Words by Erandhi Mendis // Photography by Ishani Buff
There’s always been something faintly patronising about the term triple threat. The phrase has long haunted multi-hyphenate creatives — as if to suggest that excelling at many things is somehow suspicious or at best, ill-advised. You’re good at all three? Really? It’s as much admiration as it is a warning: the tacit reminder that spreading across disciplines might dilute your legitimacy. In the ecosystem of celebrity and artistry, where credibility is guarded like a dwindling resource, a woman daring to step beyond one clearly defined lane is almost asking to be caught slipping.
For artists like Suki Waterhouse, that scepticism comes built in. Emerging in the 2010s as a model with famous friends and famous boyfriends — the kind of person the internet loves to aestheticise and dismiss in the same breath. A left turn into acting and then a shift into music was easy to side-eye: another beautiful person with a guitar, another woman presumed to be coasting on proximity rather than talent. What happens when you emerge into public consciousness not with a definitive creative output, but with a vibe? Model, actress, whatever.
It’s shapeshifting, sure – but when it coheres into something honest and magnetic — it feels like watching someone game the system in real time. Can you do it all? On a freezing cold night in Melbourne, Waterhouse didn’t just make her case – she made herself impossible to look away from.
The sprawling, raw edged PICA (one of my least favourite venues to commute to) generally suggests evenings of debauchery and electronic music – you wouldn’t expect bohemian indie pop to find a place here. Yet, as we huddled amongst revellers for warmth, the atmosphere – while chilly – made far more sense when Waterhouse emerged.
Wearing what can only be described as an Elton-esque fur/glasses combo muted by a black bubble skirt with knee high boots, Waterhouse danced onstage with the calm confidence of someone who knew exactly what she was doing.
She opens with Gateway Drug, track 1 of her second record, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin. It’s an album title that might seem childish or cutesy until you realise it’s referencing a species of peacock spider (native to Australia) known for its dazzling, deceptive beauty. Suddenly, the metaphor clicks: the shimmer, the danger, the dance.
Throughout the set, projections of spiderwebs and Shirley Barber-esque imagery flicker behind her – not quite kitsch, not quite surreal. For big hits like OMG the screen turns into a karaoke machine encouraging a far reaching singalong.
Waterhouse for her part, seems almost bemused to be here. “This is kind of crazy,” she says breathlessly, commenting on the thousands of people in the crowd. “It’s my first time here in Australia – it’s insane to be on the other side of the world singing this.”
On stage, she has that morning hair kind of perfect blowout as she dances around to Supersad. There’s a particular tension in watching someone embody effortlessness when you know, instinctively, that it’s actually the product of meticulous curation. Waterhouse doesn’t reject the archetype; she leans into it with a sly wink, inhabiting the contradiction of looking like she just rolled out of bed perfectly while delivering a set sharpened to a fine, glittering point. This is no truer than her song introductions – you’d never suspect the cool girl to use puns, but here we are.
“Are you guys having a good time?” she yells. “Sometimes I can’t tell because I’m so nonchalant…”
There is a practiced eye roll and a shared cheekiness with the audience as she begins her song by the same name. This continues throughout and I can’t tell if I enjoy it because it shatters her very specific image, or whether it is a bit trite given the kind of show she is trying to put on. It matters not because half way through the set a woman behind us turns to her partner and says in complete seriousness: “gosh, she’s a good singer.” My friend and I laugh overhearing, but it is true – she sounds great. Ever the curse of a multi-hyphenate – the expectation may have been low.
The vocal itself is sultry and haunting. A practiced alto, she is at times intentionally fragile and knows how to steer power behind a chorus. She has a full band, though to be honest there aren’t really any solos or moments of note for the storied musicians on stage, the material doesn’t really warrant it. The gasping wind through the PICA shed somehow does wonders for the sound, letting it hang nicely rather than disappearing into the ceiling.
Fan interactions punctuate the night like little exclamation marks. Waterhouse brings up a fan onstage for Johanna to dance with her, takes time to read handwritten signs (with varying success) and points out people in the crowd as she goes along.
Two particularly amusing moments arrive in quick succession – after Neon Sign, she catches her breath to read a sign at the front that says a fan’s grandmother’s funeral was rescheduled in order to attend this show. As Waterhouse reads each word out loud, slowly comprehending, her tone changes first to confusion then to laughter. “That’s really sweet… and unexpected,” she says to rousing laughter. “She must have been a fucking cool grandma.”
Two songs later, someone is holding out their phone on FaceTime. “Is that your dad? – oh, it’s your cat!” Waterhouse giggles, before nodding knowingly that Suki is an incredibly popular cat name – perhaps because it sounds delicate and faintly aloof. She smiles and says it’s an honour to meet Suki the cat.
The production of her live set is far more upbeat and overtly rock than you’d expect. She doesn’t take the sunglasses off once, and somehow it balances the theatrics with vulnerable lyrics.
Near the close of the set, Waterhouse gives the room a gift: a brand new track. After sharing the announcement of her deluxe album’s release (out June 14th), she begins singing the first track, the folk tinged The Bellboy (One Last Crush). My friend leans over to tell me Suki was teasing this on Instagram earlier – this becomes clear when a few people start singing along, “fuckboys don’t deserve me pretty, is there one last crush in New York City?” Upon further investigation, she’s also shared a slew of somewhat intimate photos from 2015 that she had sent to the aforementioned Bellboy. Waterhouse has enough of an air of mystery that this could all just be a good marketing tactic. Either way, I’ve bought in.
At the close of the set, for her last pun she proposes a question to the audience: “do we trust the good looking boys of Melbourne?” There is an immediate and emphatic ‘no’ yelled back, much to her surprise. “That was a hearty no,” she laughs before leaning into the melancholy track, released in 2017 but only charting years later – the perfect end and homage to her ascent. It’s hard to fault the performance, start to finish she sounds sublime and her deeply unconcerned energy is far more endearing than I anticipated. If Memoir of a Sparklemuffin is any indication, Waterhouse isn’t trying to convince us of her legitimacy anymore. She’s already living in the world she built – we simply have to keep up.
