After breaking her silence on the Melbourne Cup no-show that stopped a nation, Australian pop singer Jessica Mauboy has now revealed just what went down backstage at Australia’s biggest horse racing event.
As Tone Deaf reported earlier this week, Mauboy reportedly went missing after pulling out of a performance of the national anthem just minutes before she was set to take stage and after she’d been announced to the crowd.
Speaking to News Corp, Mauboy revealed she was in the final stages of make-up and mental preparation to sing the anthem to one of the biggest audiences of her career when a ruckus broke out backstage.
As tension mounted between representatives of the VRC and Mauboy’s team over what she was to wear as she sang ‘Advance Australia Fair’, the singer was struggling to block out the “bad energy” surrounding her.
Minutes before she was set to take the stage, the fashion mixup prompted Mauboy’s first panic attack, a moment she has now described to News Corp as “the scariest moment ever”.
“Before every performance, you need at least half an hour to focus on what you are about to do, the walk-on and walk-off, the lyrics, how you are going to sing it, like the original or bring your own personal flavour to it, how are you going to make it the best,” she said.
“People think it’s easy to get up there and perform one song but that one song is the hardest song to sing in Australia.” Mauboy was reportedly oblivious to the dispute as contractual details about wardrobe are the responsibility of management.
“Four minutes before I am about to be walked out from the green room, people on one side are bickering with people on another side and it started to suffocate me, it was crazy and I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
“All I could feel was all the bad energy coming from people, time stopped and I could see it all going on around me, I could see me stuck on the lounge and I’m thinking ‘Why aren’t you getting up and getting going?’ It was really horrible.”
“I couldn’t believe it was this gig. I know how to do the big gigs. I’ve done Eurovision, sung in front of Oprah, sung in front of Obama and sang the national anthem at the NRL Grand Final just a few weeks ago,” she added.
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“But I didn’t have a moment to refocus and pull myself back together and I am still in shock that it happened. I should have been prepared to just walk on stage and do my job, the job I love and they didn’t allow me to do that.”
“I love what I do so I was devastated, disappointed with myself that I couldn’t find the courage to refocus with everything going on around me. I would never intentionally let anyone down,” she said.
Mauboy said she’s still not sure just what prompted the argument, but does remember someone yelling about shoes. The singer joked she would’ve been happy to take the stage wearing thongs. “But security probably would have tackled me,” she said.
“I have been working extremely hard and it got to work overload but that’s the person I am,” Mauboy continued. “I guess I discovered through all of this that I am only human and I can’t do everything.”
