Step Inside Suki Waterhouse’s Dream Disco of a North American Tour

For musician Suki Waterhouse, 2024 was nothing short of epic. The “Model, Actress, Whatever” songwriter, an Angelo by way of London, made her Coachella debut in May before going on to open for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour at Wembley Stadium, and then embarked on a North American tour of her own to celebrate the release of her second studio album: Memoir of a Sparklemuffin. 

The follow-up to her 2022 debut, I Can’t Let Go, saw the performer and songwriter embrace a more rock-forward sound and stage presence, with Waterhouse even calling the album’s lead single, Supersad, “an ode to extreme messiness.” It follows, then, that for Waterhouse’s 24-stop tour, she and creative director Emilie Richard-Froozan sought to think outside the confines of pop convention. “She really wanted it to go hard,” recalls lighting and production designer Jonny Kingsbury of design studio Cour, who worked closely with Waterhouse on her Coachella performance. 

When it came to concepting for the Sparklemuffin tour, which takes its name from an Australian man-eating peacock spider that embodied Waterhouse’s idea of artistic metamorphosis, they kicked things up a few notches. “Suki was like, I want it to feel epic, I want it to be strobing,” says Kingsbury. “The Sparklemuffin world is this dream ethereal disco.”

For the duration of the show, a crystalline spider web glistened from behind Waterhouse while stage lights filtered through a canopy of trees and fog to otherworldly effect—“like an enchanted forest at midnight,” in Kingsbury’s words. But, as Waterhouse performed album favorites ranging from the confessional ballad “Nonchalant” to her indie-rock banger “Big Love,” fans waited for one final piece of the production design to fall into place: the three-foot disco ball that presided over the entirety of the performance, seemingly unused.

“I thought it was interesting to leave it there visible, but to not actually light it up until the biggest finale of the show,” Kingsbury says. In keeping with the sentiment of saving the best for last, the disco ball’s most impactful moment came during Waterhouse’s encore performance of “Good Looking,” a fan-favorite hazy indie-pop ballad that sounds like falling out of love at the end of the world. As Waterhouse introduced the song, confessing to the audience that “The worst thing in the world is to fall for a good-looking boy,” the dormant disco ball sprung to life under full force of the stage lights to close out the night.