The Adele Show Goes to Jakarta

This adventure started back in January, when we were asked if The Adele Show could travel to Jakarta to perform at a wedding in late July.

What followed was months of passports, visas, contracts, travel arrangements and logistics before everything finally came together.

Unfortunately, our regular singer Marcelina couldn’t make the trip due to passport issues. Luckily, Jules stepped in. She had sung with The Adele Show for many years, knew the show inside out and was the perfect replacement.

We met at Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne and, from there, everything went remarkably smoothly. The flights, transfers and accommodation all worked to plan, and the venue in Jakarta was spectacular.

We had expected a wedding of around 300–400 people. During soundcheck, however, we started to realise this was no ordinary wedding. The guest list included some of the wealthiest and most well-connected people in Southeast Asia, along with the President of Indonesia and a former President.

We were one of several entertainment acts in a very tightly organised and lavish event. Our original one-hour set was trimmed to around 50 minutes for scheduling reasons, but the band sounded great.

Jules was fantastic, delivering the big Adele songs as well as showing what an accomplished singer she is in her own right.

Preparing the set for a wedding also forced us to address an obvious truth: much of Adele’s catalogue is about breakups, regret and relationships ending. Those songs are extraordinary in a concert, but not all of them belong in a wedding celebration.

We did not simply take our regular show to Jakarta unchanged. We dropped breakup-heavy songs that were wrong for the occasion and added genuine love songs that better suited the couple and their guests. The result still felt unmistakably like The Adele Show, but the story of the set belonged at a wedding.

That distinction now sits at the heart of our wedding entertainment format: keep the emotional power, choose the lyrics honestly, and shape the music around the people in the room.

Away from the gig, we were incredibly well looked after. For a group of Melburnians escaping the middle of winter, spending an afternoon by the pool in the Indonesian sun wasn’t too hard to take. We also managed to see a little of Jakarta while we were there.

The perfect ending came on the trip back to the airport, when we discovered the car had karaoke. A car full of musicians didn’t need much encouragement, and before long everyone was singing at the top of their lungs and laughing all the way to the airport.

After months of planning for one 50-minute performance, we’d travelled from a Melbourne winter to Jakarta, played an extraordinary wedding and come home with a story we’ll be telling for a long time.

What a gig. What a trip.