Macy Gray

Glastonbury Festival 2000 reviews

Macy Gray
Pyramid Stage
Friday 23rd June 2000

As eFestivals suspected all along Macy Gray was the Special Guest who took to the stage before the Chemical Brothers on Friday Night. Her unique voice has attracted a lot of attention recently and her first album 'On How Life is' was a tremendous success last year, so huge crowds turned out to see her in action.

She arrived on stage in baggy green trousers, long pink shirt, green and red hat, large dark blue shades and a very white fluffy cardy. She immediately sang the first two funky tracks from her album 'Why Didn't You Call Me' and then 'Do Something' before turning to the audience to get their involvement by shouting 'put your hands in the air, now scream'. Macy then proceeded to tell us how she didn't give a fuck and how much she liked sex before launching into 'Sex-O-Matic Venus Freak'. So far the music played was very similar to the album and plenty of people sang along. However, her attempts at getting the crowd to shout out various things such as ' I love the dick, the dick, the dick,' were not so successful.

Moving on she sang 'Still' which was her glorious emotional bluesy second single which had us swaying our hands in the air and a nice piece of guitar at the end. 'I've Committed Murder' had a phat base line and those trumpets were blasting as we moved into a jazzy style. Again Macy attempted to split the crowd in two and have us shout different phrases but there was confusion and it really didn't work. She attempted 'all the ugly people be quiet'- nothing, and finally 'Oh sexy people make some noise' - that worked!

Macy then took a break while her band got down to some jazz and when she came back on she was wearing a coat - had it got cold or was it us? It all went a bit gospel after that, Macy sang a bit of 'Que Sera, Que Sera' followed by a new song and then into 'I Can't Wait To Meechu' and she still wouldn't give up on getting the crowd to shout stuff - anything. Towards the end she went and shook a few hands in the crowd before finishing off with 'I Try' into which was mixed a little of 'Everythings Gonna Be Alright' - Bob Marley style.

Macy gave a good performance of her songs and received great applause and huge cheers but if she's looking for audience participation she needs to rethink her act.