Rachael Sage Live at The Pheasantry

There's a particular kind of night out that sneaks up on you. You arrive expecting a pleasant evening, good music, maybe a glass of wine, some pizza, and you leave having felt something you didn't budget for. Sunday at PizzaExpress Live was exactly that kind of night. Rachael Sage's London headline show, the launch of her Under My Canopy tour, arrived during Mental Health Awareness Week, and if you needed proof that timing can be everything, this was it. Sage has long served as an ambassador for Rainbow Mind, a UK charity providing mental health support to LGBTQIA+ people.

The Pheasantry is a fitting room for this kind of performance, its the kind of venue that does half the work for you. Tucked beneath the King's Road in Chelsea, it wraps you in low light and warm corners, tables nestled close enough together that you find yourself sharing the evening with strangers whether you planned to or not. Sage, dressed in a red sequinned jacket with flowers in her hair and hoop earrings catching the light, arrived at the keyboard looking entirely at ease with that proximity. Her string duo, cellist and violinist, touring under the name The Sequins took their positions alongside her, bows occasionally grazing the edges of the front tables.

The set drew widely from her catalogue while centering much of the material on Canopy, her 2025 record and the source of the acoustic companion project this tour previews. She plays both keyboard and guitar with genuine fluency, and the arrangements, stripped back, reliant on voice and strings, exposed the structural craft of songs that might otherwise be softened by fuller production. She opened with Blue Sky Days and things settled quickly into a kind of intimacy that felt earned rather than manufactured. Sage is a natural talker between songs. funny, honest, unguarded, and those moments became just as much a part of the show as the music itself. She spoke about Rainbow Mind with genuine passion, about the collaborative t-shirts at the merch stand, about Mental Health Week and why it mattered to her that this particular night existed in this particular week.

Set one moved through a range of emotional registers: the wistfulness of The Other Side, the quietly devastating Haunted By Objects, the defiant warmth of Live It Up. There was a brief and beautiful moment featuring a song by guest Marta, that sat perfectly in the sequence before You Were Allowed brought the first half to a tender close.

Set two went deeper. Deepest Dark opened with a kind of solemn grace, and by the time Nexus arrived mid-set, the room had reached something close to a collective stillness. The song, written in response to the experiences of a non-binary teenager facing severe bullying, built slowly and then broke open. Sistersong, Unbeauty, and Alive maintained that emotional altitude, before Magenta And Blue offered a kind of gentle landing, and then The Place Of Fun arrived as an encore that felt entirely, perfectly chosen.

Rachael Sage is the kind of artist who makes you feel like the room is exactly where it's supposed to be. On a night dedicated in spirit to mental health and community, that's not a small thing. Sage heads out on a longer UK run next, then joins Wet Wet Wet in support. Based on Sunday's showing, she should have no trouble winning rooms significantly larger than this one. Though something will inevitably be lost in the translation.