Grace Jones is playing Palace Foreshore this March and if history is anything to go by, Melbourne is about to witness something it won't forget.
There are pop stars, there are icons, and then there is Grace Jones; a category entirely of her own invention.
Since emerging from the lawless, glittering nightclub scene of 1970s New York, Jones has spent five decades refusing to be contained, categorised, or told what to do.
She didn’t follow movements.
She created them.
Australia has been on the receiving end of that energy more than once.
She first toured here in 1982, then returned in 2009, 2011, 2015 and 2018 and each visit reinforced her reputation as one of the most formidable live performers on the planet.
With her Palace Foreshore show on 2 March marking her first Melbourne appearance since 2018, here’s a reminder of just how deep the legend runs.
Grace Jones – Palace Foreshore
- Monday 2 March, 2026
- Palace Foreshore, St Kilda
- Tickets: here
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Studio 54, New York City, late 1970s
Before there was a catalogue, before there were the headdresses and the hula hoops, there was the sheer, uncut force of Grace Jones commanding a room.
Her early performances in the downtown lofts and clubs of late-seventies Manhattan were less concerts and more confrontations, between performer and audience, between sexuality and power, between what pop music was supposed to be and what she was determined to make it.
She became one of the defining presences at Studio 54 at its absolute peak, rubbing shoulders with Andy Warhol and Keith Haring not as a hanger-on, but as a peer and collaborator.
This was where the legend was forged.
Tracks like I Need a Man and her version of La Vie en Rose weren’t just songs – they were provocations, and the crowds who witnessed them firsthand have never quite shut up about it.
Rightfully so.
Meltdown Festival, Royal Festival Hall, London, 2008
After a long stretch away from recording and touring, Jones returned to the stage as part of Massive Attack’s curated Meltdown festival and immediately reminded everyone what they had been missing.
The performances were a jolt.
She debuted new material from what would become her landmark comeback album, previewed visuals that were as confrontational and strange as anything she’d done in her prime, and announced, without saying a word about it that her return was not going to be a nostalgia exercise.
It was going to be a statement. It was.
The Hurricane Tour, Hollywood Bowl and Hammersmith Ballroom, 2009–2010
If the Meltdown shows were the announcement, the Hurricane Tour was the proof.
Touring behind her first album in nearly two decades, Jones hit stages across the world with a full live band, spectacular production design by the late, legendary Eiko Ishioka, and the kind of theatrical ambition that most artists half her age couldn’t dream of pulling off.
The Hollywood Bowl show and the Hammerstein Ballroom dates became instant reference points for anyone lucky enough to have a ticket.
Career-spanning setlists.
Elaborate staging.
A performer at the absolute height of her powers, on a comeback that didn’t feel like a comeback at all – just Grace Jones, continuing to be Grace Jones.
Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Concert, Buckingham Palace, London, 2012
This one needs to be seen to be believed, and even then, you won’t quite believe it.
Performing Slave to the Rhythm in front of Buckingham Palace, in front of the Royal Family, wearing an enormous sculptural hat and a striking leotard, Jones hula-hooped for the entire duration of the song.
All four minutes of it.
Without stopping.
While singing.
The crowd gave her a standing ovation.
The Royal Family nodded along.
In a concert that featured some of the biggest names in British music, it was Jones, dressed like a magnificent fever dream, who walked away with the whole thing.
Øya Festival, Oslo, 2016
Jones stepped in as headliner at Norway’s beloved Øya Festival in 2016 and delivered something that left the crowd genuinely shaken in the best possible way.
Much like the best Grace Jones shows, there’s frustratingly little footage out there to prove what went down that night.
But the Norwegian press was unanimous: the costume changes were relentless, the headdresses were increasingly and gloriously absurd, and the performance itself was ferocious and precise; a living, breathing reminder that she had been doing this for four decades and had somehow only gotten better at it.
When artists in their sixties headline festivals, the bar is usually “still got it.”
Grace Jones cleared that bar, set it on fire, and walked away without looking back.
Hammerstein Ballroom, New York City, 2023
At 75, Grace Jones delivered a show that left audiences genuinely slack-jawed.
She opened the set perched some 50 feet above the stage on a cherry-picker, surveying the crowd below her as her nine-piece band laid down the opening groove of Nightclubbing.
What followed was pure theatre; costume changes, elaborate staging, extraordinary musicianship, but it was the moments between the spectacle that caught people off guard.
Her stage banter was hilarious.
Her warmth was real.
Behind all the armour and the architecture, there was a performer who was clearly having the time of her life, and that energy was completely infectious.
She has never taken herself so seriously that she forgets to be fun.
It is one of the things that separates her from so many others.
Palais Theatre, Melbourne, 2018
Widely reviewed as one of the finest shows Melbourne had seen in years, Jones’s Palais Theatre performance was the kind of night that gets referenced in conversations about live music for a long time afterwards.
She opened elevated upstage, body-painted as a skeleton in a corset, gold mask on, a wind machine sending her headdress plumage into full flight.
From there it only got stranger and better.
She bashed a live drum during Williams’ Blood and took a moment to tell the crowd that it was actually her mum who sang the high notes on the original recording; a genuinely touching aside in the middle of what was otherwise an exercise in controlled theatrical chaos.
She sang Amazing Grace while clutching a stripper pole.
She wore a mirror-ball bowler hat for Love is the Drug and let the lasers do the rest.
At one point she slapped her promoter on the backside, called him “Your Highness” and moved on without explanation.
Classic Grace Jones behaviour.
Melbourne adored every second of it.
Palace Foreshore, Melbourne, 2 March 2026
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For the first time in years, Melbourne gets Grace Jones.
Expect surreal glamour and theatrical chaos in equal measure.
Expect a setlist that pulls from one of the most singular back catalogues in the history of popular music.
Expect to be running out of superlatives before the first song is finished.
She doesn’t simply return.
She arrives.
Grace Jones plays Palace Foreshore on Monday 2 March 2026.
This article was made in partnership with Palace Foreshore.
