1980s

Sisters

Published: 1986-02-28

Kate and Anna McGarrigle Festival Theatre

Kate and Anna McGarrigle first gained attention as songwriters in the early Seventies when Maria Muldaur recorded Kate’s “The Work Song”, and Linda Ronstadt used-Anna’s “Heart like a Wheel” as the title song for her 1974 album.

The McGarrigles began recording their own material in 1975, rapidly gaining attention for their fetchingly artless vocals and whimsical arrangements. On this tour, eleven years later, the McGarrigles are still being whimsical and fetchingly artless and it mostly works.

Their Sunday night concert in the Festival Theatre was late starting due to something called technical problems but when the band filed on stage there was still a hum coming out of the right speaker bank loud enough to entice humpback whales into shallow waters. It is simply not good enough to have poor sound systems at venues like the Festival Theatre and it certainly doesn’t help a group like the McGarrigles to deliver their delicate brand of country/pop/blues/cajun/music hall/ballad to the faithful.

The band opened with “Dancer with Bruised Knees” featuring some fine violin work from Joel Zifkin and giving us a chance ‘to take a look at the performers. For one thing there was an extra McGarrigle - three for the price of two. Jane, listed as tour manager, seems to be the group minder, providing soothing jokes when things get ragged and adding a strong third’ voice to the occasionally fragile voices of the others.

Her presence anchored the performance which was just as well because Kate’s amateur hour stage manner was threatening to become somewhat arch. “We don’t introduce our songs,” she, said a shade too tartly, “because we already know them.” Things began to settle down with a couple of songs from their early albums - “First Born” and “NaCl” and the McGarrigles stopped rolling their eyes and staring at microphones as if they’d never seen anything like them on their maple syrup farms in Quebec. By the time they got to “Naufragee du Tendre” (Shipwrecked) the band was hitting its straps as well. The rhythm section with Gerry Conway on drums and Pat Donaldson on bass have been associated with the McGarrigles since their second album but their presence is much more evident these days. Former members of Fotheringay - part of the Fairport Convention group of companies - they bring those Fairport signatures, chunky drumming and resonant striding bass lines, to the overall sound.

The McGarrigles played a delightful range of songs including the winsome “Sun, Son (Shining on the Water)” with some spacious synthesiser fills from Anna. They also sang Cajun songs, traditional ballads, songs about airline pilots, oil riggers serenading teenage runaways and songs like “Love is” - “Love is a twelve bar blues / Love is blue suede shoes / Love is a mind confused” which as with so many McGarrigle compositions has a lyric which is too cute for daylight but sung with sparkingly clear country vocals and Sankey hymn. piano chords garnished with Jorn Reissner’s nicely understated guitar lines, is all too appealing to resist.

After interval the speakers were still humming but so was the band. They began with a splendid version of Loudon Wainwright’s “Swimming Song” complete with banjo, mandolin and accordion accompaniment which they followed with some new songs which will have McGarrigle fans rampaging to their sixth album whenever it appears.

By the time they got to “Heart like a Wheel” all three vocals had blended exquisitely. After a spirited version of “Love Over and Over” and an encore by the three sisters singing “Mendocino” with Kate’s lead vocal combining beautifully with the piano, no one needed convincing that the McGarrigles can make their music sound sweet - even if they can hardly be called mcgarrulous with a crowd of folks in front of them.

“Sisters” The Adelaide Review, March, 1986, p.9.

Anderson shows the essence of pop amid hi-tech legerdemain

Published: 1986-03-28

Very few performance artists have made the leap to pop with such spectacular success as Laurie Anderson whose concert in Adelaide’s Festival Theatre opened her Australian tour and coincides with the release of her newest album, Home of the Brave.

All of the paradoxes of Anderson’s achievements are evident in her opening monologue, Progress. The eclectic, hi -tech relativism of her work exactly mirrors the processes she rails against as heartless progress. Anderson’s is a triumph of style - it is the very essence of pop, finding the most appealing musical and aural effects to suggest meanings which never quite compute.

So the overall effect of her show is curiously inert, like a live video clip- a form now notorious for its mischievous parataxis. Anderson’s work is technological legerdemain and because it uniquely combines a pop concert with the highest production values of theatre, the result is compelling for audiences.

The show consists of tapes and pre-programmed material- that haunting, melancholic, mantric sound that is Anderson’s signature - overlaid by vocals, keyboards and other treated sounds produced by Anderson beating parts of her body, thrumming on microphone stands and even, it seems, the boards of the stage itself.

As she literally mics her own body, Anderson becomes an electronic hand· maiden, vulnerable and spikily elvish as the gigantic screen behind her projects animations, action replays and visual cliches - all the unprocessed data that simultaneously means more and less than it should.

The best moments are familiar pieces such as the memorable Big Science. Gravity’s Angel and the witty anti-love song, Sweaters, and new ones such as Baby Doll with splendid back-up vocals from Phillip Ballou and Bennie Diggs.

So much of Anderson’s appeal is in the way she co-opts the most familiar American pop - it is like a monologue from the Shangri La’s run through a vocoder - and her use of musicians such as Peter Gabriel nicely located her concern for musical accessibility.

This is the strength of Anderson’s work and why, finally, her work is so unobjectionable. She does not just comment on pop, she is pop. When we see footage of her dancing with William Burroughs, it is her last tango with the avant garde.

The staging of Anderson’s show is a tribute to the performer and lighting designer, Patricia Connors, and to projectionist James Hobberman. There are no glitches, no glaring into the foldback, no rock-and-roll tantrums.

Instead, Anderson and keyboard player, David LeBolt close the show with O Superman - still her most perfect composition with its chilling augury of peril - and the credits roll on the screen like a movie. There is, of course no encore. The price of this impeccable performance is that the product is hermetically sealed - like airline food in heaven.

Murray Bramwell

The National Times, March 28, 1986, p.33.

Wagner’s Depths Explored

Published: 1986-06-13

The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner; director Bernd Benthaak; with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. conducted by John Matheson; at the Opera Theatre. Adelaide, until June 21. Cast: Malcolm Donnelly, Beverley Bergen, Arend Baumann and Thomas Edmonds.

Commentators have often been swift to chide and slow to bless The Flying Dutchman when comparing it to the consummate accomplishment of Wagner’s later work.

Certainly its mechanical division between aria, recitative and ensemble is typical of operatic form which Wagner himself was later to overhaul and redefine.

Writers such as Ernest Newman have bemoaned The Flying Dutchman’s “unimpressive stretches of unmusical declamation” while others have remarked that it lacks the “endless melody” of The Ring and Tristan.

There are a few worries with the narrative as well. Wagner’s inspirations for the opera appear to have been various - he had read Heine’s version of the story but appears to have rendered the tale more earnestly, perhaps in partial identification with the luckless Dutchman.

By the age of 30 Wagner had been pushed from pillar to post in his bid for recognition and reliable patronage. He was homesick for Germany and most significantly he began to cleave to the romantic theme that became a hallmark in his work - redemption through the constancy of a woman’s love.

It takes a nimble interpretation to steer through the potential silliness of this particular exemplum of salvation through love, because Wagner has not made crucial details sufficiently clear.

Senta’s motivation in devoting herself to the Dutchman is hazy to say the least and the uncertain status of her betrothal to the flabbergasted Erik further complicates things.

Also, while no one expects consistency in operatic plots, it is hard not to think that her father Daland is rather obtuse in failing to recognise the Dutchman from the full-length portrait he has in his own living room.

Nevertheless The Flying Dutchman is full of splendid set pieces which Benthaak’s production does much to highlight.

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under John Matheson extracts all of the colour and sense of portent from the overture that one could wish for and Geoffrey Harris’ fluent Steersman’s song is one of the real pleasures in Act I.

Baritone Malcolm Donnelly, while looking more like a prosperous grocer than a gaunt and spectral seafarer, nevertheless brings a gravity and assurance to his performance which unfortunately is not always matched by Arend Baumann’s often fluttered bass as Daland.

Ken Wilby and Mark Thompson’s ambitious designs are cumbersome, with Daland’s ship in perilously close proximity to the Dutchman’s but their massive scale and the murky lighting successfully compound the sense of a ghastly dream evoked by the music in Act 1.

The Spinning Chorus in Act II (like the sailors’ chorus later) offers some of the best chorus work heard in State Opera productions in recent years.

Wilby and Thompson’s costume designs in browns, fawns and cream are particularly effective. The set however is more cluttered Vermeer than Norwegian maritime.

Beverley Bergen’s Senta is a mixed success. Her aria declaring her devotion to the Dutchman and vowing to break the curse upon him begins strikingly as she moves from frozen tableau into passionate conviction. But, as the intensity increases, her facility diminishes and her performance becomes uncomfortably strained.

Act III brings all of the composer’s haunting motifs together with the garbled threads of his narrative.

The set made up of iron scaffolding and lead-lined windows depicts a dockside warehouse which enhances the eeriness of Senta’s conflict as she gives the heave-ho ·to earthly Erik and prepares to heave to with the other-worldly Hollander.

The trio with Senta on an iron staircase drawn by the beguiling voices of Donnelly and Edmonds is so compelling in its visual symmetry and thematic simplicity that we are not prepared for Benthaak’s truncated ending.

While Wagner’s idea of the transfiguration of the two lovers, after Senta has leapt from a cliff top to be with the Dutchman, is likely to be problematic for modern audiences, Benthaak short-circuits the work completely with Senta’s abrupt and banal suicide.

The audience is thus refused the resolving gratification of Wagner’s closing themes.

After all, by this stage we have waded too far into Wagnerian waters to be content with anything too existentially downbeat.

Nevertheless, Benthaak ’s production of The Flying Dutchman is a memorable and satisfying one and the State Opera celebrates its 10th anniversary season with a distinguished performance.

The National Times, June 13, 1986, p.31.

Sharp and Shiny

Published: 1986-11-30

Joe Jackson Thebarton Theatre

When Look Sharp, Joe Jackson’s first album appeared in 1977 all manner of sobriquets were bandied about his distinctive sound - “powerpop” and “spiv rock” among them. Like Graham Parker and Elvis Costello, he offered a churlish wit and a tight rock sound - urgent, knowing and non-sectarian.

Of the three only Jackson has conquered America. Parker sounded too much like a New Yorker to begin with and nobody ever got over Elvis Costello’s ironic remark about Ray Charles, despite the fact that no-one whose real name is Declan MacManus could fail to understand racial oppression. Meanwhile Joe Jackson moved like a chameleon from the sharp pop trio of his first and second albums to the scatty urbanities of Jumping Jive and the stylish Ellington white piano and small big band sounds of Night and Day and Body and Soul.

Jackson, based in New York and refusing to tour, was starting to look like a rocker turned smoothie – not exactly Marvin Harnlisch but with less of the pasty brashness that distinguished his first band.

“So this is the Thebbie,” Jackson noted drily to a full house already in fibrillation from the drum machine fanfare turned on for our Joe. In designer plastic mac and hello porkpie hat, Joe Jackson, man of mode and monde, put down his luggage and the band moved into “Wild West” from the recent three sided Big World set.

Next came “Right and Wrong”, perhaps the catchiest tune in the latest batch and indicative of Jackson’s sense of issues - no shibboleths from Joe, only questions jabbing into the underbelly of rhetoric. The band wasted no time as they geared into the Big World title song. Now sans hat and mac, Jackson ambled easily from piano to microphone while a bank of green lights provided an eerie mood for his keyboard peregrinations. The format was not quite full circle to Look Sharp but it sounded like it as Jackson faithfully reproduced the bright, direct-to-disc sound of Big World. Clearly, it was meant to be an album that could travel, even if its multilingual cover seemed a bit showy to the ethnocentric.

The band, well mixed and loud without bringing blood to the earlobes, was hitting ail the right buttons. Rick Ford’s bonehard six string bass lines conspired resiliently with Gary Burke’s simian but effective backbeat while New Yorker Tom Teeley coaxed a vintage rock sound from his red Fender and showed his versatility with some classy Djangoisms, some slow smoky blues and even a touch of classy thrash when required.

For no particular reason backprojections indicated that Jackson’s long set of nearly thirty songs was divided into four sections. The first two spanned the later albums; the third included Jackson stepping into Ugly American tourist costume for “Jet Set”, recovering composure for his scathing attack on Tabloid England- “Sunday Papers”, then stretching out with jazzy melancholy in “Tonight and Forever”. Part four opened with a zippy melody from Jumping Jive with Jackson’s melodica doing a fair imitation of soprano sax and the band showing enough riffs and frills to suggest the most bonsai big band we’ve heard in a while.

Highpoints among the highpoints included a spacey re-interpretation of “Steppin Out”, a lambent “Shanghai Sky” and complex medleys of “Chinatown” /“Another World” and the wistfully cynical “Will you be my Number Two”/“Breaking Us in Two”.

The theatrics of the show – a triumph of lighting and pace - showed Jackson as an accomplished performer; always at ease but with an art that conceals itself. His pretence at not remembering the lyrics of his hit “Real Man” was a forgivably indulgent irony. Moving from piano keyboard and mini synthesisers to accordian and melodica, Jackson played a series of unchic instruments with astonishing effect and in generous interaction with his first-rate band.

Lanky and quietly amiable, Jackson is certainly no angry young spiv, if he ever was. In his baggy silk suit he looked for all the world like Herge’s Tin Tin, further proof that you don’t need to eat your- vegetables to make it in British pop.

In two and a half hours Jackson showed us his musical and thematic range. It is polished, even at times florid but it retains a clarity rare in the muddled and ponderous lyrics of much contemporary pop. The show was a touch over-rehearsed but if we had a sense of perfect replica that’s a big world better than a cheap imitation.

“Sharp and Shiny” The Adelaide Review, No.33, December, 1986, p.32-33.

Swanky

Published: 1987-02-28

The Eurythmics Memorial Drive

Last time the Eurythmics were in Australia they were Tourists. The Tourists, it must be said, were never much chop. One of their singles scraped into the Top Ten but no one would have thought that Gorbals rocker, Dave Stewart, and the singer in the Mary Quant tat, Annie Lennox, would do more than sink without trace when the band dispersed in 1980.

Instead, with five hit albums in a row, the Eurythmics are here again on their aptly named Revenge tour. It need hardly be said that Lennox and Stewart have done very well, and it shows. The band is at the height of its box office powers and nothing has been stinted in staging the live incarnation of the Eurythmics’ particular patent on glamour.

The Memorial Drive concert was a creditable example of the trains running on time but mostly the Eurythmics were dead on arrival. The sound was both huge and clear, the lighting rig was awesome; not a gremlin, not a hiccup.

The whole show was choreographed down to the last spontaneity. But if this is revenge, then it isn’t so sweet.

The Eurythmics have always capitalised fully on the photogenic Annie Lennox. The opulent video clips· and fashion studio album covers have all conspired to establish an image reducible to few enough elements to be registered as a trade mark. Lennox, cropped, elegant, androgynous, cultured, is counter-pointed by Stewart, shaggy, proletarian, the rock and roll throwback. As in their recent clips, the band overdress in black and white outfits with the leads strutting and swanking in their familiar leather frockcoats. The Eurythmics, we are reminded, are expensive and they enjoy success.

From the moment the black stage curtain opens with a gigantic zipper, the performance is poised on ambiguity – it is zany but before we wonder if it is really striptease after all, the band has launched into “Sex Crime” in a blizzard of white spotlights. With “I Love You Like a Ball and Chain” they were well into their stride when we were treated to the first of reed player Jimmy Zavala’s magnificent harmonica solos. Then clouds began boiling on the stagescreen as Lennox moved into “Here Comes the Rain Again” and Dave Stewart got busy on his colour co-ordinated Fender, reminding us how much his riffs stitch together the Eurythmics’ sound. Ever the musical magpie, Stewart gives us what oft we’ve heard but ne’er so well expressed. The core of the set was the Revenge album- “Let’s Go”, “Thorn in My Side”, “When Tomorrow Comes” however it is the Be Yourself Tonight material that shines best in performance, notably “Conditioned Soul” and “It’s All Right (Baby’s Coming Back”). “Would I Lie to You?” came closest to making the flesh actually creep and “Who’s That Girl?” from the Touch album, had devotees swaying and crooning as Lennox steered her cordless microphone towards the crowd.

In addition to the splendid Zavala on saxophone, Chucho Merchan played bass like an insolent wine waiter, ex-Blondie drummer Clem Burke judiciously mixed acoustic and Simmonds drums and Patrick Seymour laid keyboard flourishes into every available crevice. In his solo he gave us a Bach Toccata and Fugue just to show us he learnt something at Oxford. So it was left to Dave Stewart to carry the torch for rock and roll as he unleashed solo after solo echoing Townshend and Clapton and resembling neither, although he actually quoted from other gifted eclectics.with a rousing serve of “Norwegian Wood” on electric 12 string and a few salty bars from “She’s a Woman”.

After a carefully timed encore of the unremarkable “Missionary Man”, Annie Lennox ignited the crowd with “Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves” with Joniece Johnson, who gave depth to Lennox’s lead vocals throughout the set, playing the Aretha bits. They skipped and twirled and partyed on like sisters in triumph until Dave, now in his rhinestone bodgie leathers, in a dissonant moment (just like the record) reminded us that it is the blokes who play all the loud guitars. It would have been a great moment to stop, however mixed or opportunistic, because the song has, rightly, become an anthem. But instead we got the icky “Miracle of Love” and a moment of resonance got submerged as the Eurythmics had their two bob each way.

Lennox and Stewart have assembled a potentially great stage act but we witnessed a talented band, over-ripe and almost cynically over-rehearsed. That, of course, is the secret of pop success and as the song goes: “Sweet Dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree?”

“Swanky” The Adelaide Review, No.36, March 1987, p.20.

Simply Red

Published: 1987-03-31

Billy Bragg Le Rox

Billy Bragg is the busker who turned busker. He used to wander the streets performing with a fifty quid electric guitar and a 60 watt amp on his back. Now he tours the world and performs at Le Rox with a fifty quid guitar and his 60 watt amp on the ground. There is much to be pleased about with Billy Bragg. At a time when record production takes an expensive month of Sundays and -results in digitally impeccable piffle, Bragg goes into Chappell Music’s studio for three afternoons and records Life’s a Riot for, Spy vs Spy, which went gold, as they say, and along with his subsequent albums and EP’s,- has earned him accolades in the English music press since 1983.

Bragg’s records sound like they have been.recorded in a bucket but what you hear is what you get - anywhere. It is a riot of guaranteed minimum product and, like punk music, it is intended to shove it straight up all the woofing and tweetering aural pedants. Bragg is a musical Leveller. He sells his records for £3.99 or less and makes sure the price is etched into the artwork so no-one can put an adhesive - nice-price increase on it.

At Le Rox, where the sound crew took all night to get audible bass lines ‘out of the Every Brothers’ opening gig Billy Bragg, the electric Luddite was in his element. He stepped on stage vamping his raggedy guitar while his amp distorted like an early SO’s hearing aid. The Bragg sound is completed by his music hall vocal, one we’ve heard before in English pop with Mike Sarne, Freddy and the Dreamers, Ray Davies and, more recently, the remarkable Ian Dury. Observers will remark that it is simply a working class accent but there is a disturbing touch of parody to it - a kind of cloth cap Stepin Fetchitt.

This may be the Billy Bragg paradox. The more anti-pop he becomes in his unbelievably ordinary green polo shirt, unbelievably ordinary jeans and sneakers and his Tommy-at-the- Somme haircut, the more the New Wave fellow travellers at Le Rox bestowon him, if not radical, then at least Wobbly, chic. In a nearly two hour set BB went through the catalogue - opening with the rancid little mantra “Did you ever love someone you shouldn’t” repeated often enough to become downright sinister. “The Milkman of Human Kindness” and “Greetings to the New Brunette” followed and drew warm recognition from the full house crowd. Then with “World Turned Upside Down” we got, the first of a series of history lessons about the lessons of history. Despite his effortless stage presence and artful lack of art in his lyrics, Bragg seems sometimes not to realise his strengths. The chat begins to ramble and we are reminded of Billy Bragg’s association with the so-called Red Wedge bands of the Labor Party hustings calling on doleboys and girls to vote. All that’s fine but in commenting on the local scene he underestimated our disenchantment with ALP backsliding. ‘You are insulting us!’ someone snapped at Bragg, and while nothing was further from his mind, he was.

Bragg is best when his songs remain elliptical, haunting, sly and unadorned with explanation. He can turn out rock riffs with astonishing ease - his “l Heard it on the Grapevine” was a marvel. But it’s his vignettes of curdled romantic love in “The Saturday Boy” and “Myth of Trust” that actually delve the social and economic alienation that he so clearly perceives.

New songs like “Valentine’s Day is Over” showed Bragg is still more than able to extrude a lyric, but rallying choruses from “To Have and Have Not”, “The Man in the Iron Mask” and “Think Again” were the ones that hit the mark.

As he worked through three encores Billy Bragg really got brewing: “A New England” - “I don’t want to change the world/I’m not looking for a New England/I’m just looking for another girl” - was followed by the bitterly satiric “The Home Front” and the melancholy “Between the Wars’. With his mate Wiggsy on hand to tune guitars it was a disappointment that Bragg didn’t call on him earlier than the final encore for a few extra chords. Bragg can coax a sweet, almost folksy 12 string sound, as his recordings of “Walk Away Renee” and the Byrds-like “Ideology” attest, but his set was more thrash than shading for the most part.

It isn’t often that performers declare themselves as openly and intelligently as Billy Bragg. He is heroically at the confluence of punk, folk and rock and roll, a kind of Bo Diddley of the barricades, and he reflects the sort of political seriousness that only Margaret Hilda Thatcher could engender. lt may be hard to believe that “There is Power in a Union” after the British Miners got the icepick but there is no doubt that he is dinkum.

When he says that no-one changed the world from the concert stage he is probably being too modest. When he points to the audience and asks “which side are you on?” - from most performers it would seem an impertinence. From Billy Bragg it sounds like a fair question.

“Simply Red” The Adelaide Review, April, 1987. np.

Getting Close to Royalty

Published: 1987-06-01

The Pretenders Thebarton Theatre

In many ways Chrissie Hynde is soul companion to songwriters Ellie Greenwich and Carole King, who between them produced most of the definitive popular music released in the early sixties by Liberty Records and Phil Spector’s own Philles label. Like Leslie Gore, Sandie Shaw and Dionne Warwick, Chrissie Hynde’s music is Aching Pop - soulful, histrionic and bitterly aware of the chains of love.

The last time the Pretenders toured in early 1982 they gave one of the worst concerts ever seen in Adelaide. The band was ragged and sullen and Hynde shrieked and pouted at everyone in sight. The grim news that guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon both died of overdoses within ten months of the gig gave some explanation but Hynde herself seemed unable to marshal her volatile talents either as writer or performer.

The Pretenders’ first album was one of the marvels of 1980. In its fusion of punk, pop and hardline rock, it showed popular music’s remarkable capacity to adapt, mutate and conquer. Their second album was a more mixed effort but then, by that time, so was the band. The third album brought in Robbie Mcintosh on guitar and Malcolm Foster on bass and was aptly named Learning to Crawl. The current album, Get Close, sees Hynde at her most confident and commercially resilient. Martin Chambers, who played drums and if their last concert was anything to go by, also refereed the. band through its indulgences and tragedies, was unceremoniously fired (a fact daintily omitted from the programme notes) and now Hynde is the only true Pretender.

But, in a sense, she always was. The band always reflected her sensibilities, the pungent lyrics, her experiences, and back in Adelaide in 1987, Chrissie Hynde showed that given half an hour to find her feet she can deliver great rock and roll. As the band straggled through “Message of Love”, “The Adultress” and, after a nervy dedication to Honeyman-Scott, “The Kid”, the crowd was feeling fidgetty. You didn’t need to own a CD of Get Close to feel that the sound mix was like kapok and Hynde nervously off-key. Malcolm Foster on bass plunked every which way and continued to ramble all night while Robbie Mackintosh kept cranking out· riffs like malfunctioning incendiary devices. The lighting was great from the word go, with mauves, scarlets, blues and banks of criss-crossing colour which, with carefully differentiated sound, should have been galvanizing.

A few phrases from John Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down” led into ‘Light of the Moon’ from Get Close and Chrissie Hynde finally started moving her stetson in time with her considerable talents. Perhaps the initial rattliness was a calculated effect because there’s nothing like a shoddy start to make you grateful when a band hits its straps. In “Private Life “ Hynde’s plangent lyric found its correlative in Rupert Black’s mesmeric keyboards and Blair Cunningham’s clipped, even drumming. At least, having given Chambers the heave-ho, Hynde found a drummer with power and intelligent detail in Cunningham. “Hymn to Her”, the band’s single, followed, with Hynde’s vocals gathering expressive energy as the band led straight into “Chill Factor”.

A nostalgic return to halcyon Pretenders material with “Stop Your Sobbing” contrasted with Hynde’s apocalyptic blues polemic about her native Cleveland, “My City was Gone”. From Learning to Crawl,-the song showed the band, particularly Robbie Mackintosh, really learning to swagger, with RnB worthy of The .Stones, which of course means boogie ripped off from only the very best of black Chicago. “Mystery Achievement”, another ineffable triumph from the first album, got a disappointingly gabbled treatment, but “Middle of the Road”, with its delectable guitar chords and witty lyrics made amends. With “Precious”, the band reassured us that it really can cope with playing the greats from Chrissie Hynde’s past life.

The sound hadn’t really got itself together by the encore, but The Pretenders had. ‘Don’t Give Me Love’! again reminded that Chrissie Hynde could make a living any day as a. Top 40 songwriter. Then she crossed our palms with the obligatory “Brass in Pocket”, which, like the best live performances came through not only with sweet familiarity but also with the shock of revelation. The audience, fitful and undemonstrative most of the night, bayed for more, and Chrissie Hynde climbed her stage staircase once more and sang “The Wait” with the rightful air of a Pretender who need wait no longer.

“Getting Close to Royalty” The Adelaide Review, June 1987, pp.12-13.

Celt Following

Published: 1987-11-30

The Chieftains Festival Theatre

Even when they’re just tuning their instruments the Chieftains sound better than most bands. Their mellifluous harmonies have been generating journalistic blarney for more than twenty four years, in which time the group has produced some fifteen albums including some very successful music for films.

In their time the Chieftains have rubbed tin whistles with just about everyone- Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Mike Oldfield for instance. They even played the curtain-raiser for the Stones at Slane Castle and the Pope at Phoenix Park.

Under the careful guidance of Paddy Maloney, the Chieftains’ chieftain, they have become the most successful Irish export since Guinness.

They’ve played the Great Wall of China and are currently involved in a project with the musically shameless James Galway. Politically the band makes a virtue of appearing non-aligned, playing up the fact that their harper, Derek Bell, is an Ulsterman among Dubliners. But the force of their devotion to Irish national music and, in particular, Maloney’s dedication as performer and record producer, has done much for the gaelic and republican causes.

Their most recent ceilidh at the Festival Theatre was a more subdued outing than usual. For a start, a good hour of the show was handed over to Mary Black, formerly of De Danaan and now the Sheena Easton of Irish pop.

She was a popular choice for many in the audience and has a winsome contralto reminiscent of the best of Judy Collins. Unfortunately, her repertoire of contemporary folk club songs lacked sparkle.

Kicking off with Eric Bogle’s Leaving the Land, she then sang a few that had been very good to her over the years - Song for Ireland, The Rose of Allendale, Ellis Island and her latest inoffensive little bijou, Katie, Not even Anachie Gordon did more than skim the dark waters of balladry.

Guitarist and composer Declan Sinnott and Patrick Cowley on keyboards provided fine accompaniment but despite their undoubted talents Mary Black and band were a bit low on Irish ergs.

Which could be said of the main men as well. The Chieftains have made a few bob by now but they sure haven’t splurged it on their stage wardrobe. Of course that doesn’t matter except that the whole show ran a shade too much on charm and’informality to really get down to business. The opening medley including Gray’s Pipe and the Flags of Dublin quickly displayed the talents of Matt Molloy, late of Planxty and new to the Chieftains but not new to the B-flat flute. Maloney’s whistles and uileann pipes were matched by Derek Bell on harp while Martin Fay and Seane Keane can play the fiddle in their sleep and just about did.

The programme was larded with bohdrim player, Kevin Conneff’s endearingly fragile tenor. He meandered through the execrable verses of Here’s a Health to the Company Man then during the Independence Hornpipe a local Irish dancer joined the fray in a rare moment of colour and movement.

The Chieftains started to get beyond the preliminaries with an all too short conflation of screen·themes ’including The Grey Fox, the Ballad of the Irish Horse and Barry Lyndon which highlighted how important the band has been in bringing Irish music to a mass audience.

After showing us what they’d learnt in China; including some startling hammer dulcimer sounds from the gifted Derek Bell, the band without looking at their watches ambled into the home straight with a marathon version of Drowsy Maggie. As each stepped forward the solos ranged from the sublime to the soporific. Molloy’s flute’ again excelled, Keane fiddled but didn’t really get it right, Fay feigned and Derek Bell played Scott Joplin just for something completely different. Then Mary Black came back· for an encore and the band played heighho. Back to the diamond mine.

The sound mix was a treat and band’s personalities blend most amiably but unlike earlier shows, the set lacked depth and some of the Chieftains’ usual Authority. This time round the Chieftains rule, but only OK-ish.

“Celt Following”, The Adelaide Review, No.45, December, 1987, p.32.

This Year’s Model

Published: 1988

Elvis Costello and the Confederates Thebarton Theatre

In his warm-up set Nick Lowe, King of the rockpile, warned that Elvis Costello’s concert in Adelaide would be no ordinary gig. After months on the road from Atlanta, Georgia through Europe, Japan and Australia, Adelaide was the band’s last stop before heading, variously, home.

Lowe obliged with a modest draught of his bubbly pop - Cruel to be Kind, Without Love and, befitting an erstwhile son-in-law of Johnny Cash, he moved his vowels from London to Tennessee to sing I Knew the Bride when She Used to Rock and Roll from his Cowboy Outfit album.

A fanfare of synthesisers opened the second half and Elvis Costello capered on with his acoustic guitar for a solo version of Girls Talk from his Trust album.

Costello emerged in the power pop days of the late Seventies along with Joe Jackson and Graham Parker. Jackson has gone into torch ballads and Ellington, Parker, regrettably, has gone into obscurity and Elvis Costello has become nearly as musically eclectic and prolific as Bob Dylan.

Dressed like the Milky Bar kid in frock coat and diamante bootlace tie, Elvis is like an egghead hoodlum. Like Dylan he arrogantly chose the pseudonym of a legend and, also like him, he has lived up to his own promise. Costello has to be one of the most inventive composers and performers to be found anywhere.

And that is even before we get to the band. Having deflected the Attractions, his regular backing group for the past decade, Costello has got together a bunch of demi-gods called the Confederates which includes Southern Gentlemen James Burton and Jim Keltner, with Jerry Schiff on bass, Austin Delore on keyboards, including Wurlitzer and Hammond, and Nick Lowe again, on rhythm guitar and vocals.

When the Confederates opened fire with Tokyo Storm Warning and the mixers frantically twiddled the knobs and switches to contain the cavernous sound, you knew it wasn’t going to be one of those fifty minute phone-ins Elvis used to be notorious for. With Pouring Water on a Drowning Man and Brilliant Mistake the band moved from rockabilly to mainline Costello like licks of lightning.

When the other Elvis, the one from Graceland, used to go on the road the first phone-call was for guitarist James Burton. On stage his speed and precision at the frets of his Fender is only matched by Jim Keltner’s drumming. Session drummer to the famous, Keltner sat hunched over his rig and not only never missed a beat all night but played like there were three of him. It was all solid bass drum and crisp snares and cymbals - no bomblast, just relentless, classic rock and roll.

Elvis sang so many new songs that it was hard to keep track. With Let Him Dangle, a bitter account of the execution of an innocent, Costello began to bring a vehemence and passion to his singing which is singularly unnerving.

In the first set with the Confederates Costello sang songs from King of America - I Wear it Proudly, The Poisoned Rose and The Big Light, then Are You Straight or Are You Blind and Uncomplicated (with Elvis spraying Stratocaster feedback everywhere) from his recent Blood and Chocolate album.

Back on his own with an acoustic guitar sound the size of a house, Costello sang his classic Watching the Detectives and, with a one-line quote from Alison, it was adieu, apparently.

Then, after the crowd peeled the paint off the roof, Elvis returned to perform the longest encore since Melba. He opened with I Want You · extemporised into a mantra of yearning the like of which we haven’t heard since John Lennon’s brand of open-heart self-surgery. In a great show this was one of the best moments.

Oliver’s Army, Costello’s tilt against the military has lost none of its chipper sarcasm. This was followed by new songs Feline Tormenter and the Randy Newman-ous God’s Comic.

Even though Costello had not brought along his chocolate wheel to spin for requests, the crowd was getting fidgety for favourites. For the long-awaited Pump it Up, from This Year’s Model, Elvis hit the switch on the rhythm machine and cranked up the Stratocaster for a raucous performance that detoured into Subterranean Homesick Blues before surfacing again. Elvis switched to keyboards for the winsome Veronica and the gentle ballad Hide Your Love. Then he out-moondanced Van Morrison with a version of Jackie Wilson Said.

When he got round to the full version of Alison it meandered into an Irish dirge of revenge against Thatcher and her ilk reminding us that not only is Elvis married to a member of the Pogues, but his real name is Declan McManus.

With the ground crew at Thebarton looking nervously at their watches Costello renewed his alliance with the Confederates to go way over the curfew for the final set. Starting with Lovable from the new album and band was by now a juggernaut of rock and roll - loud, immaculately clear and playing in preternatural accord.

They breathed life into country hokum like Merle Haggard’s Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down and Jim Reeves’ He’ll Have to Go, and, with Elvis strumming the strings off his Gibson, Nick Lowe came forward to duet on his What’s So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding? One more neanderthal rocker - Leave My Kitten Alone, a new slow march - Day is Done and then Elvis wrapped his mangled vowels around the cornpone grinder That’s How You Got Killed Before. After two and three quarter hours he and the Confederates finally punched the clock.

Though he hadn’t intended to, Costello had come close to playing a history of rock and roll. He performs like a coiled spring, his energy seems limitless and the intensity is scary.

Admirers who have been wondering whether he has been losing direction lately need not worry.

“This Year’s Model”, The Adelaide Review, No.46, January, 1988, pp.21-2.

Orchestral Manoeuvres

Published: 1988-06-01

Murray Bramwell talks with Chief Conductor Nicholas Braithwaite and General Manager Michael Elwood about the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, its past, present and, most importantly, its future.

It is the second night of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s Masters Series for May. Austrian pianist Walter Klien is playing a solo section from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major with fluid elegance while Concertmaster Ladislaw Jasek and his associate Alan Smith beam with comradely encouragement. It is one moment of many in the evening’s programme (works by Australian composer Brian Howard, Mozart and Tchaikovsky) that indicates that the Adelaide Symphony is not only playing its socks off these days, it is also greatly enjoying doing it.

There is much to be pleased about, of course. The appointment of Nicholas Braithwaite-as Chief Conductor has proven to be the best idea anyone has had in years and the orchestra itself has distinguished· itself on every outing all year. It scrubbed up well during the Festival, playing four separate concerts under guest Australians Barry Tuckwell, Brenton Langbein and Mark Elder, as well as Richard Bonynge· for Dame Joan’s mad scenes. Then there were four performances under Stuart Challender of The Fiery Angel with the State Opera.

In each case whatever else was being said about the night’s music the orchestra received warm notices. This year’s season began strongly in April with guest soloist Mark Peskanov playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and the orchestra distinguishing· itself with a much-praised performance of Shostakovich’s 8^th Symphony - and as we go to print the innovation of a concert version of Act I of Wagner’s Die Walkure is imminent. Not bad at a time when former aviator, and now Minister for the Air Waves, Senator Evans has been more than muttering about devolving the State Orchestras to help pay the ABC’s phone bill. But that particular war is not yet over. At a time yet unspecified three years hence the General Managers of the state orchestras will be meeting again to discuss by whom and how the considerable expenses of running the six Australian orchestras will be met.

The ASO’s General Manager, Michael Elwood, would be the first to say that while the orchestra is on a roll at the moment there are many questions about funding, programme, subscription sales and venues to be discreetly chewing the nails about. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra began back in 1936 with seventeen musicians. It was formed to do live radio work for the ABC - everything from signature tunes to light entertainment programmes. But the orchestra was officially established in its concert-giving role in 1949. That began a remarkable period during which Australian audiences were treated to the best of the world’s musicians. Performers sailed to Australia and performed extensively throughout the country. Many Australians will not have forgotten concerts from Klemperer, Sir Malcolm Sargeant, even Stravinsky, and many others. It was in this time that the unshakeable loyalty of the subscribers began.

But as Nicholas Braithwaite observes, all that was changed utterly by the LP record and relatively inexpensive jet travel. Both upped the ante and made the music of Europe arid North America, paradoxically, easier to reach but harder to import. The issues that now face the orchestra have been developing over the past ten years - since the salad days for the orchestra under Elyakum Shapira ended. When the Festival Centre opened in 1973 the subscriber list increased by a thousand as the format changed from the traditional three concerts in the Town Hall to two in the Festival Theatre.

After Shapira left in 1979 the orchestra worked with a series of guest conductors but no-one was really minding the store and Central Casting in Sydney was making all the decisions irrespective of their suitability to Adelaide and its audience. People got bored with the programme and as the orchestra lost morale, it lost some of its lustre as well. So when General Managers were appointed for the six state orchestras it was not before time. Braithwaite sees this as a crucial change:

“Before that, management was in direct line toand from Sydney and had no autonomy at all.The changes have created a different philosophy and we’re going to see more and more change. Orchestras are going to have a much more indepedent voice about how things are done in their town.”

The renewal of Braithwaite’s two year term will also make for better dealings with the orchestra. Now that he and his family have settled in Melbourne - he has taken the position of Dean of Music at the Victorian College of the Arts - his three months of work can be judiciously distributed. “When conductors come in for the minimum time it means that the conductor and the orchestra are nose to nose for three months. That’s too much continuous confrontation for the health of the relationship. It needs to grow all the time and over-exposure harms that. Spreading the three months throughout the year will be better for the audience, the orchestra and me.”

With the establishment of a good working relationship between the affable, energetic Braithwaite and the quietly astute Elwood two other important new appointments have been Kerry Comerford as Marketing Manager and Rosemary Boyle as Promotions Officer. The question of programming and subscription sales is their most important imperative.

Elwood comments:

“We have tried to make the Masters Series more popular and I have tried to redress imbalances in repertoire. There were years when there were no Brahms symphonies, no Haydn and Mozart and people wanted to hear them.”

At the same time Braithwaite has a commitment to broaden the repertoire -

“People like what they know which poses a problem for us because we get in an ever-decreasing circle. It’s a hard balancing act to give people what they know and what they like and at the same time trying to broaden the outlook as well. At the moment we feel we have to establish the confidence of the audience first. But I feel totally committed to the idea of performing modern music, otherwise music will become a museum and will die out like the dinosaurs. It is a question of finding the right forum to display modern music - not just Australian but from elsewhere. Modern work tends to be a ghetto anyway; we don’t want an Australian ghetto as well! One of the audiences is the 1812 ·Overture audience but I don’t think we are playing enough for the squeaky gate audience and they may not be the same. It may not be a good idea to force the 1812 audience to listen to the squeaky gate music and vice versa. We have to identify areas and venues and decide where in the series works can go.“

That is not easy, especially with limited resources for promotion compared to the teams of Education officers operating in the eastern states. Elwood ponders the outreach Meet the Music programme on Wednesday nights at the Town Hall:

“It was designed on a formula - a 20^th century concerto, an Australian work and a mainstream popular symphony. It’s been put to me that it is neither one thing or the other - but I’ in not sure whether that is relevant or not. The problem is not that the music is unlistenable - works like Szymanowski’s Sinfonia concertante and Lutoslawski’s Cello concerto are marvellous - it is just that they are unknown.”

With the terrifying statistic that 80% of their subscribers are over the age of sixty Michael Elwood is looking squarely at the business of finding a younger audience for his orchestra.

“The biggest problem we face is to find the audience that sold out the Kronos Quartet performances in the Festival-and the audience which turned out, for whatever reason, snob appeal or whatever, for the Chicago Symphony. Where are they for the ASO? So does Adelaide not value its orchestra and regard it as strictly second eleven?

Nicholas Braithwaite is quick to reply:

“Absolutely, yes. And they’re wrong. People always think the local team is not as good as the one from somewhere else. The other thing is that people listen to their CD’s and then come along to our concerts. Their CD’s are the Chicago Symphony, Berlin or whatever, done over three weeks in a studio with every slight imperfection taken out – and people regard that as the definition of the standard. The Chicago Symphony wouldn’t maintain that that is the standard they play to! Schwarzkopf put it very well when she said I’m not afraid of my competitors, but I can’t compete with my own recordings.”

Nicholas Braithwaite has appeared with orchestras in Europe, Scandinavia and Canada, as well as Australia and New Zealand. He toured as Associate to Solti with the London Philharmonic, is still Principal Conductor with the Manchester Camerata and has a distinguished association with the English National Opera. He is also very forthright in his regard for the ASO and other Australian orchestras:

“It was interesting with Chicago. I heard them in Melbourne this year. They are a first class orchestra but not very much better than what you hear in Australia and infinitely more numerous which tends to make an orchestra sound better: There were a huge number of strings which we don’t have the money to do. If we could put the number of players on the stage that Chicago had this orchestra would sound just as good. I think that there’s an ensemble of international standard here in Adelaide - something to be extremely proud of.”

One impediment to the ASO gaining wider acceptance that Braithwaite and Elwood have both identified is music criticism in Adelaide. They feel strongly that the orchestra deserves a better press.and that local reviewers are more preoccupied with maintaining their authority than reporting the event with any accuracy.

Says Braithwaite -

“For local critics to establish themselves they seem to have to knock people down in the process.·Reviewers are crucial to establishing audience confidence. They have the power to prevent that happening, although they would be appalled to think that was possible - there is no basic evil intention, just a lack of understanding of the effect that they have. I don’t deny the critics their role but when you know you’ve achieved something first class and it is unfavourably reviewed then it is demoralising because for those in the 20 to 45 age range it only confirms that they should stay away.”

It is clear, both watching the ASO in performance and talking to Nicholas Braithwaite, that he and the orchestra have taken a shine to each other. The enthusiasm he has for his task is infectious and he means it to be:

“There’s a real wave in the orchestra at the moment and it is very important to us that it gets across because if people come to really believe in this orchestra there will be an atmosphere where we can’t go to Government and say we need sixteen extra chairs on the stage to- bring us up to basic size and it will increase the standard and standing of the orchestra. And if it is perceived as doing a terrific job it will be listened to. I feel strongly about this and I can say it because I am a newcomer. I find this a really happy orchestra, who get stuck into the work - and work much harder than most I’m associated with. And they are playing to a really terrific standard. That’s something we’ve got to make people understand.”

“Orchestral Manoeuvres” The Adelaide Review, June 1988, pp.10-11.

Miles Ahead

Published: 1988-06-01

Miles Davis Thebarton Theatre

Miles Davis is unique. His forty year career in jazz has been spent at the most avant part of the vanguard. As a teenage prodigy he was, after Dizzy Gillespie, the most distinctive trumpeter in New York, or Paris, or anywhere. At the age of sixty-one he still presides over a band which is bursting with invention.

Inexplicably, on his first Australian tour, Davis attracted a less than full house for his one Thebarton concert. But those who were there won’t be forgetting it in a hurry.

The list of his musical collaborators spans the history of progressive jazz - Parker, Coltrane, Evans, Hancock, Corea, Shorter, Zawinul, McLaughlin, Jarrett, Liebman, and others, have laid the polyrhythms and polytonalitics over which Davis has played his essentially unchangeable, painterly trumpet lines.

Davis’s concert began with the opening phrases of In A Silent Way and switched straight into a non-stop three hour set of complex riffing over the most relentless rhythm in electric music. As in his live recordings at Fillmore in 1971 and the Osaka concerts in the late 1970’s, the Davis band played compositions end-to-end, no intros, no chat, just a seemingly endless serve of material from the recent You’re Under Arrest and Tutu albums.

It is an uncompromising sound, obsessive, loud and insistent. Ricky Wellman’s rock drumming is garnished and paced by Marilyn Mazur’s rippling percussion while Daryl Jones provided a nimble, bone-hard bass. On keyboards Robert Irving III and Adam Holzman (the only one of his session musicians on the tour) traded splashing synth and piano phrases as Kenny Garrett on sax and young West Indian guitarist, Foley, formed yet another paired sound.

Over all this, Davis played his amplified trumpet-bursts of rapid notes and the sinuous lyrical lines that make his work so singular. Eccentric, self-absorbed, he pads about the stage, pointing his trumpet at the floor-boards as he plays, moving to the edge of the stage for others to take solos and tinkering with a bank of keyboards to produce that skinny Farfisa organ sound he has used more recently to set washes of simple chords against increasingly strident guitar riffs.

One of the strongest rock influences on Davis has to be Jimi Hendrix and Foley’s fuzzbox feedback guitar is used almost like an additional reed in duets with Garrett.

But unlike straight rock, Davis’s music weaves, shuffles and turns back on itself. It sets up funk patterns that never resolve with the cross lines of trumpet and reed. It circles, ponders, worries a theme and opens up, only to abruptly pull back into contrapuntal tetchiness again. It is both maddening and exhilarating and must surely be the music of the late 20th century spheres.

The sound, splendidly managed by the band’s engineers, was loud but uncannily clear and the lighting and staging was up to the best standards of rock and roll. We had waited a long time to hear Davis in Australia and the concert was a credit to local promoter Trevor Hunt. That it was so far short of selling out indicates that great jazz in Adelaide may in future need to be under the umbrella of Festival subsidy.

Among a welter of material, the band played versions of Portia, Splatch and Perfect Way from Tutu and a wistful rendering of Cyndy Lauper’s Time after Time. Some of the audience waited in vain for Round Midnight and Sketches of Spain and turned on their heels before the set was over. Miles Davis, in his silver suit and heavy shades, still manages to surprise and dismay even the faithful.

Frailer now, he sends his band out on some of the more dangerous missions but none were more musically memorable than Miles Davis’s own raids on the inarticulate.

“Miles Ahead” The Adelaide Review, No.52, June, 1988, p.24.

Relative Success

Published: 1988-06-01

Clannad Festival Theatre

As their name suggests, Clannad is a family affair. Paul, Ciaran and Maire, the Brennan siblings, combined with their twin uncles Noel and Padraig Duggan in 1970 to form one of Ireland’s foremost folk outfits.

A lot has happened to Clannad since they first started winning the battle of the bodhrans back in Gweedore, Donegal. Maire’s husky vibrato lead vocals, harmonised with the choral voices of her near and dear, have made the Clannad sound distinctively, sepulchrally Irish.

It was in 1980, when their fifth album Fuaim (Sound) was released, that their hallmark blend of vocals and synthesisers became fully evolved - . then Clannad went into the film business. The lilting sweetness of Maire’s voice layered over bass synths made the traditional air Mhorga’s Na Horo Gheallaidh into the best-selling Theme from Harry’s Game. It was like Fleetwood Mac, New Age music and wistful trad-folk all rolled into one. It went to Number Five in Britain and commercial recognition in the US was not far off.

Clannad followed with the increasingly ornate Macalla (Echo) album and their latest, Sirius, recorded in Wales and gussied up on the West Coast by Greg Ladanyi and a Who’s Hum of near-celebrity vocalists like Bruce Hornsby and Steve Perry.

Opening with the majestic Caislean Or, the band made it clear that the Brennans and the Duggans intended to make the most of friends of the family, Ian Parker and his battery of keyboards, drummer Aaron Ahmun and former Bryan Ferry henchman, Mel Collins on tenor and soprano sax.

There were synthesisers everywhere and the drums were mic-ed to the teeth. Clannad certainly do not lack what is called a fat sound. After Skelligs and The Wild Cry they sang their own Second Nature from Sirius and like much of the late work of Fairport and Steeleye Span, Clannad wasted their splendid talents on mediocre pop. Despite Mel Collins’ soaring Baker Street sax work and plenty of bombast from Parker’s keyboards, Something to Believe In, another new song, was also hard to credit.

A cluster of instrumentals from the soundtrack of Robin of Sherwood provided some of the best music all night. Lady Marian opened with incandescent harp and synthesiser duets and then the flute work from the multitalented Paul Brennan gave the medley of Miss McDermott and Royal some lovely shading. The final piece, Action, got the band opened up again, but not to best effect as the heavy drum and keyboard sounds turned Clannad into Emerson, Lake and O’Reilly again.

It is as though the band doesn’t trust the core of their work enough, or else, after so long together, they are tired of the traditional nexus. But it is songs like Buchaill on Eirne, with deft acoustic guitar work from Paul and Uncle Padraig that really are the money in the bank.

After The Turning Tide and Closer To Your Heart, the band performed the Theme from Harry’s Game with disarming understatement, only to dissipate the mood with their worthy, but overblown anthem to Greenpeace, Sirius.

Clannad are a great band and they have matched traditional and high tech instruments beautifully although too often they created special moments - an unaccompanied Gweebara ditty or a winsome air - and then obliterated them with undistinguished sub-Stevie Nicks pop.

But when they hit the home straight with the traditional favourite Dohbar Do, Padraig finally plugged in his mandala and Paul got his whistle into gear. Mel Collins, a consummate reed player, played something Irish at last and Clannad achieved what they had been nudging at all night. They gave us unsentimental indomitable Gaelic music that could only be called electric.

“Relative Success” The Adelaide Review, No.52, June, 1988, pp.24-5.

Eminence Greasy

Published: 1988-10-01

Murray Bramwell talks to Doug Thomas about The Greasy Pop Empire.

Doug Thomas is about to move into the middle-sized big time. He hopes. After eight years his independent record label, Greasy Pop

(which has released nearly fifty catalogue items - more than 70,000 singles, albums and cassettes - to the perimeters of the known world) has signed a pressing, promotion and distribution deal with Festival Records. The idea is to get that company's considerable promotional resources behind two Adelaide bands, the Exploding White Mice and the Mad Turks from Istanbul.

It is an important step for Thomas's tenacious little company. Greasy Pop has always lived on its wits but on this deal Doug could lose a large piece of shirt. It has meant considerable expense upfront.

"The Exploding White Mice album has set me back six months. It owes me a lot of money. I paid for all the recording. It's a big investment and right now I owe the pressing plant and the printer, and royalties are due for three or four albums which have sold a couple of thousand copies each."

Nevertheless, Thomas is managing to look calm about it. Especially since after only five weeks the Mice album has been doing very good business interstate without systematic Top Forty airplay or the benefits of video saturation, and these days the Greasy Pop label has consolidated a brand loyalty not only in Australia but internationally - a just reward for perseverance.

It all started back in 1980 when the Dagoes, a band for whom Thomas played rhythm guitar, decided to make a record. Doug formed a company and paid for recording costs and the returns were ploughed back for their second venture "a massively expensive double EP. We blew thousands of dollars on that record. There were recording costs over months, two lots of mastering, and a massively expensive masterly executed Andrew Mc Hugh cover." Thomas pauses for an aside-

"Andrew's one person who has supported me all the way through and if it weren't for Andrew and the Empire Times Press I doubt that the company would exist." He also wryly thanks his unnamed bank manager for his forbearance.

After the success of the Dagoes records, Thomas recalls, other bands began to come forward.

"They'd come to me and say they wanted to make a record. I'd say: 'fine but I haven't got the money to do it - all my money's in vinyl, in stock. Save up gig money. You'll probably need $1500 or $2000, less if it's a single. Then give me the tape and I'll get it manufactured. I'll see it through from there.' I've always seen myself as the middleman. To me the music is the important part. I'm just the business man, and a shoddy one at that. But I've held it together - for eight years."

Thomas isn't the only independent in the business but his peers are all in Sydney companies such as Citadel, Redeye and Waterfront - or Melbourne, where A Go Go Records is based. So is it tougher operating out of Adelaide?

"It is quite isolated here. The musical centre of Australia is Sydney. But creatively it is happening here. Some of the most vital music in the country has been coming out of Adelaide in the past three years. Bands like The Garden Path and The Lizard Train are on a par with anything in the world. I'm very proud of those records and constantly frustrated that their sales figures haven't backed up my judgement of them musically."

"I don't have the resources to promote them. And radio in Australia is a closed shop. All the alternative stations play our stuff. But on commercial stations there is no rock and roll radio - there's no AM radio left in Adelaide or Top Forty. There's SA-FM, sure, they assist and give me the cursory night-time plays and have picked up a couple of my releases and played them. But basically my releases don't fit their programming which is quite bland - and I don't release bland records."

So what is the Greasy Sound?

"There is a sense of performance. It sounds like there are people involved, performing songs they believe in. If someone gives me a demo I can pick straight away if it has been worked and worked and worked on. You can hear if something is just awash with overdubs because it has usually lost all its life on the first hearing anyway.

A good song has a hook, lyrics which are not stupid and it's got that snap. It has got to have life which also has to transfer to the vinyl. When I recorded with the Spikes we did Colour in a Black Forest in two days. I like to work quickly, go into the studio and bang it straight down. The more you delay the more tired the band gets.

Everything you hear on the radio has been done over and over until every person or computer chip playing it is screaming to stop. They're saying we've done it till we hate it."

"I like pop music of all forms whether it be one person with an acoustic guitar or seventeen with wild electric guitars and drums. The Sex Pistols, Radio Birdman and the Saints are influences but I go back to the Sixties to bands like The Masters Apprentices, the Easybeats, the Troggs, the Pretty Things, the Stones and the Kinks. In Australia we are very lucky, we get music from everywhere.

“Although I tend to dismiss English music now. I haven't heard anything original in ten years. The Punk movement was basically from the Stooges and the New York Dolls from America. It was picked up and repackaged by clever people like Malcolm McLaren. The English are the chameleons of rock and roll, I don't think they have anything original to offer. I guess my taste is a bastardisation of everything I grew up with, with some kind of weird hippie ideal as to 'honest' music, not fabricated stuff."

The paradox of Greasy Pop is that many of the recorded bands are better known in Stockholm or Amsterdam than they are in Adelaide. A large proportion of Greasy stock goes straight out of the country. Thomas doesn’t do mail order selling, it is fiddly and expensive. Instead, he works with distributors in Melbourne and companies like Rough Trade in London who move his stock to France, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia as well as to the US.

There are risks involved when overseas licenses haven't been properly secured, as Thomas explains:

"It not so much a matter of bootlegging as outright lying and thieving. A company in the US owes us royalties for five to six thousand copies of the Mice's Nest of Vipers album. It's the 'cheque's in the mail' syndrome. This company also released the Screaming Believers and the Spikes."

Thomas had his suspicions all along but sometimes, he argues, it is a reasonable risk if it enables bands to get their recordings distributed overseas, especially if they have already covered costs with Australia sales. The Nest of Vipers, for instance has already been a tidy little earner. It has sold more than six thousand copies Australia-wide which, for an independent, is a hit.

But the overseas market isn't always so perilous. The Lizard Train so impressed a Swedish promoter that he flew the band to Stockholm for a rock festival and then organised a three month tour for them. Mercifully, Thomas remarks, the tour broke even and now the band will visit again, and more importantly will sell more records in Sweden.

Another band, Liz Dealey and the Twenty Second Sect, have attracted a lot at interest from the Megadisc company in Holland who have already released the Triffids, Celibate Rifles and the Screaming Believers. Megadisc are offering to licence the band and give them an advance on further recording. The Twenty Second Sect can hardly get work in Adelaide. Thomas, a vociferous advocate of his fellow musicians, still finds these ironies unendurable.

For this reason the Festival link is an important one. "It is a step into the mainstream, not mainstream music but the mainstream industry. You have to join the industry if you want to sell records and get airplay. It's magic how all of a sudden radio is interested when they're not on an independent label."

Greasy Pop records and tapes have always been cheaper than mainstream list prices and Thomas keeps a close eye on quality control. In many respects Greasy Pop is a cottage industry. Thomas operates from home, although he is moving into offices in Magill. and he attends to distribution in Adelaide himself.

A former owner of a record store he knows the trade and makes sure that local retailers are well supplied. He's a stickler for detail as well. One of the problems in manufacturing records through Adelaide is that there are no facilities for gluing covers. Thomas didn't like the way the people he hired did the hand gluing so now he does most of it himself.

As for video, Thomas has got nothing against it, except the prohibitive cost. "l can't warrant putting anything from $1500 to $5000 into one song. I can make an album for that! A video will seldom be played more than once so it becomes far too expensive. I could take a half-page ad in the Advertiser for a week and that would be more effective."

Doug Thomas had been waiting for a question about the Greasy Pop ethic and he just happened to have a press statement handy. He reads aloud:

"l can't argue for pop music as a new art form. It has been with us under countless aliases for many years. It has been disguised, diluted, synthesised, programmed and horribly overproduced so that now the accepted pop norm is a mechanical disco beat. To me pop music is 4/ 4 time and Adelaide is one of the few places where pop is being made with energy and an honest presentation of the melodies. The only thing new in pop music is the spirit which creates it."

Pausing for a moment, he says "I like that. I wrote that to go with the release of two albums by unknown bands - the Handmedowns and Morning Glory. They are barely known in Adelaide, how do I get them through to the rest of the world?

People ask me all the time, what kind of music is it?' I get tired of saying Power Pop, Paisley Pop, Psychedelic Pop, Garage Pop. It's Pop Music. That's the struggle for me, just to get people to listen. But I think I'm starting to break through."

“Eminence Greasy”, The Adelaide Review, October 1988.

Retrieved April, 2026.

Medium Cool

Published: 1988-10-31

Mick Jagger

Thebarton Oval

With the Stones on the brink of their silver jubilee it would be hardly surprising if some of the faithful at the Mick Jagger concert at Thebarton Ovalwere grandparents. It was rock of ages for all ages as Jagger and the showband served up a concert -of vintage, even antique, Stones, and late Mick from his recent-ish Primitive Cool album.

Heralded by a thunderous bassdrum roll, ’the band came on stage looking like bikies, bandits, Las Vegas musos and ads from Country Life. It’s like the Village_People- there’s one of everything. Even one of the Stones. Mick hits it with “Honky Tonk Woman” and, fifteen years on, he looks slim and expensive in his lemon silk jacket and Isadora scarf. As the band play tight and loud Jagger works the huge stage which extends right around into the crowd so he can get closer to the congregation. His routine hardly needs description - Jagger owns the patent.

He is as good as ever but you keep wondering whether the guitarist in the dark glasses might not be a rejuvenated Keith Richards. No, not that rejuvenated.

Jagger moves to the new stuff – “Throwaway”- a pretty good description really. The crowd don’t know that one and pause a bit. Then “One More Night” and, even better, “Ruby Tuesday”, hit them between the buttons. The Stones’ “Harlem Shuffle” and “Lucky in Love” from “She’s the Boss”, get the band into gear with lead guitarist, Joe Fatriani enticing a funky, grainy sound relentlessly counterpointed by Suzie Davis and Phil Ashley on keyboards, Doug Whimbish’s fat bass and Simon Phillips’ indefatigable power drumming. Charlie Watts would collapse a lung if he played like that.

In the title song, Primitive Cool, Jagger gets a little serious for a moment - “What did you do in the Fifties, Daddy?” It doesn’t suit him - great riffs from the band but the lyrics remind you of “Abraham, Martin and John”. A medium big chill runs through the crowd with “You Can’t Always get What You Want”. The band is hot, so is Jagger. But it is like community singing, the crowd swaying to the sanitized gospel of pragmatic hedonism.

“We’re gonna play some blues fo’ ya,” Mick bellows in his South London/ Alabama dialect and then proceeds to grind through “Little Red Rooster”. When he played the harp as well I was ready to donate money. “One Hit to the Body” followed, then the Hendrix classic “Foxy Lady”. Jagger sang it well in tribute.

The recent “Party Doll” featured Mick on acoustic guitar but was without the aid of the Chieftains’ pipes. Someone pressed the bagpipe button on the Fairlight instead. With an excursion into Aussie balladry, “The Wild Colonial Boy”, Jagger conjured up his execrable Ned Kelly. But it was a nice touch and it showed he didn’t think he was in Kansas City.

After departures, costume changes (more silk, a touch of leather and some Nuigini hand-prints) Mick and the band reconvened for some slick versions of “Get Off My Cloud”, “Bitch”, a spacey rendition of “Gimme Shelter” (the best of the night), “Brown Sugar” and “Start Me Up”. From there it was only “Rock and Roll (And I like it)” and Aerobic “Jack Flash”. This is classy Eighties pop and Jagger put his back into it. Then he sang “Satisfaction” like an artefact. Again, it was faultless in execution but it lacked … well, passion. It was as though we were communing at some rite of perpetual youth and Mick Jagger has not so much been reborn as Reeboksed. I still kept looking out for Keith and Charlie.

“Medium Cool” The Adelaide Review, November, 1988. p.26.

Reich and Roll

Published: 1989

Schnell Fenster Adelaide University Union

It is the sacred duty of university unions to promote bands before their time. In 1975 an unknown band called Split Enz played to thirty-seven people in the Matthew Flinders Theatre and in December 1988 Schnell Fenster, presently the wrong half of the Enz, played to little more than a hundred punters at the Adelaide Uni Union.

None of this would ruffle the confidence of Phil Judd, composer, singer, guitarist, trumpeter and photo- realist painter. He’s seen both ends of the show business and has a habit of leaving bands just when they have a megahit to deal with.

When they first toured their Mental Notes album in 1975, Split Enz were a strange spectacle. At that stage Roxy Music and Bowie were still in full glitter while the Enz were wearing skewwhiff pastel suits and·black toecap shoes. When glam hair fetishism was reaching new heights, Judd and Fenster drummer Noel Crombie (then percussionist and bird whistle soloist) were into tonsorial mutilation not even their mothers could love.

Like Crombie, Judd came through Auckland’s Elam art school and in the early days of Split Enz his was the distinctly Marat/Sade influence. Judd compositions like Mental Notes, Titus and Time for a Change marked the Split Enz sound - layers of Eddie Raynor’s keyboards all glooped through echo with plaintive vocal oyerdubs. It sounded like everyone and no-one and attracted Roxy’s Phil Manzanera enough for him to produce the remixed London release, Second Thoughts.

But when the Finns started to come to the fore with their neo-Beatle melodies and Split Enz finally got the recognition they deserved, Judd headed for the garret and ‘solo projects.’ Never acrimonious, the departure simply marked a pattern which repeated itself after Judd’s early 80’s band, the Swingers, scored one of the biggest singles in Australian pop with Counting the Beat. Again, Judd called it a day, returning to the studio a year or two later for a solo album which vanished without a ripple.

Schnell Fenster consists of original Enz members Crombie and Nigel Griggs and guitarist Michael den Elzen. Opinions vary as to whether the group’s name translates as quick window or fast glass. But either way it’s quirky and the music is certainly nobody’s Krauted House.

In a tight, loud, effortlessly managed set at Adelaide Uni the Fensters played to the first of the faithful from the Sound of Trees debut album. The sound is an amalgam of Squeeze, Rupert Hine, even Robert Palmer when he was looking for clues with Gary Numan, but, as always with Judd, it is entirely idiosyncratic.

Crombie, a proficient drummer these days - no more washboard and tambourine shenanigans for him - counts the beat with Griggs on bass while Michael den Elzen pours on the incendiary guitar. From the funk of Love-Hate Relationship to the spacey Sound of Trees and little-deuce-coupe rhythms of White Flag, Schnell Fenster play great rock.

Judd, no longer shaven, looks dangerously Wildean with his thick side-parted bob haircut. The publicity shots show the band wearing checks without balances but in concert it was all late 60’s retro. Not your Hoodoo Gurus Jughead hippie but something altogether more psychedelicate. Varilights splashed across the heavily textured backcloth while den Elzen extruded plangent guitar riffs to blend with Judd’s eerie vocal.

On the verge of falsetto he scatted through Skin the Cat and Run a Mile. Then after swinging back to Counting the Beat, the Fensters headed home on Never Stop with one foot on the wahwah pedal and Judd’s trumpet heading convincingly into Miles Davis territory before being hauled back by the band’s relentless rock beat.

It would be good to be able to herald Schnell Fenster as next year’s flavour but that might not be what Judd, the reluctant rock star, has in mind. All the more reason to catch them while you can. They are a window worth watching as a hundred lucky people in Adelaide will also tell you.

“Reich and Roll” The Adelaide Review, No.59, January, 1989, p.20.

Kelly Country

Published: 1989

Paul Kelly and the Messengers Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly has to be one of our most eclectic songwriters. The influences crowd in from all directions. Irish folk, American country, Dylan, Guthrie, Costello, even bands like UK Squeeze- they all seem to be in there somewhere. Not that there is anything derivative about Kelly, it’s just that he has such good attennae for all the sounds that sound good.

He has been making great pop music since the year dot. Or at least since 1981 when Talk, the first Paul Kelly and the Dots album was released, followed the next year by Manilla. Then, in 1985, he delivered Post, with what were to be the first versions of Incident on South Dowling, White Train and Adelaide. But it was the double set, Gossip, in 1986, that really showed what Kelly and the Dots, now Coloured Girls, could do. And that was no fluke either -Under the Sun, a year later, contained even stronger material with classics like Dumb Things and Same Old Walk.

Now Kelly and the Messengers (the Coloured Girls have transmogrified again) are touring their latest album, So Much Water So Close to Home, in a whistlestop tour from the East to the very West. A sizable home town crowd greeted Kelly at Thebarton Theatre for his single Adelaide concert and despite the bus trip from Melbourne and shredded vocal cords from the ’flu, he and the Messengers showed why anyone with any taste would rate them among the best bands in Australia.

Opening with the wistful South of Germany, Kelly took a stanza or two to get his bearings while the team at the sound desk gradually got control of the airwaves. Or at least most of them - Steve Connolly’s fine guitar work got scrunched in a very trebly mix and Kelly’s vocals in the lower register disappeared into the soup as well. Although none of that actually stopped Same Old Walk, Don’t Harm the Messenger and Stories of Me, all performed in rapid succession, from sounding like nearly a million dollars. Kelly’s band -Connolly on guitar, Peter Bull on keyboards, bassist Jon Schofield and drummer Michael Barclay- play as though they share the same ganglia while Paul Kelly himself is about as unpretentious as a rock and roll maestro can be.

For the tour Kelly has added percussionist Ray Pereira and Chris Wilson, lead singer from support band, Crown of Thorns. Wilson played soaring harmonica solos all night, and breathed life into Cities of Texas and the all-stops version of Darling it Hurts, in particular. Solos blossomed throughout - Connolly in She’s a Melody and Peter Bull’s piano in Everything’s Turning to White, Kelly’s eerily truncated version of Raymond Carver’s equally eerie story, So Much Water So Close to Home.

Paul Kelly’s lyrics, always crisp and inventive, continue to astonish. His use of the Carver story is apt because many of his songs are like miniature stories using a variety of narrators- like the mother of seven in South of Germany or the young battered woman in Sweet Guy. He can capture local detail, as in Adelaide or Randwick Bells and he can sing like St Augustine with such disclosures as Stories of Me and Careless, one of the best of the new set.

He has also written some of the best political anthems around. When someone yelled out for Billy Baxter, Kelly genially suggested they go home and play the record instead. Then he played Special Treatment, a song about black oppression Woody Guthrie would be proud to own. Jundamurra followed, about the black rebel who became a legend in the Kimberleys last century. The band roared, driven by Barclay’s tireless drumming and Connolly’s guitar -one minute Duane Eddy , Hank Marvin the next. The Messengers seem to cover the Nashville Skyline, that is when they are not suddenly, led by Peter Bull’s accordion, sounding like Planxty.

Perhaps it is to his credit that Kelly presents his material with so little fuss but you rather wish he’d go for a bit more shading sometimes. For about the last third of the set the band played full-on rock and roll instead of interspersing some of Kelly’s more pensive compositions . Finishing with the Most Wanted Man in the World, he was almost out of voice for the encores. Peter Bull played a Mexican lament on the accordion while Kelly had a gargle before closing the show with an Apocalpse Now rendering of The Execution. The lighting, inventive and striking throughout, really began to shine and the Messengers finished on full throttle. But after all this juggernaut rock, people still hung back for a bit more Paul Kelly, for something on his acoustic guitar, something a bit awkward and artless and singular, like the singer himself. Maybe nothing quite as obvious as Adelaide, but perhaps a few lines of Randwick Bells, just to ring the changes.

Commissioned by The Adelaide Review but not published. 1989.

Fully Employed

Published: 1989-02-10

UB40 Thebarton Theatre

UB40 have always been a very democratic band. Apart from taking their name from no less of a leveller than the English unemployment benefit application form and holding the thin multi-coloured line against the doughy racism of National Front skins and oi’s at the turn of the decade, UB40 have worked well as a unit. There have been no line-up changes since they began more than ten years ago, song royalties are credited to the whole band and they get on so famously they plan to set up their own village in Jamaica.

This eight piece reggae band which hails from Balshall Heath in industrial strength Birmingham has consistently purveyed a likeable mix of street politics and goodtime music that has an irresistible rhythm and splendid production values. They claim to have kept the pop in reggae and their social message is strictly the here and now. There are no transcendental Rastifarian anthems to the Lion of Judah from this band.

It is a balmy January night and the full-house crowd at Thebarton Theatre is more than ready for the main event. The varilights go into a spin, the syncussion starts to splash and the keyboards begin humming. UB40 is touring as an even dozen - there are two extra horns and two women singers, Dee Johnson and Lin Sandiford. They begin with the overture from the latest album - Dance with the Devil. Drummer Jimmy Brown starts tangling with the snares and the horn section led by Brian Travers, with occasional help from Astra on trumpet, begin the signature chords counterpointed by Michael Virtue on synths and Earl Falconer’s unswerving bass. The dry ice is already thick on the ground as banks of lights rotate from deep blues to orange. The Adelaide crowd is already off its face with the first number. The silent reggae army is marching.

Ali Campbell comes forward for the vocals on Keep on Moving from the Signing Off album. Astra followed with some serious toasting (a much more subtle word than rapping) and the band began the first of its list of hits from their covers collection, Labour of Love - the apparently irredeemable Neil Diamond oldie, Red Red Wine. With cascades of keyboards and warm harmonies it is not surprising it was a hit in twelve countries four years ago and last month even the Yanks caught on.

A switch of lights, more dry ice and the band was nearly enveloped in purple haze for an early number Please Don’t Make Me Cry. A soaring sax solo from Travers distinguished that one too. Cherry Oh Baby, also from Signing Off came next and then the new track Where Did I Go Wrong. They didn’t nor with the catchy Come Out to Play. Astra stepped up for some more hyperactivity and back for Ali Campbell’s Sonny Bono and Dee Jensen’s Chrissie Hynde in I Got You Babe. Everybody can sing in this band. Percussionist Norman Hassan led the charge with the old Slickers number Johnny Too Bad and bandleader Robin Campbell announced a song for the Black People of South Africa. A simple anthem, but like all of UB40’s material, neatly crafted and politically succinct. The house lights came up and microphones stretched into the crowd for the Amandla choruses. When UB40 say the people have power, you tend to believe them.

“Fully Employed” The Adelaide Review, No. 60. February, 1989. p.26.

Red and Blue

Published: 1989-04-01

Billy Bragg Dom Polski Centre

John Hammond Tivoli Hotel

A lot has happened for Billy Bragg in the two years since he toured last. He has performed in the Soviet Union, toured the US with Michelle Shocked, and his latest album, Workers Playtime, has everywhere sold well at its user-friendly budget RRP.

It is only to be expected that the one-time busker and all-time prolo model would be smoother and more urbane this visit, presenting a set designed for bigger rooms and bendier ideologies. It was Bragg who said that the revolution is only a T-shirt away, so it must bemuse him hugely that his own pop hammer and sickle merchandising can’t keep up with the demand.

The familiar 60 watt portable amp from his busking days was carefully placed at centrestage - but this time only for its iconography. Nowadays Bragg’s guitars are radio-controlled from the sound desk and he plays through a bank of speakers big enough for Guns ‘n’ Roses.

Arriving late from a time warp in Hobart, Bragg got down to work with selections from the early albums- It Says Here and St Swithins’ Day hit the spot as did the recent, She’s Got a New Spell, St Valentine’s Day is Over, new last time and one of the best cuts from Workers Playtime, gained even more depth in performance. North Sea Bubble, a new song, is a less catchy opus warning against overheating the All Ords.

In a deliberate attempt to liberate an oldie-but-goodie from the defiled hands of history, Bragg sang Jerusalem with resonance. It was powerful stuff but the sort of thing that can add goose steps to the goose bumps and therefore better left alone. Anyway, he’s not short on anthems himself- There’s Power in the Unions, A World Turned Upside Down and A New England all figured. But not, regrettably, his splendid skiffle version of Who’s Side are You On?

Billy Bragg has always stressed that the personal is political and Levi Stubbs’ Tears, Greetings to the new Brunette and Between the Wars all lit the touch papers. Then Bragg extemporised on safe sex and quality inter-personals, as well as Chernobyl and remembering to vote - but he knows how to keep his text nimble and likeable.

In collaboration with Cara Tivey on keyboards and his ubiquitous cobber Wiggy on the Other Guitar, Billy Bragg played Walk Away Renee, Must I Paint You a Picture, Life with the Lions and ended with the mordant, Great Leap Forward.

For more than ninety minutes he played, sang, exhorted and entertained, lending a voice to issues more complicated than a song can deal with but too important for troubadours to ignore. Looking like the young Trevor Howard, Billy Bragg is a red mole in broad daylight. And he’s still the milkman of human kindness.

It was the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band who first asked the immortal question - can blue men sing the whites? And for nearly twenty-five years John Hammond has been proving that they can. It is fitting that Hammond has been such a resolute keeper of the blue flame since his father, John Hammond Sr, did more than anyone to preserve on record the greatest exponents of American blues.

A scion of the Vanderbilt family, John Sr, after an expensive musical training from Juilliard, worked as an executive for Columbia Records and was responsible for signing Count Basie, Charlie Christian and Billie Holliday as well as fostering the posthumous reputations of Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith. Talent scout without peer, Hammond also snaffled both Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen for CBS.

John Hammond Jr, now in his mid-forties, is himself a peripatetic blues archive and whereas his solo albums for Vanguard in the mid-Sixties were often mannered and his vocal style unduly strangulated, he now inhabits the classic country blues repertoire with unaffected authority.

Travelling light with (what looked like) a custom Maton six string and a 1936 true clinks National Steel dobro, Hammond played two extraordinary nights at the Tiv, treating Adelaide’s appreciative blues brigade to note-perfect renditions of the Delta’s greatest hits.

He certainly covered the waterfront. Opening with John Lee Hooker’s Ride Till I Die and Sonny Boy Williamson’s Help Me, he also played the masterworks of Willie Dixon, Howling Wolf, Sleepy John Estes and Bo Diddley. Keeping apparently impossible rhythm with his harmonica in a holder around his neck, Hammond negotiated contrapuntal intricacies in Blind Boy Fuller’s Step it up and Go and Lemon Jefferson’s See That My Grave is Kept Clean.

But it is the Mississippi Delta on which Hammond’s playing is centred. With flawless technique his National Steel recreated Skip James’s Hard Time Killing Floor and a mesmeric seven minute version of the Son House classic Preachin’ Blues. From the Robert Johnson canon came Terraplane Blues, Come On In My Kitchen, Red Hot Mama and, as a final encore, Love in Vain. John Hammond is an unassuming, fiendishly skilful reminder that the blues are America’s priceless gift to music in this century.

“Red and Blue” The Adelaide Review, No.62, April, 1989, p.25.

Puccini Springs to Life

Published: 1989-10-07

Murray Bramwell talks with General Manager, Bill Gillespie, and singers, Marilyn Richardson, Michael Lewis and Geoffrey Harris about State Opera’s latest production, La Boheme.

Not only has State Opera been moving out of the red, but with La Boheme, which opens at the Festival Theatre on Thursday, it appears to be in the pink. After the upheavals of the past several years,the company radiates a sense of calm and pleasing confidence. Just over a year after his arrival from the Pittsburgh Opera , Bill Gillespie has applied the kind of rational management that MBA graduates know about, but more importantly, his persistence and commitment to the company has re-established its stability and reputation nationally.

Having announced a surplus of $103,000 at the end of the fiscal year in June, State Opera have carved a quarter off their debt to the State Government which floated a three year loan rather than sink the company. Gillespie has secured significant levels of sponsorship, cut his ticket prices and looked hard at repertoire choices. Even before he arrived in Adelaide, the company’s board had announced a programme which included favourites like last year’s Carmen and, more recently, Fidelio and La Boheme.

Fidelio was in many ways a litmus test. The first of the productions to be staged in the Festival Theatre instead of at Her Majesty’s (formerly the Opera Theatre) it was performed in German with surtitles, ran a shorter season with larger houses and used sets on hire from the Australian Opera. Gillespie was pleased with the results - subscriptions were up, audiences rallied quickly to a shorter season and appreciated the chance to see a major work.

With La Boheme the company is even more bouyant. As Gillespie observes, even those who have little acquaintance with opera find Puccini irresistible and this production, on loan from the Victoria State Opera has already proven to be a strong one. Originally devised by the distinguished British director, John Copley, the recent Melbourne season featured Kiri te Kanawa as Mimi.

The cast for Adelaide is almost entirely new and not only is it distinguished but it will give local audiences a chance to hear some of its own as well as singers such as Marilyn Richardson, who, some years ago, performed regularly in Adelaide. Ms Richarson has received warm notices for her four performances as Mimi in Melbourne and will return to the Festival next year for the lead in Tristan and Isolde. Baritone, Michael Lewis, singing in his home town for the first time in seventeen years, will play Marcello, Adelaide-based tenor Geoffrey Harris will sing the part of Rodolpho and Roger Howells, Schaunard. Conal Coad will sing the bass role of Colline and Beverly Bergen, presently preparing to shift to mezzo-soprano roles will play Musetta, a part that she has sung often before, for the last time.

The State production is being directed by Lindy Hume.“I am thrilled that she’s coming back to Adelaide,” Bill Gillespie enthuses.“Lindy was John Copley’s assistant when he first did the production in Melbourne in 1985-86 so she has worked closely with him over the years. When he wasn’t available at this particular time - he has an engagement in San Francisco- he suggested we talk to Lindy about coming to stage it here, that he would feel comfortable artistically with that. So we are going to see a Copley production but it has been restudied by Lindy and she will be credited in the programme as director.”

“There will be differences in this production from the Melbourne version and the ABC broadcast. Lindy is terrific to work with and she’s really getting into the roles. These are not superficial ‘stand-here-and-sing’ sort of rehearsals.”

The singers agree. Michael Lewis originates from South Australia but has not sung here since the early Seventies. “It’s been a long time between drinks. It is strange that I have not been back to Adelaide sooner and that, even though it is one of the top box office operas, I’ve never sung the part of Marcello in La Boheme before. So this is a bit of a double whammy for me.”

“There is a very good feeling of camaraderie and enjoyment in what we are doing and that’s the vital key to the success of this piece. The whole opera is built on the friendship between Rodolpho and Marcello and when all four of the friends are together there is a sense of comradeship , we become a team- four guys thinking in one way rather than four individuals each going their own way.”

I’ve just finished working with Lindy in The Pearl Fishers in Sydney. It was very successful and I’d have to say it was the happiest show I’ve ever been on. Judging from this production, I’d say it stems from the way Lindy works with people. It’s very easy going.“

Geoffrey Harris makes a similar observation. “Lindy is very encouraging of a communal sense. It happens naturally but it enhances the production. Life is beginning to imitate art here !”

Michael Lewis sees the uniformity of experience in the cast as important. “We are all roughly the same age and have all reached a fair level of competence in our careers. It is magic that we are all on the same stage. It makes a production so much better when you don’t have those unfortunate tricks of casting where you get various people at various levels in their career -so there is often an unevenness.”

Soprano Marilyn Richardson, also, sees the work itself as encouraging this chemistry. “Unless you want to be really radical with Boheme, there is a limit to what you can do, and what you would want to do with it. The interest for me lies mainly in working with different people because it is fascinating how different temperaments bring different things from the same music. Lindy Hume has worked on that. “

“I also have to say that Boheme is that kind of opera. Everyone loves doing it. It is almost as happy-making as Mozart. It has a youthful quality about it.”

Michael Lewis is quick to emphasise the freshness of this particular production as well. “We are taking the spirit of the Melbourne production but not the letter. I am pleased about that. John Copley would do that anyway. I’ve worked with him many times and he would always mould the work with the people that he has. he did that it in Melbourne and this is a different group of people so it is a different work. I think this is going to better than Melbourne in many ways.”

“When I saw the schedule,” Geoffrey Harris admits, “I wondered if we had enough time. Now it seems we have a luxurious amount of time, everything is going so quickly. Everyone has their own ideas and we just do it.”

“I think,” he adds with a smile,“ We could put it on next week if we had to.“

“Bonhomie Helping la Boheme” The Advertiser, October 7, 1989, p.15.