“I’m Not Fucking Drinking Out Of Your Shoe”: Kacey Musgaves Rejects Sydney’s Calls For A Shoey
The crowd also threw wigs on-stage.
Country-pop and Met Gala hero Kacey Musgraves is currently touring Australia, and last night, she played Sydney’s Enmore Theatre to a sold-out room mixed with pride flags, Ye-Haw enthusiasts with pink cowboy hats and the more traditional Tamworth-country crowd.
Music Junkee was on the ground to see her blitz through songs off her Grammy Album Of The Year-winning Golden Hour, alongside a select few highlights from previous albums. She had the crowd singing and screaming every word, and yelling ‘Haw’ when she did say ‘Ye’, playing off a gag she pulled at Coachella last month.
Amid the signs and rainbow pride fans, halfway through the set a fan towards the front of the crowd put up their country boot and yelled for Musgraves to do a ‘shoey’. In case you have no idea what that is, it’s a call to skol alcohol from a shoe — it’s origins are murky, but it’s been heard at Australian festivals for around a decade now.
The chant quickly caught on. What followed was genuinely a little uncomfortable, with Musgraves joking off the shoey by calling it ‘disgusting’ and saying ‘no way’ before the crowd continued to shout for a shoey.
Maybe Musgraves has read last year’s scientific study from WSU which found that shoey can result in a staph infection — yes, even with alcohol being a disinfectant. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to drink alcohol from a stranger’s boot? Who knows.
The crowd persisted, and Musgraves continued to joke it off, even when the request changed from the stranger’s shoe to her own or her bandmates.
After a minute or two, she moved on by launching into the next song before saying, “That’s disgusting. I’m not fucking drinking out of your shoe. You could have athlete’s foot or something.”
While half the crowd seemed disappointed, others took to Twitter to call the moment “tacky”.
don’t you dare think you can demand kacey musgraves to do a shoey!!! that behaviour is tacky and not cute at the same time 👺
— jess gleeson (@dogbunz) May 12, 2019
I thought kacey musgraves was a shoey free safe space… I was wrong
— geordie gray (@djgeordiegray) May 12, 2019
It was a solid amount of cultural cringe — especially given that a shout of ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi’ happened later in the night. Then, during disco-country closer ‘High Horse’, a barrage of wigs were thrown on stage. Perhaps that’s just what happens when a country-crossover comes to Sydney’s Inner West.
To the str8 boy at the @KaceyMusgraves concert who tried and failed to start a round of "aussie aussie" then looked REALLY stoked when another round took off successfully:
some of us are trying to be gay here, FUCK YOU!
— Max Minkoff (@LadderRealLow) May 12, 2019
Musgraves’ Australian tour continues this week with a show at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on Tuesday May 14.