Two women in front of me were wearing glowing butterfly wings.
They flickered gold through the crowd at Perth’s ICF Warehouse, cute enough to make the rest of us look wildly underdressed. Onstage, foliage curled around the set. Peach PRC appeared in a wonderfully strange self-made outfit inspired by mycelium, like the forest floor had been given a couture budget.
The symbolism was hardly hiding.
Peach had spent years wrapped in pink. Now she was singing about rot, roots and whatever manages to grow after you have lost sight of yourself.
Perth caught her at exactly the right time.
TL;DR
- Peach opened ‘Piper‘ on the pole and later spoke warmly about her years working as a stripper.
- The postponed Perth date gave Porcelain time to settle with fans and the live show time to find its shape.
- ‘Eucalyptus‘ featured a thirsty Princettia bought from Bunnings earlier that day.
- Peach’s pop songs were enormous fun, but the sad gay songs carried the night.
- Outside the venue, a wheelchair user tearfully called it “the best fucking night of my life”.
Perth had to wait for this one
The Wandering Spirit Tour was originally meant to reach Perth in March. Illness pushed the show back to July, leaving fans to rearrange plans, travel, work, childcare and the 900 tiny administrative tasks involved in attending anything outside the house.
That delay changed the show we eventually received.
Back in March, much of Porcelain was still unreleased. Early crowds were hearing new songs through live previews, TikTok snippets and whatever fragments had already escaped into the wild.
By Friday, 10 July, the album had been living with people for months.
We knew the words. We had favourites. Tracks had been assigned to exes, situationships, bedroom ceilings and very specific drives home where nobody was quite ready to go inside yet.
The songs had history now, even if that history was only a few months old.
Peach seemed to have found her footing inside them, too. The Perth show felt confident without becoming slick to the point of lifelessness. The pole, plants, fairy-tale imagery and mycelium costume all came from the same odd little ecosystem.
This was a bubblegum pop show with soil under its fingernails.
Salty opened the evening before Peach took over the warehouse, finally giving Perth the night it had been waiting for.
Starting on the pole, obviously
Peach opened ‘Piper‘ on the pole.
Excellent decision. No notes.
Pole dancing is beautiful, athletic, and, frankly, rude in the amount of strength it demands. Peach moved with the ease of somebody returning to a language her body already knew, while the rest of us stood below with cores made primarily of snacks and good intentions.
Later, she referenced her years working as a stripper before ‘Miss Erotica‘.
That detail gave the performance depth without turning it into a solemn lesson. Peach spoke about that period with affection, including the women and friendships that shaped it.
Pop music has borrowed the look of stripping for decades. Poles, heels, cash, choreography and red lighting are apparently fine once the actual strippers have been cropped out of frame.
Peach did not play that game.
‘Miss Erotica’ celebrated the world she came from. It was filthy, funny and full of fondness. She did not treat stripping as an embarrassing chapter to explain away before we could take her seriously as an artist.
The pole belonged there because it belongs to her story.
Also, she looked incredible on it.
The pink had to rot
Peach’s Perth outfit was inspired by mycelium, the underground fungal network that breaks down dead matter and feeds new growth.
Which sounds very educational until you see her onstage looking like a glamorous woodland creature who might either heal your inner child or steal your girlfriend.
After the show, Peach wrote about finally recognising herself again.
She described struggling at home to clean, answer emails and remember appointments, then stepping onstage and feeling a sense of purpose return. Looking out at the crowd, she saw “people just like me who get it”.
That landed squarely in the autistic and ADHD part of my chest.
Living with a neurodivergent brain can create some truly ridiculous contradictions. You can make complicated things, support other people and pour years of work into something meaningful, then spend four days avoiding an email because the wording feels wrong.
You can stand in front of thousands of people and still be bullied by laundry.
Neither reality cancels out the other.
Peach also wrote that “the pink had to rot”.
It is a brutal little sentence. Perfect, really.
Pink had become so closely tied to her image that it threatened to swallow the person wearing it. The hair, clothes and hyper-feminine fantasy helped Peach build a world people recognised immediately. Eventually, the costume stopped fitting whatever was happening underneath.
So she let it decay.
The mycelium theme made sense of the whole night. Nothing had been thrown away. The old version had broken down and become useful again.
That feels more honest than the usual pop-star reinvention where everyone pretends the previous era vanished in a puff of expensive smoke.
Peach carried the remains with her.
They were feeding something new.
A very important Bunnings employee
‘Eucalyptus’ came with a guest performer.
Earlier that day, Peach had bought a Princettia from Bunnings. The plant was fitted with electrodes and connected to a machine that translated its bioelectric activity into sound.
This is the most Australian possible version of botanical mysticism.
Peach explained the setup, checked on the plant and discovered it was thirsty.
Fair. It had been purchased, transported and booked for a pop concert in front of a warehouse full of lesbians with almost no rehearsal time.
Once connected, it produced soft electronic droning sounds that shifted beneath the song.
The whole thing could have been horribly cheese. Peach’s commitment saved it.
She did not treat the plant like a gag waiting for applause. She seemed genuinely interested in what it was doing and how those tiny electrical changes could become part of the music.
That sincerity is one of her best qualities.
Peach can joke about something without draining it of meaning. A duet with a Princettia is frankly bizarre, but my nerd brain loved it, and the performance was lovely. Nature and science? Hell yes.
I hope the plant has since been repotted somewhere peaceful and is refusing all interview requests.
‘God Is A Freak’ grew teeth
‘God Is A Freak‘ arrived in a softer arrangement, closer to how Peach said she might release the song now.
The original hides a fair amount of hurt inside bright production and a chorus built for shouting. Slowed down, the shame underneath became harder to avoid.
Hundreds of queer people sang it back to her.
A lot of us know the strange vigilance that comes from growing up around beliefs that make your identity sound dangerous. You learn to scan a room before speaking. You lower your voice. You change the pronoun. You decide which version of yourself is least likely to cause trouble.
Sometimes that habit follows you long after the original threat has gone.
The reworked song left space for all of that without pausing to explain it.
The crowd already knew.
The sad gay songs did the real damage
‘Perfect For You‘, ‘Sweet n’ Low‘, ‘Forever Drunk‘ and ‘Miss Erotica‘ gave the room everything a Peach PRC crowd could reasonably ask for.
Peach has the pop-hook thing handled.
The quieter stretch revealed why her music lasts beyond a viral chorus.
‘Loved You Before‘, ‘The Palace‘, ‘Pink‘, ‘Out Loud‘, ‘Back To You‘ and ‘Hold It For Her‘ brought the room closer. These songs feel lived in. They know how queer love can be glorious, confusing, private and deeply unfair.
‘Out Loud‘ remains particularly lethal.
It understands what happens when somebody loves you but cannot stand to be seen doing it. The relationship exists behind closed doors and disappears everywhere else. You end up grieving something other people barely knew was real.
Peach calls these her sad gay songs.
Accurate.
They are also the strongest evidence of the artist she is becoming. The viral moments brought millions of people to her door. These songs give them a reason to stay.
Her voice suits them beautifully. Light, delicate, and just frayed enough around the edges to keep everything from becoming too polished.
Ethereal is the obvious word, and I resent how well it fits.
Then the song ends, and she starts talking like the funniest person in the bathroom queue at a lesbian bar.
That also fits.
A fairy garden for grown-up lesbians
‘Shirley Barber‘ felt completely at home in this world.
For many Australian kids, Shirley Barber books offered a childhood escape into crowded fairy gardens, moonlit flowers and tiny creatures dressed for events nobody had explained.
Peach has dragged that enchanted world into adulthood and made it gay.
Now the fairy garden contains ex-girlfriends, sex work, addiction, religious baggage and a houseplant wired to scientific equipment.
Finally, some realism.
The closing run of ‘Blondes‘, ‘Josh‘ and ‘Like A Girl Does‘ gave the older songs their flowers without letting them take over the night.
‘Josh‘ still turns a crowd feral within seconds. It probably always will.
Here, it felt like a beloved part of Peach’s history rather than the only song everyone was waiting for. Porcelain had earned its place beside it.
That may be the clearest sign of how much the delayed Perth date worked in her favour.
Nobody was waiting for Peach to return to an older version of herself.
We were already with her.
“The best fucking night of my life”
The moment I keep returning to happened outside the venue.
A girl in a wheelchair was speaking to someone on the phone, tears in her eyes.
“This was the best fucking night of my life,” she said.
It was beautiful.
I do not know what her experience of the venue had been. I cannot point to one happy disabled fan and declare live music accessibility solved. Disabled people deserve clear information, safe access, decent sightlines and staff who understand what they are doing.
I only know what I witnessed.
She had reached the end of Peach PRC’s show, glowing, crying and trying to explain the size of it to someone who had not been there.
Honestly, she reviewed the night better than I could.
Peach had something to offer
Peach wrote after Perth that being onstage reminded her she had a purpose.
From the crowd, that was obvious.
She looked present. Not flawless or untouchable. Present.
There is a difference.
She was funny, strange, sexual, tender and completely at home inside the show she had built. The old pink world had sunk into the earth and become part of the new one.
Peach’s music gives lesbian desire room to be messy. Women can be horny, frightened, furious, sentimental, ridiculous and painfully sincere without being flattened into an inspirational poster about representation.
She gets to be a person. Human.
Perth watched her find herself again.
Those two glowing butterflies in front of me were cute, but Peach’s transformation had more dirt in it than that. It involved illness, doubt, decomposition and a lot of time underground.
Then she walked onto the stage in a mycelium dress, climbed a pole and sang to a Bunnings plant.
She looked out at a crowd full of people who got it.
We looked back.
She is doing it for the lesbians.
For that, she has my heart.
Stay unruly.
Peach PRC Perth setlist
- Piper
- Oasis
- Celebrity Crush
- Perfect For You
- I Wouldn’t Mind
- Miss Erotica
- Sweet n’ Low
- Forever Drunk
- God Is A Freak
- Eucalyptus
- Loved You Before
- The Palace
- Pink
- Out Loud
- Back To You
- Hold It For Her
- Shirley Barber
- Blondes / Josh / Like A Girl Does
Great review.