17 July 2024 – MCA, Melbourne – pictures by Briarna Dal Col
21 July 2024 – Fortitude Music Hall – words by Charlotte Poynton
I would like you to imagine the most chaotic yet purely wholesome, cathartically feel-good concert possible, featuring a crowd of familiar faces, pride flags, and patchwork tattoos. Now multiply that by one hundred, and now you’ve got an idea of what the girl in red concert at The Fortitude Music Hall last Sunday night was like. The Norwegian hitmaker, Marie Ulven Ringheim, behind iconic trending songs including “we fell in love in october”, “i wanna be your girlfriend” and “bad idea!” was scheduled to appear in Australia for the short-lived Splendour In The Grass 2024, adding this Meanjin stop to her Doing It Again tour, much to the excitement of many Doc-wearing women with an affinity for queer indie-pop. This tour is girl in red’s first time in Australia after the release of her 2024 album “I’m Doing It Again Baby!”, and her slot as an opener on Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras Tour’. With fans braving the winter cold to line up 24 hours before doors opening, the final girl in red show of the Australian leg (before a quick stop in New Zealand) was guaranteed to be one not to miss.
Naarm based indie trio Telenova burst onto the stage to an adoring crowd, ready to promote their upcoming debut album, Time Is A Flower. With dance moves rippling throughout the audience for ‘Discothèque Inside My Head’, lead singer Angeline Armstrong’s captivating smile lit up the room whilst her glittered stockings twinkled with her every move. Flashlights were held high during ‘Comedian’, though my personal favourite of their set was my long-time Telenova favourite, ‘Bones’.
After five minutes of intro music vamping, girl in red burst onto the stage with the title track to her latest album, ‘Doing It Again Baby!’ as a sea of deafening screams and bright red strobe lights filled the hall. Running to the different sides of the stage whilst the crowd chanted along to lyrics about “Lookin’ like a rockstar from the 70’s” and being “On a new level”. The energy of the night only grew with the next track ‘bad idea!’, with fans going ecstatic over the cheeky 2019 hit. Commenting on how “fucking freezing” Australia has been, girl in red welcomed cheers of excitement upon announcing “But not in Brisbane! So that’s why I love Brisbane now!”.
Pairing together sister songs with shared lyrical motifs, ‘bad idea!’ led into ‘girls’, heralding a cathartic and long-awaited singalong moment to the identity-affirming track. Whilst searching the crowd for a fan who contacted her over Instagram, girl in red received a gift package from a fan in the crowd, which included a “girl in red Eras Tour shirt”, stylised after the poster for Taylor Swift’s tour of the same name. “In ten years, guys! I need to make another 100 albums like Taylor Swift to ever have eras!” the beloved queer icon joked, before leading into one of her newer tracks, ‘New Love’.
‘Body And Mind’ from 2021’s if i could make it go quiet featured a prominent crowd sing along, particularly from the people surrounding me towards the left of the stage. We then welcomed a piano moment with ‘I’m Back’, a song which girl in red addressed was about leaving a depressive state, before she joked about “totally jinxing it”. She had to stop her performance of this song twice, due to technical issues and lyrical blunders, though salvaged it by a flawless third attempt and then spun it all around by saying she “messed up two times but third times the charm! Listen to Clairo’s new album Charm!”, before playing an acoustic snippet of Clairo’s ‘Sexy To Someone’. Light-hearted undertones laced a genuine announcement of girl in red’s fear of “disappointing the parents” who had attended her concert with younger fans, but in sharing this truth, there was a noticeable shift in Marie Ulven Ringheim’s character for the rest of the evening, as if she had to voice her anxieties to move them out of her immediate thoughts.
After addressing insecurities once again with ’Pick Me’ and ‘Ugly Side’, we take a trip back to the American Autumn of 2022 with ‘October Passed Me By’. Once again pairing the sister songs together, girl in red led us into the soundtrack to every TikTok user’s autumnal playlist, ‘we fell in love in october’. The setlist then switched gears with ‘Phantom Pain’, which begun the angsty era with ‘You Stupid Bitch’ and ‘Serotonin’ soon to follow. A crowd surfing moment closed ‘You Stupid Bitch’, a sea of arms with only a quarter hosting 18+ wristbands supporting girl in red as she made her way over half of the crowd, before returning to the stage in time to sing “I’m running low on serotonin” in one of the most chaotic yet highly memorable moments of the night.
Diving into my favourite section of the setlist with ‘Too Much’, the crowd left Earth and joined girl in red on Mars with the cathartic pacing bridge. A surprise song request from the crowd sees an acoustic version of ‘hornylovesickmess’, complete with a localised “in Australia thinking of you”, before we jump to the loved up and wholesome ‘A Night To Remember’. “I wrote this song about the night I met my girlfriend, and this song is about feeling sexy to someone” she announced, with a flashback to her short Clairo cover earlier that evening. Pretending to play the piano over a backing track, girl in red ad-libbed a cheeky spoken verse before breaking into the addictive bridge, then throwing away the seat at the piano and kicking her feet up as she hammered the higher register of piano keys until the end of the song. ‘A Night To Remember’ was by far the most exhilarating performance of the night, one so incredibly unique to this tour.
A flashback to 2020 came with the performance of ‘midnight love’, before pausing to sign CDs for a fan who had a sign that said “You stupid bitch please sign my CDs”, laughing “I’ll do them because you called me a stupid bitch and I fuck with that”, joking that the fan could sign them for “a gazillion cents – which is just three dollars!”. Green lighting filled the stage for ‘Rue’, which was my most anticipated song of the evening and my favourite girl in red song overall. Calling for everyone to jump at the bridge of the song, the energy was as high as ever for when she said “I know pools are quite normal here in Australia” in a horribly attempted Aussie accent, dodging audience requests for a shoey and breaking straight into major fan favourite ‘dead girl in the pool.’, complete with further more jumping as girl in red called The Fortitude Music Hall an “old ass building”, ironically as it celebrates its 5th birthday this week.
As we neared the end of the evening, girl in red broke into her first collaboration, ‘You Need Me Now?’, which usually features popstar Sabrina Carpenter but instead featured 3000 voices of her Meanjin fanbase. “Before I forget, I promised this one” announced girl in red as she played the intro and chorus of ‘I’ll Call You Mine’ acoustically on guitar, as per Instagram request by a fan.
Closing off the night with the hottest hit of the pandemic TikTok era, ‘i wanna be your girlfriend’, girl in red summoned a wall of death as she danced through the runway in the crowd, creating the very first mosh pit for many of the younger concert attenders. Many magical memories were created throughout that evening, but this moment may be the one that sticks out for the longest.
Being a performer is an art, a skill that I remember being so heavily ingrained into my system as a young child. to always smile and cheer, to never let the crowd inside your mind, to turn on a new personality when you enter the stage and leave your real self behind. It was apparent early into girl in red’s set that she was not cut from the same “performer” cloth that many musicians are told that they would fail without, but this did not appear as a character flaw – rather as an appeal for her as an artist. Though an anxiety-laden face or doubt-stricken worry about not hitting the right note may have appeared during the night, this merely strengthened the connection between the artist and the fans. Whilst singing honestly about her mental health through songs such as “I’m Back” and “Serotonin”, girl in red took a moment towards the end of the show to thank the crowd for their love, patience and understanding as she was transitioning through new medications. It was personally refreshing to see a raw and vulnerable presence, stripped of any fanciful facades, on the stage in front of me, as that is a sight you barely see in the limelight or even in the mirror anymore.
Overall, girl in red’s Meanjin show was not what I had expected it to be, instead exceeding all of my expectations with ease. As someone who personally attends many gigs and watches so many performers, I can confidently say that girl in red has a unique and refreshing demeanour whilst performing which creates a stronger connection with both the music and the audience than I have ever witnessed before. Whether you’re a 2019 girl in red veteran fan, a fresh listener from her latest album, or have only heard the phrase “do you listen to girl in red?” uttered once, girl in red is an artist that I will definitely be making the effort to catch live again on her next Australian tour and I implore that you make that same effort.
Melbourne gallery
