There are sailor suits everywhere. Thousands of them. Sydney’s Afterpay Arena looks briefly as though it has been commandeered by a particularly emotional navy, while down the front one guy has gone a bit off-script and arrived dressed as a clown. The Coneheads are here, and subtlety is clearly not on tonight’s agenda.
Backseat Mafia last caught Conan Gray when he toured Australia in 2024, but this is a very different proposition. The Wishbone World Tour is bigger, stranger and far more theatrical, built around Gray’s fourth album Wishbone and a stage shaped, naturally enough, like an enormous wishbone. Its two long arms push deep into the audience and Gray spends much of the night bouncing between them, bringing himself within touching distance of fans on either side of the arena.
The show unfolds across four acts: a wishbone never breaks even; i got the short end of the stick; took the long way to realization; and i wished for love and i found it. It could all become rather earnest on paper. In the room, it’s closer to a pop musical with Gray as its restless main character.
Gray makes his entrance riding a bicycle in the sailor suit that has become synonymous with this tour, checks a postbox for mail and later climbs a windmill., while belting out My World. The stage has been transformed into a rural Wishbone world, full of oversized props and little details that make an arena suddenly feel much less like a big black box. Even Gray’s band are dressed in sailor suits.
There is plenty of spectacle, but Gray knows when to strip it away. The Cut That Always Bleeds has the crowd on its feet as the stage turns red, while Eleven Eleven finds him with an acoustic guitar and thousands of phones glowing back at him. During Nauseous, a daughter near me turns towards her mother and they simply hold each other, both crying. For all the giant scenery surrounding Gray, moments like this explain his appeal far better than any production trick.
Conan’s Campfire takes things somewhere more intimate again. Gray sits at the edge of the wishbone with an acoustic guitar before settling beside a faux fire surrounded by foliage. He remembers his first trip to Sydney as the moment he realised he was famous, a funny little admission in an arena now packed with thousands of people dressed like him.
Then the scenery starts moving again. Romeo has Gray emerging from an enormous white boat in another costume, while The Best prompts him to ask who has come to the show with their ex tonight, as the song’s lyrics loom across the huge screen behind him. Later the boat disappears and a bed takes its place for Connell, ending with Gray stretched across it while the band lets loose with a huge rock outro.
One of the night’s funniest moments belongs to the clown from the opening scene. Gray spots Sebastian in the crowd, who tells him that the clown costume took him two months to make. Then it’s time for Wishbone Break, Sebastian and Gray pull opposite ends of a wishbone, with the winner getting to choose the next song. Sebastian triumphs and Sunset Tower gets the call. Suddenly the clown costume looks like a very sound investment.
Heather brings another enormous singalong with Gray back on acoustic guitar. During Family Line he stands right at the end of one arm of the wishbone as spotlights sweep across the audience, turning the entire arena into part of the staging rather than leaving everyone staring at a distant rectangle.
By the fourth act, Gray is barely staying still. During Actor he sprints back towards the end of the stage, again making full use of those wishbone arms. Maniac sends the room into overdrive as he introduces the band, including Renny, Grace and Emily on strings, Tiana and Eliza on guitar, Lily on drums and Hayley on bass. People are dancing, screaming and singing hard enough that the arena seems to physically vibrate.
Then comes the bad news. Gray announces that Vodka Cranberry is his last song as stars glitter across the enormous screen behind the band. Inevitably, the Coneheads respond by taking over the singing once again. Of course, it’s not really the end and Gray appears for a spectacular encore.
Gray’s career started with bedroom recordings and YouTube, moved through Kid Krow and Superache, took a brighter theatrical turn with Found Heaven and now lands here with Wishbone. What is striking tonight is how comfortably he inhabits the scale of it all. He can ride a bicycle through a fantasy landscape, climb a windmill, emerge from a giant boat and command an arena, then sit down with an acoustic guitar and make thousands of people go quiet.
Two years after Backseat Mafia last saw him in Australia, Conan Gray has gone considerably bigger. The sailor suits, campfires, boats and giant wishbone are tremendous fun, but underneath all that theatre is the same thing that got him here in the first place: songs his fans see themselves in.
Images Deb Pelser
The tour continues to Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth next, tickets HERE.
