet of her.
Sophie posing for photographers
It was also a very surreal experience. It was like listening to the CDs, but I could see her – but not only that, she could see me too! Infact a lot of the time she was looking straight at me.
At the end of the in-store a man came over and asked for a photograph. Gigi said, somewhat cryptically, “She can’t talk.” I didn’t really know what she meant by this, at first I presumed it meant she wouldn’t talk to the media. (Was Gigi really so concerned with the media?) No, it turned out that she had to conserve her voice for the shows. After the shows she would talk in whispered tones. It became apparent that Gigi was genuinely very concerned at the prospect of her losing her voice.
At the end of the in-store, Sophie began packing up her equipment. (Or perhaps more to the point Gigi did.) Apparently the plan was to take the equipment straight over to the Basement. Unable to talk, Hawkins expressed her gratitude to MGM Australia representative Bianca Jang with a hug.
I stumbled out of the store trying to process what I had just witnessed. I stopped at a food court, got out my notebook and scribbled down all I could remember. (Incidentally I ate my first meal that day at about 4pm… I was too caught up in finding places, and writing things down, to eat!)
For More Information On Sophie B. Hawkins, visit the official website here
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