1990s

Distant Strummer

Published: 1990

Tracy Chapman with Paul Kelly

Thebarton Theatre February, 1990.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Every now and then you hear a new single that you just know is going to be a big noise. Like Rickie Lee Jones’ Chuck E’s in Love or Michelle Shocked’s Anchorage - or Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. The interchange of guitar riff and lilting vocal is captivating - and the lyric, like Paul Simon’s The Boxer, is a miniature movie so perfect that it doesn’t need a videoclip.

Fast Car, it turned out, was just one of many driving forces on Chapman’s self-titled debut album. In no time she had gone from the folky coffee houses in Boston to become the sort of Grammy award winning product that goes on the CD rack next to Graceland. Then, in the latter part of last year came her follow-up, Crossroads, and some patterns- and repetitions -began to emerge. It seemed that nothing quite matched the impact of Across the Lines or the chill from Behind the Wall, or that mix of the public and the personal that so eloquently informed the first album. Instead, a formula was starting to show and a preciousness, petulance even, that sounded like an artist trapped inside a corporation.

In saying that Tracy Chapman in concert is a performer at odds with her material, her audience and her talent, I must immediately point out that the first night crowd were little short of rapturous. But that was as much in spite of her performance as because of it. Chapman’s dislike of interviews and public statements is well-known, it has almost become a hype itself. As in the old folky days it suggests integrity and independence of mind - but on stage it registers as a lack of definition and, curiously, a lack of spirit. The single spotlight on the solo performer invites a scrutiny that she cannot bear. “All you folks think you own my life/ Demons they are on my trail” she sings in Crossroads, lyrics that echo Robert Johnson’s hell-hounded blues of the same name.

The result is not a stage presence but an absence, a heart in hiding, proffering songs loaded with apparently personal meaning and political conviction, that seem to bear little connection to their author. What is this talk about revolution , what does she really think about the Amerika she excoriates in Across the Lines ? Billy Bragg wouldn’t have missed a chance to place the work in context. I’m not talking pulpit thumping here - just a nod and wink to show the troops you are not just going through the motions.

It can only seem ironic that she was singing Freedom Now, her song for Nelson Mandela, two days before his release. Considering he had been in the slammer longer than she’s been alive, she could have been a bit more animated about his impending liberation. The uninitiated could be forgiven for thinking that she was more concerned with whether she would have to drop the song from her repertoire.

That is unfair. But nevertheless, I was left feeling that, despite her new single proclaiming that she’s Born to Fight, her primary concern is with the Robin Norwood Women-Who-Love-Too-Much sentiments of This Time and For My Lover. That’s OK too but the only new songs she sang ,both unannounced, seemed to be third generation xeroxes of the same theme.

However, despite her mixed messages, there is no uncertainty about Tracy Chapman’s vocal power. She has a magnificent voice, rich, burred, with a touch of vibrato and reserves she seems to have hardly begun to call on.

When she hits her straps she can be extraordinary - on Baby Can I Hold You and Why ?, For You, Mountains of Things and, the unadorned Behind the Wall. Her guitar, affectingly simple for some, was to me simply insufficient. A band would have been nice- some of those tasty session persons that make her albums sound like six million dollars. By the time she finished her twenty song set with Talking About Revolution I am sorry to report that I thought she had strummed too much and said too little -and as for the encore, All That You Have is Your Soul, it’s not really the kind of sentiment that would have got Winnie Mandela very far.

Full marks to Tracy Chapman and her management for programming Paul Kelly and the Messengers who in a twelve song set proved for anyone left wondering, that they are one of the best bands anywhere. Drawing both from Under the Sun and last year’s So Much Water, So Close to Home, Kelly sang splendid versions of Same Old Walk, Careless, She’s a Melody and Everything’s Turning to White, his eerily truncated adaptation of Raymond Carver’s equally eerie story. Paul Kelly is a major talent and he deserves to be in an arts festival.

“Distant Strummer” The Adelaide Review, No.73, Festival edition, 1990, p.33.

New Season for Braithwaite

Published: 1990-04-01

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra: Traditional Associations and New Departures

The ASO is moving into the Nineties with even more vitality than before. It is the “on” year for the Adelaide Festival, the orchestra is moving permanently to a handsomely refurbished Town Hall and for the first time they will have their own composer-in-residence with the arrival of Canadian- born Neil Currie.

Over the past couple of years the orchestra, under the stewardship of General Manager, Michael Elwood, and Chief Conductor Nicholas Braithwaite, has consolidated its subscription base and fine-tuned its musical offerings to the evident satisfaction of audiences. The three main streams in the programme - the Masters Series, the Meet the Music Series and the Studio Series - have successfully established a horses for courses approach which has enabled the demands from all sections of Adelaide’s musical community to be met.

In 1989, subscriptions for the Masters series have been up several percent and Michael Elwood is confident that the 1990 programme will prove equally enticing. Pianist Moura Lympany, a great success previously, will be returning, this time to perform the Schumann Piano Concerto and, although Dmitri Alexeev has played in this country before, he has not been heard on the Adelaide platform. He will present the Ravel Concerto in G.

The Georgian conductor, Jansug Kakhidze, joins countryman Yuri Bashmet, for the Bartok Viola Concerto in June. Other soloists include pianist Imogen Cooper, cellist Ralph Kirschbaum and the flamboyant double bassist, Gary Karr. At the podium will be Bryden Thomson from the UK, Muhai Tang from Beijing, who has now established an enormous following in Europe and the United States, and Eduardo Mata whose work with the orchestra back in 1986 will be warmly remembered.

“The Masters series needs to be a broad statement without going out to the avant garde or staying too close to the old chestnuts,” explains Michael Elwood. “Important works like the mainstream symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann, Schubert and, of course, Tchaikovsky, all need to be heard regularly. But there are more concerts which don’t follow the old format of an overture followed by a concerto and a symphony. It enables us to play more pieces, many of which are not of symphony length. It makes things less predictable. We have had many responses from the public indicating their pleasure at seeing an increase in attendances. Without making kneejerk reactions to any particular section, we seem to be getting the mix right.”

The Meet the Music format saw significant changes in 1989 which will continue for 1990 as well. A new time of 6.30 pm and a close co-ordination with the year 12 secondary school syllabus has focused the series and won hearts, minds and subscriptions. Performances, held in the Elder Hall were consistently sold out and Elwood is particularly heartened by the numbers of young people and families in attendance.

The repertoire includes works such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Elgar’s Serenade, the Bach Violin Concerto in E, the Beethoven Third Symphony, Shostokavich Five and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 - all from the Matric syllabus- but equally in evidence are lesser known composers, favoured over the last few years by the ASO, such as Szymanowski and the distinguished Australian, Peter Sculthorpe.

Both ASO regulars, Nicholas Braithwaite and Jorge Mester will conduct in the series- Braithwaite appearing with the violinist Wang Xiao Dong and Mester with pianist Ben Martin. Frans Helmerson will play the Haydn Cello Concerto under Sian Edwards, who turns her attention to the Shostakovich Five also. Composer Richard Mills will conduct his own Flute Concerto to be performed by Virginia Taylor and with the Saint-Saens Symphony No 3 he will also ensure that the new Town Hall organ will get an airing.

Ever since the foundation stone was laid in 1863 and it opened for business in 1866, the Adelaide Town Hall has been a significant focus not only for the civic life of the city but its musical life as well. But gracious though the building undoubtedly was, by the late 1970’s it had become evident that alterations were necessary if it was to remain functional and not simply become a Victorian curiosity.

Accordingly, the Adelaide City Council announced a four stage Master Plan with a projected completion date for the 1986 Sesquicentennial. Stage I saw the external renovations completed and Stage II refitted the civic areas including the Lord Mayoral offices and such. The Auditorium and Banquet Room were completed in time for the Adelaide Festival in 1988. The final stage has been to refurbish all the foyers and service areas. Effectively this has meant almost completely rebuilding the Prince Alfred Chambers on the second level to provide catering preparation areas as well as bar and eating facilities.

Some modifications have been made with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra particularly in mind. Extra attention has paid to the staging, enabling an additional five meters of podium space and on the second floor, extensive provision has been made for artists’ rooms. The broadcast service areas have also been substantially improved. The cost for Stage IV alone has been $3.5 M and for the whole project the figure is said to be nearly $12M.

“With these changes the Town Hall has been made into a very glamorous venue,” Michael Elwood enthuses.“The foyers have been revamped so that that they wrap the Auditorium on all sides and the amenities, especially the toilet and rest room facilities, are now appropriate for the attendance numbers. Audiences will now find all the facilities they have to come expect in the way of bars, coffee service and food concessions.”

But while the creature comforts are important, especially since concert-goers have become used to the layout at the Festival Centre, the real bonus will be the quality of the sound they will hear when the Adelaide Symphony performs again in the Town Hall. As Nicholas Braithwaite observes, “While the Festival Theatre is a magnificent facility, the acoustic is a real struggle. Whereas the Town Hall is now a beautiful hall with a beautiful acoustic.”

The ASO makes it recordings in the Town Hall, some of which, including programmes of Poulenc, Shostakovich and some particularly brilliant performances of Bartok and Szymanowski by violinist Wang Xiao Dong, will be available on tape and compact disc in the near future. As Braithwaite notes, the Shostakovich could only have been recorded at the Town Hall. “All the slow, quiet violin writing in the Eighth is almost unperformable in the Festival Theatre because the acoustic is so dry.”

Michael Elwood agrees- “The Festival Theatre gives great clarity but there is no impact. I think with the return to the Town Hall the first thing people will realise they have been missing is the physical impact of the music, the sense of having music virtually all around them. They’ll certainly get in the Mahler Fifth in the first programme of the Masters. I think this a very plus. I do believe that we will come as close as we can to competing with the high fidelity of the compact disc. I hope we can encourage people to come to the Town Hall to hear a fantastically vibrant that is really going to get to them.” To compensate for the reduced capacity at the Town Hall -1100 compared to nearly 2,000 for the Festival Theatre- a third performance will be scheduled for each programme, to be played at the earlier time of 6.30 on Thursday evenings.

But the 1990 ASO season is not just going to pamper the ears with familiar masterworks it will also be showcasing the challenging new compositions of the Adelaide Symphony’s first Composer-in-Residence, Neil Currie. Originally from Vancouver he has studied both music and clinical psychology at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and the Toronto Conservatory before taking up residency in Australia based at the University of Sydney .

At thirty four Currie has already distinguished himself as a composer. His works include the Windmill series written for trombone, reeds, percussion and synthesisers, Fireflies written for the Australian Guitar Ensemble and Guiuwada which was performed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra under Dobbs Franks. He is best known for Ortigas Avenue written in honour of Cory Aquino’s peaceful coup in the Phillipines in 1986.

During his two year stay with the ASO Neil Currie will write works for performance in both the Masters series and the Studio series. Initiated this year the Studio series has been held at the ABC studios in Collinswood where the orchestra has presented a range of contemporary works with introductory comments and discussion from music specialists and the composers themselves.

Michael Elwood is keen for the association between composer and orchestra to begin. After the Melbourne Symphony worked so well with Brenton Broadstock, he is equally confident of the benefits not only to the ASO but the Adelaide music community in general for Neil Currie to establish a presence in the city. “I see the relationship as an effective two-way thing. Composers in this situation are quite privileged because they have a live orchestra to work with. They have an opportunity of snatching time here and there to get a bit played and have a sense of the sounds they are making. The other important thing is that the musicians- who can sometimes have a reluctance, certainly an apprehension about playing new music, can get to meet the composer and discuss the work being prepared.”

Neil Currie is in full agreement-“For me it is the closest thing to Utopia for a composer to be able to work with an orchestra . I have worked with electronics but my traditional musical upbringing has won out at this stage so I really do prefer to work with live performers and acoustic instruments.”

Asked to characterise his compositions, Currie says, “A lot of my music sounds like dance music, it often has a steady and lively beat, lots of syncopation and a quite discernible beat. Its origins probably come from many years pounding clapped out pianos in a dance band !.” He is also a trombonist -is there a jazz element in his writing ? “There is a kind of jam session phenomenon. The instruments all comply to a particular set of chords, similar to a jazz vehicle which forms the harmonic basis around which individual instruments play their scales and arpeggios and various filigree work. That sort of idea operates in some of my compositions.”

“When composing at the beginning I don’t work on an instrument of any kind. “ I work with a musical fragment or idea and I’ll try and plan in my mind the course it might take and elaborate it into a composition of a particular length. When I have an idea for the larger scale form for this piece then I may go to the piano for some specific working out. I’m not ashamed to admit I do a fair amount of compositional work at the piano. It ultimately leads to a sense of clarity and of rhythmic and pitch certainty.”

“Then when I feel I’ve got a coherent draft I’ll key it into the computer and print out a rough score and in effect start over again, filling in gaps that are missing and taking adavantage of the clarity that is provided by having large clean sheets of paper. “

It is at that point that having an orchestra at hand would be something of a boon. “I have been one of the composers in Australia who has benefited from the national Orchestra Composers school which is held every year with one of the symphony orchestras. Four or five composers submit works and refine their ideas with the musicians for a eight or ten day period. I have found that to be a tremendously beneficial process because orchestration is heavily dependant on experience.”

Neil Currie is certainly a gregarious artist, as he says, “there won’t be anything arms length about my involvement in the Adelaide music scene.” He already has two or three pieces sketched for development when he arrives. One of his first public works will be the fanfare for the opening of the new Town Hall organ on March 1st. he also sees himself as an ambassador for contemporary music. “I’ll have some role in trying to bring the audience into the world of the composer and bridging that gap between my understanding of the work and their’s as intelligent, interested audiences.” “One of my own modus operandi is to use music to capture the spirit of an event like the folk songs in Ortegas Avenue or an Aboriginal song in Windmill, where I fragmented it subjecting it to a series of mathematical processes -which is another of my main musical tools. The Ortegas Avenue work was my response to a peaceful coup, an expression of the will of the people ousting an unpopular dictator. That is what working with Peter Sculthorpe has encouraged in me - a sense of bringing the world into my composition and to understand the importance of this me and for my listener, so that people will find it easier to share in my musical composition.”

Murray Bramwell

“New Season for Braithwaite” Symphony Australia, ABC Publications, 1990, pp.35-6.

Time Bandits

Published: 1990-05-01

Harry Dean Stanton and the Repo Men Tivoli Hotel

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

With a distinguished list of flakey, downbeat movie roles to his credit, Harry Dean Stanton has moved from screen to stage for a whistlestop tour with his band the Repo Men. Comprising Jim Leslie on bass, drummer Stephan Mugalian, Jimmy Intveld on lead Fender and Nashville cat, Billy Swan as frequent lead singer, songwriter and general factotum, Harry Dean’s band is more like the Wild Bunch than anything as new wave and urban as repo men. As in Peckinpah’s movie these guys are time bandits, crooning old Tex-Mex, goitre-trembling rockabilly that’s older than the Thompson gun. Leastways, that’s where Harry Dean and Billy hail from. The rhythm section looked like LA musos who still can’t believe how they got there. Guitar ace, Jimmy Intveld, on the other hand, played like he was being paid by the yard.

It is weird to see Harry Dean Stanton in the leathery flesh since his touring garage band is something straight out of the movies. Stanton has been the genius of the cameo role - as sidekick, cop, crim, father, he was always precise, edgy, memorable. Then came the lead in Paris, Texas and he finally got his due- after all those years with Corman and Peckinpah, and movies like The Missouri Breaks. And Cisco Pike, a B-Grade number by Bill Norton with A-Grade work from Gene Hackman, Kris Kristofferson- and Harry Dean, as a strung-out mandolin player who overdoses the way musicians used to do in 1971. It was a scary, poignant performance and it made you look out even more for Stanton’s name in movie credits.

On stage at the Tiv, Harry Dean Stanton, mixed art and life impeccably. Hitching on their guitars the Repo Men could have been a West Texas snake-handling sect, rattling out a Chuck Berry soundalike -All Right in the Morning, then Mama Ain’t Got no Shoes and the holy roller, When I Get My Reward. At about this time Billy Swan broke a strang on his gittar and began to look a bit agitated- especially since he was upfront for the first of many of his own numbers. Harry Dean was looking sardonic. “We don’t have no spare gittars,” he mumbles, “we’re a cheap band.” Droll. He’s seen a few things, has Harry. He’s looked into life’s uglier orifices. Eventually an extra guitar materialises after Harry Dean has gallantly lent his axe to Billy for his country pop number, I’m Living My Life.

Time for a Mexican moment. Harry Dean’s thin tenor is matched with some of his desultory strumming and for a minute there you start to imagine kids setting fire to scorpions. Jim Leslie who had so far spent his time demonstrating his one-finger bass technique took the lead with a whiney number dedicated to his musical daughter, Amanda Lynn. Things picked up with Driving Wheel and some hot licks from Jimmy Intveld. Even the rhythm guys stopped wondering when Harry Dean was going to change chords.

In a moment of vocal adventure Stanton sang Blue Bayou just the way Roy Orbision would if he was reincarnated as a coyote. Cancion Mizteca followed, another Mexican ballad, sung by Harry Dean on the Ry Cooder soundtrack for Paris, Texas. Still on the Mexican theme, the Repos tried a four part harmony that came perilously close to landing at four different airports. A long likeable version of The Borderline brought the set to a close and the band ambled off.

The crowd at the Tiv know a good time when they are having it, so the Repo Men were recalled for five more - corkers including Billy Swan’s million seller, I Can Help, the Arthur Crudup classic, It’s Alright Mama, Dylan’s Knockin on Heaven’s Door from the Pat Garrett soundtrack and finally a full-on rocker, with Intveld leading the Repos through Bright Lights, Big City. Harry Dean looked mighty pleased in a quiet kind of way. So he should. I wouldn’t have missed it for pesos.

“Time Bandits” The Adelaide Review, No.76, May, 1990, pp.20-1.

High Fidelity

Published: 1990-07-01

Marianne Faithfull with Barry Reynolds Old Lion, June 1990

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I bought my first Marianne Faithfull LP. in 1964. I’d gone to the shop to buy the Stones’ Aftermath and somehow got distracted by As Tears Go By. It was a pretty feeble album really - breathless, nylon-string folk songs with recitations of Full Fathom Five and Jabberwocky to fill up the second side - but I had made a choice for Art (and the fetching cover photo) and there I was, stuck with it.I spent fifteen years wishing I’d bought Aftermath.

Then in 1979 came Broken English and I was vindicated. Surely one of the best records of modern times, it was an entirely new creation . Drawing from New Wave, Kurt Weill, and the confessional pop pioneered by Lennon and Ono -it sounded like none of them. With a voice as grainy and expressive as Lotte Lenya or even Eartha Kitt, Marianne Faithfull was no longer singing about a garden where the praties grow but a garden of earthly delights where les fleurs du mal grew instead.

She remade Working Class Hero, created (with musical collaborator, Barry Reynolds) rock incantations like Guilt, Witches’ Song. and, with lyrics from Heathcote Williams, popular music’s darkest love song, Why Did Ya Do it. And there were others- The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and Broken English, the title track, both classics.

Three more albums followed -not as distinctive in style but the strength of her work was still discernible. The last studio recording, Strange Weather, indicated a marked shift towards Brechtian cabaret with the world-weary Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and blues standards, via Berlin, such as Ain’t Goin to the Well and Trouble in Mind . There was also a remake of As Tears Go By. After more than twenty years of personal and public harrowing, Marianne Faithfull had turned a song of innocence into a song of experience. The end of exploration, it seemed, was to arrive and know the place for the first time.

Onstage at the Old Lion Marianne Faithfull is on her Blazing Away tour, accompanied by Barry Reynolds and laying ghosts from her legendary bad trip of 1969. Standing at the microphone under blue and red spotlights , a serious music stand to one side and on the other, Barry Reynolds with a heavily miked acoustic six-string, the chanteuse opened the set with a track from Dangerous Acquaintances, Falling from Grace. Straight off, complexities are established- the song is satiric, the style ironic, the singer herself, demure.

She began gradually - Strange Weather, a touch too slow, then two new songs Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song and Conversation on a Bar stool, the latter written by Bono and The Edge but sounding like it might have belonged to an Irish tinker called Public Domain.

Then came the sea-change, not just the rock-style chord work from Reynolds or the fullness of the vocal but the sense of a song fully inhabited- I feel …Guilt. Nothing of the victim, not a response to pious yellow press diatribe but something, well, existential you’ld have to say- a slow blues about not treating yourself as you deserve. Gracious, actorly in manner, Marianne Faithfull has the kind of dignity that could be mistaken for insincerity but it is not that, it is a persona, a public presentation, in public terms, of things, not only too deep for tears but nobody else’s business either.

The title track from the new live album, Blazing Away, did rather less than that, but it was if the pressure was taken off only to be applied again with greater intensity for more of the anthems - Sister Morphine sung like a slow march to ground zero and Working Class Hero, undiminished for being sung by a blueblood. As Tears Go By became a sardonic singalong, Why Did Ya Do It, a black spell with a death-rattle guitar and Lucy Jordan a ten year history of feminism.

Closing with Times Square, Marianne Faithfull played three encores - a version of Broken English that confirms it as a great poem, with accompaniment that invoked the shades of Reynolds’s incendiary riffs from the album. When you consider the band on Blazing Away, Dr John, Garth Hudson, Lew Soloff et al, it is a wonder Barry Reynolds could deliver so much rock and roll without even a hint of overdub. Then, alone on stage, Marianne Faithfull concluded the set with the ballad, She Moved Through the Fair, not with that breathy affectation that still passes for sensitivity, but with the clear, lonely authority of an artist who knows a thing or two about the truth of art and life and was good enough to share it in a beer hall.

“High Fidelity” The Adelaide Review, No.78, July 1990.

Myth Match

Published: 1990-12-01

Eric Clapton Festival Theatre November, 1990.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Eric Clapton has always set the standard. After the music papers announced that Clapton used a banjo string on his guitar, the shops sold out of banjo strings. Curiously, he has followed traditional American music and become an innovator in the process. Starting in the Yardbirds in 1964, Clapton has always been a purist. Just when the band was starting to get a bit fab he was off to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Laconic, quirky - he’s the one reading Beano on the album cover- and already a gifted guitarist, Clapton’s blues sound had the edge, even on very capable competition. Mayall found other good players, including the splendid Peter Green, but one of the best tracks his many bands ever made was Eric Clapton’s version of Robert Johnson’s Rambling on My Mind.

Cream came next and the official story is that it was a grandiose band that died of ego. Clapton himself subscribes to that view, telling interviewers that the band couldn’t hear each other on stage and didn’t care either. Listening to live recordings suggests otherwise. Cream -and the particular combination of Clapton and Jack Bruce -was producing a blues hybrid, at times the equal of Hendrix, which was leapfrogging towards the kind of jazz Ornette Coleman was making. In his solo adventures Jack Bruce has produced mixed work but it is clear that he was the eclectic one. It’s hard to imagine Clapton recording lyrics by Samuel Beckett.

Instead he was joining cabals of American musicians. The Allmans and then Delaney and Bonnie brought him into the mainstream of blues funk, with Mar-Keys horns and down home lyrics. The white negro from Surrey was now living permanently on Ocean Boulevard. A dozen albums followed all working the same territory- Chicago blues standards, creamy love songs, Atlantic R’n’B and forgettable B side compositions. Like Joe Cocker, the miracle was that Clapton was even still going. He’d seen the best minds of his generation go to cactus and for ten years he was walking wounded himself.

In the past five years Clapton’s work has continually strengthened and through numerous guest appearances and movie soundtracks he has found a new young audience just discovering 12 bar blues. Recent albums like Under the Sun, stylishly produced by Phil Collins, no longer sounded as if they had been recorded by seventy different musicians in twenty different studios- even if they had been, and the release of the massive retrospective, Crossroads, was also a timely reminder that Clapton is not just a white kid copying Howling Wolf, B.B. King and Muddy Waters, he is one of the foremost blues artists of our time.

And that is what he looked like on stage at the Festival Theatre. Touring the Journeyman album, possibly his best solo work yet, Clapton produced a state of the art concert.

Heralded by some portentous keyboards and a puff from the smoke machine, Clapton’s six piece band moved straight into the Jerry Williams song, Pretending. Spaciously arrayed the players laid the ground for the master. Greg Phillinganes on synths, Phil Palmer on second guitar, Tessa Niles and Katie Kasoon on vocals, drummer Steve Ferrone and mainman Nathan East on bass and strategic vocal - glided in effortless accord while Clapton coaxed from his black and white Fender the sinuous, singing guitar lines that are his hallmark.

Some elements of his playing you think you’ve heard before- B.B. King, Roy Buchanan, J.J. Cale, Jeff Beck- but not the way Clapton combines them. His guitar aspires to the condition of the soprano sax. When the new tech arrived, like Hendrix, Clapton was on to it - fuzz, wah-wah, anything that would bend, sustain, extrude and sweeten a note, he incorporated into his technique. While the jazz and rock heroes all try to play a million silly notes a minute, Clapton is supremely minimal, with a lyrical quality that soothes the ganglia at the same time that the rhythm section is thudding your rib-cage. This is the secret of blues rock, ministration in equal measure to body and soul.

After dedicating No Alibis to a dress circle full of sheepish members of the touring England cricket team ( routed by Hickey at the Oval that afternoon) Clapton added Running on Faith before launching into a dereggae-lated version of I Shot the Sheriff. But he was only kidding. After a spacy prologue the familiar rhythms of the Marley classic took over. Then, with white magnesium light pouring into the auditorium providing somewhat literal emphasis, the band switched to the signature chords of White Room. Changing guitars only once for some filigree acoustic work on Can’t Find My Way Back Home ( featuring Nathan East on vocal and upright bass) Clapton returned to Bad Love, one of his own songs from Journeyman. Punctuated by crisp drum work by Ferrone, the band create a cumulative series of crescendos and pauses, those moments, often marked by a shift in the lighting, when Eric is about to Hit the Pedal. It’s as inevitable as Christmas and he’s been doing it for twenty-five years but it still takes your breath away.

The Bo Diddley song Before You Accuse Me, a bit routine on record, proved to be a classic instance of Chicago blues with fine solos from both Clapton and Palmer. He was never Eric Bloodaxe and the nickname Slowhand is misleading because Clapton never really played fast, he is, instead, amazingly fluid. Interestingly, two of his croony love songs - Old Love and the gushy, Wonderful Night- were highlights. Turned by the whole ensemble into powerfully improvised slow blues, Clapton transformed two apparently unremarkable songs into unashamedly personal statements, both in the unguarded directness of vocals and the exquisite restraint of his guitar.

It was probably to be expected that, in conclusion, Clapton would Hit the Pedal with Cocaine, Layla and Crossroads- they do, after all, represent the great work. Those who came to see the Legend may have been disappointed that there were relatively few of the old classics in the set but no one could quibble with the lascivious riffs in Cocaine, the ensemble strength in Layla and the fact that the last word went to Robert Johnson. There was a great deal to like about this show - the absence of hype, Clapton’s generosity to an excellent band, the unobtrusive quality of the sound rig, the artful lighting and the sheer elation of seeing musicians play this well. Eric Clapton is no journeyman, these days he’s a bloody marvel.

“Myth Match” The Adelaide Review, No.83, December, 1990, p.47.

Jo Jo Gets Back

Published: 1991

The Black Sorrows Tivoli Hotel, December, 1990.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The crowd at the Tiv waited a long time for the Black Sorrows to arrive but not as long as Joe Camilleri has. He’s made a lot of music in his forty two years. From the King Bees to Adderley Smith, from Lipp to the Pelaco Brothers he started on the ground floor of Australian music and has now elevated himself to the top of the heap. After leading the Falcons to the height of success, Camilleri’s current lineup, The Black Sorrows are an even happier idea. Last year’s release, Hold On to Me, was, along with Paul Kelly’s So Much Water So Close to Home, one of the best of the 89 vintage and personal shoppers were inclined to agree.

Touring this year’s model, the equally substantial Harley and Rose, Joe Camilleri and the Sorrows demonstrated to a packed house in the unsalubrious Tivoli that they are keepers of the flame. With the opening chords of Tears for the Bride -from the tender lines of violinist Jen Anderson, Camilieri’s supple vocal and Jeffrey Burstin’s plangent guitar sound to the soaring harmonies of the Bull sisters, the band meant serious business. They still thrive on live audiences and standing in the midnight hour the faithful and the newly converted listened avidly to the Sorrows’ playlist.

t was mostly recent and very upbeat - Fire Down Below from Hold On to Me and Angel Street and Never Let Me Go from Harley and Rose. Joe picked up his tenor sax for one , Jen Anderson a mandolin for the other. Then the band changed tack with Burstin and fellow guitarist Wayne Burt hitting the Delta chords as Camilleri leant at the microphone, harmonica at the ready, for a startling version of Robert Johnson’s Come On In My Kitchen. On Daughters of Glory he sounded like a young Bukka White, on Harley and Rose he was a tuneful Dylan, circa Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

Camilleri’s songs, co-written with Nick Smith, are riddled with familiar riffs and sentiments but he is the master of every idiom he inhabits- whether reggae or soul, r’n’b or country rock. It is no more weird for these songs to emanate from Melbourne, than for Gloria to come from Belfast or Roll Over Beethoven from Liverpool. The Black Sorrows have already produced their own classics -Chained to the Wheel with Vika Bull producing some of the hottest back-up singing since Helen Terry’s work with Culture Club, and The Crack-Up- Exile on Main Street out of Bob Segar- punctuated by Burstin’s nimble lead work and Camilleri’s yacketty sax. On the title track Hold On to Me, he chose soprano instead, unleashing a sweet sinewy solo that could break your heart if you weren’t careful.

The Sorrows were also not short on rockabilly -whether the recent original House of Light or the sterling Johnny Cash standard, Walk the Line. But it’s with the blues that the band really hit the spot. Driven by bassist Richard Sega and the steady foot of drummer Peter Luscombe, Camilleri sidled into some hallmark John Lee Hooker- complete with the grainy vibrato, the how-how-hows and the leery gutturals. This was no pastiche -well, certainly no more than Al Wilson or Eric Burdon might have done.

Wrapping up the set with some small group work with the Bull Sisters on Dear Children, with the guitarists on Brown Eyed Girl and the whole band for some generic soul/ gospel/ rock, Joe Camilleri took his leave. Every inch the bandleader he presides over a group of musicians who know their time has come. That they were playing a pub gig instead of Memorial Drive was just one of life’s little peculiarities. I’m inclined to think it’s one of its great sorrows.

“Jo Jo Gets Back” The Adelaide Review, No.84, January, 1991, p.26.

Symphony Australia

Published: 1991

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

Celebrating Mozart

Two centuries on Mozart’s compositions continue to be music to our ears. Conductor Nicholas Braithwaite and Concertmaster Ladislav Jasek talk with Murray Bramwell about what Mozart means to them.

Unless you’ve been living in a cupboard for the past year you will know that 1991 marks the bicentenary of the death of Mozart. Throughout Europe and North America commemorative programs of his music will be performed to audiences whose love for his work only increases with time. In Austria extensive celebrations are in prospect and large numbers of visitors will be making the pilgrimage to Vienna, Salzburg and other Austrian cities associated with the peripitetic Wolfgang.

When we consider the singularly unhappy circumstances of Mozart’s final years and his premature death in pitiful circumstances, the magnitude of public admiration for his music nowadays has an unavoidable irony about it. In his own lifetime his work was undervalued by envious rivals and a fatuous court and despite his tenacity and optimism his career was buffeted by ill-health, fickle patronage and financial uncertainty.

We can take no comfort in the romantic myth that suffering is a catalyst to creation. Even a passing glance at the facts suggests that Mozart died of neglect. Michael Levey in his biography, The Life and Death of Mozart, describes countless times when well-to-do audiences were happy to applaud but less willing to subscribe. One instance, in Leipzig, caused Levey to fume - “Two of Mozart’s finest arias -Bella mia fiamma, probably, and Ch’io mi scordi di te- two mature piano concertos and portions of two unidentified symphonies were included in a programme which may make posterity weep for envy of those who heard it, and for shame that humanity would not pay for such a privilege.”

The focus on Mozart in 1991 is valuable and timely. Singling him out gives the chance to acknowledge fully the scale of his achievement. Even though he died at thirty-six he had a prodigious writing life of thirty-one years in which he produced , according to Kochel’s diligent catalogue, 626 works -an output which in itself represents the pinnacle of achievement in the classical period.

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is not only presenting a series of four Mozart-only concerts during April and May, it has initiated a cluster of other events relating to the Mozart celebrations. The ASO will appear with the State Opera in its production of Don Giovanni in May and the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra and the Australian String Quartet will also be performing during this period. The Adelaide Festival Centre Trust will be coming to the party with a series of Mozart film screenings and there are plans to present a season of chamber music with players from the University of Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium performing in the Festival Centre foyers.

ASO General Manager, Michael Elwood is enthusiastic about the Mozart program which is unique to the Adelaide concert season. “The idea came from the excitement when Walter Klien came in 1988. We virtually booked him on the spot. He is carrying several other Mozart concertos for other cities but only Adelaide has made it a specialty.”

Austrian born, Walter Klien has distinguished himself in both the classical and 20th century repertoire, touring regularly throughout Europe and North America. He has also recorded extensively - amongst some 65 recordings he has performed all of the Schubert sonatas and the complete Brahms and Mozart solo works.

Principal Conductor Nicholas Braithwaite will present all four of the Mozart concerts. “I first worked with Walter Klien in my very first job with the Bournemouth Symphony,” he recalls, “it was in the late 1960’s and we did a Mozart concerto then too. He’s a Viennese musician and the thing about them is that they really know about music. You have a soloist come who specialises in Mozart but you talk about a Puccini opera and he can play it to you from memory.”

“He was stunning then and I never worked with him again until the performance in Adelaide about two years ago. it went so well that at that time we suggested he come back to do the Mozart anniversary season with us. The concerto selections are his choice and then we had to decide what else to do for the four programs.”

“We went through all sorts of permutations like Mozart and Vienna, Mozart and his Contemporaries and so on,and we found that they were either too restrictive or dangerous in other ways. We looked at various programs other people had done recently and they do tend to show a great composer with a lot of other not-very-great composers. You can end up with a ragbag collection really.”

“In my opinion Mozart is the one composer above all others where you can do lots of different programs purely from his music without becoming saturated. After Walter Klien had selected the piano works, the question was then how to structure the rest of the program. We decided to do something really simple which was Symphonies 39, 40, 41 and the Requiem. They are the peak of Mozart’s creativity -it is a logical sequence of the three major achievements in the symphonic world in the 18th century plus the major choral work of the 18th century. It is a simple idea but we thought `Why not ?’ We then matched the concertos with the different character of the symphonies and built the program up from there.”

Nicholas believes that the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus has contributed to a revival of interest in Mozart. An admirer of the play he saw the Peter Hall production five times. “The play, and the film, have done a magical service for music,” he explains, “because although we are all aware that many of the details are factually incorrect, Amadeus captures absolutely what it was like for Mozart to be Mozart at that time and what it was like for the people around him to be confronted by him. It showed his frustration at finding himself being judged for appointments to jobs by people whom he knew to be infinitely inferior to him and their fears to find themselves in the company of someone they knew to be so much better than they were.”

“I’ve come to Mozart’s work over a very long time. I started my musical life as a trombone player, interested in the music of Wagner and Tchaikovsky and Verdi. Over many years working with chamber orchestras Mozart has become a larger and larger part of my life and I expect that to go on growing.

“I think one of the reasons is that there is about Mozart a sense of balance and perfection which you don’t find anywhere else. Now, I don’t really believe in perfection- I believe in the search, but not in its realisation. But Mozart confounds me because in his music- and I would say I knew about a quarter of it well- there seem to me to be no imperfections.I find that difficult to come to terms with !”

“Mozart’s work is a perfect blend - when you get to the people who transcend their period and their time such as Mozart or Wagner, I think they blend the qualities of Classicism, Romaticism and Impressionism together. All of these elements occur in their music which is why they are so good. When it comes to externals it is easy to find labels but when it comes to internals, like the balance of a piece which may be the reason it is ultimately more successful than another composer of comparable melodic gifts, these labels dissolve. Then you find that Mozart is just as Romantic as Beethoven and Beethoven as Classical as Mozart.”

All the orchestral works in the program have personal associations for Braithwaite. “The Requiem interests me because as a trombone player it has a super part for trombone ! Also, I find the sheer sense of creative excitement in the Requiem very moving. Mozart was dying and it was left unfinished. Mozart did not dictate it from his deathbed, and certainly not to Salieri ,as suggested in Amadeus. He left sketches for others to complete. The excitement of that process,though, of getting the vision in someone’s mind on to a piece of paper, that stays with me when I do the Requiem. “

“I have conducted it twice before and the symphonies all have life-long associations with my early days with amateur orchestras. I’ve been doing them on and off ever since and I’m gradually learning to come to grips with them in the way I want to do them. The piano concerto in B Flat K 595 is also a return to a familiar task because we performed it in 1988 with Walter Klien on his last visit. “

For Nicholas Braithwaite, a conductor whose warmth and enthusiasm has made him popular with Adelaide audiences in his time with the ASO, the Mozart season, particularly with Walter Klien, is one he looks forward to -“ There is so much space in his playing, “ he notes admiringly, “that’s the element of classical perfection that Mozart gives you, the complete sense of timelessness and space in his music.”

Violinist Ladislav Jasek has been Concertmaster of the ASO for eight years. He came to Australia in 1959 to teach at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide and soon distinguished himself as a soloist with a number of Australian orchestras as well as with the widely regarded Elder Trio. He returned to Prague as Resident Soloist with the Czech Philharmonic and travelled throughout Europe. Australia became a base again in 1966 and he also worked a stint teaching at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has been guest Concertmaster with the Royal Philharmonic and the London Mozart Players. He was Concertmaster with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust Orchestra before taking the front chair with the ASO.

In conversation Ladislav Jasek’s affection for Mozart is immediately apparent. “My enthusiasm began when I was a child,” he recalls with a quiet smile, “I used to be a child prodigy myself. I started playing when I was five years old and I played my very first Mozart concerto when I was six. I studied it and performed it in my local village in Czechoslovakia. Later I played it professionally and performed all seven of the violin concertos. Also, not many years ago I recorded one of the Mozart concertos with our Adelaide orchestra.”

“I am an avid collector of records which began when I was very young. I started with 78’s and then LP’s and now compact discs. I have three full sets of Mozart piano concertos and also the symphonies. For me personally Mozart is a great joy and the Mozart season will give us a wonderful opportunity to play his work.”

“Mozart’s genius is his simplicity and yet he makes definite statements. The structure of his themes is simple yet precise. It is not possible to make any changes. You can find composers, even Beethoven, where some things, not necessarily could be added, but re-orchestrated or slightly changed. In Mozart that would be sacrilege. It is a statement -right there, that’s how it is. It is there like a law - a kindly law, not abrupt or strict, something you play with an equal loving care, which is what the music conveys.”

“There is a tremendous sense of humour in Mozart as well as something very profound, especially in the later work. I am refering to the symphonies and operas like The Magic Flute. There is a story of a Czech composer who was asked what he would do if Beethoven came into the room. He said he would bow very low in honour of Beethoven. And if Mozart came into the room ? He said he would get under the table and never come out !”

“Mozart was there, is here and will always be here. The only thing that we may change is our conception of how to perform him. I think, thank God, that we now go to the simplicity and play precisely what is there without adding any unwanted Romaticism and -talking as a string player - without any unwanted portamenti or glissandi. We keep to what is written without -again from the string point of view- any excessive vibrato. Then the beauty of the music is fully revealed as the composer intended. Mozart wrote with such ease that he could even write two or three things at the same time and never would one thing interfere with the others- such was his genius of mind and spirit.”

Jasek is also looking forward to working again with Walter Klien and is especially fond of the later piano concertos. his favourite is the Concerto in C, K467 -now sometimes called the Elvira Madigan after it was popularised by Bo Widerberg’s film in 1967. “You know that so-called relaxation music that people use ? When I really want relax I play the slow movement from 467. Sometimes when I go to sleep I simply switch off the light and play the tape I have of Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting the London Philharmonia. I have often thought to tell my children that when I have my funeral that they should play that particular tape for me because it is one of the most sublime pieces of music, by any standard, written by any composer.”

Commenting on his animated approach to music, Ladislav readily concedes -“It is part of the Slav race you could say. Ever since I showed my particular talent as a child I always believed that music is the deepest expression of the human soul and spirit- combined together through physical means- and that has to be obvious, not in an ostentatious manner, but expressed nevertheless.”

“This Mozart program is a happy event for the orchestra. We all love to play Mozart. I could not possibly imagine anyone in the orchestra not enjoying the series. In fact, we may have a problem because we have to reduce the orchestra size and already we are wondering who on earth will be left out. So we may do some rostering so everyone will have an equal chance to participate.”

“I remember the 200 year commemoration of the birth of Beethoven. I was in New Zealand and I performed all ten sonatas.” Then the violinist adds- “I wish I could perform all 35 or so of the sonatas and we could do all the concerti and symphonies.” With a wry smile, Ladislav Jasek interrupts his enthusiastic reverie. “But we have to be modest,” he concedes with a reluctant shrug, “ and look forward to these four concerts instead.“

Symphony Australia, 1991.

The Four Hoarse Men of the Apocalypse

Published: 1991-06-01

The Highwaymen Memorial Drive May, 1991.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

This is the age of the conglomerate. After the takeovers, the buy-outs and the barracuda raids have come rationalisation, employee-led rescues and all the other attempts at damage control. No less so in rock and roll. Lately, there’s been a whole lot of corporate huddling going on. Take the Travelling Wilburys for example - bigger than you know-who and not even deterred when Roy Orbison collected his dividend. In this time of re-issues, digital re-mastering and the chart supremacy of the ragbag movie soundtrack, the equivalent on the concert stage is bound to attract subscribers.

It’s a nice concept, value for money- and something of a novelty in live rock performance. So when The Highwaymen come along - in alphabetical order, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson- who wouldn’t hand over their valuables. Publicists would call this a legendary line-up. Two hundred and twenty six years of cowboy/rock/tex mex/rockabilly/ whiney Nashville history. This is the Mt Rushmore of country music, the four goodest ol’ boys you ever saw.

And four is a good symmetrical number- when ah think of the four suits the man used to say in The Deck of Cards, ah think of the four apostles. This time without their teaspoons, the substance-free Highwaymen look like the Wild Bunch in Florida, relaxed, solvent (even Willie) and happy to be sharing the weight.

The backing band opens up, a ten cylinder machine which is testimony of the pervasive influence of rock, even in what passes for heartland country music. The rhythm section lays a baseline which never falters in two hours while Reggie Young on lead guitar and Rocky Turner on pedal steel garnish with every idiom they can find. If someone needs a fiddle sound, Young hits a switch, for barrelhouse piano Bobby Woods pummels away at his Roland.

The set opened with the Waylon Jennings mock weepie Mammas Dont Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys. Jimmie Rodgers would have had a fit. But he wouldn’t have been surprised - each of the Highwaymen has contributed to the hybridising of country genres, modernising, popularising and ensuring that this rogue mutant idiot bastard music still finds a place deep in the cardiac tissue.

The chores moved quickly between singers- each taking a verse and all, plus some healing voices from the ten behind, on the hooks and bridges. It became as clear as piss in the sunshine that we were going to hear a lot of songs that have been very good to their owners through the years. Jennings amply introduced his theme from the Dukes of Hazzard , Cash got out his death-rattle croon for Folsom Prison Blues, Willie Nelson his nasal tenor for Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain and Kristofferson, without a second glance at the storm clouds over Memorial Drive, sang Help Me Make it Through the Night.

They may be a band but the Highwaymen maintain their separate identikits. The Mattel Willie Nelson has a stetson and a plait, Waylon is in black and white Gene Autry bad taste, Kristofferson, in rock leather and jeans, has trimmed up but you can put the same old TM next to Johnny Cash. In bible belt gothic he still looks like Elmer Gantry’s brother and his version of Ring of Fire still has a ring of half-truth about it. June Carter Cash, waiting in the wings, took a bow while Johnny mumbled awkwardly about her being the light of his life, or his spark-plug, or something to do with his ignition. The trouble with courtly tributes in country music is that they all sound like crash repairs.

Willie took the lead and then Kristofferson took the spotlight for Loving Her was Easier . Back to Willie for You Were Always on My Mind and then Kristofferson managed to mangle Me and Bobby McGhee with the wackiest tempo he could find.

That was the exception though. Cash, with some significant help from the band, brought his 1957 rockabilly hit Get Rhythm into present perfect- proving that he too was a Memphis Sun king. Kristofferson brought some social protest to the meeting with Johnny Lobo and Willie Nelson’s Still Still Moving to Me was a highpoint, fluid in both vocal and guitar. His rendition of I Love You So Much it Hurts Me strained credulity but prepared the unwary for a splendidly hokey Ghost Riders in the Sky, complete with yippie-yi-ays, which Johnny Cash disarmingly followed with Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.

Waylon Jennings worked the crowd with Amanda, Light of My Life and a string of his surreal honky tonk signature tunes. Waylon moves with thoughtful deliberation and likes to rest a lot between engagements but he moved like the wind with his joint homage to Presley and Flintstone jelly -Yabba Dabba Doo the King is gone and I am too. The gang of four then hit a mournful spot with Desperadoes Waiting For the Train and Johnny Cash closed the set. With I’ll Walk the Line surely ? Numb with disappointment, I momentarily lost the plot. I think it was Orange Blossom Special.

Encores all round. Cash was first. I’ll Walk the Line? Sorry. A Man Named Sue, subtle as a pit bull. Kristofferson rinsed us in the blood with Help Me Jesus. Waylon, a more secular soul, swayed lasciviously through Some Basics of Love. Willie, with hardly a thought for the IRS, sang On the Road Again. The Highwaymen had played for two and a quarter hours, the rain had fallen neither on the just nor the unjust, and the four hoarse men had been a revelation. I just want to know what happened to I’ll Walk the Line.

The Adelaide Review, No.89, June, 1991, p.29.

Kelly Country

Published: 1991-07-01

Paul Kelly and the Messengers with Archie Roach Tivoli Hotel

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 antennae 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.

The 1989 album, So Much Water So Close to Home, Kelly’s finest album to date, displayed the Messengers at their tasty best and Kelly creatively more adventurous than ever. With American producer Scott Litt the band revealed a depth in their sound to match the lyrical density of songs such as Everything is Turning to White, Kelly’s intriguing double-take on a Raymond Carver short story.

Currently touring the new double album , Comedy, Kelly and the Messengers are indicating that changes are coming. The singer has said in recent interviews that separate projects are likely. The band, who accompanied Michelle Shocked early in the year, have their own plans for writing and recording while Kelly seems more confident than ever as a soloist. It’s all very mutual but -there were certainly no rifts apparent when Kelly and the Messengers recently blew the dust and most of the paint off the rafters at the Tiv. Eighteen months ago they played a likeable but patchy set at the Thebarton Theatre, this time round we are talking height of the powers.

Archie Roach first though. Kelly has been performing Roach’s Took the Children Away, an elegiac account of the compulsory fostering of Aboriginals in the 1950s, for a while now. The decision to include Roach’s band (which includes his wife Ruby) on the present tour, is an even better idea. Opening with Charcoal Lane, title track of the excellent album which Kelly produced, Archie Roach quietly demonstrated why he is rapidly becoming a creative and political force around the country. Softly spoken with a voice as good as Sam Cooke’s, he and his band were warmly received despite the electrical gremlins. Performing No,No,No, Native Born and Sister Brother, all from the album, Roach with his sweet, lilting vocals and assertive Nunga-pride lyrics showed how he might well be the one to mainstream Aboriginal music.

Ruby Roach also led with strong compositions of her own- Down City Streets and Black Woman, Black Wife. Archie might get the billing but this is a partnership. The sound rig for their set was woeful and it was clearly giving the singer grief when feedback from his guitar player mutilated Took the Children Away. These things, however, can be easily remedied. Next time round, Archie and Ruby Roach will really be in charge.

Paul Kelly began his hundred and fifty minutes with the domestic short story, Other People’s Houses, reminding us that he is one of the very few performers around who can write songs about social class. Stories of Me, in the perked up Comedy version, followed, then Brighter, also from the new album. A brace of tunes from So Much Water - You Can’t Take it With You and No You really brought the band on line. With No You, Steve Connolly’s guitar work flourished for the first of many times while Jon Schofield on bass and drummer Michael Barclay maintained the usual splendid rhythm department.

Kelly and the band kept stacking them on - Keep it to Yourself (like Don’t Start Me Talking, from the Positively Fourth Street school of retribution), Take Your Time and She’s A Melody. Keyboard player, Peter Bull let loose with an incendiary intro for To Her Door which was succeeded by John Cale’s Buffalo Ballet. After that Kelly took up his harmonica and sang a set of solos including his Gurindji land rights anthem, From Little Things Big Things Grow . With a tune borrowed from The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and a chorus melody straight from God, Paul Kelly walks among the shades of Guthrie and Ochs, Zimmerman and Seeger. It is a marvellous song, one of his very best.Others in the solo set, the wistful I Can’t Believe We Were Married and Turning to White also proved that Kelly can more than hold a pub crowd on his own.

It was the best of both worlds, though, when the Messengers returned for Blue Stranger and a rock hard version of Dumb Things. All Downhill From Here and Wintercoat - with a fine lyric and Connolly playing the kind of throaty fuzz solos that David Cohen used to do for Country Joe and the Fish- added new pleasures as Kelly powered through the set finishing with a Smiths cover, some vintage rockakellybilly, a plangent unrecorded song- When I first Met Your Mother and a new rendering of Sweet Guy. Instead of the discrepant up-beat recorded version, Kelly put a slow blues to the dark lyric - with arresting effect. It was a powerful point to end things. In fact, Paul Kelly and the Messengers were enticed back for six encores- including Kelly’s song for Jenny Morris, Beggar on the Street of Love and standards, Under the Sun and The Execution, the latter driven as always, by Peter Bull’s synth and Steve Connolly’s searing guitar lines. Kelly had played thirty five songs from the canon in a performance that would be hard to fault. He is one of the most creative souls to come out of this city - someone should invite him to an arts festival.

The Adelaide Review, No.90, July, 1991, p.33.

The Rough with the Smooth

Published: 1991-10-01

Joe Jackson Thebarton Theatre Coppel/SA-FM

Elvis Costello and the Rude Five Entertainment Centre MTV/SA-FM

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Someone once said that after the Beatles made it big the pigeon-chested weaklings got all the best girls. That’s not entirely true - Buddy Holly had already made it despite his nerdy horn rims and so did English rockers like Adam Faith even though he, clearly, never ate his vegetables. In fact, the ectomorphs have ruled the earth since the beginnings of rock and roll. But it took runty little jokers like Dylan to set new benchmarks which the poms matched in imperial measure. Keith Richards, Townshend t-talking about his generation, Hendrix and the young Rod Stewart, they were all lording it, kicking sand in the face of Charles Atlas.

The late seventies saw a further flowering of weeds and while Malcolm McLaren adroitly ensured that spotty Johnny Rotten and his mate Sid got icon status, it was the triumvirate of Graham Parker, Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson who were the real McCoin. From the pubs and the lounges they came -ready-made geniuses, shaping two minute forty second power pop that put paid to the windy meanderings of art-rock. Queen survived the onslaught, Yes and Supertramp sank like Stones. New wave, some vaguely nouvelle publicist was calling it- these punchy little quartets with whiney vocals and a lot of spivvy energy. In his pork pie hat Joe Jackson looked like a barrow boy, Graham Parker in his dark glasses, like he’d never seen daylight and Elvis Costello, well, he was Buddy Holly back from borstal.

More than thirty albums on, all three are still in the hunt. This year’s Parker, Struck by Lightning, is a return to amiably acoustic form while Jackson and Costello have not only released new material they have been whistlestopping through the country performing it.

It was something less than a stroke of genius to have Joe and Elvis hitting town a day apart. By the look of the gaps in the Costello crowd at the Entertainment Centre I’d say Joe got most of the cherry. Not that we’re talking Tweedledee and Dum here. Since Night and Day, Jackson has gone for a creamy Manhattan sound, stepping out with a percussive, croony urbanity. Meanwhile Costello has produced album after album of lyrically brilliant , densely eclectic country honk. It was horses, you might say, for courses.

At Thebarton, Jackson performed the sort of splendidly suave set that has you almost hoping for a glitch. Solo at the Roland he opened with Stepping Out while the band appeared in fugue formation. On came Melinda Jostyn violin, harmonica and vocal, Sue Hadjopoulos on percussion, Graham Maby on bass - and It’s Different for Girls. Enter Dan Hickey on drums and guitarist Tom Teeley. Finally Ed Roynesdal took over the synths and the whole band swerved into a fast-ticking Got the Time. But even though Maby hit those famous bass-lines you wouldn’t exactly call it beat crazy.

In his mustard-coloured, teddy boy frock coat and burgundy baggies, Joe has clearly ditched the Dick Powell look. Relaxed, but measured, he started on the Laughter and Lust material - Obvious, Goin Downtown- pausing for some drolleries about lip-synching on Hey Hey it’s Saturday,and then into Hit Single. A double-header followed from Night and Day- Chinatown and Another World- featuring splashy keyboard work from Roynesdal and Teeley on fuzz guitar. There was a sharp shift to Look Sharp and to the newest standard, The Other Me.

The new material is unmistakeably Jackson but sometimes you can’t help feeling that he’s only moving the deckchairs around. It was the oldies that stopped the show in its tracks - Real Men and Precious Time. And for the encore, I’m a Man - fast but not entirely furious, not like the version on that double live set, no hernias here.

Once again Joe Jackson had played a pin-sharp set with a great band. Finally, alone again at the keyboard , he sang a dreamily-phrased version of A Slow Song , pressed the repeat button and while the riff infinitely restated itself, left the stage. It was like all the other carefully rehearsed repeat buttons in the show, in impeccable taste but curiously short on flavour.

By way of contrast, Declan Patrick McManus with the three members of his Rude Five performed an erratic, ecogentric set that could have benefited from a bit of Joe’s premeditation. In contrast to his show with the Confederates back in 1987, Costello favoured a rough and artless sound. A nice idea - Elvis jumping from Rickenbacker to Gretsch, playing lead on some very respectable grunge rock. But the sound in the Entertainment Centre, new home of the people’s music, was - from my balcony at least- all trebles and drums. Either the air traffic controllers at the sound-desk had their heads in a bucket or the acoustic in the Centre has a nasty problem. Every time Larry Knechtel hit the Hammond, former Attraction Pete Thomas his over-hyped drums or E.C. his wonderfully ironic guitar hero chops, the upper registers shrieked.

Fortunately, the shitty sound did not noticeably inhibit the faithful. As indeed it shouldn’t have. The new shaggy Elvis, compleat bodgie in shades and shiny shoes, was more personable than ever. A dry comic and a majestic talent he roared through twenty-odd songs- opening with She’s Happy Now. He really found his feet with This is Candy from the new album, Mighty like a Rose. Then he moved to the brilliant I Want You and went mellow with the Very Thought of You. Completely steering around King of America and Blood and Chocolate, Costello looked instead to Spike- and the latest work , with its new expression of anti-war sentiment, Playboy to a Man, and smoothies like The Other Side of Summer.

The high points were the solos -Let Him Dangle sandwiched in hard-driving medley with Watching the Detectives. Of the oldies Oliver’s Army hit the spot as did Almost Blue. In the encores- with Alison the aim was true and with God’s Comic it was divine. Closing the set Elvis hit the wah-wah pedal and he and the Rude boys worked hard to put some funk into the incomparable Costello rocker, Pump it Up. But, again, the sound mix stuffed things. The Pump don’t work - because the vandals took the handle.

The Adelaide Review, No.93, October, 1991, p.39.

Was It Rolling, Bob ?

Published: 1992-03-15

Bob Dylan with Bonnie Raitt

Entertainment Centre March, 1992

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Bob Dylan has toured Australia four times in his thirty year career- which to his many admirers seems like slightly less often than Halley’s Comet. It is hardly surprising, then, if expectations run high. We have a complex and cumulative sense of his work. Many of us have grown up with Dylan and like few other performers his songs, attitude and style remain with us. Dylan is now part of our nostalgia but, unlike most golden oldies, he is also part of our present lives -as his many remarkable records attest.

Throughout his moody, mercurial career Dylan has resisted the mantle of prophet, spokesperson and ideologue. He ditched his public role almost as soon as he began- to the dismay of the Left in the folk scene, for whom he was a particular jewel. Instead, for three decades he has been cranky, unpredictable, contradictory, zionist, christian fundamentalist, sexist, crazy, drunk, disappointing and bored- as well as brilliant, witty, inexplicably imaginative, inspirational, wise and profoundly memorable. Bob Dylan, you might say, is the master of the mood swing.

When he toured in 1986 with Tom Petty, Dylan astonished the Memorial Drive crowd with his ease. Tanned and affable he chatted to the crowd, played driving electric music with the Heartbreakers and then produced several acoustic sets which few will forget - an extended version of Hard Rain that, in the quality of the vocal and beauty of his guitar playing, reclaimed the song, and a rendering of In the Garden magnificent enough to momentarily set aside all those vexed questions about his religious mania. That tour set a benchmark for Dylan in middle-age. No-one expected to see the skinny punk from Highway 61, just a bit of good honest here-and-now and some pride and regard for his own creative gifts.

Taking the stage at the Entertainment Centre after we’d just seen a very likeable, rock-steady sixty minutes from Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan looked like a man sick to death of being Bob Dylan. Maybe he should franchise a series of nervy young ectomorphs to do tribute shows of his greatest hits. At least they’d look like the Dylan on the T-Shirts at the merchandising counter and they could do those feel-good anthem sessions where everyone holds up their zippo lighters and sits quietly together for a bit of sixties heaven.

Instead, Dylan is on what he himself has called his Never Ending Tour. His biographer Clinton Heylin has warned us about this. It had been running two years even then. Now it’s reached the four year mark and what you find is certainly what you get. The most notable thing about Dylan and his funk-rock quartet is that the tempos they are a-changing, to a point well beyond parody. When I think about it- opening with Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) had a sense of augury about it. It took about two minutes to rattle that one off and before the band had finished their final chords Bob was off doing a 78rpm version of Oh Mercy’s Most of the Time. No studied pauses over lost love there- jeez, there’s a garage band version of All Along the Watchtower to get through. At least that one could take a good rock thumping, unlike Just Like A Woman, in doubletime with half-meaning and some Spike Jones steel guitar.

By now the audience was in some quandary. It was, after all, Him up the front there -although some weren’t even sure about that. The pub crowd were all standing up and the New Seekers people wanted to sit down on their forty-three dollars worth. Dylan may well have wondered if he was hearing a lot of requests for a song called Sit Down. Except that he hadn’t really been beamed down properly himself -oblivious to the audience and the task at hand. This was all too evident with the monumental hash he made of Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again). Mumbling into the microphone he and the band reduced Blonde on Blonde to mud on mud. In defence of the band - with Dylan’s approach to rehearsal they may well have had three milliseconds to arm themselves for that one. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight almost survived its careless delivery but Maggie’s Farm barely stopped for a gasp.

The contractual obligation concert continued. Switching to acoustic guitar, Dylan made sweeter business of She Belongs to Me, and two solos -traditional ballads of the kind Martin Carthy used to teach him back in 1963- tantalised us for a few minutes with something that had some presence and some point to it. Typically, the sit-down-in-front people, miffed at those still standing up, bellyached loudly through the few still moments in the whole night.

Dylan’s next task was to take eleven minutes of Desolation Row and scrunch it down to under three. It’s a ponderous piece and could use an edit but, with a thousand songs in his repertoire, why not choose something else -like Tangled Up and Blue ? Similarly the incomprehensible sunday-schooler God Sent the World (?) could have been improved on by almost anything on Saved or Shot of Love, let alone Slow Train Coming. I’ll Remember You, from Empire Burlesque, got desultory treatment but with a long string-band intro and an almost-samba rhythm he breathed new life into The Times They Are A-Changin’, which, almost uniquely, was given enough time, space and dignity to succeed. Highway Sixty One and Ballad of a Thin Man both got a lively rock drubbing with a fat bass and gutsy lead - perfectly fine if they’d been Johnny B Goode and Wild Thing. But you would never have known that these songs were ever weapons of satire or that they had anything to say about all those people tucking into hampers in the corporate boxes, that- as the line goes- something is happening here and you don’t know what it is…

A gibberish version of Rainy Day Woman served as the first encore and a denatured strum through Blowin In the Wind for the finale. The band, identities unknown thanks to the taciturn Dylan and the murk of the sound mix, played solid, acceptable rock and roll. If they got rid of their boffo lead singer they’d get a pub gig anywhere. It’s great that Bob Dylan doesn’t do a mortuary show and he wants to keep trying the new angles. But these ones were too oblique for anybody’s good and, when you wait for Halley’s Comet, you can’t help expecting a little more illumination than this.

03/15/9203/14/92

Funerals and Circuses

Published: 1992-04-01

by Roger Bennett Music by Paul Kelly Magpie Theatre, South Australia Director: Steve Gration Assistant Director: Kaarin Fairfax Designer: Kathryn Sproul Choreographer: Debra Batton Lighting: Laraine Wheeler Cast: Wayne Anthoney, Roger Bennett, Robert Crompton, Fille Dusseljee, Francis Greenslade, Michael Harris, Nick Hope, Paul Kelly, Kate Roberts, Mandi Sandilands, Lillian Sansbury, Simone Tur.

Rarely does a theatrical work speak to its audience as directly and potently as Funerals and Circuses. In the midst of the Adelaide Festival, with all its attendant sense of cultural consumption, is a play that is about our immediate reality. In the same week that ABC-TV created fierce public debate by screening Cop It Sweet, a documentary on police attitudes towards Aboriginals, and Mandawuy Yunupingu, lead singer of Yothu Yindi, was refused service in the Catani Bar in Melbourne’s St. Kilda, Funerals and Circuses presents us with a vivid account of racism in a South Australian community.

This play has not come out of nowhere. It continues and builds on a core of black writing in recent years begun by the powerful witness in Jack Davis’s work, plays by Bob Maza and Eva Johnson and the widespread and well-merited success of Bran Nue Dae. But Funerals and Circuses has learnt well from its antecedents and the process of its development has been a particularly creative one.

The setting is a small unidentified town where the lives of whites and Aboriginals are in daily, intimate encounter. This contributes much to the intensity of events - Nona, the daughter of the local cop Graham Royal, has married an Aboriginal, Ben Bean, which alienates not only the local whites but also Ben’s daughter Jessie. Ben’s sister Rose has a son, Joseph, a spirited youth who is often in conflict with official and unofficial white authority. Running the local bar on the best apartheid principles is Corey, while Pam McMahon and her racist tearaway son Kev operate the shop. Next door at the garage is Tony, friend to Ben and Joseph and therefore suspect as far as the white residents are concerned. The play, as the title suggests, begins with a wedding and ends in grief but it richly explores the attitudes and fears of the characters and in so doing brings the abstraction of racism into human terms.

Opening in promenade fashion, the crowd is invited to a madcap wedding celebrated with Paul Kelly’s nimble song Until Death Do Them Part. Having established a sense of frivolity, the vehemence of the racism -expressed when the guests are refused a nuptial drink at the local - cuts deep. The local cop is feckless, the white youths of the town homicidally out of control. A shadow falls over events when Rose fears her son Christopher is missing and Jessie decides to head out to a dreaming site just out of town. The play threads a complicated plot artfully, creating suspense and tension in the process.

Richard, a cousin from town, introduces a star-crossed theme when he quotes Romeo and Julietta Kev’s disillusioned girlfriend Julie. This theme of prejudice and vengeance imbues the play. It is the young who suffer most terribly - and the play does not stint in saying so.

Directors Steve Gration and Kaarin Fairfax have drawn fine performances particularly from the less experienced performers. There is a truth to their work which is powerfully eloquent. Writer Roger Bennett brings a shrewd comedy to the part of Ben Bean while Robert Crompton and Michael Harris are crucially convincing as Joseph and Richard. We experience vividly the vindictiveness with which they are treated. The desperate racism of Corey (Nick Hope) and Kev McMahon (Francis Greenslade) serve a key dramatic role in the play and Greenslade, in particular, contributes one of the finest stage performances. Wayne Anthoney as the cop skilfully epitomises the kind of easy-going approach to law enforcement which serves racism best while Lillian Sansbury and Simone Tur as Rose and Jessie, black women violated and betrayed by random violence, give performances which are precise, eloquent and harrowing in their detail.

Funerals and Circuses is unsparing in its depiction of injustice but it is also imbued with a radiant spirit. This is not in the form of easy sentiment but a sense of the unquenchable vitality of Aboriginal society and the careful protocol which unites it. Director Gration has maintained workable balances in the production , aided by a practical and appropriately detailed set, one of Kathryn Sproul’s best. The store fronts and shanties, petrol pumps and desert settings give specificity to the narrative and anchor the drama in an identifiable locale. Finally, mention must be made of Paul Kelly, gently offbeat as Tony and a vital contributor to the success of the show. His music - lyrical, slyly memorable and always shaped and integrated with the action - brings a kind of joy to the production. Funerals and Circuses is not an easy account of our times. It presents much to feel grief and shame for. But the simple gifts of Kelly’s Finale Song offer a kind of benediction that promises better. Not just because we wish it, but because good people have already striven for it.

“Funerals and Circuses” Lowdown, Vol.14, No.2, April 1992, p.55.

Song and Danse

Published: 1992-05-01

Angelique Kidjo Old Lion

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Slipstreaming behind Womadelaide comes another world music star. More middle-of-the-road than Remmy Ongala or Youssou N’Dour, Angelique Kidjo, late of the West African state of Benin is now an exponent of Paris pop. Her music is selling well here, Logozo the current album has gone top forty, one of the first world music releases to do so.

The appeal is clear enough. Kidjo’s sound is a stylish mix of percussion, smoky vocal, bright keyboard and guitar funk. It’s classy dance music with a smidgeon of social comment and plenty of flash production. The album has guest solos from the likes of Sting’s Blue Turtle people -notably saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Collaborating with her husband, bassist Jean Hebrail, Kidjo blends western pop with traditional swahili ballads and chants. The result is beguiling - echoes of Simply Red, even middle period Thompson Twins but always driven by intricate, cross rhythmic percussion.

On stage at the Old Lion Angelique Kidjo and her band were a formidable sight. In her trademark zebra skin tights Kidjo was in perpetual motion, coolly shadowed by percussionist and fellow mover, Jean-Paul Waboty of Zaire. Behind them Hebrail maintained a sternum-rattling bass along with drummer Jean-Philippe Fanfant and percussionist Pierre Chenisse while keyboard player Alain Bonin worked all his reed and brass programs and guitarist Joao Mota kept a steady foot on the wah wah. The combination of rippling rhythm and electric funk hasn’t sounded so good since Weather Report’s Sweetnighter days or maybe Miles Davis in the Tu Tu sessions.

Working through the Logozo material Kidjo built a wall of energy with Eledjire, grinning to the crowd- are you hot ? The bopping slowed with the ballad, The Day Will Come, a call for a united black South Africa. Kidjo is less proselytising than other West African performers and since moving to her Paris base is openly critical of the marxist regime in Benin. She rarely translates her lyrics even with songs like Kaleta, which despite an almost discrepantly sprightly tune is a plaintive reminder of the plight of suffering children.

The momentum resumed with Batonga, loud and mesmeric with Kidjo’s effortlessly pitched vocal threading above the beat, and then, at the bridge, she and Waboty went into an extended dance duet weaving, dipping and spinning in and out of the relentlessly unfolding rhythm. Malaika, a traditional Tanzanian chant broke the pace. Slow and richly sung, Kidjo’s performance celebrated influences from the legendary Myriam Makeba. With Tche-Tche and We-We, Kidjo and the band played unstoppable dance music the singer’s playful vocals intermingling with Bonin’s splashes of synthesiser and Mota’s insinuating funk . The riff from We-We remained almost maddeningly memorable days later. Logozo, the song of the tortoise, has a samba-like rhythm, with nimble percussion underscored by rich spreads of synthesiser. Like so much of Kidjo’s music it makes for irresistibly smooth pop.

The band closed their set with an extended version of Ewa Ka Djo - an endless propulsion of drumming with a vibrant vocal which Kidjo turned into dialogue with the crowd who ventured replies in approximately phonetic swahili. Hauling dancers on to the stage the singer remained a miracle of energy and verve throughout.

Returning for an encore, Kidjo quietened the mood with Senie, a love song sung in the Ewe dialect. The band and the crowd sang the bass line while Kidjo found yet another chamber in her lungs to launch her exceptional voice. Understandably the crowd noisily hung about for more- and more is what we got as the Angelique Kidjo band rocked out with Ekoleya, an anti-war song -although you’d hardly know it from the perky beat. More like Mick Hucknell really, with a bit of Kylie. Only better, much better. Angelique Kidjo may be giving a mixed message with her politics but her dance music is out of this monde.

The Adelaide Review, No.102, May, 1992, p.40

One of a Kind

Published: 1992-06-01

Paul Kelly Old Lion, May 1992

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I arrived late for Paul Kelly’s solo spot at the Old Lion. At ten thirty I was still watching Malvina Major’s splendid account of the expiration, via madness and grief, of Lucia, late of the Lammermoors. Moving from the studied contrivances of bel canto to the easy colloquialism of Paul Kelly calls for some rapid cultural gear changes but by no means a drop in expectation. Kelly’s music and lyric invention have steadily increased over the past few years to a point where you’d think widespread international success must be inevitable. He’s been making steady inroads into the US market lately and will consolidate this when he moves there to live later this year. He deserves to be feted but it may not happen. He is certainly not given to the kind of hype that goes with world-wide promotion nor does critical success necessarily translate into sales - as Randy Newman, Richard Thompson and a large legion of others readily attest.

There is also something definitively (but not restrictively) local about Kelly. His reference points are concretely urban Australian - St Kilda, Kings Cross, Randwick, the back porch wisteria on Kensington Road. It is the kind of precise detail that poets aspire to- William Carlos Williams achieved it in his native Paterson, Vin Buckley in the streets of Parkville - and it takes considerable force of imagination to make it stick.

Like Bob Dylan, Paul Kelly has reconstructed himself and like Dylan he flattered by imitation. As Dylan followed Guthrie so Kelly followed them both - harmonica holder, rockabilly balladry and all. But, again like Dylan, Paul Kelly has long since transcended his derivations. He’s written probably fifty songs that are first rate and, judging by his most recent performances - during the Adelaide Festival and now back to a full and very appreciative house at the Old Lion- he’s getting better all the time.

In this set, solo except for some shrewdly measured alto sax work from Kate McKibbon, Kelly stepped forward to the audience, confident in his work, letting the lyrics speak, revealing the strength and structure in his compositions. With slower tempos and richer phrasing, familiar songs become revelations - not unlike the new readings of classics on the recent Dylan bootlegs.

Armed only with a guitar -acoustic or electric -and some basic piano chords, Paul Kelly is hardly the virtuoso. His raggedy strumming is reminiscent of that other concert hall busker, Billy Bragg. Sometimes you hanker for the tasty musicianship of the Messengers. They knew the territory the same way the Band used to with Brother Bob, the Rumour with Graham Parker or the Heartbreakers with Tom Petty. But Paul Kelly’s willingness to go it alone is not a denial of any of that. This new rawness and readiness to take a chance is a gracious choice, a risk to be honoured.

Working his way through the canon Kelly plays non-standard standards and some new ones from the Hidden Things miscellany. He bangs out Sydney from a 727, then, slow and smoky, Before Too Long. At the piano there’s a hint of Tom Waits in the sly wonkiness of I Was Hoping You’d Say That and another new song, with a vocal to match McKibbon’s fine sax work, Brand New Ways. The rockers also take on new irony and resonance, even a routine lyric like Your Little Sister acquires an edgy worldliness.

In any of Kelly’s acoustic sets there are show-stoppers. His land rights anthem co-written with Kev Carmody, From Little Things Big Things Grow, is reliably one, Maralinga (Rainy Land) is another. This time it was Careless, playfully laced with harmonica, and Dumb Things, transformed into a wry confessional with a catchy bridge that had the crowd crooning in a momentary bout of community singing. It is partly a joke - and Kelly makes a crack about singalongs- but it is also a recognition that time and change has turned a song of innocence into a song of experience.

There is a warmth in Kelly’s work these days, a tenderness that makes songs like When I First Saw Your Ma as simple as sunlight. The lack of sentimentality is not accidental, it is a poet’s measure. On another tack is Deadly, a rap piece from Funerals and Circuses, Kelly’s collaboration with Magpie Theatre, which the singer has drawn back into his own repertoire and idiom.

Paul Kelly played a strong set, richer than ever. Among encores he sang Blue Stranger, the James Reyne classic, Reckless and, slowly picking at the keyboard, Know Your Friends. Kate McKibbon, stylish in her playing throughout, added her dash to From St Kilda to King’s Cross and then Kelly called it a night. He’d played maybe thirty songs and still had barely begun. I couldn’t help wondering what he might have done with Randwick Bells or Before the Old Man Died or Stories of Me - scraps of rhyme when you see them written, magicked into something else in performance. That is Paul Kelly’s considerable gift. From little and hidden things bigger meanings just keep on growing.

The Adelaide Review, No.103, June 1992, p.34.

Soul Survivor

Published: 1992-07-01

Wilson Pickett Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It would have been interesting to know how many people who bought tickets for the Wilson Pickett show thought he was Irish. Certainly his fortunes have received some word-of-mouth resuscitation from Alan Parker’s 2-D movie about a Dublin pub band. Much mentioned but never seen, Mr Pickett served as a grail hero for the Commitments, a retro-soul tribute band playing note-for-note Stax and Atlantic hits from the mid sixties.

The fact is, that in its day, soul music, while piling up sales in the US and Europe, was pretty much eclipsed by the shift in rock taste led by the Beatles, the Stones and the Good Vibrations period Beach Boys. 1966 may have been the year that Mustang Sally went gold, but so did The Last Train to Clarksville, Revolver, Friday on my Mind, Aftermath and Wild Thing.

A quarter of a century on, the dues are being paid and the music is being recognised. Now we can also see that Plato was wrong. When the mode of the music changes the walls don’t crumble at all. In 1968 there was no radical social change despite the millennial preoccupations of song writers. Instead, a different bunch of opportunists got to make the money.

Invariably, a black commercial idea becomes a white commercial success. Jazz, blues, rockn' roll, soul, disco, rap, it's a long list. Even Alan Parker's Commitments, despite their proletarian lack of couth, are essentially in the lucrative tradition of the Monkees. It's hard to hang on to the patent - as Willie Dixon knew when, for a long time, the Stones, Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin pillaged without so much as a thank-you. Dixon eventually set up a trust for black musicians ripped off by white composers’. Chuck Berry undoubtedly felt the same about Brian Wilson’s Surfin’ USA and the Beatles’ Back in the USSR. No wonder he wanted everything COD. When he was forever getting caught with his luggage full of banknotes he was trying to get even. Whatever he owed the IRS was nothing to what the music industry already owed him.

And it’s probably the same for Wilson Pickett. He had some nice successes in the late sixties working with Bobby Womack and white soul gutarist Steve Cropper . Like Otis Redding, Pickett also made some cross-over to white audiences attuned to soul of the rubber variety. In an curious reverse-flip both he and Redding sang Beatles songs in the style of Joe Cocker. But the salad days were soon over for Pickett. Except maybe for Bryan Ferry’s arty revival of Midnight Hour, he became just another lost soul playing the lounges with all those songs which had been very good to him.

No doubt Wilson Pickett is only too pleased to be mistaken for an Irishman if it means that he can still play the circuit at the age of fifty-one. With his seven-piece band he worked the Thebarton crowd like a steak knife salesman. First of all, the showband- led by Curtis Pope on trumpet- got us hyped up with riffs from The Land of a Thousand Dances, home of those anthropological curiosities the madison and the watusi. Then second trumpeter David Akers, in a heritage-listed frilly shirt, sang My Girl- momentarily confusing us into thinking this was Wilson Himself. It wasn’t. But the band plunged on in their diversity. The young fry- guitarist Ronald Hinton, bassist Gail Parrish and Terry Scott on keyboards -looked like the Partridge family in dreadlocks. Up front, Curtis Pope led the push with his anabolic shoulderpads while Vernon McDonald, excellent but under-represented on tenor sax, could have passed for Malcolm X.

After what must have been twenty minutes of overture and will- you-please-welcomes Wilson Pickett appeared in a suit with oroton lapels. In the Midnight Hour. The voice is unmistakable. A high grainy tenor, not as sweet as Otis Redding, not as dangerous as James Brown. Pickett serenaded the audience like a singles bar lothario, a wall of brass behind him, tight rhythm from Gail Parrish and drummer Tyrone Green, Terry Scott- Booker to a T on keyboard- and Ronald Hinton on guitar looking like he’d like to get into some Metallica.

Dragging the folks on stage -under the benign gaze of a minder the size of a Toyota landcruiser- Wilson Pickett sang his greatest. Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You, Don’t Knock My Love, Mustang Sally- ricocheting off into a medley with 634-5789, Steve Cropper’s famous phone number. With the crowd on its feet and twenty-odd people of all sizes and proclivities partying on stage, the joint was undeniably jumping. On went the hit list -Funky Broadway, Hey Jude, and a lewd, boppy version of Everybody Needs Somebody. The band was nimble as a wrestling troupe and Terry Scott hinted at hidden depths on the Roland.

Then after just under an hour Wilson Pickett was whisked from the stage. Like a Vice-President ,maybe -or a short-punch middleweight or a corrupt evangelist. The landcruiser steered the on-stage invitees back into the crowd and, after the audience bellowed long enough, Pickett returned for a reprise of In the Midnight Hour and some shrieks, mercies and na-na-na-nas from the land of dances. I want to hear it for my hard-working band, he roared- and the brass sent out another salvo. Pickett hauled another dozen devotees on stage and, towel over his shoulder, was swept back into the wings. The band left- but encouraged by the pandemonium, Scott, Hinton and Gail Parrish returned. They sounded like they were ready to start a palace revolution but Wilson and the other old guys were already heading back to the hotel. Tomorrow, after all, was another day for a hard-working band.

It was a short gig- vulgar and full of horseshit. It was also a golden hour and a bit of glitzy, exhilarating, soul-shaking music. I hope Wilson Pickett filled his suitcase with used notes, he deserved them. He may not be the King of Soul but he’s serious royalty -and he makes the Commitments sound like a pale imitation.

The Adelaide Review, No.104, July, 1992, p.40.

Receding Temples

Published: 1992-09-01

Hair By Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt McDermott Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

By the time Hair opened at the Biltmore Theatre in New York in April 1968 many of the major happenings of Hippie history had already… happened. More than a year earlier in January 1967, twenty thousand turned up (and on) for the Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. That was the year of the Summer of Love, photogenically documented with lots of groovy articles in those well-known organs of radicalism, Time and Life. One of the perplexing realities of the counter-culture was that its anarcho-syndicalist, pacifist libertarianism was such a cinch to market back to the squares.

If there were truly radical viruses abroad at that time- and there were in student politics, black power and the rapidly mobilising anti-war movement - they were still mostly carried by the media and the record industry. The music is especially interesting. Bastions of corporate America like Capitol and RCA were now making a fortune out of psychedelia and all manner of other brainrot. Commentators like Louis Menand have shrewdly observed the widespread trappings of the late Sixties ersatz-high society- light shows, day-glo, tie-dye, fish eye lenses. Whether you were in South Bend, Indiana, Manchester England, England or suburban Australasia you didn’t need a diagram to know what Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was about, or eleven minutes of the Doors, or the Byrds’ Eight Miles High.

This spaced out music was coming from all directions. Lennon and McCartney had gone global with All You Need is Love and the Stones, surrounded by Afghan rugs, were aspiring to their own satanic majesty. But it was a hard-core of West Coast inter-galactics, musically inferior perhaps, but from the authentic Haight Ashbury heartland- bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish , Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead- that were really carrying the torch. They all had surrealist names and album designs indecipherable to the optically uninitiated. They were the return of the Ghost Dance, a polymorphous caravanserai that made CBS richer than Scrooge McDuck.

It was around this time that the record industry started to understand market diversification. In such high times there was room for everyone. Friendly marijuana pop from the Loving Spoonful, the Monkees and the Association. Or, for those who just wanted to watch, there was Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair), The Mamas and the Papas’ California Dreaming and The Fifth Dimension (on the new, hip Andy Williams Show) taking you Up, Up and Away.

For me, that was about where Hair fitted in. It was like those false moustaches and sideburns advertised in the San Francisco Oracle for the compleat weekend hippie. It was bigger than God of course. The Hair album ranked number one in the US for twenty weeks in 1968 and then stayed in the charts for three years by which time it sold in excess of five million copies. Good Morning Starshine, Aquarius, Hair, all became singles hits- for such luminaries as Oliver, and the Cowsills and the Fifth Dimension. I ask you. Next to Disraeli Gears, Are You Experienced, or even Sunshine Superman and Moby Grape this stuff was, well - just show business. It had as much to do with the floral revolution as West Side Story had to juvenile delinquency.

On stage in the Thebarton Theatre, Hair, the stage show is an odd phenomenon. Even though it is now being presented in a snood of nostalgia, Hair has had a lively history in this country. Jim Sharman’s 1969 production was a challenge to popular entertainment in Australia, outspoken in sexual values and fiercely anti-war at the height of LBJ-ism. In its time, Hair’s nudity, ragged musicality and energetic theatricality were genuinely liberating to those who saw it and deeply abhorrent to those who hadn’t but regarded it as an invasion of visigoths anyway. As Sharman writes in the programme notes - Hair was ‘a long overdue revenge on a reactionary, uninspired regime that had outstayed its welcome.’

Unfortunately, nearly twenty five years on, Hair does little more than remind us how moribund music theatre has been since 1969. It is a monument to the one time that social and political issues actually impinged on Broadway (and its branch offices world-wide) - but it was a freak of business, one of those exceptions which so splendidly ensure the rule. Certainly few other works of popular entertainment had commented so openly on US foreign policy. Hair dealt with questions of race at a time when Governor Wallace and Mayor Daley held public office, it also embraced sexual liberation and tolerance - even if it flunked the basic feminist PC test. In fact, its achievement seems greater now than in its time, when it seemed so much part of the swim.

But that’s only because there is so little in the swim at the moment. These are peculiarly unimaginative times for theatre and its allied trades and part of that lack of imagination is reflected in the current impulse to haul sixties and seventies relics out of cryonic suspension.

Staged by David Atkins, Nigel Triffitt and Graeme Blundell with costumes by Laurel Frank, Hair combines some strong talents from the recent past but despite the restraint in presentation and a faithfulness to the spirit of the task, the show remains a curiosity. Triffitt’s set, a chrome and neon structure surrounded by dense rigging is decorated with indigenous psychedelia as well as sparklies for David Murray’s obligatory strobes. Laurel Frank’s costumes, archaeologically precise for the most part, also feature neo-hippie embellishments in the big production numbers.

In the leads, Justin O’Connor as Claude, Terry Serio as Berger, Melvin Carroll as Walter and Meredith Chipperton as Sheila, give spirited performances of songs that still carry some of their original wit and charm - Manchester England, Frank Mills, Air and others show Ragni and Rado’s off-centre lyrics blending creatively with McDermot’s often imaginative score. The band, led by Michael Kocent on keyboards, indicate that the past twenty years have been good for sound technology. If anything has energised this revived Hair it is the strength and clarity of the music.

Hair remains a mix of sub-standard pop and smart music theatre. The final cluster of songs- What a Piece of Work is Man, Good Morning Starshine and The Flesh Failures- which I only ever knew from the album, offer very different meaning in the context of the show where Claude, the conscripted hippie killed in Vietnam, is returned in a body bag to the arms of the tribe. In this production it remains a potent anti-war tableau. But, as with the rest of Hair, it just doesn’t travel. Despite the goodwill of this production, Hair is too ludicrously out of sync to be much more than post-modern space junk. Instead of provoking a spark of renewed vitality it only signals further cynicism.

The Adelaide Review, September, 1992.

Receding Temples

Published: 1992-09-01

Hair Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt McDermott Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

By the time Hair opened at the Biltmore Theatre in New York in April 1968 many of the major happenings of Hippie history had already happened. More than a year earlier in January 1967, twenty thousand turned up (and on) for the Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. That was the year of the Summer of Love, photogenically documented with lots of groovy articles in those well-known organs of radicalism, Time and Life. One of the perplexing realities of the counter-culture was that its anarcho-syndicalist, pacifist libertarianism was such a cinch to market back to the squares.

If there were truly radical viruses abroad at that time- and there were in student politics, black power and the rapidly mobilising anti-war movement- they were still mostly carried by the media and the record industry. The music is especially interesting. Bastions of corporate America like Capitol and RCA were now making a fortune out of psychedelia and all manner of other brainrot. Commentators like Louis Menand have shrewdly observed the widespread trappings of the late Sixties ersatz-high society- light shows, day-glo, tie-dye, fish eye lenses. Whether you were in South Bend, Indiana, Manchester England, England or suburban Australasia you didn’t need a diagram to know what Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was about, or eleven minutes of the Doors, or the Byrds’ Eight Miles High.

This spaced out music was coming from all directions. Lennon and McCartney had gone global with All You Need is Love and the Stones, surrounded by Afghani rugs, were aspiring to their own satanic majesty. But it was a hard-core of West Coast inter-galactics, musically inferior but from the authentic Haight Ashbury heartland- bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish , Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead- that were really carrying the torch . They all had surrealist names and album designs indecipherable to the optically uninitiated. They were the return of the Ghost Dance, a polymorphous caravanserai that made CBS richer than Scrooge McDuck.

It was around this time that the record industry started to understand market diversification. In such high times there was room for everyone. Friendly marijuana pop from the Loving Spoonful, the Monkees and the Association. Or, for those who just wanted to watch, there was Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair), The Mamas and the Papas’ California Dreaming or The Fifth Dimension (on the new hip Andy Williams Show) taking you Up, Up and Away.

For me, that was about where Hair fitted in. It was like those false moustaches and sideburns advertised in the San Francisco Oracle for the compleat weekend hippie. It was bigger than God of course. The Hair album ranked number one in the US for twenty weeks in 1968 and then stayed in the charts for three years by which time it sold in excess of five million copies. Good Morning Starshine, Aquarius, Hair all became singles hits- for such luminaries as Oliver, and the Cowsills and the Fifth Dimension. I ask you. Next to Disraeli Gears, Are You Experienced, or even Sunshine Superman and Moby Grape this stuff was, well- just show business. It had as much to do with the floral revolution as West Side Story had to juvenile delinquency.

On stage in the Thebarton Theatre, Hair, the stage show is an odd phenomenon. Even though it is now being presented in a snood of nostalgia, Hair has had a lively history in this country. Jim Sharman’s 1969 production was a challenge to popular entertainment in Australia, outspoken in sexual values and fiercely anti-war at the height of LBJ-ism. In its time, Hair’s nudity, ragged musicality and energetic theatricality were genuinely liberating to those who saw it and deeply abhorrent to those who hadn’t but regarded it as an invasion of visigoths anyway. As Sharman writes in the programme notes- Hair was `a long overdue revenge on a reactionary, uninspired regime that had outstayed its welcome.’

Unfortunately, nearly twenty five years on, Hair does little more than remind us how moribund music theatre has been since 1969. It is a monument to the one time that social and political issues actually impinged on Broadway (and its branch offices world-wide)- but it was a freak of business, one of those exceptions which so splendidly ensure the rule. Certainly few other works of popular entertainment had commented so openly on US foreign policy. Hair dealt with questions of race at a time when Governor Wallace and Mayor Daley held public office, it also embraced sexual liberation and tolerance - even if it flunked

the basic feminist PC test. In fact its achievement seems greater now than in its time, when it seemed so much part of the swim.

But that’s only because there is so little in the swim at the moment. These are peculiarly unimaginative times for theatre and its allied trades and part of that lack of imagination is reflected in the current impulse to haul sixties and seventies relics out of cryonic suspension.

Staged by David Atkins, Nigel Triffitt and Graeme Blundell with costumes by Laurel Frank, Hair combines some strong talents from the recent past but despite the restraint in presentation and a faithfulness to the spirit of the task, the show remains a curiosity. Triffitt’s set, a chrome and neon structure surrounded by dense rigging is decorated with indigenous psychedelia as well as sparklies for David Murray’s obligatory strobes. Laurel Frank’s costumes, archaeologically precise for the most part, also feature neo-hippie embellishments in the big production numbers.

In the leads, Justin O’Connor as Claude, Terry Serio as Berger, Melvin Carroll as Walter and Meredith Chipperton as Sheila, give spirited performances of songs that still carry some of their original wit and charm - Manchester England, Frank Mills, Air and others show Ragni and Rado’s off-centre lyrics blending creatively with McDermot’s often imaginative score. The band, led by Michael Kocent on keyboards, indicate that the past twenty years have been good for sound technology. If anything has energised this revived Hair it is the strength and clarity of the music.

Hair remains a mix of sub-standard pop and smart music theatre. The final cluster of songs- What a Piece of Work is Man,Good Morning Starshine and The Flesh Failures- which I only ever knew from the album, offer very different meaning in the context of the show where Claude, the conscripted hippie killed in Vietnam, is returned in a body bag to the arms of the tribe. In this production it remains a potent anti-war tableau. But, as with the rest of Hair, it just doesn’t travel. Despite the goodwill of this production, Hair is too ludicrously out of sync to be much more than post-modern space junk. Instead of provoking a spark of renewed vitality it only signals further cynicism.

The Adelaide Review, September, 1992.

Murph and the Magictones

Published: 1993-04-01

The Blues Brothers Band Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is a scene in the Blues Brothers movie when the eponymous Jake and Ellwood are putting The Band back together. They go to an empty dinner club to find a remnant of the group in musical purgatory -dressed in mulberry velour playing easy listening kitsch nobody wants to hear. Billed as Murph and the Magictones they epitomise the fate of all has-beens and nevers-were. Sadly, they also prefigure the “unique concept” of the Blues Brothers Band and Movie which has just concluded its national tour.

The Blues Brothers has been described as the most expensive Roadrunner cartoon ever made. Expanded from the Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi sketch on Saturday Night Live the movie blends homage to R’n’B- particularly the Stax sound of the Mar-Keys- with the kind of stunt slapstick that eventually led director John Landis to fatal disgrace in the twilight zone. Considered a wunderkind filmmaker after the success of Animal House, Landis really let go with the Brothers Blue. In an orgy of demolition he blew the budget from fifteen to nearly thirty-five million (1979) dollars.

The stunts were state of the art excess. In one scene Ellwood and Jake completely wreck a shopping mall. In the final chase there are three hundred collisions destroying more than sixty cars. Against warnings Landis ordered that his crew dynamite a petrol station (instead of using less explosive black powder) shaking an entire neighbourhood and blowing out the stained glass windows of a nearby church. The footage wasn’t even used in the final cut. When Landis saw the rushes of the Bluesmobile finally falling to bits he decided it wasn’t spectacular enough and demanded it be done again - at a further cost of several hundred thousand dollars.

These days, despite the cameos by James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, The Blues Brothers has lost most of its charm. Devotees still get out the black suits, the fedoras and the ray-bans but, with Belushi gone and Aykroyd at the fat farm, the movie now looks pretty much like the Eighties - an expensive mess that is still being paid for.

Besides, even if you love the Blues Brothers movie- and many still do- it turned out to be a very extended overture to the Return of the Band. And since most people already know every crinkle of the movie they also know it takes forever to finish. The crowd at Thebarton cheered the songs as if that might hurry things along - or magically conjure up the musicians themselves. Others just sagged into boredom as the cars piled up, the tanks coverged on Daley Plaza and Steven Spielberg pretended to be a minor public official.

When the credits finally began to roll and the Blues Brothers Band took the stage it was as a trio- Donald Duck Dunn on bass, Leon Pendarvis on organ and Steve Cropper on guitar- playing a thumping version of the Booker T classic (and Cropper composition) Green Onions. At last, we thought. But then the rest of the band appeared and patience frayed when Duck Dunn began extensive introductions. Just play some music will yer, yelled a wit who’d had enough foreplay for one night. Dunn, unable to get the message, mugged- `I don’t understand yuh, ahm from the South.’ And on he went. Ten in the band - five original Blues Brothers - Cropper, Dunn, Matt Guitar Murphy, Blue Lou Marini and the Al Mr Fabulous Rubin, augmented by Pendarvis, Birch Slide Johnson on trombone, drummer Steve Potts, vocalist Larry Thurston and, direct from cryonic suspension, special guest Eddie Floyd.

The whole ensemble lurched into a presentable version of Baby Elephant Walk - smart keyboards and strong, crisp horns. These good ol boys can play. Thurston took over with Gimme Some Loving and reminded us by contrast that, legends though Jake and Ellwood may have been, they couldn’t sing for toffee. All the same Thurston was staying in second gear. Eddie Floyd, the main man you understand, was still in the wings. Thurston gave a creditable Taj Mahal-influenced version of She Took the Katy and then the band started pumping the band’s new Red White and Blues album with You Got the Bucks, a clone by Marini and the diffidently satiric Blues in an Air Conditioned Room.Cropper and the horns sloped off and Matt Guitar took the spotlight for My Grief is Gone- playing that kind of interminable B.B.King riffing technically known as mucking around. At this point a show that had taken two and half hours just to get going, started seriously falling apart. The band hashed their way through Sweet Home Chicago and the Blues Brothers theme, Can’t turn You Loose, while the drum rolls gathered for Mr Floyd.

He swooped in with a medley of Wilson Pickett numbers- In the Midnight Hour and Land of a Thousand Dances. The Blues Brother ring-ins jumped on the stage again - a cheer squad in suits and shades complete with a six year old munchkin in full regalia. Eddie and Cropper dialled up 634 5789 (that phone number that’s been very good to them over the years) and the band went through the motions. Pendarvis prodded at the keyboard, Mr Fabulous looked glassy-eyed. Eventually, Eddie Floyd, half throttled by his body jewelery, launched into a ten minute version of his Greatest Hit, Knock on Wood. He worked hard, did Eddie. He knocked on so much wood he was sweating through his coat. But despite all the effort, it was not, as they say, much chop.

Someone sent out a flare and Mr Fabulous arrived back for a blast of brass on Soul Man and the band once again shuffled off stage. Larry Thurston returned for the first encore, What She Did, then Eddie hit the lead and up came the Blues dancers for a rattly finale of Everybody Needs Somebody. Introductions all round and the band took a bow for the fourth time. But not even the infectious riffs of a soul classic could mask the fact that this band couldn’t save an orphanage. Undeniably talented and unfailingly genial, they were, nevertheless, trapped in a desperate concept. Doomed to being their own tribute band, they were too bored to shake a tailfeather.

The Adelaide Review, April, 1993.

Uncle Tom’s Cabaret

Published: 1993-05-01

Ain’t Misbehavin’ The Fats Waller Musical Show Festival Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

While it is one of the great twentienth century art forms and an instance of American culture at its most inventive and vigorous, the blues sometimes gets the blues itself. With a shift to an African aesthetic many Black Americans no longer warm to the music of oppression, some would say defeat. And the shift in sexual politics in the past twenty years has left the blues looking more than somewhat phallocentric. But this music has a context and a politics and although within the genre there is plenty of dross it would be absurd to dismiss it as politically incorrect.

However, these are sensitive times and it is reasonable to consider what sort of images and ideas are being presented in black American music. These days there are still enormous pressures- economic and social- on the black American community . While some women are finding better days, many men are losing ground. They are also facing renewed stereotyping for violence and family neglect. This is not without considerable empirical evidence but it vastly oversimplifies the situation to blame the victims.

Everything from the LA riots to Public Enemy to The Color Purple has deepened racial confusion. So did the extraordinary public spectacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings. The recent SBS program on the effect of Anita Hill’s testimony reminded us of the complexities still for American persons of colour. What are clearcut issues for the white bourgeoisie raise old and painful stigmas for African Americans. Anita Hill displayed remarkable courage and was absolutely entitled to speak out. But it was bound to feed racist America’s old fears and fascination with black male sexuality. The prurient details, transmitted live by network TV, mutated questions of sexual misbehaviour into racial humiliation for both Hill and Thomas.

All this is to say that these are racially difficult times and people of goodwill in racist societies- whether in the United States or in South Australia- want to do better. We want to understand and change old habits of objectification, to recognise the workings of corrupt mythology and unresolved attitudes. There is a lot to learn and understand. This is where the entertainment business has much to contribute- whether it is through Bran Nue Dae or the movies of Spike Lee. And it is this that also makes you wonder why you’re sitting watching Ain’t Misbehavin’.

Thomas “Fats” Waller was a fine musician and entertainer and it is hard to see what he ever did to deserve the travesty that is Ain’t Misbehavin’- The Fats Waller Musical Show. Waller, a brilliant stride pianist and highly successful songwriter was a major exponent of classic blues. Recording for Okeh from the early twenties he was a contemporary of Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey and Louis Armstrong. He also wrote for and recorded with Bessie Smith and like these performers enjoyed commercial success - but always at a price. No matter how famous Armstrong or Bessie Smith or later, Billie Holiday became, they always played servants and lackeys in the movies, their smiles were as old and compliant as Mr Bojangles himself.

Another problem with classic blues, compared with the more direct lyricism of country blues, is that for every masterpiece - Bessie Smith’s Backwater Blues or Waller’s own Black and Blue and The Joint is Jumping- there was much that was unimaginative and derivative. What rescued Bessie Smith- and Waller himself- from the crudely salacious lyrics of the talented, but altogether-too-prolific Andy Razaf, was the performers’ wit, dignity and presence, something that not only distanced them from the banality of the material but gave it authority and subtlety it didn’t deserve.

Unfortunately Ain’t Misbehavin’ is not looking to give the music any political or social context beyond the denatured glitz of late Seventies Broadway. The show, devised by Richard Maltby jr and choreographed by Arthur Faria, has been on the road for fifteen years. This particular incarnation, directed by Jackie Warner, despite able musical direction from D.G. Ivey, is showing every sign of fatigue. Whatever energy it may once have had is reduced to bump and grind. Every fat lady wobble gag, every dizzy bimbo and country bumpkin cliche and every grope joke is wheeled out with stupefying obviousness.

As the Fats Waller persona , Frank A. Farrow III has an engaging presence, a fine baritone, but no room to move. He doesn’t play piano- instead he and the company chew through a list of numbers choreographed to death and reinforcing sexual and racial stereotypes with depressing repetition. Of the rest of the five person company- Gail D. Anderson does well with I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling, and in duet with Farrow, but Sharon E. Scott fails to recover from the weight-challenged vulgarity of Squeeze Me. Of Marion J. Caffey’s hyperactivity and Carla Renata Williams’ screeching, the less said the better.

A chance to give the smart, genuinely comic music of Fats Waller some flair and shading has been wholly lost. Instead, the performers, done up like pimps and retro-disco queens, laboured every irony and ground our faces in every entendre. I left at intermission after the particularly lame version of The Joint is Jumpin. Maybe something got turned around in the second half when they sang Black and Blue but I wasn’t going to risk it. There’s only so much misbehaviour anyone should have to take .

The Adelaide Review, May, 1993. p.36.

Uncle Tom’s Cabaret

Published: 1993-05-01

Ain’t Misbehavin’ The Fats Waller Musical Show Festival Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

While it is one of the great twentienth century art forms and an instance of American culture at its most inventive and vigorous, the blues sometimes gets the blues itself. With a shift to an African aesthetic many Black Americans no longer warm to the music of oppression, some would say defeat. And the shift in sexual politics in the past twenty years has left the blues looking more than somewhat phallocentric. But this music has a context and a politics and although within the genre there is plenty of dross it would be absurd to dismiss it as politically incorrect.

However, these are sensitive times and it is reasonable to consider what sort of images and ideas are being presented in black American music. These days there are still enormous pressures- economic and social- on the black American community . While some women are finding better days, many men are losing ground. They are also facing renewed stereotyping for violence and family neglect. This is not without considerable empirical evidence but it vastly oversimplifies the situation to blame the victims.

Everything from the LA riots to Public Enemy to The Color Purple has deepened racial confusion. So did the extraordinary public spectacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings. The recent SBS program on the effect of Anita Hill’s testimony reminded us of the complexities still for American persons of colour. What are clearcut issues for the white bourgeoisie raise old and painful stigmas for African Americans. Anita Hill displayed remarkable courage and was absolutely entitled to speak out. But it was bound to feed racist America’s old fears and fascination with black male sexuality. The prurient details, transmitted live by network TV, mutated questions of sexual misbehaviour into racial humiliation for both Hill and Thomas.

All this is to say that these are racially difficult times and people of goodwill in racist societies- whether in the United States or in South Australia- want to do better. We want to understand and change old habits of objectification, to recognise the workings of corrupt mythology and unresolved attitudes. There is a lot to learn and understand. This is where the entertainment business has much to contribute- whether it is through Bran Nue Dae or the movies of Spike Lee. And it is this that also makes you wonder why you’re sitting watching Ain’t Misbehavin’.

Thomas “Fats” Waller was a fine musician and entertainer and it is hard to see what he ever did to deserve the travesty that is Ain’t Misbehavin’- The Fats Waller Musical Show. Waller, a brilliant stride pianist and highly successful songwriter was a major exponent of classic blues. Recording for Okeh from the early twenties he was a contemporary of Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey and Louis Armstrong. He also wrote for and recorded with Bessie Smith and like these performers enjoyed commercial success - but always at a price. No matter how famous Armstrong or Bessie Smith or later, Billie Holiday became, they always played servants and lackeys in the movies, their smiles were as old and compliant as Mr Bojangles himself.

Another problem with classic blues, compared with the more direct lyricism of country blues, is that for every masterpiece - Bessie Smith’s Backwater Blues or Waller’s own Black and Blue and The Joint is Jumping- there was much that was unimaginative and derivative. What rescued Bessie Smith- and Waller himself- from the crudely salacious lyrics of the talented, but altogether-too-prolific Andy Razaf, was the performers’ wit, dignity and presence, something that not only distanced them from the banality of the material but gave it authority and subtlety it didn’t deserve.

Unfortunately Ain’t Misbehavin’ is not looking to give the music any political or social context beyond the denatured glitz of late Seventies Broadway. The show, devised by Richard Maltby jr and choreographed by Arthur Faria, has been on the road for fifteen years. This particular incarnation, directed by Jackie Warner, despite able musical direction from D.G. Ivey, is showing every sign of fatigue. Whatever energy it may once have had is reduced to bump and grind. Every fat lady wobble gag, every dizzy bimbo and country bumpkin cliche and every grope joke is wheeled out with stupefying obviousness.

As the Fats Waller persona , Frank A. Farrow III has an engaging presence, a fine baritone, but no room to move. He doesn’t play piano- instead he and the company chew through a list of numbers choreographed to death and reinforcing sexual and racial stereotypes with depressing repetition. Of the rest of the five person company- Gail D. Anderson does well with I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling, and in duet with Farrow, but Sharon E. Scott fails to recover from the weight-challenged vulgarity of Squeeze Me. Of Marion J. Caffey’s hyperactivity and Carla Renata Williams’ screeching, the less said the better.

A chance to give the smart, genuinely comic music of Fats Waller some flair and shading has been wholly lost. Instead, the performers, done up like pimps and retro-disco queens, laboured every irony and ground our faces in every entendre. I left at intermission after the particularly lame version of The Joint is Jumpin. Maybe something got turned around in the second half when they sang Black and Blue but I wasn’t going to risk it. There’s only so much misbehaviour anyone should have to take .

The Adelaide Review, May, 1993. p.36.

Marvellous

Published: 1993-06-01

The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow Heaven

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

A Rose is a ruse is a total freakout -as the packed and ogling house in Newmarket Heaven discovered when the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow made its only- shall we say- appearance in Adelaide. Out of Seattle, the Weimar of the New World, and late of the Lollapalooza road show in the US, Mr Rose and his associates do their very best to keep their audiences entirely captivated. We are not freaks, says Jim, we are human marvels.

Take Matt “the Tube” Crowley for example. The shy pharmacist from Montana set things going with a few condom tricks - up the nose and out the mouth perhaps, or put it over your head and inflate it till it bangs. Then there’s the angle grinder generating a savage arc of sparks into which Matt thrusts a face wrapped around a cigarette. He lights up with smile. To follow, Matt blows up a hot water bottle to the size of an armadillo and, cajoled by Jim Rose’s sneering banter, succeeds in blasting it to shreds.

Rose, the master of ceremonies has a few tricks of his own. Ouch, he screeches as Miss Beebie, the show’s stage manager, fires darts into his back. The Human Dartboard ! - he bellows, ouch. Meanwhile at stage left a crazed person draped in a fishnet veil and wearing a silk top hat is persuading a bank of synthesisers to sound like hurdy gurdies from hell.

The pace is relentless. Out with the darts and on with - Mr Lifto, a gangly, dangerously pale individual with pink hair and a variety of piercings. The son of a carnival performer we are told but a marvel in his own right. He slips out of his satin tutu and starts hanging tough. Irons from the earlobes- steam irons that is. Plastic Man. Irons and a concrete block from the nipples, stretched little dugs. Rose raves, Lifto looks passively into the middle distance as he puts a coat hanger through the nose. For modesty a screen is produced for Lifto’s pierce de resistance. From the prepuce, people. A brick descends in silhouette until Jim Rose storms through - are you having fun Adelaide ? Down comes the sheet and there is Mr Lifto, unaccommodated man, folks, hanging by a thread. To calm things down a bit Jim took the stage, swallowing razor blades and dragging them out again on a string.

After interval it’s the Torture King. Not to be outdone Jim staples a ten dollar note to his face. But the TK is pretty hard to beat. Chewing up a bulb - Osram pearl 75 watts it looked like- he turns to the human pincushion routine. He is not pre-pierced, shrieks Jim in a frenzy as the hatpins go through the arm and eyesocket, not to mention the one through his cheeks. He doesn’t say much, drools Jim, he’s …lugubrious. Beautiful, he coos, Science ! I will never exploit you Torture King says Jim. Then, spinning towards the crowd, he reprimands some for not watching. You’re not watching, he screams, you won’t get your money’s worth. Aha, the subtext. Like, who’re the real freaks here, eh Jim ? Tod Browning where are you tonight ?

The Torture King climbed a ladder of swords then hooked himself to a generator and made a fluoro tube in his mouth light up. When he put a circular fluoro on his head, Rose called the crowd to bow down before Electric Jesus. Just to get differently flakey.

At that point the veiled organist disrobes and drags himself to the full extent of his neck chain. He is tattooed with a jigsaw puzzle pattern across his entire body, shaven head and all. This is Enigma. Why? asks Jim ponderously, Why ? Enigma eats things - worms, maggots, crickets. Don’t eat that it’s been on the floor, screams Jim. Look at him- Jim’s spiel is in full flow now- twenty-four years old, apart from working in a music store what will he ever be able to do at fifty ? Enigma swallowed swords, lifted weights from his eyesockets and returned snarling to the Korg to provide crescendos for Jim’s straitjacket routine.

Matt the Tube came back for a spot of gavage. Tubing up the nose and into the stomach. Science ! exults Jim. The road to excess leads also to the palace of wisdom. But did William Blake know about 44 ounces of Vic Bitter being siphoned into the stomach and sluiced out again. You’re not watching. No Jim, not really. After Matt the Tube’s escapade Jim jumps into the audience which parts like the Red Sea. Panic is not the word. Everybody’s running from me like I killed the Lindbergh kid, he drily observes. Jim’s eyes bulge as he takes his `volunteer’ back on stage. To walk on top of him while he lies on a heap of broken glass. Get your ass in that glass is the mantra we are instructed to repeat. Jim rises up unbloodied and unbowed for his final rave. They don’t have an album so we can buy a T-shirt instead. All the gang come back out to sign shirts. All our pals from this Robert Crumb nightmare - Matt, Lifto, Enigma, the Torture King.

May all your days be circus days. Jim signs off like he’s Bing Crosby. The audience has just gawked at ninety minutes of the fastest, strangest, crassest and wittiest entertainment imaginable. Not since Archaos was in town have we seen anything like it. Jim Rose is the key to the enterprise. His patter is smart, his timing perfect, his rapport with the crowd a conspiracy with its voyeurism. This is comic book Artaud. The theatre of cruelty, he wrote, was the truthful distillation of dreams, the obsessions, the savageness, the fantasies, the utopian sense of life and objects. Get to see Jim Rose if you are ever visiting Heaven, Antonin, he’s one of yours.

The Adelaide Review, June 1993, p.40 .

Fiesta-ville

Published: 1993-07-18

Murray Bramwell

From September 10 -26 Adelaide and environs will be alive with the sound of fiesta. The Honda Adelaide Music Fiesta will be getting into gear on a number of fronts- jazz, country, popular, rock, dance, choral and a broad classical program. There will be a variety of international and interstate performers but the focus for Fiesta is also in showcasing and promoting local talent.

The Music Fiesta originated in 1991 with a festival of more than 140 events in a three week span. It attracted about 100,000 people back then. This time the organisers expect to more than double that number. It is a biennial event timed to alternate with the Adelaide Festival and this year, to avoid clashing with Womadelaide, it has been organised as a Spring event- a decision that fits well with a strong pitch from Tourism SA.

Many believe that Fiesta’s time is overdue -including Executive Director, Libby Ellis : “South Australia has had four specialist music schools for over twenty five years and we have some of the country’s finest musicians right across the spectrum. The Festival of Arts is wonderful, it brings in the talent of the world for three weeks. I see Fiesta as the complement, bringing the other side. For three weeks we show the talent of South Australia to the world. They are very complementary aims. We have the talent here but not the showcase - so performers have to go away.

“Fiesta is a South Australian music festival picking up the strengths of our lifestyle, our specialist music schools, our multicultural community, our vineyards, beaches and beautiful facilities. We are picking up all these things and placing the showcase on them.”

The program includes a day of free activities in Elder Park, an international busking competition in Rundle Mall, a street party in North Adelaide and events at the Bay. There will also be lunchtime concerts in shopping centres. While many events are still being finalised, some highlights of the Kenwood Classical Fiesta have already been announced. The season will begin in the Adelaide Town Hall with a performance by the Australian Chamber Orchestra with guest soloist Barry Tuckwell. They will present Dvorak’s Serenade for strings, horn concertos by Mozart and Roseeti and Britten’s Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge. Other recitals in the Town Hall include the University of Adelaide Wind and Brass ensembles with guest soloist Geoffrey Payne (principal trumpet for the MSO) offering a baroque program and selections from Grainger. Payne also appears with the Adelaide Youth Chamber Orchestra under conductor Piero Gamba.

In the Elder Hall the Australian String Quartet perform a program of Schubert, Beethoven and Peter Sculthorpe and in the Adelaide Town Hall Roger Woodward will present an evening of Chopin works - an event that is likely to prove a hot ticket.

St Peters Cathedral is to be the venue for Cathedral in Concert, a program ranging from Bach and Beethoven to Andrew Lloyd Webber. It will feature soloists David Shepherd, Jo Dudley and Leslie Lewis as well as some impressive choirpower from Pembroke School, St Peters Cathedral, St Peters Glenelg, St Cuthberts Prospect and St Andrews Walkerville.

Consistent with a high level of both quality and interest in choral music in Adelaide the Choral Fiesta is likely to attract strong interest. A combined choir from the Adelaide Chorus, Cantabile, the Mt Lofty Singers and Chandos Choral - 180 voices in all- will present Haydn’s Creation with soloists Thomas Edmonds, Felicity Baldock and Alan McKie. It will be conducted in the Town Hall under Piero Gamba. Elsewhere Cathy Weber’s Cantabile will present a variety of works in concert in the Norwood Town Hall and, again in the Cathedral, the Corinthian Singers and Melbourne’s Faye Dumont Singers will join forces for the first time.

Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld will get a whirl from the students of the Elder Conservatorium and, in similarly lively mood, Co-Opera will give a contemporary tweak to an English translation version of Cavallo’s I Pagliacci in the Norwood Concert Hall.

A good example of the Fiesta showcasing local performers is the concert of the 1993 Adelaide Eistedfodd Award winners to be held in a Sunday afternoon program in the Adelaide Town Hall. Special guest soloist will be the 1992 winner, soprano Alison Farr.

Libby Ellis is especially keen on this event-“ I’d be inclined to think that there wouldn’t be one percent of Adelaide who has heard Alison Farr, a singer at present studying in Germany. This will give Adelaide a chance to hear her now, to say `we heard her when…, we saw her at Fiesta’“

It is providing a bridge- and an appreciative audience- for musicians of promise that interests the Fiesta organisers. There are hopes for Fiesta awards and scholarships to foster development and there has been good response from Adelaide’s music community many of whom are planning events for what is hoped to be a future Fiesta as soon as 1994.

In the Dance Fiesta performers from the Australian Ballet will be presenting new works from young choreographers. This will include a tribute marking the centenary of the death of Tchaikovsky.

Jazz enthusiasts will also be well served with appearances from Don Burrows and George Golla performing with young local musos and a full Sunday of jazz at the University of Adelaide. Using four different stages everything from trad to acid jazz will get a go from musicians including Errol Buddle and Friends and Andrew Firth who stirred a lot of dust at Montsalvat this year. Also performing will be the very classy Dale Barlow and Carl Orr and the University Big Band.

In the Town Hall, the Australian Jazz Quintet will gather from various Australian, European and Australian destinations for a reunion performance. It will be a nostalgic moment for many when Errol Buddle, Bryce Rohde, Jack Brokensha, Ed Gaston and others take the stage.

The Honda Adelaide Music Fiesta has gathered a large range of offerings. The organisers emphasise the accessibility of the fare and- with many tickets at eight and ten dollars and what they hope to be a top ticket of around twenty five dollars- that recession buzzword, affordable, gets honourable mention.

For Libby Ellis the Fiesta has two main aims - to provide enjoyment to a large community of music enthusiasts and to give encouragement to performers themselves. “We are breaking the blinkers,” she explains, “We deal with all kinds of music and within genres there are always divisions. People are starting to get together who would not usually do so. They are starting to talk to each other, and even better, to listen.”

The Adelaide Review, No. 116, July, 1993, p.33 -4.

06/18/9306/17/93o

More Fiesta

Published: 1993-08-01

Murray Bramwell

Further details have been announced for the Honda Adelaide Music Festival which opens on September 10 - 26. The classical program has already been released and word is that tickets for headliners Roger Woodward and the Australian Chamber Orchestra are already moving fast.

But Fiesta is nothing if not diverse as the just-released Dance and Country programs indicate. The dancers of the Australian Ballet will present a mixed offering of well-known favourites with new work from the younger choreographers. There will also be a tribute to Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky to mark the centenary of the composer’s death. Those performances will be at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Saturday September 25 and on the following Sunday afternoon.

In a different mode is the Fred Astaire special, Change Partners and Dance. A cast of nearly sixty dancers led by popular names Barry Crocker and Geraldine Turner will trace the career of Astaire and collaborators Ginger Rogers and sister Adele. Written by Maureen Sherlock, directed by Rob George and compered by John Dean and Jane Doyle, the Fred Astaire tribute will showcase the combined talents of Hot Gossip, the Leigh Warren Dancers, the Tom Fairley Dancers and the Australian Drill Team. This return to the heady days of tap will be on Saturday September 18 in the Entertainment Centre.

In addition to an evening of dance with performers Tom Fairlie, Carmel Vistoli and Caroline Benson there is the National Ballroom Dancing Competition featuring dancesport exponents from around the country. The event promises steep competition for the richest prize pool ever offered in South Australia. Music will be performed live under the direction of international bandleader Ross Mitchell.

Traditional and contemporary dance forms combine at the Old Lion with music from Africa, the West Indies and Australia when African Waza performs with calypso steel drums and Ngarinderi Narungga Dreaming. At the Royalty Theatre the Latin American band Caramba feature in a night of Spanish music and dance presented by Ochita and the Spanish Dancing Academy of Australia. Meanwhile at the Old Lion on September 24 and 25 a program of traditional Brazilian, Chilean and Peruvian dance will be offered by Sabor Latino, Rio Samba, Clave Latina and Konalien.

There is plenty for country fans during Fiesta. Mo Award and Australasian Country Music Award winner Deniese Morrison will play at the Royalty supported by local singer Beccy Cole along with Margi Miller and Tracey Coster. Gospel singer Jimmy Little with his Country Bumpkin band leads a Country Gospel session also at the Royalty. The support includes Jim Hermel, Dallas List, Roger Redpath, Danny and Lea and Michele Stuart. Twice the Concert, scheduled for the Town Hall, brings together acoustic favourites Doug Ashdown and Mike McClellan for the first time in ten years and bush favourite Ted Egan will perform at the Old Lion with local band Kelly’s Revenge.

With the announcement of a Government underwriting by Tourism Minister Mike Rann, Fiesta has been acknowledged as a major lure for interstate visitors as well as the South Australian community. Executive Director Libby Ellis and the organisers of are anticipating that more than 250,000 people will turn out for the proposed events. The variety and quality of the classical, choral, jazz, dance and country programs already announced certainly suggests that the Adelaide Music Fiesta is on a roll.

The Adelaide Review, August, 1993.

Paul Kelly and his songs

Published: 1993-09-01

Available as PDF: Paul Kelly and his songs.pdf

Murray Bramwell

Look around you; we’re living in amazing times They are not so important-your little crimes ‘Keep it to Yourself’

Things sometimes have a habit of going full circle. Take Paul Kelly for instance. In Adelaide, his home town, he began writing in his teens, poetry at first and then prose. For a time in the late 70s he coedited the magazine Another One For Mary. Now he has a book of lyrics due for publication by Angus and Robertson in October.

What is exceptional is that in the intervening fifteen years and especially in the last decade, Paul Kelly has achieved eminence, not in the literary circles that in another epoch he would have been destined for, but as a leading singer-songwriter not only for a tenacious local audience but in the United States and, increasingly, Europe. Since 1981 he has recorded nine albums, each one surpassing its predecessor. He has led several bands first the Dots, then the Messengers (nee Coloured Girls), one of the more legendary associations in recent Australian music which ended last year when Kelly began performing solo.

It is a hoary platitude to say that songwriters are the poets of the age. People began proclaiming that when Adam was a teenager and the list was usually compiled from the early 60s folk boomers-Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and, a little later, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon. The Beatles’ artier work got attention, especially anything identifiably by John Lennon. There was also belated mention of Chuck Berry and, since he was a real writer already, Leonard Cohen. Popular music has flourished for a full twenty years further, but the status of the huge variety of recorded work is still unclear. Everybody listens to some aspect of it and as time goes on, each of us is carbon-dated by our favourites.

But despite the enormous impact of pop music, it remains a kind of guilty pleasure and its commercial self- reliance is seen as proof of its philistinism. Occasionally someone like Camille Paglia will say something fatuous about Madonna, the way the English music establishment used to patronise the Beatles, but by and large the genuine eclecticism of the community is ignored . Instead there is a schizoid stand-off between the subsidised arts and what is called commercial entertainment and (despite the efforts of postmodernism to hijack the vocabulary with a no-blame patois of its own) the weary perpetuations of high and lowbrow remain. The result is that a major aspect of contemporary culture is disenfranchised and our notions about late twentieth-century art-witness our arts festivals-remain substantially denatured. Perverse romantic notions persist about the incompatibility of creative integrity with wealth and fame despite the examples of Picasso and Pavarotti. And the upshot is that many of our finest artists like Dickens and Puccini in their day-are so prominent as to become invisible.

In the present literary landscape, that could describe Paul Kelly. He is not alone; there is plenty of Australian-based songwriting talent about - the Finn brothers, Deborah Conway, Kev Carmody, G W McLennan, Joe Camilleri and others. But there are few who can touch Kelly for the thrift and flair of his writing and the alchemy of lyric and melody.

Although Kelly began recording in 1981, it is his third album , Post, recorded in 1984, that marks a consolidation of recognisable styles. In an interview with me late last year Kelly observed:

“That record was a turning point for me-with songs like ‘From St Kilda to Kings Cross’ and ‘Incident on South Dowling’. When I first wrote that one I thought: how the hell am I going to sing this ? I laughed when I wrote it because it seemed so black. But I did go ahead and sing it and I learned something from that: you can sing anything. I think I got some idea of the distance of the writer and the song from that one. I thought: I’ll just put the song out there and sing it. It felt strange singing it at first because it seemed a sick joke but it freed me up to write about really anything.”

My baby was dying Turning so blue Four feet from me dying My head was like glue …

I was watching a movie where someone looked dead Now people they whisper Now people they stare They say I couldn’t save her Even though I was right there We lived on the first floor We lived in two rooms Now my poor baby She lives with the worms.

‘Incident on South Dowling’ Typically, in trying to extrude a line or two from Kelly’s sinuous lyric you end up quoting nearly all of it. What can’t be evoked is Kelly’s dirgelike vocal set against Chris Bailey’s doleful harmonica and the jaunty counterpoint from drummer Michael Barclay.

While Kelly is not the only one to use particular locations in songs, his evocations of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide are distinctive and convincingly achieved.

“It’s straight from Chuck Berry,” he notes. “We get bombarded by these places all the time, especially American places. I love the way that some of Chuck Berry’s songs are lists. He uses brand names, subjects at school, names of towns. I wanted to map out my territory the same way. I like using place names as a short cut, a quick way of describing something. Rather than say there is a road that goes along the beach with palm trees on it and a big hotel where people drink on a Friday night, you say The Esplanade.

“A lot of people will know that and if they don’t know it, it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s just a bonus to the emotions of the song. You don’t need to know what the name means. Whatever the name means The Esplanade becomes a mythical place just like Memphis was to me. Kansas City-I’ve never been there in my life but I certainly knew what that song was about. I knew what Memphis was about-not about the town but about a father who’s lost his daughter. People ask: how will Americans get your song? Well I’ve been getting American songs for years without living there.”

It is not hard to spot influences on Kelly’s work. Despite the fact that he emerged out of the punk and power pop of the late 70s - epitomised in Australia by bands like Jo Jo Zep, Radio Birdman and the Sports - Paul Kelly’s songs belong to the strong narrative tradition of balladry and the American populist folksingers who adapted the form directly as a political call to arms.

But it is his capacity to vary points of view that makes his songs rich and intriguing. ‘South of Germany’ is told from a woman’s perspective in the fragmented style of English Napoleonic war balladry. In Everything’s Turning to White’ Kelly builds a son out of the Raymond Carver short story ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’. The disconcerting indifference of a group of hunters, who find the violated body of a young woman and leave her in the water while they go fishing for the weekend, is intensified in the song told from the perspective of the wife of one of the men.

I went to the service a stranger; I drove past a lake out of town There’s so much water so close to home When he holds me now I’m pretending Nothing is working inside And behind my eyes, my daily disguise Everything’s turning to white . “I’ve got widespread likes in music,” says Kelly, “and I like to expand the way I write. For some reason writing narrative ballads is one of the things I can do. I’m sure that comes from folk music from Woody Guthrie and early Bob Dylan. In that tradition there is no surprise, there is nothing special in swapping points of view; men singing from the. view of women and vice versa, young people singing from the point of the old, people not working singing from the point of view of a miner. It’s accepted that if you sing a song you sing it from inside that person’s character. It’s never become a part of rock and pop. That’s more an expressive form where the I is close to the actual person singing. You don’t assume that there is a big jump from the person singing and the voice of the song.”

It is exactly that capacity to make the jump that has made Kelly’s work so much more substantial. It has also broadened his range immensely. For instance, his commitment to and involvement with Aboriginal land rights developed from the song ‘Maralinga (Rainy Land)’ on the 1987 Gossip album. Kelly explains:

“I wrote Maralinga straight from the newspaper, the old Nation Review-an article by Bob Ellis on the Royal Commission into Maralinga. I’d had Rainy Land as a title in a notebook for a long time. From poems by Baudelaire-‘I’m the king of the rainy land’, a poem about a bored prince. I thought it was a good title for a song, I didn’t know what sort. I read this article and thought- Maralinga, Rainy Land. A lot of the phrases in the song were straight from the article, like “the big black mist began to roll.” Yami Lester was quoted and so was Milli Puddy. She didn’t speak English but her husband did. They were separated and the way he proved he spoke English was to sing this old Bible song he’d learned at the mission.“

My name is Milli Puddy They captured me and roughly washed me down Then my child stopped kicking Then they took away my man to town They said do you speak English He said I know that Jesus loves me so Because the bible tells me so I know that Jesus loves me so Because the bible tells me so This is a rainy land This is a rainy land No thunder in our sky No trees stretching high But this is a rainy land

‘Maralinga (Rainy Land)’ “I didn’t know Yami Lester or any of the other people when I wrote that song. But I’ve stayed friends with him since. He liked the song.”

The song connected Kelly to the Nunga community. He was already friends with Bart Willoughby from the band No Fixed Address based in Melbourne and got drawn into playing benefits and Land Rights concerts. We met Kev Carmody and, when they first toured the US with Midnight Oil, Yothu Yindi. Later he co-wrote songs with them.

“Yothu Yindi invited me up to Arnhem Land in 1990 when they were working on songs for their second record. They’d done the first one with one side traditional and the other side more Western rock ‘n’ roll. With their second album they wanted to mix the two together more. They asked me to come up and work on some of the arrangements and preproduction. We had a week or so in the bush just sitting around with guitars, didgeridoo, clapsticks, congas. Then we went into the rehearsal room in Darwin and most of the songs ended up on the record.

“I also wrote a song with lead singer Mandawuy Yunupingu. He asked would I write a song about the treaty and he quite definitely wanted to write that song with me. It was a definite plan on his part. He has what he calls the philosophy of the two ways-the white way and their way, the traditional way. It is the way he runs his school. The children learn traditional culture and Western culture as well. Even his band is set up that way with black and white members. He was very keen to write a song about the treaty because the issue had been in the news in 1988 but was put on the back burner. He wanted to write it with a prominent songwriter and also a white fella. I was the man!

“It was funny because we approach songwriting so differently. He comes from an educational, didactic philosophical viewpoint. He has a very coherent world view. I don’t write like. this. I write about characters. I write from a little detail or what someone has said. I’ve never been able to write a propaganda, teaching song. But that’s where Manduwuy comes from.” It may not have been his express intention but nevertheless Kelly has written songs that are already etched in current consciousness. Songs such as ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, co-written with Kev Carmody, which chronicles the dispute at Wattie Creek between the Gurindji people led by Vincent Lingiarri and the Vestey company-

Vestey man said I’ll double your wages Seven quid a week you’ll have in your hand Vincent said uhuh we’re not talking about wages We’re sitting right here till we get our land Vestey man roared and Vestey man thundered You don’t stand a chance of a cinder In snow Vince said if we fall others are rising

From little things big things grow

… Eight years went by, eight long years of waiting Till one day a tall stranger appeared in the land His name was Whitlam and he came with great ceremony And through Vincent’s fingers poured a handful of sand

From little things big things grow The melody has more than an echo of Dylan’s ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, especially garnished as it is with rudimentary harmonica. But the song is a classic with an assurance that, far from being derivative, indicates one in complete command of the idiom. Another song is based on a newspaper article from Derby, Western Australia quoting a pastoralist complaining that Aborigines were getting special treatment. With a characteristically blithe tune Kelly ironically catalogues the history of special treatment- My father worked a twelve hour day As a stockman on a station The very same work but not the same pay As his white companions He got special treatment Special treatment Very special treatment Mama gave birth to a stranger’s child A child she called her own Strangers came and took away that child To a stranger’s home She got special treatment Special treatment Very special treatment. The apparent simplicity of the lyric is deceptive. Kelly wrings little ironies and wry ellipses with increasing fluency in his work-especially evident in his May 1992 Live set where, unplugged, unadorned and often slowed down, many of his standards were given refreshed, sinewy new readings.

But while Kelly proves his abilities and considerable stage presence as a soloist he continues to diversify with collaborations. His association with Archie Roach, including as a producer of his album, has been mutually fruitful. He has also written for and with Jenny Morris and Vikka and Linda Bull, vocalists with The Black Sorrows. A more radical departure has been his involvement as composer, musical director and actor in Funerals and Circuses, Magpie Theatre’s project for the 1992 Adelaide Festival.

Paul Kelly first met the director Steven Gration who was then based in Darwin with the Corrugated Iron Youth Theatre group. Gration recalls the occasion: “Darwin is an informal, outdoor place, especially in the dry season and you often bump into visiting rock stars in the coffee shops. I introduced myself and talked about the storytelling quality and sense of character in his songs. I asked him if he’d ever thought about writing for the theatre. He said not really but if l heard any songs of his I liked to let him know and he’d give me permission to use them.”

Gration had more in mind than that but it wasn’t until he moved to Adelaide and began preparations for a play with a Nunga theme-to be written by Roger Bennett, a playwright he’d known in Darwin- that the director contacted Kelly again.

“I didn’t even have a script at that time,” Gration recalls, “I just had an idea. Paul asked me to send a booklist of the sort of things I like to read. I sent a wide list ranging from Latin American novels right through to sporting books. I think the one that really got him in was one of my favourite, The Complete Leg Break Bowler. I was a leg-break bowler as a kid and it turned out he was too.”

The combination of the theme of the play, the opportunity to perform in the Adelaide Festival and the masonic handshake of a fellow cricketer brought Kelly in. He wrote sixteen songs for the production and played the part of Tony, an aspiring musician stuck in a country town running his father’s petrol station. The project was deservedly one of the critical highpoints of the festival. Gration notes not only the singer’s generosity and patience in teaching the songs but his astute suggestions for developing and clarifying the script. Kelly, for his part, is full of praise also.

“I went into it not knowing how it would turn out. We all did. Steven Gration had the vision and the confidence. He pulled all the elements together and they were pretty disparate-the people he chose and the styles. For me it was a really enjoyable experience. It helped my songwriting even further. I got to write some funny songs. The songs were part of a larger theatrical effect that was the thing I enjoyed most, that feeling after opening night. It was like being part of a giant clock.”

Since its first season Kelly pledged to make himself available for a further run and now in September and October of this year Funerals and Circuses will play in Melbourne and Canberra. With the release of his book as well as theatrical appearances Paul Kelly is in danger of becoming a renaissance person.

But while these diversifications may suggest some gentrification, Kelly’s achievements are centrally in popular music and with audiences who are largely unaware of literary and theatrical coteries. While Kelly does not foster the kind of common-bloke appeal of someone like Jimmy Barnes, nevertheless his perceptive, direct songs have attracted a diverse and loyal following.

During his solo tour last year it was clear that his audiences know the canon well and are responsive to the subtleties of interpretation, his nonstandard approach to standards, even the occasional self-parody. Armed only with a guitar-acoustic or electric-and some basic piano chords, Kelly is hardly the virtuoso. His raggedy strumming is reminiscent of concert huskers like Billy Bragg. Enthusiasts for the Messengers could not be blamed for the occasional yearning for the quartet’s strong driving rock sound. Fortunately they are well represented on disc. Nowadays Kelly is very much out front, making it new, owning the songs and giving them full measure. It is a risk that has worked.

Paul Kelly has probably recorded fifty songs that could be called first-rate, a high strike rate in the one-hit wonder world of popular music. In the recent solo Live set the range of his work is strongly apparent. I’ve already mentioned the Nunga songs. Others- like ‘When I First Met Your Ma’ and ‘I Can’t Believe We Were Married’ wistfully capture past relationships. Love songs like ‘Randwick Bells’ and ‘Wintercoat’ have a clarity and emotional focus that is memorable. Kelly always knows how to pitch things, never cloying, never glib. He has a poet’s instinct for economy and understatement. Even the more confessional songs are both rueful and generous to others-‘Dumb Things’ for instance:

I lost my shirt, I pawned my rings I’ve done all the dumb things I melted wax to fix my wings I’ve done all the dumb things I threw my hat into the ring I’ve done all the dumb things or ‘Careless’: How many cabs in New York City, how many angels on a pin? How many notes in a saxophone, how many tears in a bottle of gin? How many times did you call my name, knock at the door but you couldn’t get in? I know I’ve been careless I’ve been wrapped up in a shell nothing could get through to me Acted like I didn’t know I had friends and family I saw worry in their eyes, it didn’t look like fear to me I know I’ve been careless (I lost my tenderness) There are indications of new approaches in recent songs like ‘Just Like Animals’, in the playful wonkiness of’ I Was Hoping You’d Say That’ and the airy lyricism of ‘Invisible Me’. Kelly has never sounded better and while plenty of people have been alerted to his singular talent he deserves more. The publication of his lyrics is a good move especially if it brings more people to his recordings. On the page his writings can seem slight, just scraps of rhyme. But they are magicked into considerably more in performance. That is Paul Kelly’s uncommon gift. And you can find him at a store near you.

Murray Bramwell is a writer and drama critic. He is the coauthor of Wanted for Questioning (Allen & Unwin).

Sitar Struck

Published: 1993-10-01

Alan Posselt and Aneesh Pradhan

Elder Hall

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Derived from the Persian “seh-tar” meaning three stringed, the sitar- multi-stringed, long-necked lute from Northern India- has been a featured instrument of the classical Hindustani tradition since at least the sixteenth century. Apart from musicologists and Indianists, Western audiences only began turning ears to its ineffable cadences in the late 1950s when Ravi Shankar gave his first recitals in London and New York.

By the early sixties folkies like the ubiquitous Davey Graham were playing and recording guitar “ragas” but it was George Harrison’s solo on the Rubber Soul album that sent the sitar global. Cranking through a few runs on Norwegian Wood, George gave a hint of what was to come. Love You To, on Revolver, indicated he was getting the hang of things and by the time he recorded Within You Without You for Sgt Pepper half the pop musicians in London had their leg over a sitar. Brian Jones, Traffic and Eric Burdon’s band, for instance. On the West Coast there was Richie Havens and when the Byrds went Eight Miles High they took an electric sitar.

It was no accident that the modal weavings of Indian classical music came to prominence at the same time as psychedelics. It wasn’t just Timothy Leary’s Millbrook soirees that used ragas for their lysergic adventurings. Every provincial kid in the world was putting Portrait of Genius on the turntable before trying out some high-grade dried banana peel. Understandably Ravi Shankar was unimpressed with becoming Captain Trips, even though he himself produced some rather interesting movie music for Conrad Rooks. After performing at both Monterey and Woodstock, Shankar withdrew from the pop circuit and gradually the fad for things Indian turned to rhinestone cowboys instead.

The jazz fusion musicians turned out to be the true carriers of the flame - John McLaughlin with his Mahavishnu and Shakti projects and talented Shankar proteges like the late Collin Walcott whose splendid group Oregon once performed to thirty seven people in Adelaide. Now Indian music comes to us from the Festival and Womad circuit - virtuosi such as Ali Akbar Khan and L. Subramaniam continue to amaze audiences of Subcontinent nationals and Western enthusiasts alike.

It was no surprise to find just such a mixed audience at the Elder Hall for the sublime sitar and tabla recital given by Australian Alan Posselt and renowned young Indian musician - and, I’m told, star of his own Taj Mahal teabag commercial- Aneesh Pradhan. Originally a classical guitarist, Posselt, who studied sitar in India with Ustad Alludin Khan (father of Ali Akbar Khan) has also reached great proficiency with sarod and other Indian classical instruments.

They performed three works consisting of ragas, the basic melody line, and talas, their rhythmic counterpoint. Raga Madhuvanti began first in tintala or slow tempo, shifting to jhaptala- fast tempo- and returning to tintala to conclude. For nearly an hour Posselt gathered the room around him, building rhythms to intense energy and releasing them again into melodies of subtle delicacy. His technique, while not as breathtakingly fluid as Shankar, is nonetheless remarkable. And Aneesh Pradhan’s tabla work is brilliantly deft and fluent.

The second item, Raga Eshri proved to be even more accomplished as Posselt moved from slow tempo to ever more intricate cross rhythms while Pradhan’s hands turned to a blur of speed and sound on the tabla. It is not surprising that ignorant listeners like me are inclined to compare the vivacity and freedom of Indian music with the improvisations of jazz and blues but in fact the motifs and scales have to be painstakingly learned. “It’s almost scientific,” Shankar once said, “but at the same time you’re free as a bird.”

Alan Posselt and Aneesh Pradhan were just such scientifically free birds- and the audience did its share of flying as well. The evening concluded with Raga Bhairavi, a total of two hours aural pleasure. David Arbon’s sound rig was excellent and 5UV taped the performance which will go out on Global Rhythm in the Saturday midday slot. Watch the 5UV program guide for details.

Commissioned October, 1993 for The Adelaide Review but not published.

Multifoliate

Published: 1994

Jim Rose Circus Sideshow

Old Lion

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

O Rose, thou art sick. Blake didn’t know the half of it. From Seattle, Washington, grunge mecca of the New World, the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow returned to Sunday night Adelaide to bring worms visible and invisible from his garden of unearthly delights. Too big for Heaven this time, Jim packed us into the Old Lion for the gawp of our lives. Looking around we looked normal enough. People who eat fresh fruit with their own teeth, people with jobs, people entrusted to handle machinery and sign invoices.

But Jim knows better. Wired from the first nanosecond, he hits the crowd like a preacher on speed. This is a medicine show for the sick at heart, live tabloid. An ogle-fest, people. This is Oprah with goitres. Jim likes to take the offensive. You look like a jaded fuck, he shrieks into his hand mike, leering into the face of a paying customer in row three. Check out this spoon, he demands. When the punter gets over-forensic, Jim is volcanic with sarcasm. Don’t patronise me, he sneers. Retrieving the cutlery in question, he spears it so far into his nasal cavity you expect it to reappear through his fontanelle.

Jim knows how to pace things. Forget the spoon. Where’s Bam Bam the Strong Man ? A chubby fellow in owlish glasses Bam Bam puts his hand in a racoon trap and then does the old Mat the Tube trick of inflating a hot water bottle like a balloon. It reaches the size of a tyrannosaurus pancreas then shreds all over the groundlings. Bebe, Queen of the Circus follows, reminding us that Jim is an EO employer and that it’s a cinch to walk barefooted on a ladder of blades. Jim croons to her with his carny spiel, promising her that should she expire on the knives he will `exhibit, I mean raise’ (he corrects his swinish lapse) her child as if it were his own. Bebe wraps some neon around her person, sticks a fluoro in her mouth and, with a little sizzling voltage, lights up for an encore.

Jim grabs Sonia from the crowd to smash up some bottles with a hammer. Audience participation time and who will refuse the MC ? Get your ass in the glass we shriek with the cheery unison of a lynch mob. I do it for you croons Jim, phantom of the opera, Barnum ghoul, the human dart board. Then to finish off Act One things get a further lift, you might say.

Last year’s pilgrims, or anyone watching that dolt Vizard, already know what’s imminent when out comes the obsequious Lifto, masochist and piercee. Warming up with the superglue-on-the-fingertips- ripped-off-the-bowling-ball trick, Mr Lifto does his other familiars. The coathanger through the septum, the hook through the tongue, the nipple-lift with the concrete block, the irons from the earlobes while Jim sashays him across the stage. Lifto mugs and swoons like an ill-used lover, like a lanky Blanche Dubois. Jim whiffles his moustache like a Southern Colonel with unspeakable proclivities. And speaking of the unspeakable. Lifto’s finale. The secret’s out again. The old pizzle push-up. Two steam irons hanging off the Prince Albert ring and Lifto rolls back his eyeballs. Abject, scarified, Lifto is inscribed with shame. His, ours. Everyone except the cheery huckster, Jim Rose- beastmaster and timekeeper. We have had thirty five minutes. A fifteen minute break and there are fifty five well-calculated minutes of gaping still to go.

Jim staples twenty dollars American to his forehead by way of getting Act Two underway. Then he unravels the Enigma, a tattooed Caliban who has been tormenting a stack of Korgs with mesmeric conviction since the show began. Enigma eats some lightbulbs and drools them down his chin. Jim explains Enigma’s supremacy over the gag reflex as the jig-sawed one swallows an intestinally improbable amount of sword. Jim treats him badly and Enigma squirms ever more parodically. He’s a creepy fellow Enigma. But then so is the Armenian Rubber Man. He squeezes his hypermobile shoulderblades through a stringless tennis racquet while Jim waxes pentecostal with hysteria. By contrast Mark the Knife is a fresh looking college type. He juggles knives, bowling balls and chainsaws and for the finale balanced a lawn mower in his mouth while Jim threw lettuces into the blades.

This year’s sideshow carried the same mania as Jim’s last visitation. Given to prophecy Jim reminded us that while five hundred appeared unto him last time the present crowd was more than double. Jim likes these millenarian touches- especially as a build up for his T shirt sales hype. If these T shirts do not treble in value in fifty years then your money will be cheerfully refunded. Jim should worry. He sweated and cursed, warbled and moaned. He explained, boasted and exulted. Science! he would shout positivistically. Do not try this at home, these people are professionals.

Personally, I missed Matt the Tube, the softly spoken pharmacist from Montana and things seemed quiet without the Torture King. But there you go. Enigma haemorrhaged his keyboards one last time, Barkey Ray’s Fender hit the death rattle and the Sideshow brought its revels to an end. On they trooped for the bow. These American gargoyles, harbingers of murky desire, travesties of appetite. May all your days be circus days, coos Jim, like we’ve just seen the Tin Man and Dorothy- and not the Elephant Man with a wrecking ball on his prepuce. It’s no good wiggling your shoes. There may be no place like home. But Jim’s made sure you’re never getting back to Kansas now.

The Adelaide Review, 1994.

Open G

Published: 1994

Graham Parker The Office

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

When, in 1975, he sent a demo tape into Charlie Gillett’s show on Radio London, an unknown service station worker named Graham Parker helped jump-start English music. Weary with disco and reeling from lugubrious concept albums, listeners were suddenly swept by a New Wave. Short songs with sharp lyrics and pumped up rhythm were back. Power pop somebody called it, others called it punk. Whatever it was, it unleashed a burst of new talent which threatened to outflank the British invasion of a decade earlier.

Out of the ruck -and beyond the publicity aura of Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols - came bands like The Clash and the Police. And, also- the Auden, Spender and MacNeish of their generation- Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson and Graham Parker. Each has gained enduring distinction. Costello as a prolific and uncompromising composer and performer, Jackson as a jiver turned piano crooner and Parker as a songwriter with a legendary band who kept on producing great albums which nobody much got around to buying.

Performing solo for a series of Australian concerts, Graham Parker is promoting his latest CD, 12 Haunted Episodes. It has songs for older people, he remarks drily, people who have babysitters. He confides to the diehards gathered at the Office that he has been listening to the Seattle grunge sound and made the discovery that all the songs are in open G tuning. So I’ve got with this idea, he drawls with sarcastic London adenoids- “in a David Blue-Donovan-James Taylor kind of way.”

Those who saw Parker lead the Rumour through two hypermanic tours in 1978 and 1979 will know what he means by heat treatment. But even when he was squeezing out the sparks his music never lacked nuance- as tracks like You Can’t Be Too Strong eloquently indicated. And with the live acoustic album, Alone in America, GP also anticipated, by several years, the current fad for things unplugged. So, up on stage -with a sunburst acoustic Maton, a harmonica and Seattle open tuning- Graham Parker never looked or sounded better. Or more himself.

He’s still a scrawny little ectomorph and we still don’t know for sure that he owns a pair of eyeballs, but at least these days the lenses in his trademark aviators are rose-coloured. He opens the set with Watch the Moon Come Down, then, from Mona Lisa’s Sister, a soulful version of Back in Time. A quick plug for the new album- “it’s still pretty good stuff” - and he sings its crappiest track, Pollinate. Force of Nature works considerably better, as does the title song , even with some Van Morrison dit-dit-didits between stanzas. Then he mixes it around again, Success, a catchy tune from Mona Lisa, and a dreamy reading of Temporary Beauty, confidently and winningly performed, ballad in plain G.

He makes a joke about the song being turned into elevator music and goes up the escalator for a sweetly edged version of Love Without Greed and another new one, See Yourself. By now Parker is enjoying the space and he unwinds into a lengthy anecdote about pranging his Lancia on an English motorway. It is a pub rocker’s confession, a droll account of fly-boy hubris. Or, as he puts it -“a yob song about getting slashed.” The song never made it on to Squeezing Out Sparks. Instead, it went to Dave Edmunds and Parker reclaims it with relish. Crawling From the Wreckage. A song of insentience becomes a song of experience.

Things are going nicely and Parker is now open to suggestion. He calls for requests. Various titles are called out . Someone behind me wants Cupid. I hear this croaky voice yell out Protection and realise it’s mine. What was that song -I’m not crying for attention, I’m screaming to be heard ? Well, damn it anyway. I can’t manage to project over all those others who want White Honey.

He plays eleven requests. All sorts. Gypsy Blood, Hotel Chambermaid, Between You and Me -the demo that started it all. Howling Wind. Love Gets You Twisted- slowed down and metaphysical, the reggae inflections of Start a Fire and, one from The Real Macaw, Can’t Take Love For Granted.

Others get a go, but no votes for Protection. I’m temporarily exhilarated by Don’t Let it Break You Down mutating into the old Who song, Substitute. It is both sardonic and elegiac, smart but full of feeling. And, chimes before twelve, Parker vamps his way through Discovering Japan- “my watch says 8.02 but that’s midnight to you.” Scheduled to play for an hour Parker has stretched it to more than two. More chunky chords and he’s away again. It’s only a bit of electric strum but you can hear the ghostly chords of the Rumour - Brinsley Schwartz’s electric glide, Goulding and Bodnar, the symbiotic rhythm section, Bob Andrews on keyboard. Just can’t get, just can’t get, just can’t get no… Protection. Is there a better hymn to paranoia than this three minute marvel ? Kafka and Marcuse. Beckett on speed. “It’s not the knife through the heart that tears you apart,/ It’s just the thought of someone sticking it in.”

Graham Parker plays several encores - an even more grown-up version of You Can’t Be Too Strong and, his anthem from the no future days, Don’t Ask Me Questions (there ain’t no answers in me). Hearing him perform so engagingly from across maybe a dozen albums I’m not sure he can pull that one on us. In an era when the erstwhile trade on nostalgia and the has-beens run on self pity, Parker is, as ever, his own man- self-possessed, inventive, articulate, funny. He has written three or four dozen first rate songs and he still has his own teeth. I’d say that’s some kind of answer. And he knows the secrets of open tuning.

Commissioned by The Adelaide Review but not published.

Words and Unheard Melodies

Published: 1994-02-02

Lyrics

Paul Kelly

Angus and Robertson

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Books of song lyrics are still quite rare. One thinks of The Beatles collection, whimsically decorated by Alan Aldridge, or the various editions of Bob Dylan songs. In the latter case there were frequent revelations. Dylan only occasionally provided lyric sheets with his album releases and we long term listeners found we had cherished some fascinating mishearings over the years. To read the actual wording (although Dylan watchers note that the Great Man often alters them for publication) twenty five years after the release of say, Visions of Johanna, can be deeply disconcerting. You tend to decide, in good postmodern fashion, to stick to your initial deciphering because somehow it seems right anyway.

But none of this is likely to happen with the publication of Paul Kelly’s song lyrics since he has always obligingly included them with record releases. So why a book ? Would people buy the book who didn’t know the albums ? And if they did, what would they make of them ? Would they be people who buy “poetry” - and who, for that matter, are they ? There is some evidence to suggest that everybody wants to publish poetry but nobody wants to read anyone else’s.

Let me say immediately that the release of this volume is a way of paying much deserved attention to Paul Kelly’s accomplishments and if it returns readers to his recorded work then that is an excellent thing. If it also catches the attention of people unfamiliar with his work- the newly-healed deaf, perhaps, or people who have been locked in cupboards or stranded at McMurdo Sound- then that is a bonus.

What disconcerts me is the strategy taken in Robert Adamson’s brief introduction. First he tediously reminds us that the first poets performed with lyre accompaniment so that Kelly is more traditional than the contemporary poet ever is. That, if I may say, is not only unilluminating it is a cliche with hair on it. Then Adamson cites Imre Salusinszky “of the University of Newcastle” (to emphasise the credentials of the opinion) that Paul Kelly should be included in anthologies of Australian poetry. Well of course he should. But, on the other hand, why the hell would he want to be ? Paul Kelly does not need to publish books to prove he is one of the country’s leading artists- and a highly successful one. It is high time it was recognised that poetry as a published form is in serious decline. It is a marginal activity. What new fiction has not annexed from it has been ceded to the recorded music industry.

And not recently either. Over more than thirty years there has been a huge amount of writing covering every speck of human experience in a variety of languages. But the torch of communication has not been the book it has been the cassette. From Bob Marley to Joni Mitchell to Youssou N’Dour to Public Enemy to Bjork to whoever you want to name, poetry is alive and well and travelling in the constant company of rhythm and music. Similarly in Australia, Deborah Conway, the Finn Brothers, the Painters and Dockers, Nick Cave, The Beasts of Bourbon, Dave Graney are just a few of the new, or not so new, writers.

As is Paul Kelly. Kelly’s links are especially with the ballad- the traditional variety and the revival of the radical folk scene of the Fifties and Sixties. He has debts to Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley and Bob Dylan. But also, he will tell you, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker and the power pop of the late seventies.

As Lyrics indicates, Paul Kelly’s writing has gathered tremendous steam over nine albums. But it was always classy. The collection is set out in chronological order- from Post onwards. Opening with From St Kilda to Kings Cross is a strong start for anybody’s money-

“I want to see the sun go down from St Kilda Esplanade

Where the beach needs reconstruction, where the palm trees have it hard

I’d give you all of Sydney harbour (all that land and all that water)

For that one sweet promenade.“

Incident on South Dowling, is spare and unsparing in its strung out account of an overdose. Adelaide evokes the sundering of home ties. Then again, Give Me One More Chance could be vintage Hank Williams. On Gossip it is the candour of Before the Old Man Died and the tenderness of Randwick Bells that strikes the reader, as they do in Kelly’s fine arrangements on the album as well. Then, Maralinga (Rainy Land) the first of Kelly’s land rights anthems, records historical particulars - “My name is Yami Lester…My name is Edie Millipuddy.”

The collection is a reminder of how many first rate songs Paul Kelly has written- Dumb Things, Same Old Walk, and Special Treatment from the Under the Sun period. Almost everything from So Much Water So Close to Home- but especially Careless, South of Germany and Everything’s Turning to White. And, written at the same time, the shrewdly framed Other People’s Houses. Winter Coat and From Little Things Big Things Come (co-written with Kev Carmody), express the range of gifts on the Comedy album. Lyrics gathers together songs from Funerals and Circuses, Kelly’s highly memorable collaboration with Roger Bennett for Magpie last Festival. Recent works such as Just Like Animals also appear , it was one of the stand-out performances on Kelly’s double live set issued in 1992.

Lyrics is proof that Paul Kelly’s writing can more than hold its own on the page. But when you consider how delectably, surprisingly and memorably they entwine with his wry, original, sometimes breathtaking melodies it seems a pity to separate them.

I have no doubt about the claims made for Kelly as a poet.

But, writing this review to a background of albums - Hidden Things, Gossip, Comedy- and listening again to the music so integral to his achievement I am reminded that we- and Paul Kelly- are doubly blessed.

The Adelaide Review, No.123, February, 1994.

Full to the Brim

Published: 1994-04-01

The Guinness Celebration of Irish Music

Festival Theatre, April 1994

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Looking at my program for the first Guinness Celebration back in 1986 I am reminded of names in the line-up. It was an impressive two-night card- The Dubliners, Christy Moore, and Stockton’s Wing. Also, Maura O’Connell, Liam O’Flynn, Nollaig Casey and Arty McGlynn, all of whom were back for this year’s gathering. It is hard to believe that in just eight years there has been such a transformation in Irish music. With the huge success of U2 and, to a lesser extent, bands like Hothouse Flowers and the Waterboys, it has become a force in world music. Paradoxically, with performers such as Van Morrison and Elvis Costello, aka Declan McManus, identifying themselves ever more strongly with their Irish origins, the music is also defiantly regional.

The Irish sound, long cherished by nationals, expatriates and folk enthusiasts everywhere, has been steadily moving into the mainstream. Once it was only The Dubliners, The Clancy Brothers, The Chieftains and, lord forbid, Val Doonican. But the groundswell from the formation of Planxty in 1972 made room for the soft pop of The Fureys and more importantly the folk rock sounds of De Dannan and Clannad. From there came the New Age popularity of Enya and the collapse of those pedantic demarcation disputes that frequently splinter and enervate the folk scene.

The attention and success that Irish music now enjoys has given it a collective confidence and vitality that was everywhere evident in Jon Nicholls’ splendid 1994 Celebration. After some droll warm-up from comedian Brian Doyle harpist Maire Ni Chathasaig and guitarist Chris Newman took the stage. The legendary harpist Blind Carolan was the source for the first item, followed by a brace of jigs and some eclectic numbers. Maire Ni Chathasaig is the leading harpist in Ireland today, her technique is faultless and her scholarship is worn lightly - as in her amusingly informative introduction to a Celtic May festival song. Chris Newman betrays his longtime jazz associations when in pieces like A Sore Point and Out of Court he djangoed to Maire’s ringing harp sound.

Maura O’Connell, former lead singer for De Dannan, has been working out of Nashville since the late Eighties. Accompanied by two American guitarists, she showed she’d moved a step or two since her somewhat stodgy set back in 1986. Opening with the Paul Brady song, To Be the One, followed by Summer Fly, she gave a sardonic spin to Irish Blues, a little touch of sexual politics with some zippy fretwork from the Nashville boys. She closed with the some likeable pop -It Still Hurts Sometimes- evidence that her Grammy nomination was no fluke. But it was her unaccompanied version of the traditional favourite, The Water is Wide, that really caused shivers on the neck.

There are plenty of rock and reel bands these days. But there can be few with both the precision and thump of Four Men and a Dog. With Gino Lupari upfront on bodhran and face-pulling, the rest of the group play like demons. Cathal Hayden’s fiddle playing is nothing short of exceptional while Gerry O’Connor on banjo and guitarists Kevin Doherty and Arty McGlynn also hold their ground. Doherty even crooned a version of Woody Guthrie’s Rambling Man as the musicians moved form traditional jigs and reels to American ragtime and string band styles. Lupari, a huge fellow with an hilariously restless stage manner, also threatens to be the Ginger Baker of the bones and bodhran.

After interval came the evening’s true highlight - the set by Liam Flynn, Arty McGlynn, Nollaig Casey, and joining them, Andy Irvine. All fully paid up members of the pantheon, these musicians were impressive. McGlynn is one of the most skilled guitarists on the music scene with credits back to Van Morrison and Planxty, his wife Nollaig Casey is a superb fiddle player and Liam O’Flynn, co-founder of Planxty, has to be the best uilleann piper on the planet. With The Irish Bog and Maugham’s Return the trio showed their spell-binding best, the tender melancholy of the pipes matched effortlessly by the other instruments.

With Donal Lunny having to leave the tour early, Andy Irvine teamed up with the O’Flynn trio instead. This proved a most fortuitous circumstance. Irvine led with the emigration song, A Storm Free, and working with his trademark bouzouki and mandola, he pitched in with jigs like Alastair’s March and Paddy’s Wack. But it was his own songs that touched most. The West Coast of Clare may be as shamelessly sentimental as Irvine says but it was given a memorable rendering by the group. Irish traditional music and its creative hybrids have never looked more vigorously alive than here.

So, for me, the smooth pop sound of headliners Mary Black and the Black Dogs seemed less satisfying even though the opening number Ellis Island amply revealed the sweet clarity of Black’s voice and the easy unity of her six piece band. Dressed in crofter chic, Black capered at the microphone for Past the Point of Rescue and a tuneful, if slightly over-sweet, version of Ewan McColl’s School Day’s Over. She sang contemporary songs like Carolina Road, Bright Blue Rose and Sandy Denny’s By The Time it Gets Dark. But it was the De Dannan weepie, Song For Ireland that really hit the button.

The finales from the entire ensemble were a sight to behold - eighteen musicians on stage and no-one getting in anyone else’s way. They sang the Luke Kelly song Will You Come to the Bower, thumped out jigs with an arsenal of pipes, fiddles and guitars and Maura O’Connell led some croony community singing. For the last show of the tour Jon Nicholls took a bow and danced a jig, as well he might with a success like this. His Guinness Celebration is an established fixture- look for it in 1995.

The Adelaide Review, No.126, April, 1994, p.32.

Alive and Brilliant

Published: 1994-06-01

Deborah Conway Norwood Town Hall

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

With the solo albums, String of Pearls and last year’s Bitch Epic, Deborah Conway has been proving that, sponsorship from Poppy notwithstanding, she is more than a pretty lip gloss. Since leaving the fabled Do Re Mi she has moved up the octave with fruitful collaborations with Richard Pleasance, Paul Kelly and most recently, guitarist Willy Zygier.

Surrounded by her band, the Mothers of Pearl, the quartet Strings of Pearl, percussionist Paul Edzell and back-up singer Tina Kopa, Deborah Conway recently wound up her Epic Theatre tour in Adelaide. After a series of pub engagements Conway has been playing theatres with a crisp, stylish stage show reminiscent of smoothies like Joe Jackson. Epic Theatre, she disarmingly informs us, recalls Sunday afternoons in Melbourne- when, after the roast and the World of Sport, came the gladiator movies and the sword and sandal dramas of the Epic Theatre.

Opening with synth and string fanfares the band found splendid accord in the rallying choruses of Alive and Brilliant. Conway began as she meant to continue- in confident voice and with a stage presence that you might call, well, theatrical. In variously coloured Mao suits the ensemble have a carefully considered dash about them. But Conway, the former Southern Comfort girl with her hair fetchingly awry, is nobody’s object. In charge, and in touch with an enthusiastic audience, she is very much the emancipated woman. She raises the temperature with I’m Not Satisfied and sings a rich, sinewy version of String of Pearls, guitar at first and extending to the full band. Then more from the same album -Buried Treasure, a boppy take of It’s Only the Beginning, a bluesy version of Only Girl- smoky vocals and tasty guitar from Zygier - and an achy reading of White Roses, with quartet strings tugging the heart and a lambent trombone solo from the versatile keyboards player.

In blonde wig and padded-up gold lame, Conway out-Basseys Shirley with the full-throttle kitsch of Goldfinger and then emerges -“Silk worm to cabbage moth” in a white muslin shift for the jazzy, Joni-influenced Madame Butterfly’s in Trouble. You are reminded how many first-rate songs Deborah Conway has written when she moves from the defiant Now That We Are Apart to the hand-in-glove melody of She Prefers Fire and the classic pop cadences of Today I’m a Daisy.

For the encore it has to be Man Overboard, that perfect capsule of Eighties pop. And then the band, on all cylinders, for Holes in the Road. Conway closed with an extended account of Under My Skin, song of co-dependence- I’m just a girl who can’t say nuh,nuh- but in its soaring rock vocal, also a song of triumph. The band peeled off one by one, down to the last rattle of percussion and stage blackout. Deborah Conway’s epic concert is smart, funny and musically well-judged. A gem you might call it. Or a string of pearls.

The Adelaide Review, No.128, June, 1994, p.32.

Alive and Brilliant

Published: 1994-06-01

Deborah Conway Norwood Town Hall

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

With the solo albums, String of Pearls and last year’s Bitch Epic, Deborah Conway has been proving that, sponsorship from Poppy notwithstanding, she is more than a pretty lip gloss. Since leaving the fabled Do Re Mi she has moved up the octave with fruitful collaborations with Richard Pleasance, Paul Kelly and most recently, guitarist Willy Zygier.

Surrounded by her band, the Mothers of Pearl, the quartet Strings of Pearl, percussionist Paul Edzell and back-up singer Tina Kopa, Deborah Conway recently wound up her Epic Theatre tour in Adelaide. After a series of pub engagements Conway has been playing theatres with a crisp, stylish stage show reminiscent of smoothies like Joe Jackson. Epic Theatre, she disarmingly informs us, recalls Sunday afternoons in Melbourne- when, after the roast and the World of Sport, came the gladiator movies and the sword and sandal dramas of the Epic Theatre.

Opening with synth and string fanfares the band found splendid accord in the rallying choruses of Alive and Brilliant. Conway began as she meant to continue- in confident voice and with a stage presence that you might call, well, theatrical. In variously coloured Mao suits the ensemble have a carefully considered dash about them. But Conway, the former Southern Comfort girl with her hair fetchingly awry, is nobody’s object. In charge, and in touch with an enthusiastic audience, she is very much the emancipated woman. She raises the temperature with I’m Not Satisfied and sings a rich, sinewy version of String of Pearls, guitar at first and extending to the full band. Then more from the same album -Buried Treasure, a boppy take of It’s Only the Beginning, a bluesy version of Only Girl- smoky vocals and tasty guitar from Zygier - and an achy reading of White Roses, with quartet strings tugging the heart and a lambent trombone solo from the keyboards.

In blonde wig and padded-up gold lame, Conway out-Basseys Shirley with the full-throttle kitsch of Goldfinger and then emerges -“Silk worm to cabbage moth” in a white muslin shift for the jazzy, Joni-influenced Madame Butterfly’s in Trouble. You are reminded how many first-rate songs Deborah Conway has written when she moves from the defiant Now That We Are Apart to the hand-in-glove melody of She Prefers Fire and the classic pop cadences of Today I’m a Daisy.

For the encore it has to be Man Overboard, that perfect capsule of Eighties pop. And then the band, on all cylinders, for Holes in the Road. Conway closed with an extended account of Under My Skin, song of co-dependence- I’m just a girl who can’t say nuh,nuh- but in its soaring rock vocal, also a song of triumph. The band peeled off one by one, down to the last rattle of percussion and stage blackout. Deborah Conway’s epic concert is smart, funny and musically well-judged. A gem you might call it. Or a string of pearls.

The Adelaide Review, No.128, June, 1994, p.32.

Digital Sound

Published: 1994-07-01

Leo Kottke Norwood Town Hall

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is one of the ironies of modern times that the music that made a heap of money for William Ackerman and became known generically as Wyndham Hill, was pretty much invented by Leo Kottke. Not that Ackerman’s own watery tinkerings and the no-sudden-loud-noises ambient style of his record label bear comparison with the vigorous driving twelve string rhythms that are the Kottke hallmark.

It also has to be said that Kottke’s music, style and personality are just too danged idiosyncratic to accommodate the smooth niche marketting of Wyndham Hill. Ever since his debut album for Takoma appeared about twenty-five years ago, Kottke has been producing records that don’t quite fit the demographics. There’s the guitar sound, not quite blues or folk or raga. And the vocals, that even the singer himself compared to a dying frog, or was it a raccoon in extremis. Maybe it’s all the fault of Athens, Georgia, home of that other weirdo lyricist

• Michael Stipe of REM.

If you are wondering what Leo Kottke is up to these days, the answer is- much good. He has reputedly re-worked his playing techniques after developing repetition injuries (Fairport fiddler Dave Swarbrick was similarly forced back to the soundboard to re-jig) and has just finished a national tour promoting his newest album, Peculiaroso. Produced by Rickie Lee Jones, who is also touring soon, it is as fine as any he has released.

In performance Kottke is both brilliant and dotty. It’s no accident that he was a regular on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion because he is a match for Keillor in the shaggy dog narrative department. After opening with a flawless version of the jaunty instrumental Peg Leg and a spacious revival of the Platters’ hit Twilight Time, both from the new album, Kottke whimsically pondered about the protocols of talking to the audience at the beginning of a concert. Relaxed, and gently comic, he plays the rube while making Noam Chomsky jokes.

Then he picks up his 12 string to play fingerbusters that sound like three Leadbellys and John Bonham. The voicebox is invoked for the Randall Hylton tune, Room at the Top of the Stairs, a ragtime country crooner from Peculiaroso. Even better was his classic reading of the Byrds’s Eight Miles High, the fluid, wistful playing matching his burred vocals in elegiac recollection of higher times.

Kottke summons pictures of small-time USA, kids living out of sync, mischief in the bible-belt. His daffy stories have the same curdled satire that lurks in Keillor’s not quite benign memoirs. His new song, Parade, captures it too. Like a kind of West Texas Randy Newman with a refrain that hints of Joni Mitchell’s Tin Angel.

One thing you can do when you watch Kottke perform live is count his fingers. He keeps them tucked under so you can’t be sure, but I’d guess eleven on the left hand and thirteen on the right. He seems to sprout more whenever he reaches for the 12-string and lose a couple for the bottleneck tunes which, by the way, are rivalled only by Ry Cooder.

Kottke played sublimely and nattered amiably for ninety minutes. He told a lovely story of Joe Pass being serenaded by the Georgian Film Actors at the 1992 Adelaide Festival and dedicated his concert to his memory. For an encore he played one more of his mighty fingerplunkers- Vaseline Machine Gun, or was it Jack Fig ? Or that bicycle thing. It doesn’t matter. From the first album to the peculiar present, for Leo Kottke that circle remains unbroken.

The Adelaide Review, No. 129, July, 1994, p.28

Fine Graney

Published: 1994-10-01

Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes The Synagogue

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Dave Graney’s second coming to the Synagogue is nothing less than revelation. Riding their current album, You Wanna be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel, Graney and his band the Coral Snakes are in supremely confident form. As well they might be, they are as good as anything you’ll find in current music.

Taking the stage in black suits the Coral Snakes are crisp and fluent - like the Messengers, or Ian Dury’s Blockheads. Opening with an overture from Unbuttoned, the bonus appendix to You Wanna Be There, the band sets the style - heartbeat rhythms from drummer Clare Moore and Gordy Blair on bass, jazzy turns from Robin Casinader on keyboards and Rod Hayward’s guitar, a model of sinewy understatement. Grooving to the mock-cool of The Confessions of Serge Gainsbourg, Dave Graney makes his entrance. It is safe to say there is no-one in modern music quite like him. A tiny fellow, he is Tintin in lycra. Favouring as he does the acrylics and stylings of the early seventies Graney has established a trend you might call ACTU 73. In a purple suit with a black body shirt and classic cover-the-shoes tubular bells, this man could have sold you a Monaro or a Kingswood HG.

As Serge segues into Graney’s mordant signature, You’re Just Too Hip Baby, the crowd is bobbing as one. Dave stares implacably back, his arms moving in slow hypnotic tai chi gestures. We haven’t seen irony this deadpan since Bryan Ferry. `You take a feather from every bird you see/ you’ll never fly,’ he croons in a voice and a persona that seems to have taken a feather from everyone from David Ackles to Tom Waits to Stan Ridgeway to Stephen Cummings. Except Graney and his band definitely know how to fly.

Drawing influences from fifties hipsters and the American new cinema of the seventies, Graney introduces his Melbourne fantasy of Alfredo Garcia. Warren Oates in Spencer Street with a banged up Holden- “There with no grace of no god you go/through the united states of Warren Oates.” Then its tabloid photography, Graney as Weegee - Three Dead Passengers in a Stolen Second Hand Ford. With a tune lilting like The Smiths in a happy moment, Graney describes a scene from his part of country South Australia. Outside of Keith near the border, the best minds of his generation “laughing like fools as they reversed into the night.”

But while he likes to spike his songs with local iconography Graney’s lyrics can also be as classically pop as Joe Jackson, especially when it is augmented with Casinader’s chiming piano work. A cluster of ballads - There Was a Time, I’m Just Having One of Those Lives, You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Want to Travel- all distinguished by the grace of their melodies, the Graney wit and the length of their titles, confirms the band’s claim to versatility.

That’s all the ballads, Dave shouts to the swooning throng, cueing the band to hit the pedal for the driving thump of Won’t You Ride With Me- tasty guitar runs from Hayward and faultless upbeat from Clare Moore. More from the current album, New Life in a New Town and then You Wanna be Loved (a dense little meditation on social tyranny with three-part harmonies from the sinuous Snakes) paves the way for the hypnotic repetitions of Graney’s beat classic, Night of the Wolverine. Pausing to glare about the pesky feedback which they had battled valiantly all night, Dave leads the Coral Snakes to The Stars Baby, The Stars and the band pulls out the stops for I’m Gonna Release Your Soul, Hayward on wah-wah and rococo flights from Casinader.

For the encore Graney unbuttoned again with the toxic tongue-in-cheek of It’s Your Crowd I Hate. After more jokes about the Australian Doors, attempts to channel Jim and an elaboration of his death-bath theory Dave played a cover. A rockabilly version of Robert Johnson’s anthem to the gun lobby, 32-20 Blues- which Graney transforms with wicked irony and some extempore wolverine howling from that other loathsome king of the beats, Allen Ginsberg.

Graney and the Coral Snakes closed the set with as much octane as they started. Dave chose a spiritual message to match his balletic martial arts benediction - “The Word is Nah, close sesame, the word is Nah.” He’s a sharp little ectomorph, with a great band. Let this man into your life. He’s says he’s gonna release your soul.

The Adelaide Review, No. 132, October, 1994, p.32.

Wise Blood

Published: 1995

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Thebarton Theatre, December 1994.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

More first feature than support act, Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes are having one of their lives. Most of the full-house crowd at Thebarton are inside to see them. The hypnotic sound of the Confessions of Gainsbourg surges into the Graney signature, You’re Too Hip For Me Baby. Dave is the usual triumph of man-made fibre, doing his tai-chic workout while the band goes about its reliable business. Under blood-red lights Graney sings You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel. Robin Casinader’s keyboards chime above a murky sound mix. The foldback is obviously fine- Graney is gliding confidently, oblivious to the fact that bassist Gordy Blair is trapped inside a forty gallon drum.

The band work through the list- Warren Oates, Won’t You Ride With Me, and the enticing repetitions of There Was a Time. Then Dave starts his attenuated Australian Doors joke. The ironists get it but this is a mixed crowd and you wonder whether maybe some of the Cave people think that even a channeling tribute band is better than no Jim at all. Just to add to the ambiguity, Dave curls his lip around It’s Your Crowd I Hate before opening into the final cluster- You Wanna Be Loved, his classic Beat lyric, Night of the Wolverine, The Stars, Baby, The Stars and I’m Gonna Release Your Soul. The crowd roars, and the Coral Snakes look pleased even though we missed out on most of Rod Hayward’s guitar. It has been good Graney all the same. There are no encores. The order of service is tight.

It’s time for Saint Nick. And where else but Thebarton Theatre on an Adelaide Sunday evening would you look for the laying on of tongues, for the snake-handling pentecost of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. This is the Night of the Hunter, rock and roll Apochrypha. This, as the Ass said to the Angel, is Revelation. The backcloth announces the band’s name- in blotchy blown-up type. I’m told that this favoured graphic of the underground press is currently available as a computer font. Smudgy Remington is now known as American Typewriter.

Through the reds and blues of the dim stage the band take their places. Thomas Wydler in back on the drums, Martyn Casey on bass, Conway Savage ready at the keyboard to transmit through hair and fingertips. Group linchpin, Mick Harvey, on guitar and synth, surveys the crowd from the OP side while guest Seed Jim Sclavunos gets ready to do some Roland Wolf.

Through the metallic, rippling keyboard chords- reminiscent of Barry Reynolds’ arrangements for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English- comes Nick Cave, a stovepipe Rimbaud in a stovepipe suit. Cave swings his hank of dark hair. A lot has happened since we were last in Adelaide, he gruffly observes while the crowd goes palpable at the sheer idea of seeing the living ledge. A guy near me, stripped to the waist, is about to give himself an aneurysm bellowing his approval. One lung has punctured and the other one is flickering. His thorax and voice box unequal to the level of homage he has in mind, he switches from bellowing to a tinnitus-inducing whistle.

We are all enveloped- the old, the young, the halt, the lame, the lupine whistlers. Between the slicing piano and the hypnotic synth chords, between the essence and the descent comes - “I found her on a night of fire and noise/ wild bells rang in a wild sky…” The portentous opening lines of what may yet be Cave’s greatest song- Do You Love Me. Like the rest of Let Love In, Nick Cave’s current album, it is galvanising proof that the singer is, to coin a phrase, at the height of his powers. He is certainly at the height of something- his audacity, his mythology as a post-punk, post-Berlin cult fave, his triumph over chemistry. Here is the man who survived his own birthday party.

It is hardly new to say that Nick Cave is a confluence of the Romantic Gothic. But it is worth noting yet again how well he does it. His imagery is derived from the Old Testament and the mad bits from Blake. The devotion to dark ladies is Petrarchan, with all the gallantry of Nosferatu. We have heard these hoarse, erotically languid vocals before. Leonard Cohen’s S-and-M Sisters of Mercy for one, and James James Morrison Morrison- before The End said it all so prematurely. But neither Cohen nor the Doors at their overblown, legendary best could work a crowd with Cave’s atavism. Like Flannery O’Connor’s preacher from the Church with no Christ, Nick Cave has wise blood.

The Bad Seeds need no time to get bedded in. From the opening salvos they are in full cry, creating the hurricane of sound needed for the still centre of Cave’s demonic intimacies- “Do you love me, do you love me, do you love me ?” And then, insinuating the unspeakable - “Do you love me- LIKE I LOVE YOU…” The playlist is well-rehearsed with no frigging around between numbers. There’s the quirkily Appalachian-sounding, Papa Won’t Leave You Henry, then the shunting rhythm and sudden eruptions of Red Right Hand. And, from the classic repertoire, The Good Son. One more man is … gone. Certainly, next to me, Whistler is near dementia with adulation. Fingers sprouting from his mouth he is surely summoning every dog from here to Semaphore. Asked by the now hearing-challenged around him if all this is entirely necessary, he explains that he wants to hear himself on the live recording. Now who will be the witness/When the fog’s too thick to see ?

Let Love In is well represented- the flesh tearing cadences of Loverman and, the title track itself, Cave’s croony baritone somewhere between Johnny Cash and Graham Parker. Then the slow march chords of The Ship Song have the audience spellbound as Cave offers rest to the weary and the Bad Seeds crank up every available keyboard. Chorus vocals come from Mick Harvey, Sclavunos and Blixa Bargeld, former engine of the German avant garde band Einsturzende Neubauten. But any state of grace is temporary. City of Refuge and Jack the Ripper are taken to new intensities, the crowd to perilous levels of arousal.

And then lamentation. Go son , go down to the water. This is a weeping song, a song in which to weep. Again the drums and voices of the Bad Seeds create mass hypnosis. The solemnity of the song verges on the parodic. A flake like Jim Morrison couldn’t have carried this one. Nick Cave knows the drama of the liturgy, the pathos of repetition. Skinny gremlin that he is, he drapes his arm around the melancholy statue of Blixa Bargeld, pale valkyrie, punk child of Schiller.

Jangling Jack gets the treatment but despite its catchy hook it is rather B grade stuff. Unlike The Mercy Seat. The band play in such alchemic unison they are like a great steel drum. The ringing hammers of the younger Blixa are reintegrated into a rock sound of ego-melting proportions. The Periodic Table of Elements is acquiring a new entry.

The sinuous ironies and cowboy strains of Nobody’s Baby Now serve as first encore leaving us unguarded against the finale. From Her to Eternity. A six minute blitzkrieg, shades of David Byrne but with many more ergs. Atop Casey’s pulsing bass and Wydler’s kettledrum, Cave croaks his circling lyrics while Blixa punctuates with shrieks, Conway Savage chops at the keyboard and various guitars angle-grind into perfect chaos.

After seventy one minutes Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds leave the stage and don’t return. They play with such precision and intelligence you wonder what it would be like if they ambled a bit, Nick doing some talking, reading some poems - that kind of thing. There is something arm’s length about this, American Typewriter, over-calibrated. Although not for the Whistler, who is, as far as I can tell, now nearly unconscious, his eyeballs have rolled back, his whistle fingers limp at his sides. He’s either just been exorcised or he needs one. As for me, seventy-one minutes is just fine. I feel like my brains have been arc-welded. Any more and things could get Faustian.

“Wise Blood” The Adelaide Review, No.135, January 1995.

A Life of Bryan

Published: 1995-04-01

Bryan Ferry Paramount Theatre Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

When they first appeared Roxy Music represented an outbreak of style. Even their name was confidently generic. Amidst the singing cowboys of California and the remnants of psychedelia had come a definite change of paradigm. Roxy Music, with their quiffs, their leopard skins, their gilded platforms and their beguiling, shuffling rhythms promised to deliver us from all those grievous angels and ladies of the canyon, the singer songwriters and pedal steel guitars. All that excess , shall we say, of sincerity.

There were a few portents- David Bowie’s Hunky Dory and the brilliant Kinks- but when the first Roxy Album appeared in 1972 it was like a new species. Not just the music - Brian Eno’s synths, Andy Mackay’s blaring reeds, Phil Manzanera’s fluid guitar- but the whole schmiel. The packaging, those cover concepts from Bryan Ferry and Nicholas deVille. The Roxy pinup women -in pink satins for the first album, in Mapplethorpe leather for the second. These fetishised sirens defied the pragmatic feminism of the seventies, but like all aspects of Roxy Sensibility they were subverted by their own parody. Their poppy poutings, like Ferry’s matinee idol affectations, were a complicated put-on- half in love with easeful fashion but at the same time highlighting its vacuous artificiality.

Ferry’s career sashayed through to the early Eighties with an impressive run of albums- the Roxys, brilliant with Siren and Avalon, the solo ventures in an upward spiral from the wonky cover versions on These Foolish Things to the consummate assurance of In Your Mind. There was more to come but the signatures began to blur. With Eno long gone and Mackay and Manzanera gradually dropped from the batting, Ferry worked with pickup bands -top guns from the session music aristocracy to be sure- but his early flair was yielding to a surfeit of postproduction.

Returning to Australian stages after more than a decade Bryan Ferry has some large cultural claims to make and, although modest in number, the Adelaide crowd showed the kind of enthusiasm this city has demonstrated for Roxy Music from the Beginning. But even though he has anticipated virtually every nuance of retro-chic from the windswept aviator look to the damply Wildean disdain ubiquitous in current English art rock, on the stage of the Paramount Theatre, the half size version of the Entertainment Centre, Ferry looks like a man more overtaken by history than in command of it.

It is scarcely a secret that he has been in a career doldrum- with delays and disappointing sales for his Mamouna album he released the covers album, Taxi, as a stopgap. He has also referred recently to difficulties in his private life. But, all the same, it comes as a surprise to see him putting together such a diffident and indistinct retrospective.

Opening with great promise with I Put A Spell on You , lead track from the Taxi album, Ferry and his six piece band get into groove. Following keyboard player Guy Fletcher’s fanfare and a serve of guitar on full sustain the rhythm section kicks in with unwavering precision. Then, into the Arabian-style tent with which the stage is framed, into the dense red and blue lighting and the usual wads of smoke, making one of his slow and sinuous entrances, it’s Bryan. He’s still got most of his dash- hair tossed to one side like a bodgie Errol Flynn. Dressed in careful style- leather trousers and bum freezer jacket- but no longer a decade ahead, he sings I Put A Spell on You and puts the first twenty rows into certain hypnosis.

Further back and on the side in this unlovely venue, the effect is less convincing. Despite an excellent sound mix for the mostly-unplugged support set from Wendy Matthews, the pesky acoustics of the Entertainment Centre are again in evidence. The bottom end is booming and the trademark Ferry crooning is getting buried. It is a setback but we persevere. The order of performance consists of alternating hymns ancient and modern. Slave to Love from Roxy, Your Painted Smile from the new album, Out of the Blue, then Mamouna. A cluster of classics follow - Casanova, Virginia Plain and Jealous Guy. Tossed off without introduction they seem at arm’s length. By now it is also apparent that the band is a veritable engine of funk but that is all we are getting. When Ferry sings Carrickfergus to solo piano accompaniment the variation is startling and refreshing.

The band takes charge with extended solos on The Thirty Nine Steps, the stand-out track from Mamouna. Melvin Davis virtuosic on bass, metronome beat from drummer Alvino Bennett, chunky guitar rhythms from David Williams and searing leads from Robin Trower, guitar whizz with Procul Harum, latter-day collaborator with Jack Bruce and now, co-producer with Ferry. They are a great band but I can’t understand Ferry touring without a sax player and for arranging the songs with so little concern for their complexity.

We know what we’ve been missing when, with minimal accompaniment, Ferry dreamily enunciates the opening lines of In every Dream Home a Heartache. The panegyric to an inflatable sex-aid is still chillingly sardonic. Extruding his meanings to twanging point Ferry’s performance is startling- Inflatable doll, lover ungrateful/ I blew up your body but- you blew my mind. On cue comes Robin Trower’s wall of wahwah, the kind of eyeball-melting rock that Roxy used to such sparing good effect with Manzanera and Ferry continued so successfully with Chris Spedding on the solo albums.

Closing the show with Love is the Drug and encores -Avalon, Let’s Stick Together and Do The Strand- Ferry kept to the Greatest Hits format of his Street Life compilation. We’d been given the Life of Bryan. The band played the chords and Ferry sang the lyrics. His performance of Dream Home had offered a glimpse of the stylist’s shading and wit, although, for most of the evening, it was in disappointingly short supply.

The Adelaide Review, No.137, April, 1995, pp.32-3.

Mo’ Better Blues

Published: 1995-05-01

John Hammond The Office

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

On the cover of his album, Nobody But You, John Hammond poses in a dark suit and tie with a National steel-bodied guitar across his knee. The photo, sepia tinted, has been retouched to look like the sort of studio portraits record companies used in the thirties to publicise the likes of Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Willie McTell and Robert Johnson. There is an irony in Hammond’s smile but he’s entitled all the same. After nearly thirty years of performing John Hammond Jr, scion of the Vanderbilt family and son of the legendary Columbia A and R man, is as dinkum as any blues player around.

The good news is that Hammond tours here regularly- every year for the past three or four- and his recent set at the Office is absolutely up to standard. Imposingly tall, with patrician good looks and a courtly manner, he is the same age as Mick Jagger but could pass as ten years younger. And when he hooks up his harmonica and starts his familar acoustic guitar runs, the crowd is his for the duration.

Opening with a cluster of vigorous standards including Move on Up the Line, punctuated with strong harp accompaniment, Hammond then takes up the National for a sensational reading of the Sleepy John Estes classic, Drop Down Mama. This is followed by a long, languorous version of Come On In My Kitchen, hand in glove with the Robert Johnson performance but still powerfully Hammond’s own. No-one currently can capture those majestic metallic sweeps and cross rhythms as well as Hammond. It is shiver down the spine stuff. And, as if to top things further, he turns to the sweet, lyrical melancholy of Blind Willie McTell’s Mama T’aint Long ’Fore Day- “Blues grabbed me at midnight/ Didn’t turn me loose till day…” John Hammond not only gets it right, here his choice of repertoire is unerring as well.

But not all blues lyrics are as fresh as a Delta morning. Ride Till I Die, a variation on all that chauffeur, jockey, getting-in-the-saddle sexual boasting, is less impressive, despite some dazzling fretwork and gutsy harmonica. John Hurt’s Spoonful is more to my taste,and, back to the National - Johnson’s Walking Blues and the Muddy Waters classic Sail On, cut back to the bone, the long sliding changes and bends invoking the aching piano rolls from Leroy Carr’s original.

Hammond sings selections fom his recent albums -Hello Stranger, Someday Baby (You Won’t Worry My Life No More) but it is the Mississippi motherlode which provides the showstoppers - Travelling Riverside Blues, “She got a mortgage on my body,now/ and a lien on my soul” and the Skip James hymn to occupational health and safety, Hard Time Killing Floor. We have heard this playlist from previous tours but it gets richer in the repetition. John Hammond knows this music inside out and none better than his six minute finale, a ringing version of Preaching Blues. A Johnson composition originally, Hammond takes the Son House variant, with its eerie rhythms and high desolate vocals. He amplifies its impact with each repetition- his hands flying up and down the guitar neck, pulling the heavy steel strings back into tune even as he pounds them. It is exceptional virtuosity and a reminder that guitar blues is an art form that will outlast the century that produced it. We have the extraordinary recordings of Robert Johnson and his colleagues to thank for that. But for the chance to hear this living legacy the big apple goes to John Paul Hammond as well.

The Adelaide Review, May 1995.

Coming up at The Office this month - Deborah Conway on May 2 and,on the 26th, blues guitarist Dave Hole. Also, at Thebarton on May 27 Joe Jackson makes a welcome return and at Norwood Town Hall on May 30 , the Hilliard Ensemble, whose collaboration with Jan Garbarek on the hugely successful Officium album has brought them wide attention, will perform a range of vocal works spanning five centuries.

The Glory of Gershwin

Published: 1995-05-18

Larry Adler with Issy Van Randwyck

Musical Director- Kelvin Thomson

George Golla (Guitar) Craig Scott (bass)

David Jones (drums)

Festival Theatre, Adelaide.

Murray Bramwell

George Gershwin is quintessentially the American artist of the twentieth century. His music distilled the mood of his time,

first mainstreaming the bluenotes and syncopations of jazz into Tin Pan Alley then transmuting them into such Modernist classics as Rhapsody in Blue and his opera, Porgy and Bess. Gershwin’s music, like the Marx Brothers, Scott Fitzgerald or Dorothy Parker in the New Yorker, epitomises American cosmopolitanism- accessible, popular and irresistibly stylish. And, when he died, tragically of a brain tumour, George Gershwin hadn’t lived as long as John Lennon.

Larry Adler, on the other hand, has flourished splendidly into his ninth decade and currently he’s on a mission for George. It started with the compilation CD, The Glory of Gershwin, a gathering of performers which turned into a Who’s Humungous in popular music. Sting, with whom Adler had recently collaborated on his Summoner’s Tales album, put his hat in the ring- and Elton John, Lisa Stansfield, Cher, Jon Bon Jovi, Courtney Pine and others followed. George Martin produced and the record sold a heap. Mr Adler even won distinction in the Guinness Book of Records for the being the most senior citizen to record a number one album.

On tour with singer Issy Van Randwyck and a quartet led by Kelvin Thomson, Larry Adler not only confirms the glory of Gershwin but he gathers more than a little for himself. After a set from pianist Bernard Walz, the band takes the stage in darkness. First we hear the inimitable Hohner mouth organ, all fluency and shading. Then, Larry Adler, in fashionable black, enters from the wings, sits down at the piano, plays the signature chords with his left hand while in his right- from what a gangster once referred to as Adler’s tin sandwich- Gershwin’s sinuous melody is unleashed, and instantly recognisable. It’s Summertime and the living is easy.

Larry Adler’s celebration of Gershwin is a marvellous blend of music and memoir. His comments, intros and asides are as fascinating as they are droll. After all, he was there at the time. Friend of George and Ira, not to mention - although he makes sure he does- Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers, Frank Loesser, and more.

After Bernard Walz sets a more scholarly note with his opening selection- transcriptions of That Certain Feeling and Clap Your Hands, followed by a spirited rendering of Three Preludes- singer Issy Van Randwyck joins the band with The Man I Love, S’Wonderful and They Can’t Take That Away From Me. In good voice, if somewhat uncertain in her microphone technique, Miss Van Randwyck could probably ditch the pink boa and other flapperings, which not only constrict her movement but lend a kitsch aspect to the event. The freshness of the Glory of Gershwin recording project is in the directness of the readings, unencumbered by nostalgia or pastiche. Now on stage, everyone can take their cue from Larry. This is not a show which needs much colour and movement.

While Gershwin songs like I’ve Got a Crush on You represent the best of the seamless pop of their day it is the Porgy and Bess material which shines -

My Man’s Gone Now, It Ain’t Necessarily So, and, new for the tour, Adler’s superb exploration of Bess, You is My Woman Now. Seated in a chair, urbanely coaxing amazing sounds from an instrument no-one took seriously until he took it to the concerts halls of Europe, Larry Adler has still got plenty of of somethin’.

The second half strains with Issy Van Randwyck’s opening set- Vodka, American Folk Song and Treat Me Rough- and Adler’s return provides welcome focus. Somebody Loves Me works well, as does Van Randwyck’s track from the album, I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise. But it is Adler’s tranquil recollections of Gershwin and the almost elegaic recital of Rhapsody in Blue- with Bernard Walz at the piano- that is the highlight. To think that this man performed with George Gershwin himself more than half a century previously. It is like shaking hands with the man who shook hands with Napoleon.

“Rhapsody in blue notes” The Australian, May 18, 1995, p.13.

Joe Cocker

Published: 1995-09-13

Festival Theatre

Adelaide

Murray Bramwell

It was once just a Lennon and McCartney throwaway. With a Little Help from My Friends, a Ringo song that George Formby might have written. Then, out of nowhere , came a version that transformed it into a soul gospel classic. Joe Cocker, gas fitter from Sheffield, had discovered some serious pipes of his own and was being hailed as the rival of Ray Charles and Otis Redding.

Celebrating twenty five years in the biz and embarking on his tenth tour of Australia, Joe Cocker has never been in better fettle and fans will be delighted. His current album, Have a Little Faith, is his strongest since he became a civilised man. After the rip-offs and chaos and the patchy albums with song selections which seemed to have landed by parachute, Joe Cocker is a leading performer in the adult-oriented charts. Astute management and top production values have positioned him, as they say. He is major product. The mad dog has come in from the noonday sun.

On a circumnavigating twenty six gig tour Cocker and his seven member touring band have put together a show as assured and smartly-produced as the album. In a spray of burgundy varilights-or should that be grapella ?- Joe opens with Let The Healing Begin. Choppy drum rhythms, gliding keyboards garnished with elegant guitar Knopflerisms. It could be Fleetwood Mac. Except, at the centre of the careful choreography, the superb sound rig and the high-tech magenta and baize green lighting is Joe Cocker, survivor, in classic pose - arms splayed back, chest pushed forward like a bullfinch, his grizzled features scrunched in concentration as he sings his songs of experience.

The themes are all about making it through. A little faith, simple things, shelter from the storm- with, of course, a little help… The music combines the balm of gospel with the grit of rhythm and blues and the voltage of rock and roll. We, he reassures us, can stand a little rain.

Without comment or introduction, Cocker powers through the classic repertoire- Feeling Alright, and a colossal version of Hitchcock Railroad, Ken Strange thundering on piano and the back-up vocals from Stacy Campbell and Maxine Green reaching up where Joe’s used to belong. John Hiatt’s Have a Little Faith is spacious and affecting, Cocker’s newest greatest hit. Other signatures get an airing- Up Where We Belong, the Grammy one, and Keep Your Hat On, belted out like Randy Newman had never heard of irony.

Anchored by the heavily-miked thump from drummer Jack Bruno, Warren McRae’s steadying bass line, Ken Strange as the ghost of Leon, Steven Grove doubling on keyboards and yakkety-sax, and Paul Warren on skitey hot-lick guitars, the musicians provide a frame of showband virtuosity. Too Cool is their chance to open out, while Joe changes his shirt and lights come down for the piano and bass version of You Are So Beautiful. The phrasing is there but Cocker, ever grainy and expressive in the middle registers, poignantly strains over “to me”. The crowd goes wild - heard melodies are sweet but sometimes those unheard are sweeter.

“Mad Dog Survivor” The Australian, September 13, 1995, p.14.

Finding the Pulse

Published: 1995-11-01

The Blackeyed Susans Crown and Anchor

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

“You realise you are about to hear the best band in Melbourne.” I am lip-reading a friend’s emphatic prediction while G.T. Stringer wind up their set in the bonsai confines of the Crown and Anchor. Led by sax player Trevor Ramsay the band is sharp and accomplished. More evidence of the depth in the batting in Adelaide. A plug for their new CD and the crowd gives them a well-deserved hooray.

The Blackeyed Susans are providing the main course. It is their second appearance in Adelaide in a month. “We are doing a tour of Grenfell Street,” drawls singer Rob Snarski with leaden irony. The turnout at the Crown and Anchor is modest but well-primed to hear Melbourne’s best band. Tomorrow night many will be at the Producers for a second helping.

What began as a garage band for Triffids-on-their-days-off has now consolidated into a permanent fixture. Neither tropical flowers nor a Victorian melodrama, the beguilingly named Blackeyed Susans deliver dense, sardonic music, carefully crafted in the studio and full of bottle in its live incarnation. With Mouth to Mouth, their current (and enthusiastically received) album, the band has secured a line-up based around Snarski and songwriter Phil Kakulas with Kiernan Box on keyboards and Dan Luscombe on guitar. David McComb has left the fold but his songs and collaborations continue to strengthen the enterprise.

The Susans open with Glory Glory beginning as they mean to continue. The sound is tight and loud. Drummer David Folley (on loan from the Killjoys) plays the stuff as though he has written it, Kakulas puts in the no-nonsense bass while Kiernan Box creates a swirling Hammond sound matched -not, as on the album, with the smooth pedal sound of Graham Lee, but a thriftily incendiary Fender line from Dan Luscombe. Snarski’s plaintive baritone croons above the band …“Marie has left the building.” His voice is full of nuance. A hint of the Smiths maybe, or Everything But the Girl. Even a ghost from Graceland.

The band gets to business. As it Was , the strong opening track from Mouth to Mouth has Box and Luscombe in serious dialectic while Snarski bites lyrics on loan from the Old Testament- ‘As it was, so it shall be.’ The effect is rather like the thousand hammers of the Bad Seeds, a surging, chiming sound. Like Blonde on Blonde with steroids. Ocean of You, complete with flamenco rhythms from Snarski’s Maton, changes tempo but not the temperature. A Curse on You follows, Luscombe throttling his Fender while Kiernan Box throws the keyboard into overdrive. It all goes a halfturn closer to chaos with Please Don’t Stop Me, the guitar disintegrating into a feedback from Hades while Snarski mixes in his effortlessly versatile vocals.

The Susans’ current single, Mary Mac, a mordant study of a phone sex worker, gets a harsher reading in live performance. As does Sheets of Rain, bereft of the mandolin filigree of the studio version. The Mouth to Mouth material stands strongly in the band’s list.I Can’t Find Your Pulse, brilliant on disc, takes on even more life-threatening proportions as Snarski builds the guignol over a sinister bass and drumbeat. The Morricone effects on the album are traded for Luscombe’s death-rattle guitar while meagre piano chords mingle with Snarski’s well-judged theatrics. It is an excellent song, its angst dangling between metaphor and postmortem.

With no sign of flagging the band work the best of their last two albums- Let’s Live and She Breathes In from this year’s model. And, from All Souls Alive, Snarski wraps himself around Apartment No.9 and a satirically laced version of Leonard Cohen’s Memories. Closing the set with Dirty Water the Susans have given us a fine serve of their work. But encores are mandatory on such occasions and even Snarski seems keen to perform his own request- This One Eats Souls.. With only Kiernan Box on piano, Snarski’s expressive vocal insinuates itself into Kakulas and McComb’s creepy lyric. “This one goes to market/ This one went to bed with someone you know…You may lose your way in the night/But by the end it is perfectly clear that/This one eats souls.”

For a last encore Snarski demurs at Suspicious Minds but closes with a Presley song all the same- If I Can Dream. The Blackeyed Susans have again graced Adelaide with some of the most intelligent music around. If they are not the best band in Melbourne I’d like to know who is.

The Adelaide Review, No.145, November, 1995, p.30.

Ray Davies

Published: 1995-12-12

Her Majesty’s Adelaide

Murray Bramwell

Just when you thought nostalgia isn’t what it used to be- along comes Ray Davies. Except that this one-Kink show, which has been touring the known world since its acclaimed debut at the Edinburgh Festival, is much more than a greatest hits fest. Drawing from Davies’s recent “unauthorised autobiography”, X-Ray, the two hour show is an intelligent, wonderfully wry mix of music and memoir.

Raymond Douglas Davies is the exceptionally talented leader of an exceptional band. When the Kinks first released You Really Got Me, the blend of brother, Dave Davies’s gutsy guitar and Ray’s nasally-challenged vocals equalled instant hit. And defined mod style.

While much is made of the Beatles and Stones, it is the Kinks who are the godfathers of English pop, influencing everyone from contemporaries, like the Who and Small Faces, to Eighties groups like XTC and Madness. And now, more than thirty years after their foppish looks and sly social criticism made the Kinks so singular, they receive open homage from bands like Oasis and Damon Albarn’s London band, Blur.

Onstage, Davies is full of beans. Notoriously reclusive and ambivalent about his pop success, the current project has clearly energised him. The success of X-Ray is surely part of the reason. In a genre dominated by lumpy ghostwriting, Davies has written a highly imaginative exploration of memory and the curious relation between past and present. Framed as an interview in the 21st century the book precisely, sometimes harrowingly, recalls the experience of success at twenty, the rapacity of the music industry and the anxieties of talent.

Alternating between cut-down, semi-acoustic performances of the songs, accompanied by guitarist Peter Mathison, and readings from X-Ray, Davies gives a potted history of his life in art. Opening with Dedicated Follower of Fashion and Sunny Afternoon, his vocals are initially ricketty but he has the audience, some of them Muswell Hillbillies themselves, singing lyrics now permanently embedded in the DNA of most forty-fivesomethings.

Davies has written many great songs and familiar as they are, performed in his keening, expressive style, they are still fresh- Autumn Almanac, Tired of Waiting, Set Me Free and See My Friends. There are new songs as well- 20th Century Man, variation on his ubiquitous Village Green theme, and The London Song, a celebration of the villages of Hampstead, Highgate and Muswell Hill.

Some of the new songs are as much elaborations of the readings as discrete works. Americana (Big Fat Cowboy) for instance, garnished with some tasty electrics from Mathison, is an extended talking blues about the Kinks in the new world. But To the Bone and She Was Really Animal are A-grade Ray. As are, we are powerfully reminded, the inimitable Lola and the lambent Waterloo Sunset.

Selecting the gentler sections from his often ascerbic book, Davies closes with an account of a meeting with his father at Streatham Ice Rink where the Kinks had just performed their Number One Hit- You Really Got Me. And he sings Days. Thank you for the days. Make that -thank you for the Davies.

The Australian , December 12, 1995 . p.12

Making Gravy

Published: 1995-12-31

1996

Paul Kelly

with Paul Brady

Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly has played here four times this year and each time he’s been full of surprises. The January gig at Heaven brought a five piece line-up plus a set from the Blackeyed Susans. Then, fresh from the Womad train, he played a full house at Festival Theatre with fabled pedal steel player and national broadcaster, Lucky Oceans. The Norwood Town Hall show featured Renee Geyer, whose fortunes have lifted since Kelly wrote songs for, and produced, her recent albums. And, now back on tour and performing in the amiable setting of the Governor Hindmarsh, Kelly is sharing the bill with Irish singer/songwriter -and Bob Dylan’s “secret hero” -Paul Brady.

It is a happy association which began when they met in Boston this year. While others of his contemporaries, particularly recording associate Andy Irvine and Planxty alumni like Donal Lunny and Matt Molloy have been here many times on the Guinness express, this is Brady’s first visit. Way overdue, if you ask any of his many Australian admirers.

It was clear that many know Brady’s work as he settles into his opening number- Nobody Knows from the 1991 Trick or Treat album. A rather bookish fellow with a shock of sandy hair Brady casts a glowering look at the chatterers at the bar but soon settles into a likeable set of his own tunes accompanied by driving acoustic guitar and filigree electric piano.

Lakes of Pontchartrain is a lovely ballad, closest in mood to the melancholy traditional fare with which he first made his name. Deep in Your Heart, sung in his sweet Dublin tenor, is another notable. Then comes a song which has been very good to him, as they say in the lounges- Luck of the Draw, title track for Bonnie Raitt’s multi-platinum album. And, to conclude, The World is What You Make it from last year’s Spirits Colliding CD.

Home town crowds are getting ever more fervent for Paul Kelly. Standing up the back at the Governor Hindmarsh is like standing on the hill at the cricket. One guy has brought his marine band harp with him, to play along. What is this - karaoke harmonica night ? Despite some bemused looks nobody seems to mind the quadrophonic harmonica too much. Meanwhile Kelly works his recent repertoire. I Can’t Believe We Were Married segues into an extended organ solo from keyboard player Bruce Haymes. Shades of the Susans, and the baddest seed, Conway Savage. Funny that, because now Kelly sings one from the Nick Cave songbook- Nobody’s Baby Now. Measured, elegiac- it is a perfect baton change. I’ll Be Your Lover Now is a new song with back-up vocals from Haymes. It is familiar Kelly fare, well-constructed, catchy. The harmonica bloke picks it up fairly quickly.

Fortunately he keeps his peace while the nation’s foremost songwriter unveils his ballad about the nation’s foremost bushranger. Ned meet Paul. Haymes on accordion and Kelly opens out a complex new song, Our Sunshine. Good on you Mr K, someone mutters on the hill as Haymes moves into some weirdly discrepant accordion for Kelly’s re-reading of Everything’ s Turning to White. A slower than slow blues, darkness at noon, the affectless accordion underscoring the cruelty of the Carver theme.

Then a song for old men- Papa Doc, Mao, Joe Stalin, Kelly suggests- Before the Old Man Died, Haymes brilliant on piano. And with the first test a week away, Behind the Bowler’s Arm- Paul Kelly’s anthem for the Australian summer. The hill is swaying, as they are for Kelly’s ol’ browneyes version of Sinatra’s All the Way, complete with extended harmonica break. Mr Karaoke puts his harmonica away for this one. Instead he’s holding up his bic lighter in solo tribute. Careless and Wintercoat also receive crooning treatment, augmented by Haymes’ splendid chiming piano. And to close the set, two new songs: Melting , a song about ice cream and Kelly’s new single, also available on the Grace Brothers/ Myer Christmas album- a fine new song about families and regret, How to Make Gravy .

The encore is Reckless, the boys on the hill singing in beery unison. That Paul Kelly can sure stand a little Reyne. But the highlights are the duets with Paul Brady. Arthur McBride, the provo anthem Brady has refused to sing in recent times, resumes the playful rebellion that infused Brady’s first memorable recording of it, back in the late seventies with Andy Irvine. It is a fine reading, Kelly in good voice with Haymes on accordion and Brady’s keening Dublin accent shaping the narrative with sardonic pleasure. Then, to return the favour, another song for the times, the Kelly and Carmody classic, From Little Things Big Things Grow, with its jaunty optimism and melodic tralalas from an enthusiastic Brady, it brings a roar of recognition from the crowd -and a reminder that Paul Kelly is our poet true.

Commissioned by The Adelaide Review but not published.

Published: 1996-02-02

Joan Armatrading Festival Theatre Adelaide

Murray Bramwell

There are few singer/songwriters as singular as Joan Armatrading. Over seventeen albums she has not only put a patent on her lilting vocal, she has consistently explored themes where most other lyricists fear to tread. While she can write perky tunes with the best of them, it is her investigations into the telltale heart which have made her an audience favourite. She writes grown-up pop: about jealousy and betrayal, about women who love too much, about showing some emotion and putting some self-esteem back into me, myself, I.

Joan Armatrading’s songs charted the pulse of the women’s movement - Back to the Night and the subsequent self-titled album were drums that many marched to. Not that they were especially heavy on doctrine. Rather, in the ambiguity of gender and the focus on the complexities of relationship they subverted the stereotypes of romantic love. And she has continued to make raids on the inarticulate and inexpressible, as the excellent 1988 album, The Shouting Stage, attests.

Back touring in Australia for the first time since then, Armatrading is full of surprises. She has a cracking eight piece band -including a violinist and cellist- and her current album What’s Inside, her first for new label BMG, is full of riches. Opening with I Can Walk Under Ladders, the singer has the audience in her thrall from the first. Dressed in stylish basic black, with her spiky hair at shoulder length, Joan Armatrading is as self-possessed as ever. The band -led by Simon Baisley on guitar, Gary Spacey-Foote on tenor sax and Natalio Faingold on keyboards begin to construct a hard, jazzy sound which gains ever more assurance as the night progresses.

When Joan Armatrading takes up one of her battery of Fenders and Gibsons we are reminded that, even now, few women play electric guitar with such an air of forthright emancipation. The first section of the show is devoted to the classic works, performed without introduction. Ladders, Down to Zero, Let’s Go Dancing, Love and Affection.

Then for some unchained melody, Armatrading brings on cellist Laura Fairhurst and violinist Prabjote Osahn on to play an acoustic set from the new album. Opening with Merchant of Love, nicely garnished by Faingold’s piano, the blend of strings and voice is well-judged. Everyday Boy and the more upbeat, Back on the Road, follow. Shapes and Sizes, recorded on the album with the Kronos Quartet, has some splendid violin flourishes from Osahn while Fairhurst’s honeyed cello lines harmonise with Armatrading’s playful vocal.

Trouble, a gentle tribute to the singer’s mother, and In Your Eyes complete what Armatrading calls “the sitting down part”. On their feet for Drop the Pilot, the band goes into full cry in a hard funk re-reading of Kissin’ and A Huggin’. The baton passes from Baisley’s fluid guitar to Spacey-Foote’s spirited sax and Jeremy Meek’s solo on six-string bass. The ensemble playing is first class as the band swings into a fast, beaty version of Show Some Emotion. Closing the set with a rocking version of Me Myself I, Joan Armatrading shows that all three of her selves are sparking. For the encore, only the lambent strains of Willow could cap such a night. Joan Armatrading is stepping out again, and it’s great to see.

30/1/96

The Australian, February 2, 1996, p.8.

Artful Dodges

Published: 1996-03-01

Adelaide Festival

Living Yesterday Tomorrow

Malcolm McLaren

Her Majesty’s

The speaker for the evening takes the stage. Strolling towards the lectern in a baggy black suit and a peach coloured open-neck shirt, shuffling papers and lugging an attache case, he looks like a dotty art theory lecturer. This is Malcolm McLaren ? The Fagin of punk, Alfred Jarry of the Kings Road, bagman for the Sex Pistols ?

With his tousled Harpo curls, his languorous eyelids and drawling delivery he could be a toned-down Quentin Crisp, or some chum of Clive Bell’s here to inform us about the works of Stanley Spencer. Instead Malcolm McLaren, who turned fifty in January, has come to tell us he is the last romantic- choosing for theme: traditional sanctity and loveliness. Well almost. He is certainly more Wilde than angry these days and his meditations on life and work are now more inflected by aestheticism than by Alexander Trocchi’s sixties situationists

Not that any of this is a bad thing or at all uninteresting. McLaren has always been a very good talker-about-himself and as consultant to everyone from Steven Spielberg to the Polish government he is still an acute reader of the zeitgeist.

I don’t know how all this will go, he muses at the opening of the show- in Perth I talked until one in the morning. Yeah yeah, we think, a bit of Malcolm hyperbole. Apparently not. The McLaren disquisition runs for just on four hours- with slides, asides and whatever questions you have left. There is little visible artifice and a strong sense of the extempore, but an evening with Malcolm McLaren is rarely dull. It’s like have a very long cup of coffee with someone who, while greatly liking the sound of their own voice, is also worth the attention.

His narrative begins with childhood and an enmeshed relationship with Rose Isaacs, his wealthy Jewish grandmother. Dickensian analogies abound as, Fagin to his Oliver, she encourages the freckly child to behave with impish indifference to the requirements of school and society. The neurotic fix on his gran lasted until his early teens -according to McLaren he slept in her bed until he thirteen, fawning to her delusions and serving as her confidante. His mother he hardly knew, or so he says. His father he met for the first time a few years ago.

As he recounts his personal mythology it is Art School which opens him to the world- and one which gives him licence. This was the period when all of English pop was emerging from the art schools- Brian Jones and Keith, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, all the fine young cannibals. It was then that McLaren met his Yoko- designer Vivienne Westwood, who led him into the Chelsea scene of happenings and fashion.

Pointing his electronic slide changer towards the screen at arbitrary intervals, he narrates the metamorphosing history of 430 Kings Road, McLaren and Westwood’s shop turned gallery, turned crucible of style. 430 transmogrified from the Teddy Boy timewarp Let it Rock to become, in turn, Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, the notorious SEX shop, Seditionaries: Clothes for Heroes, World’s End and Nostagia of Mud.

Malcolm McLaren reminds us through this succession of concepts and boutique facades that for him music was merely an accessory to selling T-shirts. It is the haberdashery that fascinates him, son and grandson of London tailors, paramour of Westwood of Chelsea. Never mind the chord changes, feel the zips and safety pins.

In his revisionist history the Sex Pistols are little more than a footnote. Depicted as a slightly more rodenty version of the Bash Street Kids, the Pistols are good for a few oneliners- Steve Jones is the artful thief, John Lydon Rotten is despised for his Catholic repression, Glen Matlock is the wimp sent to Coventry and poor, pathetic Sid, is merely an artistic aside, exemplum of the Pistols’ parody of themselves. The nasty facts-Sid and Nancy and all that sad jazz- are overlooked, as is any reference to the lengthy litigation between Lydon and McLaren about who owned the rights to the name Rotten.

More upbeat are the descriptions of the Buffalo Gals fashion show (with matching hiphop hit single) and McLaren’s excursions into aural merchandising with Fans and Paris. Depending on your point of view, McLaren’s narrative is either a portrait of stupefying superficiality or he is the harbinger, like Warhol and Madonna, of true postmodern flux. He is probably both. He believes in beautiful things, he can explain his t-shirts down to the last inverted swastika (they are now in the V and A Museum in London). He is at his proudest describing the outfit that made Adam Ant an overnight sensation.

An evening with Malcolm McLaren is a strange and contrary thing. He is generous in his time and candour, he is self-serving in his selective memory. He is charming and undoubtedly smart and although given the chance to parachute out at eleven o’clock I happily stayed till the end. Mind you, running on till 12.30 in the morning, with plenty of wind still in his sails, you wondered whether Malcolm McLaren might become an overnight sensation all over again.

The Adelaide Review, No.150, March, 1996, p.27.

Simply Red

Published: 1996-04-01

Entertainment Centre Adelaide

The last time I saw Simply Red they were touring the second album Men and Women. Their mix of reggae, soul and Brit pop had, even with their debut Picture Book, made immediate impact. The band was on its way and they knew it. Singer Mick Hucknall set the pace; brash, cocksure and blessed with vocal gifts to rival Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. Like other UK stylists such as Eric Burdon, Joe Cocker, Paul Young and Boy George, Hucknall was to take the action back to the heartland on its own terms. The sound had come from the studios of Chess, Motown and Atlantic but the urgency came from England’s post-industrial north.

Twenty three million albums on, the band is synonymous with Hucknall. Spending time equally between Manchester, Paris and Milan, his Simply Red is now also Simply Rouge and Simply Rosa. Made-over for his New Flame and Stars incarnations, Hucknall has gone from doughboy to doge, his carroty curls smoothed into shoulder length cascades, his flowing robes a fantasia from Maxfield Parrish.

On a world tour with the new album, Life, Simply Red is absolutely in the pink. Mick Hucknall is looking relaxed and affable and a lot more real. Rather more the apple-cheeked Mancunian than the Milanese medici, he leads a seven piece band through a repertoire which has made them rulers of Europe.

Opening with It’s Only Love, Hucknall’s keening tenor dominates as he soars effortlessly above the band driven by bassist Steve Lewinson and Velroy Bailey on drums and supported by back-up singers Dee Johnson and Sarah Brown. Life predominates in the early part of the set. So Many People, So Beautiful and Never Never Love with pivotal work from the old firm -original member, Fritz McIntyre’s ubiquitous keyboards and longtime associate Ian Kirkham’s well-judged sax.

Duetting with Heitor T.P. on acoustic guitar, Hucknall unleashes his pop masterpiece, Holding Back the Years, fresher than ever in its pared down lyricism. The older material is still distinctly strong -Red Box and The Right Thing get the band firing, although even such ho-hum songs as Thrill Me and Hillside Avenue are given room to expand, displaying both Hucknall’s ranging vocals and the unity of the band.

The crowd is swooning with Stars - punctuated by a firmament of pinlights on the backcloth-and brought to the boil with Money’s Too Tight. Hucknall doesn’t miss a beat, working the crowd to the final encore with genial ease. Signing off with Fairground, Simply Red is in full furl. Not as dangerous as their early promise, they are still indisputably a great pop unit. And if Mick Hucknall ever decides to shoot for more, they could really catch a fire.

The Australian, April 15, 1996.

Adelaide Music

Published: 1996-04-16

Simply Red

Entertainment Centre

Adelaide, 15 April, 1996

Murray Bramwell

The last time I saw Simply Red they were touring the second album Men and Women. Their mix of reggae, soul and Brit pop had, even with their debut Picture Book, made immediate impact. The band was on its way and they knew it. Singer Mick Hucknall set the pace; brash, cocksure and blessed with vocal gifts to rival Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. Like other UK stylists such as Eric Burdon, Joe Cocker, Paul Young and Boy George, Hucknall was to take the action back to the heartland on its own terms. The sound had come from the studios of Chess, Motown and Atlantic but the urgency came from England’s post-industrial north.

Twenty three million albums on, the band is synonymous with Hucknall. Spending time equally between Manchester, Paris and Milan, his Simply Red is now also Simply Rouge and Simply Rosa. Made-over for his New Flame and Stars incarnations, Hucknall has gone from doughboy to doge, his carroty curls smoothed into shoulder length cascades, his flowing robes a fantasia from Maxfield Parrish.

On a world tour with the new album, Life, Simply Red is absolutely in the pink. Mick Hucknall is looking relaxed and affable and a lot more real. Rather more the apple-cheeked Mancunian than the Milanese medici, he leads a seven piece band through a repertoire which has made them rulers of Europe.

Opening with It’s Only Love, Hucknall’s keening tenor dominates as he soars effortlessly above the band driven by bassist Steve Lewinson and Velroy Bailey on drums and supported by back-up singers Dee Johnson and Sarah Brown. Life predominates in the early part of the set. So Many People, So Beautiful and Never Never Love with pivotal work from the old firm -original member, Fritz McIntyre’s ubiquitous keyboards and longtime associate Ian Kirkham’s well-judged sax.

Duetting with Heitor T.P. on acoustic guitar, Hucknall unleashes his pop masterpiece, Holding Back the Years, fresher than ever in its pared down lyricism. The older material is still distinctly strong -Red Box and The Right Thing get the band firing, although even such ho-hum songs as Thrill Me and Hillside Avenue are given room to expand, displaying both Hucknall’s ranging vocals and the unity of the band.

The crowd is swooning with Stars - punctuated by a firmament of pinlights on the backcloth-and brought to the boil with Money’sToo Tight. Hucknall doesn’t miss a beat, working the crowd to the final encore with genial ease. Signing off with Fairground, Simply Red is in full furl. Not as dangerous as their early promise, they are still indisputably a great pop unit. And if Mick Hucknall ever decides to shoot for more, they could really catch a fire.

“Vintage Red holds back the years” The Australian, April 16, 1996. p.15

Unplugged

Published: 1996-05-01

Fairport Convention

Royalty Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Fairport Convention are a bit like the family axe. It has had so many replacement heads and handles that it is hard to know whether you recognise it after all these years. Twenty six albums later-more than forty if you add up all the solo ventures- Fairport continues to lay claims to being at the still centre of the turning world of British traditional music. They run their own record label, Woodworm, based in the Oxfordshire town of Banbury and convene annually at the Cropredy Festival, now established as the largest folkie kneesup in Europe.

Twenty-nine years ago Fairport single-handedly changed traditional music. They pumped its veins full of electricity and took it on such trippy excursions as A Sailor’s Life and Sloth. Now, in the current mode, they are offering their acoustic option. Sans ace drummer Dave Mattacks, the touring band consists of Simon Nicol on guitar, Maartin Allcock on guitar and bouzar, fiddle player Ric Sanders and Dave Pegg on bass.

Shambling onstage at the Royalty Theatre the band potter with their chairs and their drinks and begin to chat. There is extended introduction and much boisterous bonhomie until eventually they set to with Slip Jigs and Reels from The Jewel in the Crown, last year’s studio album. It is good ersatz folk -resonant harmonies from Nicol and Allcock, plaintive cadences from Sanders and vigorous thrumming from Pegg’s five string electric. The band is unsettled with the lack of foldback and continue to fuss about on stage while Ric Sanders introduces the Stephane Grappelli-ish instrumental, Woodworm Swing.

The Hot Club of Banbury acquit themselves stylishly well but the old Jangling Rhinoheart sound- as Sanders, with laboured wit, refers to it - has been pretty much plundered already. Jim Kweskin did it thirty years ago, Dan Hicks, twenty. It is a reminder that like their rivals Steeleye Span, Fairport have a repertoire problem almost as soon as they move out of the Childe ballad archive. Richard Thompson built his songwriting gifts on the folk of ages, as did the gifted Sandy Denny, but no-one else in the Fairport lineage has really been able to manage it.

Paul Metsers’ There Once Was Love is a find however, a contemporary ballad which gives the band a chance to focus. Nicol’s vocals are a little hoary but Sanders and Allcock are splendidly fluent. The rest of the first half is devoted to a slow moving instrumental Portmeirion, followed by an unimaginative exhumation of the McGarrigle sisters’ standby, Foolish You and more jigs and reels with Mock Morris Ninety.

Perhaps it is the venue; the Royalty is a daunting bit of old proscenium empire. Perhaps it is the fact that the audience, though appreciative, is modest in number and the band is looking for a bit more action. Maybe it is that we are all as sober as judges at a temperance meeting. Whatever it is, despite the talents of the band, this gig is foundering.

Determined to do our bit for the cause we went round the corner to King William Street to find an inspirational ale. On return we find that interval has been extended while the band do more sound checks. They then amble into the second half with a bundle of jigs and more banter. It is at this point that I have that sinking feeling that Fairport are not going to get this together.

Simon Nicol introduces Crazy Man Michael, the Thompson /Swarbrick original from the band’s 1969 masterwork, Liege and Lief. It is a good chance to ground the proceedings and is well-suited to the acoustic setting. But despite the beauty of their sound the band is determined to undermine its own success. When Allcock is taking a solo, Sanders is pulling focus with silly faces, Dave Pegg stands upstage chatting to Nicol and overall the band gives an excellent facsimile of a group who could perform their repertoire in their sleep.

The stage chat is now wearing thin. All that false cheer about pie floaters and whatever- while the band takes forever to get to the next item. The audience is getting uncomfortable with the sub-Python wit, do these guys think they are the Goodies or what ? And when we don’t pick up the ball, the zany grins tighten and like all bad comics they start to turn on the crowd. Is there anybody out there ? asks Nicol tetchily, is this the soundcheck ?

The tunes keep trickling. A Surfeit of Lampreys, Maartin Allcock’s nimble tune taken like a baton from Sanders to Pegg and back to Allcock again. All momentum is lost though as they dawdle between numbers, introducing the truly execrable faux ballad, The Naked Highwayman. James Taylor’s The Frozen Man atones with its delicate tune and quirky cryonic theme and Allcock’s tune Lalla Rookh is another highpoint- if lost again in a tedious catalogue of banjo jokes and blue humour. The Hiring Fair, a Ralph McTell original, stretches lugubriously, pleasingly decorated but essentially prosaic.

It is Liege and Lief which again anchors things as the band concludes with an extended version of Matty Groves, the Appalachian variant of Little Musgrave. The heavy strumming from Nicol and Allcock’s intricate fretwork join forces with the soaring melody from Sanders and Pegg’s resolute bass rekindling the dark energy of one of Fairport’s all-time signature tunes.

The band are sounding fresh yet it also conjures up the splendid Fairport legacy -Sandy Denny’s wraith like vocal and Thompson’s saturnine guitar. Maybe it is finally happening. Fairport sounding like Fairport, giving the work some space, letting the intrinsic drama of balladry take effect. In short, taking themselves a bit seriously. But no, Sanders is still pulling nerdy faces and Nicol is doing the Lord Arnold dialogue in different voices. This powerfully grim ballad doesn’t need embellishment. And it certainly doesn’t need the Four Stooges.

Then, as they round the bend into the tandem jig Dirty Linen ,with Sanders in full flight, Dave Pegg, who has been capering about all night, apparently good-humouredly, suddenly lunges to the microphone and bellows to the sound desk - Turn up the violin, you f-ing c’s. Chucks his bass clattering on to the nearest chair and exits stage right. Is this happening ? Did he just say that ? Is the real show suddenly going to happen in the next four seconds ? Did this merry bunch of happy-go-lucky Banbury boys just call the sound engineer a f-ing c. ? The bloke from the local Fairport fan club comes on stage apparently unaware that the sound engineer is a f-ing c. And we give the band an extra big round - if partly to see what will happen next. Will Dave Pegg come back and call us us all f-ing c.’s. For being so …so, reticent.

The band comes back and plays Meet on the Ledge as if no-one is, or has ever been, a f-ing c. But the sound person is still looking ashen and the promoter has headed back stage, presumably to have to a word in Mr Dave’s peg-like ear. The man from the fan club comes back onstage. That’s it he says, ethereally. He confides knowledgeably that the band never play after Ledge. It’s their signing-off tune. That -and the old f-ing c. battlecry ? - we wonder.

Promoter Lee Miller did a good job bringing Fairport to town and she deserved better. The sound was fine and if there were foldback problems they didn’t notably alter the performance. What did affect the show was the fact that Fairport played sixteen songs in the time it would take to perform two dozen. Never mind Meet on the Ledge. They took us to the brink then frittered their talents and wasted our time. There’s an excellent live album just out -Old New Borrowed Blue. It’s worth a listen because it’s the show we should have had. They’ve cut out all the stage prattle. And no-one gets to be a f-ing c.

The Adealide review, No.152, May, 1996, pp.22-3.

Marshall Arts

Published: 1996-05-01

Link Wray

The Tivoli

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It was Plato who said that when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city crumble. He was talking about Link Wray, of course, and the D chord which in 1958 changed everything. The record was Rumble and with its majestic sweeps and menacing repetitions it secured the electric guitar as the twentieth century’s preferred instrument of hedonism.

With brothers Doug and Vern, Lincoln Wray has played every kind of music since the late Forties -rockabilly, white gospel and then rock and roll. But Rumble was a change in the mode. As a teenager Bob Dylan went to hear Link play in Duluth, Paul McCartney played the hit single incessantly and Pete Townshend, in a recent program note for the re-release of the Wray oeuvre, credits ol’ Link as the being the reason he took up rock guitar.

Onstage at the Tivoli, Link Wray proves that he is still one of a kind. He is etched in rock history but he’s back on the road. His music is on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and the elite continue to sing his praises but the word is that Wray has been having some hard times lately. It is the sad old broken-record story of copyrights and wrongs, the close encounter with venial practice which made twisted wrecks of everyone from Chuck Berry to Ray Davies. But to his credit, it has not touched the impeturbable spirit of Link Wray.

Dressed in black leather biker’s jacket with slimline shades and his hair pulled back in a long black ponytail, Link Wray is the essence of Cool. The Tiv is shaking with the volume as the Fender bender hits the big notes for his fifties hit Rawhide. The band are already in full throttle. Drummer Rob Louwers’ galloping beat, bass lines from Eric Geevens which, like his moppy haircut, come via the Ramones -and Link, showering high notes like sparks and then sliding into those slow lascivious chords that would have any self-respecting Southern Baptist reaching for the lynch rope.

Fed through a Marshall amp, Wray’s battered red guitar encompasses every idiom from rock and roll through surf music to thrash. The shade of Jimi Hendrix hovers, you hear the Stones and the Who, but only to remind us that Link was there first. Turning to crooning rockabilly with I Can’t Help It, Wray is suddenly back at Sam Phillips’ Sun label where Elvis Presley first made records.

There is a simultaneity about it all- classic rockabilly with all the hard rock trimmings. All effortlessly performed with Wray’s slow laconic smile. He grins encouragement to his hard-working sidesmen, young enough to be his grandsons. He wants the sound up. I’m from the old school, he drawls, I want it loud in the house. Any louder and our faces will melt. And the air traffic controller at the sound desk seems disinclined to shred his speakers as early as the second number. Link just smiles his elderly smile.

Link breaks a string. His rule: no stops for repairs and there’s no spare instrument. He’s strictly a one Fender guy. So, like a Formula One mechanic, on comes the roadie to change the string while Link keeps grinding his way through the second chorus. It’s not easy changing a guitar string while someone is still pounding sound out of the other five. And adding to the absurdity, Link’s lyrics are particularly hokey and sentimental just when this hulking roadie is kneeling at his side. It’s a serenade - the very idea has him in stitches.

The early material dominates. The cocky rhythms of Run Chicken Run, the bombast of Jack the Ripper. Bruce Springsteen’s Fire is the first number to post-date the death of JFK and even then it is followed by by an all stops version of Mystery Train, a Presley classic like That’s All Right Mama, the Arthur Crudup standard, which comes next. Wray plays some lacerating riffs then calls on Ian Nancarrow from support band, The Others. Nancarrow, who at the earlier soundcheck brought in his original 1958 single of Rumble for signing, plays a swooping harp solo while the Great Man beams beneficently.

As he swaggers through Jailhouse Rock, we are reminded that Link Wray is the genuine article. A tiny fellow with pipe cleaner legs he makes the moves from a bygone era. But the sound, especially with his hip young rhythm section, is perpetually, electrically current. He closes the set with Rumble. Of course. A blistering six minutes of his greatest hit -ricocheting in all directions but held steady by the mighty architecture of the D chord. Link grins to the audience, shakes hands with the front row and lowers his guitar down for the punters to have a strum- as if anyone could put the notes together and work the tremolo like Link Wray.

For encore he plays another favourite. Dinnah dinnah dinnah dinnah- Bat-maan. Sixties TV kitsch with Eric Geevens going out on a limb with the Hohner bass and drummer Louwers adding threshing cross rythms to the main beat. The encore threatens to become a second set as Born to Be Wild, the old Steppenwolf hit, gets Link heading on the highway for more and better. Hoarsely belting out the words, Link Wray is an old rocker with one good lung who, at sixty seven, is old enough to know better. But he is also a man of great presence and dignity. He played to a few hundred at the Tiv as if we were a first night at Madison Square Garden. Even when we get our hearing back we won’t forget the night that Link Wray got the motor running.

Coming up in May

May 1 Max Gillies Live at Club Republic at Her Majesty’s

until May 11.

State Theatre’s production of David Williamson’s prescient footydrama The Club opens at the Playhouse on May 4 . Rosalba Clemente directs. Featuring Don Barker, David Field and Syd Brisbane.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Emmylou Harris plays at Thebarton Theatre, May 4. Have a listen to her new CD Wrecking Ball

Alexei Sayle with good friend Bobby Chariot do their stuff 17 May at Thebarton.

Also on the 17th, The Guinness Celebration of Irish Music returns to Her Majesty’s at 7.30. Featuring, among others, Frances Black, Four Men and a Dog and the wonderful Arty McGlynn and Nollaig Casey.

Jethro Tull perform at the Entertainment Centre (or another venue to be announced) on the amended date of May 20. Ian Anderson will play all the heavy horses and the new album, Roots to Branches.

May 21 One Man Guy, Loudon Wainwright returns to the Office with more songs, observations and bulletins from the Far Side.

The Adelaide Review, No.152, May, 1996, pp.22-3.

Clannad

Published: 1996-10-03

Festival Centre

Adelaide, October 1, 1996.

Murray Bramwell

As their name suggests, Clannad is a family affair. The Brennans and Duggans. Or more precisely - Maire Ni Bhraonain, her brother Ciaran and twin uncles, Noel and Pol O Dugain, who form the core of a band which has variously included a songwriting brother, Pol, and a singing sister, Eithne, now known to more than thirty million record buyers as Enya.

For twenty five years and over twenty seven albums this band from County Donegal has forged a honeyed, Celtic folk pop sound which has infused contemporary music. Keepers of the traditional flame, they have blended keyboards with whistles, harps with fenders and whispery harmonies with each other. Clannad, like the Chieftains and Planxty, are the springboard for such re-formed Irish patriots as Van Morrison and Sinead O’Connor as well as, of course, the Shepherds Moon etherealisations of Enya.

There are other debts to Clannad. Most importantly they have made Gaelic available to popular Irish culture as well as a wider international audience. When theTheme from Harry’s Game made the British top five it was a significant political achievement by other means.

On this world tour Clannad is currently a ten piece band showcasing their new album Lore, lushly produced by Hugh Padgham and featuring songs from Ciaran and Maire. Their record company has also released a silver jubilee triple pack of signature work from the eighties including albums Sirius and Magical Ring.

It is the druidic chanting of Newgrange which opens the show. The musicians are sprayed by buttery spotlights and backlit by projections of rune-ish images. Maire’s lilting lead vocal is buoyed by the Duggans’ acoustic guitars and the sound is enveloped by synths and drumbeats. The sibilant siblings chant hypnotically and Clannad asserts its trademark. But its familiarity is also its limitation. The studied atmospherics, once so fresh, now verge on self-parody.

The sprightly mandolins on the traditional tune translated by Ciaran as The Apple are more the ticket, as is the Scottish air Alasdair MacColla given some likeable thump from drummer Paul

Moran and electric guitarist Ian Melrose. New works- Broken Pieces by Maire, A Bridge from Ciaran and Noel Duggan’s elegy to the Cherokee, Trail of Tears - are ably performed but undistinguished. Second Nature is stronger pop, but the audience lifts when whistle and uilleann pipes player, Vinnie Kilduff, steps forward for two splendidly simple solos with Ciaran on guitar and vocalist,Bridin Brennan on bodhran.

Maire’s unaccompanied Donegal air, Gaothbearra is winsome, as is her surprisingly hesitant rendering of Yeats’s Down in the Salley Gardens. The band regroups for the hit tune In a Lifetime, Seanchas, the title track from Lore, and a refreshingly rollicking ramble with Dulaman.

The medley from Legend - Robin the Hooded Man, Herne and Darkmere - despite Maire’s lovely harp and filigree sax work from former Bryan Ferryman, Mel Collins- veers into kitsch, with bombastic synth fills from Ian Drinkwater and a generally tinkly preciosity. Then there’s a perfect replica Harry’s Game to draw proceedings to a close.

Clannad encore with a boppy drinking song, Not Yet Daytime and the musicians have a last lash to remind us of the band’s hidden depths. But this is Clannad for the faithful, all polished surfaces and no surprises. Perhaps they will stretch out as the tour progresses, but having so singularly lifted the standing of Celtic music, Clannad now sound uncomfortably like an Irish elevator.

The Australian, October 3, 1996.

Alexander’s Ragtime Band

Published: 1996-11-01

Balanescu Quartet Mountadam Vineyard

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Since the release of their 1992 recording Possessed, the Balanescu Quartet has held a variety of music enthusiasts in their thrall. For some their spirited, rhythmic playing conjured associations with folk and Romany styles. The miked-up sound appealed to the rock and jazz fusion crowd. And their witty re-drafts of composers such as David Byrne and the German proto-techno band, Kraftwerk, made fashion victims of us all.

Attending the Barossa Music Festival to perform works showcasing the eponymous Possessed, with Meryl Tankard’s ADT, the quartet led by Alexander Balanescu and co-composer Clare Connors also perform their own recital on the Monday holiday of the festival’s first weekend.

Originally, the music for ADT was to have been performed by the New Leipzig Quartet but Balanescu vetoed the idea preferring to perform his compositions himself. Instead, a link was planned for simulcast performances -the Tankard dancers in Lehmann’s Winery and the quartet in a soundproof booth in London. This prohibitively expensive notion was then followed by Plan C. Sponsors, Santos and Adam Wynn’s Mountadam company, dipped into their pockets and the quartet flew out for just four days to add their own galvanising sound to the Barossa’s splendid festival.

The ADT project at Lehmann’s is in every sense a success. Characteristically, Meryl Tankard and her collaborator Regis Lansac have recognised the quality and potential of Balanescu’s music and created a production which nicely matches the informality and spontaneity implied when wineries are suddenly turned into performance venues. There is a playful air to the solo and duet work- sketches and impromptus which give added impact to the swooping, erotic energies of the main work, the intricately aerial Possessed. Throughout, the dancers and musicians show an easy rapport and a refreshing willingness to give each other space. It has been a unique event for all concerned.

The quartet’s lunchtime performance at Mountadam begins in easy style with some prefatory remarks from Balanescu. Heavy set in his baggy dark suit ,buttoned white shirt and signature brown fedora, he looks more like a bootlegger than a bandleader- especially surrounded by roof-high stacks of Wynn’s hooch, oak barrels enticingly marked with chalk runes- PN, Cab M.,Shiraz.

The group opens with East from last year’s Luminitsa album. They begin with a lyrical bar or two from Clare Connors on violin, melancholy Romanian riffs which are suddenly undercut by David Cunncliffe’s repetitive cello lines, then followed in fugal rotation by heavy strumming notes from Balanescu and sinuous viola runs from fourth player David Hirschman. The sound is percussive and vibrant, reminiscent of some of Mahavishnu Orchestra and jazz violinists such as Jean Luc Ponty but still remaining within the parameters of the string quartet. If this sound is created from a single rib, though, it is probably the Kronos group’s blood-rush rendition of Hendrix’s Purple Haze.

The group also use overdubs- as in Still With Me . Verging on the lugubrious it has an eerie, dirgelike quality as Balanescu recites a chronology of Eastern bloc tyranny and revival. All things are left, left behind, he intones as piano trills, handclaps and ghosty voices blend in from somewhere near the sound desk. The grim recital from the death of Stalin to the blockade of Chechnya is set in contrast to the soaring optimism of the music and the reminder of that even the composer’s native Romania is in some recovery from forty years of madness.

Introducing the Kraftwerk section, Balanescu notes with irony that the German band predicted an end to acoustic instruments by 1980. The quartet prove them wrong but with plenty of voltage coursing through their woodwork nevertheless. Beginning with Robots the band gets into a mesmeric violin scrape which is then earthed by an unrelenting cello riff. Moving on to the Autobahn the quartet manage to create a torrent of sound, complete with Balanescu’s Kawasaki throttle imitation -but, as in all their work, there is a sweetness of timbre at the same time.

From Computer Love the focus shifts to Chain , a repetitious little link work, one of several written by Connors to be interspersed among the major thematic works on Luminitsa. The final item turns out to be the title composition itself. It opens with a duet between cello and violin. It is a playful tempo, like a skipping rhyme which develops an hypnotic intensity as Balanescu runs a heavy arm over the fretboard. This time a little too heavy and amidst the moulting bow strings a long curl of catgut hangs off his violin. With charming ease he announces that he has to restring and we wait while he leaves the stage to effect repairs. It provides time to reflect, admire a few more barrels and realise what singular music we are listening to.

Alexander returns, restrung, and the quartet starts up again. Luminitsa - meaning “little light of hope’ - is an amalgam of sounds with contrasts of tender melody and thrumming brooding tones. It is a paranoid rhapsody, perhaps, but as its title suggests, it reaches towards the light.

The quartet play two encores - Model, one last Kraftwerk excursion and The Right Don Giovanni , a short piece by Michael Nyman. The Balanescu Quartet have performed just over an hour and sent our ganglia rattling like pitchforks. Their concert has been affable, inventive and ringing with energy. I’m informed that a peevish review in the press that weekend suggested that the sponsors for Balanescu should demand their money back. On the contrary, they are to be commended. Their generosity enabled the warmly appreciative audience at Mountadam to hear one of the most interesting and accessible quartets in contemporary music.

The Adelaide Review, No.145, November, 1995, pp.29-30.

Broken German

Published: 1996-11-01

Marianne Faithfull

with Paul Trueblood

Space, October, 1996

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Marianne Faithfull has gone arty. It is not the first time. Even as a teenage waif, under the murky guidance of Andrew Loog Oldham, she was given to recitations of Jabberwocky and Full Fathom Five. She even returns to The Tempest again in A Secret Life, last year’s disappointing collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti. And, of course, she is no stranger to European cabaret- whether on The Boulevard of Broken Dreams or contributing some of the most memorable tracks on the late eighties Kurt Weill tribute, Lost in the Stars.

But now she’s gone the whole nein yards. Her current tour promises an Evening in the Weimar Republic, a showcase of Kurt Weill, Bert Brecht and Hans Eisler with a little help from Friedrich Hollaender and Noel Coward. No more pub gigs, none of that middle-aged grunge, Marianne Faithfull has gone legit. She’s in the thee-aytre.

There is a black chair and a table with a scarlet cloth, there is even a droll little string of lights from Martin Sharp. Ms. Faithfull is dressed in black brocade with a plunging cleavage, vertiginous high heels and a microphone cord that she negotiates like a coil of barbed wire.

Alabama Song opens, as it does on 20thCentury Blues, her current CD of the show. Faithfull’s voice is familiar as ever, rasping, vulnerable, defiant, and sardonic. Trueblood’s piano is bright and vigorous and Kurt Weill’s song rings with all the familiarity of the first Doors album. Want to Buy Some Illusions follows, with an ambling, crooning rhythm which suits the singer’s narrow but distinctive range. When she sings about romantic illusions there is a querulous edge to it all.

Introducing Pirate Jenny from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Faithfull enthuses over Irish playwright Frank McGuinness’s heavy-handed new translation and spends rather too long in explaining a song which so eloquently speaks for itself. Professor Faithfull, as she archly refers to herself, takes us on a rather shaky history of the Weimar period and even Trueblood’s eyebrow arches at the factual approximations. Better to get on with the songs- a quirkily phrased Salomon Song, an over-raucous Boulevard of Broken Dreams and an eerie reading of Complainte de la Seine.

The Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife, a grim Eisler/Brecht/Weill composition remains one of Faithfull’s best renditions of the German music theatre. The jaunty phrasing and the bitter satire sits well with her and she brings an intelligence closer to her own best form. More Weill works follow- Mon Ami, My Friend and a rather wonky Mack the Knife- along with Falling in Love Again and Noel Coward’s monde-weary 20th Century Blues.

Interestingly, the most engaging item is Harry Nilsson’s Don’t Forget Me, preceded by a truly macabre anecdote about the songwriter’s funeral. Apparently his coffin disappeared into the ground during the California earthquake, never to be seen again. It may be an urban myth but Marianne Faithfull tells the story without a flicker of irony.

Since the release of Broken English, Marianne Faithfull has established herself as a most singular writer and singer. Her literate, worldly lyrics and the smoky fragility of her vocals have made recordings like Guilt, Strange Weather, Sister Morphine and Blazing Away into classic portraits of a survivor, despatches from her own exquisitely annotated section of purgatory.

Watching her tottering around in her chaunteuse slingbacks doing a dotty version of Marlene Dietrich, I pined for her set at the Old Lion a few years ago when she and Barry Reynolds revisited the Faithfull canon. There too she played the faded Edwardian actress routine- the shy coquetry and the Venus in Furs aestheticism. But she created knowing ironies out ofWorking Class Hero and scurrilous comedy from Why’D Ya Do It. It was mannered and self conscious but, in the rough ambience of a beer hall, it worked brilliantly. It was unashamedly part of rock and roll. It wasn’t ersatz bohemianism, or kitschy salon pop.

The evening in the Weimar Republic has many enjoyable moments. Paul Trueblood is a fine pianist and Faithfull a likeable performer. She is astonishingly gracious, and unfazed with a sometimes pesky audience which is, in turn, unfazed by some notable eccentricities in the performance. But I’m disappointed that Faithfull has surrendered her hard won ground for this simulacrum of sophistication. When, at the Old Lion, she sang her sixties hit, As Tears Go By, it was unexpectedly stunning- a song of innocence transmuted into a slow blues. When she sings it as an encore this time it sounds pallid and denatured. Marianne Faithfull seems to have left the building. It is as though the spirit of Pirate Jenny has not made any real sense to her. Let alone the dark wisdom of Sister Morphine.

“Broken German” The Adelaide Review, No.158, November, 1996, p.39.

Making Gravy

Published: 1996-12-01

Paul Kelly with Paul Brady Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly has played here four times this year and each time he’s been full of surprises. The January gig at Heaven brought a five piece line-up plus a set from the Blackeyed Susans. Then, fresh from the Womad train, he played a full house at Festival Theatre with fabled pedal steel player and national broadcaster, Lucky Oceans. The Norwood Town Hall show featured Renee Geyer, whose fortunes have lifted since Kelly wrote songs for, and produced, her recent albums. And, now back on tour and performing in the amiable setting of the Governor Hindmarsh, Kelly is sharing the bill with Irish singer/songwriter -and Bob Dylan’s “secret hero” -Paul Brady.

It is a happy association which began when they met in Boston this year. While others of his contemporaries, particularly recording associate Andy Irvine and Planxty alumni like Donal Lunny and Matt Molloy have been here many times on the Guinness express, this is Brady’s first visit. Way overdue, if you ask any of his many Australian admirers.

It was clear that many know Brady’s work as he settles into his opening number- Nobody Knows from the 1991 Trick or Treat album. A rather bookish fellow with a shock of sandy hair Brady casts a glowering look at the chatterers at the bar but soon settles into a likeable set of his own tunes accompanied by driving acoustic guitar and filigree electric piano.

Lakes of Pontchartrain is a lovely ballad, closest in mood to the melancholy traditional fare with which he first made his name. Deep in Your Heart, sung in his sweet Dublin tenor, is another notable. Then comes a song which has been very good to him, as they say in the lounges- Luck of the Draw, title track for Bonnie Raitt’s multi-platinum album. And, to conclude, The World is What You Make it from last year’s Spirits Colliding CD.

Home town crowds are getting ever more fervent for Paul Kelly. Standing up the back at the Governor Hindmarsh is like standing on the hill at the cricket. One guy has brought his marine band harp with him, to play along. What is this - karaoke harmonica night ? Despite some bemused looks nobody seems to mind the quadrophonic harmonica too much. Meanwhile Kelly works his recent repertoire. I Can’t Believe We Were Married segues into an extended organ solo from keyboard player Bruce Haymes. Shades of the Susans, and the baddest seed, Conway Savage. Funny that, because now Kelly sings one from the Nick Cave songbook- Nobody’s Baby Now. Measured, elegiac- it is a perfect baton change. I’ll Be Your Lover Now is a new song with back-up vocals from Haymes. It is familiar Kelly fare, well-constructed, catchy. The harmonica bloke picks it up fairly quickly.

Fortunately he keeps his peace while the nation’s foremost songwriter unveils his ballad about the nation’s foremost bushranger. Ned meet Paul. Haymes on accordion and Kelly opens out a complex new song, Our Sunshine. Good on you Mr K, someone mutters on the hill as Haymes moves into some weirdly discrepant accordion for Kelly’s re-reading of Everything’ s Turning to White. A slower than slow blues, darkness at noon, the affectless accordion underscoring the cruelty of the Carver theme.

Then a song for old men- Papa Doc, Mao, Joe Stalin, Kelly suggests- Before the Old Man Died, Haymes brilliant on piano. And with the first test a week away, Behind the Bowler’s Arm- Paul Kelly’s anthem for the Australian summer. The hill is swaying, as they are for Kelly’s ol’ browneyes version of Sinatra’s All the Way, complete with extended harmonica break. Mr Karaoke puts his harmonica away for this one. Instead he’s holding up his bic lighter in solo tribute. Careless andWintercoat also receive crooning treatment, augmented by Haymes’ splendid chiming piano. And to close the set, two new songs: Melting , a song about ice cream and Kelly’s new single, also available on the Grace Brothers/ Myer Christmas album- a fine new song about families and regret, How to Make Gravy .

The encore is Reckless, the boys on the hill singing in beery unison. That Paul Kelly can sure stand a little Reyne. But the highlights are the duets with Paul Brady. Arthur McBride, the provo anthem Brady has refused to sing in recent times, resumes the playful rebellion that infused Brady’s first memorable recording of it, back in the late seventies with Andy Irvine. It is a fine reading, Kelly in good voice with Haymes on accordion and Brady’s keening Dublin accent shaping the narrative with sardonic pleasure. Then, to return the favour, another song for the times, the Kelly and Carmody classic, From Little Things Big Things Grow, with its jaunty optimism and melodic tralalas from an enthusiastic Brady, it brings a roar of recognition from the crowd -and a reminder that Paul Kelly is our poet true.

The Adelaide Review, December, 1996.

Truebadour

Published: 1997-02-01

Andy Irvine

Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Dressed in a Redbacks t-shirt and looking a little weary from day one of the Fourth Test, Andy Irvine fronts an enthusiastic crowd for his Saturday night set at the Governor Hindmarsh. No stranger to Australia, or the music scene here, he is on the summer festival circuit and winds up with the Canberra gathering at Easter.

Irvine remains one of Irish music’s true believers. Youthful devotee of Woody Guthrie, pupil of Rambling Jack Elliott, foundation member of Planxty, he has impeccable radical/trad credentials. He is also a charming performer and a gifted musician.

With his familiar tousled black hair and beard Irvine is relaxed but purposeful as he brandishes a variety of custom built instruments which he describes as ‘guitar-bodied derivations of the Greek bouzouki.’ And with these eight string wonders and a series of winsome open-tunings he performs a mixed repertoire of emigration ballads from Co. Antrim, a medley entitled Lintheads featuring textile worker songs from Belfast and North Carolina, and a genial song from days on the road with his former band Sweeney’s Men- My Heart’s Tonight in Ireland. Highlights of the first half are a song dedicated to the patriot James Connolly and a lovely long and winding ballad, The Highwayman.

For the second half it is a re-working of Woody Guthrie’s Pastures of Plenty -The Old Dusty Road, a Cecil Sharp find- Two Sisters, and a splendid version of Alistair Hulett’s tender elegy to Wittenoom asbestosis victims, He Fades Away.

For many Andy Irvine is fondly remembered for his 1976 duo album with Paul Brady and he performs two requests. The first is The Plains of Kildare, a spirited song of Stewball and his epic run against the Monaghan grey mare, performed, as ever, with Irvine’s gently burred vocal and chiming guitar style. And, to follow, for the second time at the Gov in two months, the provo anthem Arthur McBride. Paul Brady also sang it in duet with Paul Kelly recently. Let’s say the score between Brady and Irvine is one-all.

Andy Irvine has long incorporated Bulgarian and Romanian folk forms in his music and his own song, Baneasa’s Green Glade is a haunting tune which he follows with a horo, a sort of Romanian jig, in breakneck 13/16 time. Closing with his steadfastly Wobbly song, Never Tire of the Road, the singer returns for a well-chosen encore. First, a vivid narrative based on Mawson’s Antarctic journal which Irvine wrote after a previous visit to Adelaide, and, to conclude, and befitting a genial evening of musicianship and wit, an unaccompanied song of good cheer, Ballyhooly. With a set as thoughtful and accomplished as this one, let us hope it will be a while yet before Andy Irvine tires of the road.

The Adelaide Review, No.161, February, 1997, p.32.

First Person Singular

Published: 1997-02-01

Laurie Anderson

Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Laurie Anderson is describable in so many ways - performance artist, poet, singer, narrator, virtual diva, legend in her own website- that it is easy to overlook just how accomplished she actually is in all these arts, ancient and postmodern, and sciences, big and minimal.

Her current show, The Speed of Darkness, on loan from the Festival of Sydney, features many new, as yet unrecorded, angles of vision from the Innovative One. It is more than ten years since we saw her big screen, high tech show, prototype for Home of the Brave, with its video apparitions of William Burroughs and canny blend of Robert Wilson and Peter Gabriel. Hard-edged, pristine, curiously weightless, it brought the precision of theatrical production values to the rhythmic pleasures of rock and dance music. For some it was like aural tupperware, for others, like eating airline food in heaven.

At fifty years of age, Laurie Anderson is still at the pointy end of what used to be the avant garde. And her achievements are clearer. Recent albums such as Bright Red (Warner Music) produced by that prince of ambience Brian Eno, a CD-ROM entitled Puppet Motel and a flourishing internet site called Green Room all indicate that Anderson is not just up with the trends but state of the art.

On stage this time for the Speed of Darkness , Laurie Anderson is not exactly unplugged but she is looking very … economical. The screens are gone, and the baggy rocket scientist outfits. She leans over a keyboard into two craning microphones. It looks like a news conference, or an inauguration. Dressed in a chic spotted jacket with her hair softly spiky, she is agelessly elfin and aristocratically self-possessed.

Coolly, she takes up a plexiglass violin and draws several bow strokes. The theatre fills with a huge sound, like two Mahler Fifths. The stage speakerboxes are misleadingly compact. Anderson reaches to the keyboard and a hypnotic pulsing begins, a drum program insinuates itself, some bagpipe noises, and then, another thrilling Wagnerian scrape of the violin. It is show business of a very high order, this. Big Science, big music.

But this is not we are here for. “I remember where I came from”, Anderson intones in her breathless whisper, “I remember when my father died. When my father died/ it was like a whole library burned down” It is World Without End from Bright Red. Reading from a script book Laurie Anderson is in personal mode, the show is a monologue with a dance track, The Speed of Darkness is a meditation on the failure of information and the fragility of knowledge. Anderson describes a Cree Native American performing for a film crew. But he can’t remember the words of the dances, he is a fading signal, making up sounds, Hey-ey-a, hey-hey-ey-a.

And if we expected a geewhiz spruik for the internet we were wrong too. No piper at the dawn of Gates here. Anderson sets off another salvo of muttering synths and turns some reverb up on the left hand microphone- Can you feel my heartbeat ? she enquires synthetically. Is this, she asks, how technology is improving the world ? Maybe the Unabomber was right, she wonders and considers founding the Lead Pencil Club. Can this be ? -the audience muses. The Green Room homepage-holder, giving it all the digit ?

Anderson continues her narrative as the synths tick over, a musing there, an observation there. Hints on cooking bratwurst on a hotel lamp, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alexander the Great trying to spend a coin with his own likeness on it. Computers are making us work harder. And everywhere, the Control Room. The new spin on an old idea, the fantasy of being in charge. On the Star Trek Enterprise, or on the not-so good ship Pequod. Call me html://Ishmael.

Laurie Anderson plays with ideas, dabbles in sound, she trafficks in the insubstantial, the fleeting. Switching on a vocoder she begins a dialogue between her own voice and one slowed down down like a shadowy witness on Sixty Minutes. She sings that old Cree song Hey-ey-a, hey-hey, ey-a. She closes with a song from Bright Red, a spectre of drowning, the world flooded by Muddy River. For an encore we have some pillow talk- or rather she puts a tiny pillow speaker in her mouth and vocalises a slow wah-wah as she gets out the old Mahler violin machine again. More big bowings, more Laurie Anderson signatures. Her work is playful, beguiling, it is meaningful and then elusive. It is, nowadays, less earnestly robotic and more pleasingly sardonic. Come to think of it, it is like eating airline food in heaven.

The Adelaide Review, No.161, February, 1997, p.30.

Tivoli Recitals

Published: 1997-04-01

Stan Ridgway Dirty Three Tivoli Hotel

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Stan Ridgway’s set at the Tivoli would have had the significance of the Second Coming - if he’d ever been a first time. Among the modest sized crowd, gathered on day seven of the century celsius, were ticket holders from the cancelled Stan show slated for February 1987. Ten years and one day it has taken us to get to Adelaide, Stan bellows good-naturedly. Yessiree Bob. We may have lost our premolars, fifteen percent of our hearing, John Martin’s department store and several levels of Moodies ratings since then, but Stan Ridgway’s Quintet brought us momentary forgetfulness of all of life’s tribulations.

Stan led with the great ones. The Big Heat, I Wanna be a Boss, Can’t Stop the Show, his voiceover singing style forever cool but, as ever, counterpointed by a deadpan carnie wit. With his necktie loosened and a cigarette in his hand, he hunches over the mike while a naked light bulb swings above his head like a scene from Sam Spade.

His band plays fast and loud and the acoustic mix is splendid. From Black Diamond, there’sWild Bill Donovan, founder of the CIA, sung like a heroic western ballad with harmonica garnishes and jaunty mocking choruses- American tabloid rockabilly. Big Dumb Town is another Ridgway signature. You’re a little too smart for a big dumb town. Big keyboard sweeps from Stan’s significant other, Pietra Wexstun, thudding bass from David Sutton. And Joe Berardi’s faultless drumming is like money in the bank. Stan is strumming on his Fender 12 string and lead guitarist Mark Schulz transmutes electricity into liquid glory.

If anything the standards have only gained over time- especially with the kind of octane Stan is able to summon in a room temperature of a hundred and five. Overlords is Woody Guthrie rock and roll, the kitsch weepie, Camouflage , sounds like a giant engine, and then there’s that steal from Robert Creeley’s micropoem- Drive She Said. Also, for true followers of the Stannard canon, from the wailing Wall of Voodoo, Mexican Radio.

The Quintet plays two encores - Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons, Ring of Fire from the old Cash converter himself, and new songs Passenger and Crystal Palace. Ridgway doesn’t miss a beat, even the band seems incredulous at his energy and his salesman antics, sweet-talking the crowd like a defrocked TV evangelist. Ridgway is the James Ellroy of music. Check out his Drywall Project and other recent stuff now available through TWA records, Stan Ridgway is a continuing renaissance. For the final encore he gives us Jack Talked Like a Man on Fire. So, let me tell you, did Mr Ridgway. And yessiree Bob, I’ll be going back to hear him any old decade he happens to be passing through.

A band we may not see so often in future, judging by the demand in the US especially, is Dirty Three. When they are not being listed in US Rolling Stone’s best top five albums for last year or appearing on the Lollapalooza circuit, violinist Warren Ellis is touring, with increasing frequency, as a member of Nick Cave’s pod of Bad Seeds.

In a packed-out hot Sunday arvo set at the Tivoli, instrumentalists Dirty Three play their extraordinary blend of jazz grunge ragas. Led by Ellis, a frenetic gargoyle who looks like a cross between Marty Feldman and Christina Rossetti, the three - Jim White on drums and Mick Turner on guitar - they huddle down into a series of improvisations. Like ripples in a pond their modal, almost ambient sound gathers pace and intensity until before we know it we are in the eye of one of Warren Ellis’s melodic hurricanes, a place both terrifying and exhilarating.

Leaning at the microphone, Ellis introduces each piece with paragraph length titles that seem, like the music itself, to have just settled on him like some strange creature of pentecost- I Knew it Would Come to This, or I Really Miss You a Lot. Some have profane subtitles. All are accompanied by some likeably rambling front bar wisdom from Warren before he drapes his pale skinny arms back around his battered looking violin and plays something else spectacularly lyrical and psychotic.

The Three play tracks from Horse Stories- Hope, and the long elegy, Sue’s Last Ride. Turner blows his amp part way through the ride and the band stop for repairs. Ellis fills in with a spirited reel, reminding us that swirling around in the Dirty mix is a lot of traditional Celtic sound as well.

Dirty Three play Leonard Cohen, a fragile reading of Suzanne and a dervish-like Indian Love Song. Another, also from their debut album, we heard at last year’s Big Day Out- Everything is Fucked . Listening to it, you wouldn’t think so. Ellis closes with another Horse Story, Warren’s Lament. The encore- and the crowd is in the mood for many more -is The Dirty Equation.

I’m not sure how to factor this equation. Under all that stolly- guzzling and ordinary bloke-iness Dirty Three are a very un-ordinary band. Their music gathers the imagination of Sugarcane Harris, Ornette Coleman, the free jazz movement, cajun and Irish music and the dark genius of electric rock. The Dirty Equation is postmodern mathematics - and, as someone once said, it makes a beautful set of numbers.

The Adelaide Review, April, 1997.

Hot Days and Nights

Published: 1997-04-01

Big Day Out

Wayville Showground

Stan Ridgway

Dirty Three

Tivoli Hotel

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In five years Big Day Out, the Australian version of the Lollapalooza roadshow, has become a summer institution. Promoters Ken West and Vivian Lees have officially declared this year’s model to be the last. Big Day Out is no more. Now the legend can begin. And history will be kind to this rite of summer. It has been, in every sense, good value. For the price of a stadium ticket, fans get to party for twelve hours while taking in the frenzied musical offerings of some forty different acts.

In 1992 BDO showcased, among others, the neophyte soon-to-be superband Nirvana, Violent Femmes, Henry Rollins and Yothu Yindi. This year saw the return of 1992 originals You Am I, along with Beasts of Bourbon and Seattle heavies, Soundgarden. It also welcomed such current indie favourites as Osaka’s Shonen Knife, American bands The Offspring and Fear Factory, and from the UK, britpoppers, Supergrass and technopunks, The Prodigy. There is, as ever, a strong Australian contingent- Powderfinger, The Mavis’s, Dave Graney, and local heroes Mark of Cain and The Superjesus.

Unlike the interstate version, the Adelaide BDO has a touch of delinquency about it,. Scheduled at the end of January it coincides with the first week of term so Friday attendance sheets at most schools look downright pandemic. Perhaps it is this that gives the event such a sense of festivity and troop loyalty. Maybe the location, Wayville Showground, home of the Royal Show, also provokes a kind of subliminal transference. Whatever it is, the punters came in droves. 26,000 by four o’clock according to local catalysts, Dianne Joy and Peter Curnow, who can take a bow for the faultless logistics of this major event.

The Day this year was as hot as stink and it looked like water consumption was keeping apace with the usual lager frenzies. The various cliques and sub-sets mingled amiably. Skaters and urban surfers, unreconstructed punks and wilting goths, ravers and junior hepcats, even senior citizens like myself, all dispersed towards the five performance venues. Where’s the Pope and Buellah’s Fix opened the batting and both Mark of Cain and The Superjesus turned in excellent sets.

Among the international acts, the seven piece band, Rocket From the Crypt, looked like Mormons in alfoil. They played a sort of loose version of Devo while the guy in FBI raybans made the kind of moves Dave Graney gets silver medals for. Supergrass played weedy English pop and kept out of the sun. Singing Alright Time and Caught by The Fuzz, Gaz Coombes worked the crowd cheerfully enough. But they weren’t a patch on last year’s Elastica, I should coco. Shonen Knife, in matching pink lame, parlayed cute Osaka pop. But, as usual, the acoustics at Stage Three were unkind so they sounded like the Shirelles in a bucket.

We are going to play some textures you won’t have heard much today, announced Dave Graney, in red lycra polo shirt and unmatching check flares, as he and the sinuous Coral Snakes settled in for some soft and sexy sounds. The king of pop was very …regal and like Powderfinger produced the sort of quality that makes Homebake a very attractive concept.

The Prodigy, bridesmaids last time, proved to be this year’s Most Cool. Liam Howlett worked the instruments like a one-armed paperhanger while frontpersons Maxim Reality, Keith Flint and Leroy Thornhill breathed and poisoned, vogued and voodooed their music for the jilted generation. Having morphed their way through every musical style in five years, the Prodigy play a deadly mix of hellbent electronics and hungry punk. It’s only 7.15 and they’ve stolen the night.

The Offspring, Orange County’s finest, also appealed as they crashed through their Ixnay on the Hombre repertoire. Dexter Holland and Noodles would like us to think they’re mean and rancid but listen to their single All I Want. Those perky harmonies, the peroxide hair, it could be…the Police.

I passed earlier on what seemed to me a rather perfunctory outing from You Am I but nothing prepared me the yawning disappointment Soundgarden turned out to be. BDO originals they now seem musclebound by their own celebrity, playing pompous stadium rock alternating with prissy Matt Cameron solos like Black Hole Sun. They were still pontificating through Blow Up the Outside World when I headed back to the tunnel of sound at Stage Three. The Beasts of Bourbon are playing like it’s the first day of the world, while at the Grove, local alchemist, Groove Terminator is melding his floor of sound.

Big Day Out will be a hard act to follow. It is a major gathering of the clans. and now it’s finished. We are heading for the gates for a last time. Walking through the hot night air with twenty thousand other refugees, my mohawk by now tilting rakishly, I check out the various regalia around me. Mambo, Adidas, the N word. But more often, beloved and much-laundered t-shirts from previous legendary gigs. Ten points for Rage Against the Machine, fifteen for The Damned, thirty for Dead Kennedys. Best current merchandising, at slightly less than the carnivorous top price, Fear Factory. Pouring out into nearby Wayville we go- the tired, the battlesodden, and the alcoholically sorrowful. The mosh army of the lower middle class returns to the burbs. Whatever will we do next year- go back to school ??

Stan Ridgway’s set at the Tivoli would have had the significance of the Second Coming -if he’d ever been a first time. Among the modest sized crowd, gathered on day seven of the century celsius, were ticket holders from the cancelled Stan show slated for February 1987. Ten years and one day it has taken us for us to get to Adelaide, Stan bellows good-naturedly. Yessiree Bob. We may have lost our premolars, fifteen percent of our hearing, John Martins and several levels of Moodies ratings since then, but Stan Ridgway’s Quintet brought us momentary forgetfulness of all of life’s tribulations.

Stan led with the great ones. The Big Heat, I Wanna be a Boss, Can’t Stop the Show, his voiceover singing style forever cool but, as ever, counterpointed by a deadpan carnie wit. With his necktie loosened and a cigarette in his hand, he hunches over the mike while a naked light bulb swings above his head like a scene from Sam Spade.

His band plays fast and loud and the acoustic mix is splendid. From Black Diamond, there’sWild Bill Donovan, founder of the CIA, sung like a heroic western ballad with harmonica garnishes and jaunty mocking choruses- American tabloid rockabilly. Big Dumb Town is another Ridgway signature. You’re a little too smart for a big dumb town. Big keyboard sweeps from Stan’s significant other, Pietra Wexstun, thudding bass from David Sutton. Joe Berardi’s faultless drumming is like money in the bank. Stan is strumming on his Fender 12 string and lead guitarist Mark Schulz transmutes electricity into liquid glory.

If anything the standards have only gained over time- especially with the kind of octane Stan is able to summon in a room temperature of a hundred and five. Overlords is Woody Guthrie rock and roll, the kitsch weepie, Camouflage sounds like a giant engine, and there’s the steal from Robert Creeley’s micropoem- Drive She Said. Also, for true followers of the Stanard canon, from the wailing Wall of Voodoo, Mexican Radio.

The Quintet plays two encores - Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons, Ring of Fire from the old Cash converter himself, and new songs Passenger and Crystal Palace. Ridgway doesn’t miss a beat, even the band seems incredulous at his energy and his salesman antics, sweet-talking the crowd like a de-frocked TV evangelist. Ridgway is the James Ellroy of music. Check out his Drywall project and other recent stuff now available through TWA records, Stan Ridgway is a continuing renaissance. For the final encore he played, Jack Talked Like a Man on Fire. So, let me tell you did Stan Ridgway. And yessiree Bob, I’ll be going back to hear him any old decade he happens to be passing through.

A band we may not see so often in future, judging by the demand in the US especially, is Dirty Three. When they are not being listed in US Rolling Stone’s best top five albums for last year or appearing on the Lollapalooza circuit, violinist Warren Ellis is touring with increasing frequency as a member of Nick Cave’s pod of Bad Seeds.

In a packed-out hot Sunday arvo set at the Tivoli, instrumentalists Dirty Three play their extraordinary blend of jazz grunge ragas. Led by Ellis, a frenetic gargoyle who looks like a cross between Marty Feldman and Christina Rossetti, the three - Jim White on drums and Mick Turner on guitar - they huddle down into a series of improvisations. Like ripples in a pond their modal, almost ambient sound gathers pace and intensity until before we know it we are in the eye of one of Warren Ellis’s melodic hurricanes, a place both terrifying and exhilarating.

Leaning at the microphone, Ellis introduces each piece with paragraph length titles that seem, like the music itself, to have just settled him like some strange creature of pentecost- I Knew it Would Come to This, or I Really Miss You a Lot. Some have profane subtitles. All are accompanied by some likeably rambling front bar wisdom from Warren before he drapes his pale skinny arms back around his battered looking violin and plays something else spectacularly lyrical and psychotic.

The Three play tracks from Horse Stories- Hope, and the long elegy, Sue’s Last Ride. Turner blows his amp part way through the ride and the band stop for repairs. Ellis fills in with a spirited reel, reminding us that swirling around in the Dirty mix is a lot of traditional Celtic sound as well.

Dirty Three play Leonard Cohen, a fragile reading of Suzanne and a dervish-like Indian Love Song. Another, we heard at last year’s Big Day Out- Everything is Fucked . Listening to it, you wouldn’t think so. Ellis closes with another Horse Story, Warren’s Lament. The encore- and the crowd is in the mood for many more -is The Dirty Equation.

I’m not sure how to factor this equation together. Under all that stolly guzzling and ordinary bloke-iness Dirty Three are a very un-ordinary band. Their music gathers the imagination of Sugarcane Harris, Ornette Coleman and the free jazz movement, with cajun and Irish music with the dark genius of electric rock. The Dirty Equation is postmodern mathematics - and, as someone once said, it makes a beautful set of numbers.

“Tivoli Nights” The Adelaide Review, No. 163, April, 1997, p.32.

Newfangled

Published: 1997-06-01

Guinness Celebration of Irish Music Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In its eleventh year, Jon Nicholls’ touring Irish mini-festival is more of an achievement than ever. Like the Barossa Festival and Womadelaide it is a South Australian initiative which has established a format pleasingly familiar, keenly awaited, and widely regarded as a showcase of the best available.

Over a decade the Guinness Celebration has introduced audiences to talents who were already, or have become, major figures in the rapidly expanding Irish music industry. Christy Moore, Mary Black, Andy Irvine, Four Men and a Dog, Davey Spillane- all have brought their distinctive sounds. Others who, for me, have equally confirmed the gaelic gold standard include Altan, Sharon Shannon, Arty McGlynn, Maire Ni Chathasaigh and Eleanor Shanley.

In the constantly shuffling Guinness line-ups one name remains constant. Donal Lunny, co-founder of Planxty and Moving Hearts and, for some time now, elder statesman of the Dublin recording scene, has co-ordinated talent and programming for the whole shebang. Self-effacing, always generous to other musicians, Lunny has made a major contribution to the success of the event.

He also seems to be the architect of something of a paradigm shift in the 1997 model. Perhaps it is because of the unprecedented (and to me, inexplicable) success of Riverdance and its factional rival Lord of the Dance. Perhaps it is the increasingly commercial nature of international music marketing. Whatever the reason, Lunny’s celebration is far less traditional and far more revisionist this time round. Sure, there’s Ronny Drew from the rambunctious Dubliners singing McAlpine’s Fusiliers and Christy Moore’s No Passeran but the likes of Seamus Begley and Ronan Browne have been replaced by younger Cranberry-maybes like Tamalin and Lunny’s own showband Wheels of the World.

Featuring Nollaig Casey and Maire Breathnach on fiddles and some very funky uillean pipe from John McSherry, the Wheels have plenty to cruise with. But unlike say, Womad highlights, the Afro-Celt Sound System, who bring together distinctly traditional instruments with a techno mix, Lunny’s band has too little shading, and too much rhythm. Bass-heavy and using conventional percussion more than the bodhran, the Wheels sound perilously like Santana-plays-Donegal, or a Dublin version of Murph and the Magictones. This is harsh, I know, because the skill of the musicians is undeniable. But the murky mix at Thebarton seems like quite a come-down from the acoustically crisp sound at Her Majesty’s last year.

Australian singer Shane Howard, presently exploring his Irish connections on his album, Clan, sings Silvermines and a slow ballad, Gabrielle before joining with the Wheels of the World for Spirit of the Land. The band then follow with a fine instrumental, Mystic Slipjig, stylishly led by Maire Breathnach.

Ronny Drew’s rough old voice gives us Paddy Kavanagh’s If Ever You Go To Dublin in a Hundred Years or So and The Dunes, a grim Shane Macgowan song about the Famine. Later, he provides a marvellously Joyciferous recitation from that other author of the Dubliners.

Tamalin, a young Belfast band with more siblings than the Corrs, play a mix of poppy ballads and sprightly reels with John McSherry’s uillean pipes sounding splendidly like escapees from the Bar-Keys. Lead singer Tina McSherry sings a softly fetching original, In the Morning, but it is the more robust instrumental, Reconciliation, that shows the band to best effect in a set so brief that they seem to have hardly got into gear.

Singer Eimear Quinn, determined to show there is life after Eurovision, trills a warm version of Black is the Colour, marred only by a lot of Stevie Nicks shawl trailing. Steeleye Span standards, Lowlands of Holland and The Blacksmith- the former with some well-placed help from Nollaig Casey, the latter with the full engine of the Wheels of the World concludes a fine set.

Donal Lunny leads a likeable instrumental, Cavan Potholes, before introducing the flamboyant talents of Brian Kennedy. Irrepressible in a lurex shirt, Kennedy comes on like a weird cross between Bono and Barry Manilow. But his voice is extraordinary in both range and expression. Opening with the strongly republican ballad, The Four Fields he shifts to the undistinguished title song from his album A Better Man , and an assembly-line Van Morrison yodeller, Crazy Love.

Kennedy, ably supported by Calum McColl on guitar, also sings a lovely gaelic composition by, and with, Maire Breathnach, followed by the World Party anthem Put a Message in the Box.

As always, the entire retinue took the stage for the finale. All nineteen- I think I counted right- in rousing versions of Raglan Road and Ewan McColl’s Dirty Old Town -with Kennedy managing to pull focus from nearly every angle. His solo for The Wild Mountain Thyme is terrific however, matched by Eimear Quinn, and the band, under Donal Lunny’s excellent stewardship, playing like nineteen persons of one mind.

The Guinness Celebration is a great event and this year’s no less so. although I am sorry to see the traditional accordians, whistles and harps absent just at a time when acoustic miking is able to showcase them so brilliantly. And I’ve always been ambivalent about that species of sentimental pop which stalks Irish music- whether in Mary Black, or Brian Kennedy’s gaudy update of Patrick O’Hagan. But the Thebarton crowd loved this show and I loved most of it. I’d just like a bit more Altan next time, or Sharon Shannon or Ronan Browne or…

The Adelaide Review, June, 1997.

Angels and Devil Drivers

Published: 1997-07-01

The Mutton Birds Cartoons Club

Dave Graney ‘n’ the Coral Snakes Flinders Uni Refectory

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There are plenty of bands with unappetising names but there can be few less prepossessing than the Mutton Birds. They could have chosen something a bit more… lyrical. Even the Shearwaters sounds better. But, no. Just plain old muttons. A salty seabird and a possible sheep joke, that’s how they like it. And always have. Lead singer and principal composer, Don McGlashan has never been one to play it easy. From his beginnings in punk band, The Plague, to that arty mix of music and video, The Front Lawn, and on to his present band, the Mutton Birds, he has liked to do things differently.

Interestingly, for all their apparent lack of chic, the Mutton Birds have great commercial potential. Like other New Zealand bands. such as the original Split Enz and The Chills, they have a nervously haughty, take-it-or leave-it approach to performance. But, listen to the music. It is tuneful, stylishly crafted pop that only improves with acquaintance. When the Mutton Birds played at Womad (unfortunately eclipsed by Gil Scott Heron’s indulgently late running set) they made a strong impact with songs from their two albums- the eponymous first, and Salty, featuring such instant classics as In My Room, Queen’s English and Anchor Me.

At Cartoons for the launch of their excellent new CD, The Envy of Angels, the Mutton Birds are not in what you’d call full flight. The turnout is small and, although there are pockets of noisy devotees, many look like they’ve got a free ticket to a blind date. The band, now based in London and enjoying good recognition there, senses this and it seems to gradually depress them. You get the feeling they’ve decided that this is not a night to win the hearts and minds of Australians. There is an air of weariness and a whiff of contractual obligation, not helped by the fact that McGlashan has to valiantly front everything while the rest of the quartet goes into desultory withdrawal.

Opening with the title track of the album is also a bit sudden. Envy of Angels is a divine song. Poetic and elusive, with haunting minor chord progressions and trickling rhythms, it signals a set of songs which are the band’s best to date. McGlashan sings it in his sweet high tenor with harmonies from bassist Alan Gregg. Unfortunately the sound mix is ghastly, the bass booming intolerably and any vocal subtlety is all but buried. A cluster of new work follows- Straight to Your Head, April, She’s Been Talking. Then the creepy anti-gun song they first recorded back in 1992 : replete with elegiac euphonium, A Thing Well Made.

Trouble with You should have sounded brilliant, guitars from the Yardbirds, the vocals blending like early Hollies, or maybe even the Byrds minus Gene Clark. The band toils but the mix is too rough, even for a low tech guitar band like this. Don’t Fear the Reaper, the Muttons’ revival of that little pearl from Blue Oyster Cult, is a winner even against technical odds. And, even though new guitarist, Chris Sheehan,looks like a recent graduate from the Marc Hunter School of Pouting. He plays well but with an indifferent manner. The band seems to be missing foundation guitarist David Long, who in London reported homesick and headed back to the Antipodes.

The Mutton Birds play Anchor Me with tender voice and The Heater with creditable, if murky wattage. For encores there’s While You Sleep, another lambent tune from the new release and they close with Nature. It is not a great gig by any means but we get a tantalising glimpse of what they can do. With the demise of Crowded House and the Finns in retreat there is definitely a place for something Beatle-ish, something with a bit of XTC and UK Squeeze, even a touch of REM. The Mutton Birds have all of that. Listen to their album. Better still, buy it. They really are the envy of angels.

Never one to be bashful in live performance, Dave Graney plays to rapturous regard at Flinders Uni on a cold Thursday night. With the Coral Snakes in excellent form, Dave, in his Melvin Van Peebles blaxploitation pimp hat and duck-egg blue regency fop suit, tours us through his fine new opus, The Devil Drives, with additional servings of those soft ‘n’ sexy sounds from the recent past. He is nearly over his King of Pop hubris although there is plenty of encouragement from the crowd for all that naughtiness.

Opening with Feeling Kinda Sporty, Dave keeps the hat until the first chorus and then he’s down to the sideburns and Bon Brush moustache. He croons blithely through I Don’t Know You Exist and I’m Gonna Live in My Own Big World. He makes a joke about the Bolivar stink then luxuriates into a breathy Barry White voiceover for The Birds and the Goats. Dave is playing frilly acoustic guitar with cascades of percussion and piano from Clare Moore and Robin Casinader and those ever-steady bass lines from Gordy Blair.

Dave puts on his Mt Gambier souvenir t-shirt and slips into something uncomfortable. You’re Too Hip For Me Baby. He makes risible remarks about the Sturt football club and twirls the fingers of his right hand in King of Pop benediction. He plays the crowd like a stage hypnotist. Like the young Franquin, or Martin St James before the legals. Night of the Wolverine gets a reflective treatment while the standout track from the new album, Pianola Roll is fuller, with choppy cross-rhythms from Clare Moore. The set closes with the old groover, I’m Gonna Release your Soul and, Dave-turns-Faust, The Sheriff of Hell.

The last several Graney albums have at times verged dangerously on cheesey, ultra-lounge atmospherics. But, live and sweaty, Dave and the Snakes can still cut the rug. Among the encores, It’s Your Crowd that I Hate , is punctuated with incendiary pedal riffs from guitarist Rod Hayward while The Stars Baby, the Stars has Casinader’s keyboards in full attack. Graney ‘n’ company may be soft ‘n’ sexy but they haven’t forgotten those old wolverine blues. Don’t be fooled by that black silk bolero top and the Herb Alpert fanfares. Dave Graney may be at the height of his affectations but he still not afraid to be heavy.

The Adelaide Review, July, 1997.

Words and Music

Published: 1997-08-01

Paul Kelly

with Monique Brumby

Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

A lot has happened since Paul Kelly played at Womad in February. For a start he has become a household word. When his Greatest Hits collection, Songs From the South (Mushroom/Sony) hit the stores in June, it seemed like everybody had to have one, or even two. Perched in the top five of the album charts week after week, the CD has gone gold, platinum, double platinum, cadmium. Everywhere on the Periodic Table of Elements but lead. Nearly a hundred thousand copies sold in less than two months. Paul Kelly has temporarily become a force of nature.

So it is no surprise that his sell-out concert at Her Majesty’s has such a buzz about it. He is from here, isn’t he ? Didn’t he wrote that song about how Adelaide sucks ? Well, anyway- that song about how you have to leave home to become who you are. And now when he comes back- to Writers’ Week, to a full house at the Festival Theatre, as a headliner at Womadelaide, he is dipping his hat to the old home town and enjoying being feted in return.

Tasmanian singer/songwriter Monique Brumby opens the show with a slew of songs from her debut Thylacine CD. Accompanying herself on guitar, with twelve string back-up, Brumby sings One Day, Fool for You , The Change in Me and others. She sounds close to her influences- Rickie Lee Jones, Suzanne Vega, Sinead. That’s no crime, these are early days and we will be hearing more from Monique Brumby.

When Paul Kelly takes the stage we are reminded how astutely he constructs his performances. He is doing the rounds with his Greatest- so just to keep us guessing he opens with a new song, guitar only. It’s called Little Kings, a tilt at petty tyrants and mean spirits. He makes his point but doesn’t dwell on it. We are still ruminating on it when he lobs into the many verses and occasionally lumpy end-rhymes of Bradman. In fugue form as the band assembles- Steve Hadley on upright bass, Bruce Haymes on keyboards, Peter Luscombe, drums, on guitar, Shane O’Mara.

Winter Coat gets a new styling, a lyrical slow waltz treatment with lovely fills from Haymes and a clear, keening vocal from Kelly. Deeper Water follows and then- as O’Mara hits that wah wah pedal- Dumb Things. I melted wax to fix my wings. I’ve done all the dumb things. The crowd is starting to sway with recognition. Songs remembered from parties, listened to late at night, on long car trips to wherever. Before Too Long, When I First Met Your Ma, and with heavy garnishes of harmonica, Love Never Runs on Time.

In this set there are new songs and an old Earl Brown cover that has been getting steady radio time, It Started With a Kiss. A high point is Melting, with dreamy back-up vocals from Monique Brumby and thrummy bass from Hadley. O’Mara reaches for the sustain and his guitar gently weeps and melts, duetting with Haymes’ swirling Hammond sound in a spacey version of country style psychedelics. It’s a fine new song and one destined to stay in the repertoire.

Which may not happen for Tease Me, a bit of bump and grind r’n’b, performed, believe it or not, complete with exotic dancer. In gentler vein there is that much-performed Kelly standard- confession of a libertine, tale of ordinary madness, Careless. Tricked up with Haymes’ Let it Be intro, it is a song now toppling into parody, it needs a rest. Unlike To Her Door and that edgy venture behind closed doors, Sweet Guy.

A fluent, expansive reading of Gravy demonstrates again what a great band Kelly has assembled and how that in turn gives momentum to his composition. Look So Fine, Feel So Low- the old Gossip track reminds us also of the angst-ridden bravado that made those early songs so true to life. It is a good place to end the set, and a rest before those ample encores that are the guarantee of a Kelly concert.

Kelly’s solo, From Little Things Big Things Grow, is a popular choice. Anthem to a former time it is now even more apposite, since the circle, it turns out, is not at all unbroken and we have a future ahead just re-inventing wheels. Beating of Your Heart, another new song, is a revelation as the band, in splendid accord, plays electric music for the mind and body. More Hits pile up - Summer Rain, My Love and Pouring Petrol on a Burning Man. But it is the songwriter’s song about songs which has the last say. Words and Music, a lovely reverie and yet another Kelly epiphany.

So far this has been Paul Kelly’s year and it is well deserved. Best of all, the CD sales will surely secure an audience for new work due out early next year. And the glimpses we have so far suggest that, in no time at all, Greatest Hits Volume Two will be going helium.

The Adelaide Review, No.167, August, 1997, p.32-3.

Simple Gifts

Published: 1997-09-01

Leonardo’s Bride Flinders Uni Refectory

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It’s not very often we hear a debut album as good as Angel Blood, released earlier this year by Sydney band, Leonardo’s Bride. There is a lyrical introspection and a perky confidence about them that is reminiscent of Do Re Mi or even the Go-Betweens. There is also a sense of a group arriving on the scene, not with the usual larval potential but already formed. You know… butterfly-ready.

With both the album and the single, Even When I’m Sleeping, in the Adelaide charts, the band returns for the first time since their support performances for Everything But the Girl, back in March. And even in the draughty expanse of the Flinders Uni refec, Leonardo’s Bride create their own little mise-en-scene. Designer Christo has taken their cover art signatures- red and gold circus stars on a pumpkin coloured backcloth, and festoons of fabric bunting, studded with red fairy lights. Like everything about the band it is considered, and stylish.

The band takes up positions- all seated on stools, like a chamber ensemble. Drummer Jon Howell gets installed first, then bassist Patrick Hyndes. They get a beat going and are joined by Dean Manning, songwriter, guitarist and mensch behind the Angel Blood concept. Then, finally, also in black with orange accents, Abby Dobson, youthful diva, the Voice of the Bride.

A swig of Mount Franklin, a toss of her preppie blonde locks- daggied up slightly with a carefully careless tie-up sprouting at a raffish angle- and Dobson burrows straight into Hey Hey. Howell’s beat is strong, the bass lines ripple, Manning’s guitar has a rheumy vibrato, that George-on-the-White Album sound so prevalent again these days. But it is Dobson’s voice which galvanises the sound. It could be early sixties pop. A Sad Movies Always Make Me Cry, little-girl croon. But then it stretches out, gathering in intensity, defining the emotions with pungent emphasis. “You don’t have to go for that. “ The repetitions gather, the band plays sweetly and loud in a strong, clear mix. Dobson trills fearlessly above, gliding in thermals, dipping and turning in Manning’s fetching melody.

A new song follows, Oh Yeah , is it ? And from the album, Kissing Bedrock. “You’ve been kissing bedrock I can tell.” A slow ballad, with hints of Deb Conway. But, again, Dobson’s vocal creates shivers. Just when you expect her to taper off she finds angel gear. Forty One False Starts has the Leonardos waxing literary - Hemingway and Lenny Bruce. As in The Problematic Art of Conversation-“it makes me think of Oscar Wilde…” - Manning can be awfully arch, but he knows how to wrap a lyric in a pretty tune.

Which brings them to Even When I’m Sleeping, a strong reading of their hit single, lit with a single white light and a plangent acoustic guitar from Dobson - while a crowd of young things sways to the newest minting of pop romanticism. Fall is another highpoint, Dobson’s own composition and one of the album’s best. A simple hook- “Don’t fall for me, I’m already down” - spirals down into minor chords and plaintive rhythms, chiming guitars and throaty vocals. More hints of the White Album as the band loops over and through in hypnotic repetition, but it is hard to resist alright already.

A bunch near me keeps calling for Buzz but instead we get Buddha Baby, the new single, complete with three part harmonies, then Titanic and, to close the set, a big chunky version of So Brand New. It has been a classy set, with great sound from the air traffic controllers and a well-judged set list from the sit down band.

For encores there is the enticement of Stay. “Stay another change of heart, stay another memory, stay another great expectation.” Not much on the page, perhaps, but perfect pop in the hands of the Bride. Then Manning cranks up the voltage, hits the pedal, and Abby Dobson takes another deep breath. “Hey Buzz, this town doesn’t hold me any more.” Never mind that Buzz is Christo’s rabbit. Never mind the incipient banality of suburban pop. Just listen to that bridge, that tender tough guitar, that heartbreak vocal. The lineage is from Goffin and King, from the Bobbys, Vinton and Vee, from California folk rock and Liverpool lullabies. It is the history of the heart at 45 rpm - and all part of the dowry for Leonardo’s Bride. They are a great little band and deserve the good buzz they are getting because, even what we’ve heard before, sounds… so brand new.

The Adelaide Review, September, 1997.

The Blues Fall Like Rain

Published: 1997-10-11

Keb’ Mo’ (Blues soloist) Tivoli Hotel, Adelaide. 29 Sept. 1997.

The Blues Fall Like Rain

Keb’ Mo’ - that’s Delta blues for Kevin Moore- is beaming at the stand up crowd at Adelaide’s Tivoli Hotel. “Yo’ got yourselves a championship football team.” His drawling pentameter turns the phrase into twenty five syllables. And the Crows fans love every one of them. It has been a top weekend. Yesterday’s win at the MCG and now some Sunday night good-time blues from a very amiable stylist.

It was when he landed a role as a bluesman in an LA theatre production seven years ago that Keb’ Mo’ got back into roots music. He used to play backup to Papa John Creach in the seventies and then in r’n’b house bands in the eighties. But nothing quite predicted that he’d be picking up the coveted W.C.Handy blues award for his 1995 debut album, or a Grammy for best contemporary blues recording for his current CD Just Like You. (Sony)

In his coffee coloured fedora and matching vest, Keb Mo looks like a St Louis gambler and has all the charm of a carpet bagger. His fingers glide over his Gibson guitar as he opens his set with Victim of Comfort. The cascading bottleneck runs, rich grainy voice and easy manner has the audience bopping straight off. Reminiscent of Taj Mahal and that sweet old legend, Mississippi John Hurt, Keb’ Mo’ is strong on self irony and low on angst.

The nimble syncopations in Perpetual Blues Machine are garnished with harmonica. ForThat’s Not Love and his new age blues, You Can Love Yourself , he takes up his National Resophonic dobro, a gleaming, steel-bodied wonder which summons up the very mortgaged soul of the Mississippi Delta. The sound pours off the guitar like metal ribbons, all cross-hatchings and unexpectedly tender harmonics. This is the blues today. Not artificially exhumed, not a feat of scholarly ventriloquism, but an idiom inhabited and renewed. It Sets Me Free , he sings -and you know what he means.

Just Like Me, a beautifully judged call for racial harmony, is a high point. Soulful pop, sung with conviction, it showcases Keb’ Mo’ as a versatile contemporary performer. Purists have been known to protest such excursions but it is futile pedantry to do so. Besides, when he swings into Dangerous Mood, a sardonic portrait of the singer as Badass, as Staggerlee, Keb’ Mo’ is back in that honourable lineage of blues shouters from Joe Turner to Jimmy Witherspoon.

Closing with Hand it Over , a jump-driving, dobro ragtime which has the crowd in raptures, Keb’ Mo’ mixes gospel jubilation with a wry smile. The Australian tour is over but check out the CDs and watch out for him next time round. In the current scene you won’t find mo’ better blues than this.

Weekend FIN Review, October 11, 1997.

Mo’ Better Blues

Published: 1997-11-01

Keb’ Mo’

Tivoli Hotel

Johnnie Johnson

Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

A late despatch from last month. Keb’ Mo’ - that’s Delta blues for Kevin Moore- is beaming at the stand up crowd at the Tiv. “Yo’ got yourselves a championship football team.” His drawling pentameter turns the phrase into twenty five syllables. And the Crows fans love every one of them. It has been a top weekend. Yesterday a win at the MCG and now some Sunday night good-time blues from a very amiable stylist.

It was when he landed a role as a bluesman in an LA theatre production seven years ago that Keb’ Mo’ got back into roots music. He used to play backup to Papa John Creach in the seventies and then in r’n’b house bands in the eighties. But nothing quite predicted that he’d be picking up the coveted W.C.Handy blues award for his 1995 debut album, or a Grammy for best contemporary blues recording for his current CD Just Like You. (Sony)

In his coffee coloured fedora and matching vest, Keb Mo looks like a St Louis gambler and has all the charm of a carpet bagger. His fingers glide over his Gibson guitar as he opens his set with Victim of Comfort. The cascading bottleneck runs, rich grainy voice and easy manner has the audience bopping straight off. Reminiscent of Taj Mahal and that sweet old legend, Mississippi John Hurt, Keb’ Mo’ is strong on self irony and low on angst.

The nimble syncopations in Perpetual Blues Machine are garnished with harmonica. ForThat’s Not Love and his new age blues, You Can Love Yourself , he takes up his National Resophonic dobro, a gleaming, steel-bodied wonder which summons up the very mortgaged soul of the Mississippi Delta. The sound pours off the guitar like metal ribbons, all cross-hatchings and unexpectedly tender harmonics. This is the blues today. Not artificially exhumed, not a feat of scholarly ventriloquism, but an idiom inhabited and renewed. It Sets Me Free , he sings -and you know what he means.

Just Like Me, a beautifully judged call for racial tolerance, is a high point. Soulful pop, sung with conviction, it showcases Keb’ Mo’ as a versatile contemporary performer. Purists have been known to protest such excursions but it is futile pedantry to do so. Besides, when he swings into Dangerous Mood, a sardonic portrait of the singer as Badass, as Staggerlee, Keb’ Mo’ is back in that honourable lineage of blues shouters from Joe Turner to Jimmy Witherspoon.

Closing with Hand it Over , a jump-driving, dobro ragtime which has the crowd in raptures, Keb’ Mo’ mixes gospel jubilation with a wry smile. Check out the CDs and watch out for him next time round.

And, four weeks later at the Governor Hindmarsh, veteran piano master Johnnie Johnson is surrounded by two Hippos, a Black Sorrow and a Bondi Cigar. The house band made up of bassist John Power, Rory McKibbin on guitar, Joe Camilleri on sax and drummer Ace Follington, represents some of the best blues/soul musicians in the country. But tonight we are seeing their collective homage directed towards Johnnie Johnson, born St Louis Missouri, 1924, piano player with Chuck Berry for thirty years. Despite helping complete the Berry sound he never saw a royalty for his writing until Keith Richards and Eric Clapton sponsored his solo comeback album a few years back. But does Mr Johnson look bitter and twisted ? Far from it.

In striped shirt and tractor driver’s cap he looks like a Florida retiree on vacation. Good-humoured and warmly generous to his fellow musicians, he sets up business behind his electric Roland. The band has played a well-judged opening set and come back to set the stage with Crazy in a Mixed up World. Johnnie opens with Got to See You, his large hands grabbing big bunches of notes, trills and strides, while the band respectfully lays the rhythm and McKibbin the guitar fills. Kansas City follows, Johnson warming to his task with hard rocking glee.

Tanqueray, a new title from the Keith Richards collaboration has some nicely ambling guitar while Joe Camilleri adds smoky garnishes on tenor horn. And it wouldn’t be a Johnnie Johnson show without a reminder that he is the ivory Chuck left behind. JoJo leads the vocals on You Never Can Tell and Promised Land and McKibbin takes over for Bright Lights, Big City also adding some hot guitar turns as well.

The band which is now on its way to points west and north is clearly enjoying its Master Class opportunity. Johnnie Johnson, lord of the slow blues, plays effortless interludes for Key to the Highway and Stormy Monday, and the rock-a-boogie of Johnny B.Goode never sounded better. But it is not all work for a septugenarian piano legend. For the encore he unwinds a loping syncopated shuffle for Goin’ Fishin’. It is apparently a great enthusiasm of his. And he’s probably good at it. He certainly had this Thursday night turnout completely hooked.

The Adelaide Review, No.170, November, 1997, p.36.

Music

Published: 1997-11-07

Long John Baldry

Governor Hindmarsh Hotel

Adelaide

Murray Bramwell

Recently, in an interview, Long John Baldry whimsically recalled that old conundrum from the Bonzo Dog DoDah band - Can Blue Men Sing the Whites ? Hoary questions about the authenticity of the British blues seem almost laughable now. In the early sixties the blues had virtually been reborn in England- and then exported, value added, back to the US.

The Rolling Stones reaped the main rewards of course, as did the Yardbirds and the Animals. But the godfathers of the British blues revival were musicians like Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies- and Long John Baldry.

And, on tour in Australia for the first time ever, he is in great form. Onstage at the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel, Baldry is settling in for the night. The band has warmed up with a sax-heavy blast and the singer makes his entrance. In black shirt, light slacks and his signature panama hat, he glides straight into Every Day I Have the Blues. He is a giant in every sense. At six foot seven, in the old money, he towers above his band, particularly diminutive frontmen

sax player John Lee Sanders and Widgeon Holland on guitar.

Baldry’s voice is splendid- rich, grainy and with a lower range that can rattle windows. He could be the reincarnation of Howling Wolf, with choreography by Cab Calloway. He glides as he sings, his huge hands gesticulating like ocean gulls. Pausing to sip from a glass of white wine, he is straight into the up-tempo One Step Ahead.

He is keenly aware of the theatrics of it all. Can you take away that green light ? He asks, in a polite but commanding minor public school accent, I feel like Nosferatu up here. A sanguine wash of red instantly envelopes him as he fires up for some wang-dang- doodling in Shake that Thing, a likeably lascivious reading distinguished by eerie guitar fills from Widgeon Holland.

Stormy Monday Blues is a highlight. Baldry’s huge voice is effortless and expressive, framed with tender reed solos from Sanders and incendiary Texas guitar from the talented Widgeon, anchored by Norman Fisher on six string bass and Al Webster’s money-in-the-bank drumming.

The Tall One ambles back for Baldry’s Out and A Thrill is a Thrill, which transformers into Lou Reed samples. Baldry and the band rather fancy these medleys, morphing from Iko Iko toWilly and the Hand Jive. Sanders hits the zydeco button on his synth and the band goes into full gumbo. Later, in Baldry’s menacing reading of Randy Newman’s Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield the baton changes to raunchy choruses of the Willie Dixon standard, Spoonful .

The set covers plenty of ground in more than two hours. Baldry does a solo turn with twelve string guitar- including Leadbelly classics Easy Rider Blues and Black Girl. And, with sweetly nuanced piano from Eric Webster he gives us a memorable version of the Grateful Dead favourite Morning Dew.

Long John Baldry is, you might say, at the height of his powers. From Don’t Lay the Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll to the old Faces song Flying, he shows he can cover the lot. The blues, the whites, the ballads, the hollers. Everything that is, except the greens.

The Australian, November 7, 1997, p.19.

String of Pearls

Published: 1997-12-01

Deborah Conway

Governor Hindmarsh

November, 1997.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Spring 1997 performances by Deborah Conway might well be called the Great With Child Tour. Certainly, the singer- on the road with a band featuring her creative and procreative partner, Willie Zygier- is in very full bloom.

Resplendent in a spangled red dress, Conway puckers her poppy lips and rattles earrings the size of chandeliers. But there is nothing garish here. Deborah Conway is not only one of the best singer songwriters in the country, she has Style. Buckets of it. And none of it extinguishable.

Tilting slightly to balance the motherload, Conway beams at the Governor Hindmarsh crowd. Her dark hair is tied back, leaving her face framed by those familiar bouncy bangs. She is, as ever, the very model of the emancipated Australian woman. Devotees draw near. One huge, bashful gallant, looking like a bouncer on his night off, presents her with a bouquet- and, crikey… booties. The diva is regal and acknowledging. Several photographers close in with lenses set to steal her very soul. She frowns and pouts her way through the opener - a track from the newly released My Third Husband album, All of the Above.

The band feeds in a mix of samples and woozy riffs. Clayton Foley on keyboards spreads out a tonal wash, while Jack Orszaczky lays some bony bass lines and Zygier hunches over his guitar intently supplying his particular modal magic. The new album, written and recorded in London, has come in for some flak for its heavily produced sound. All that programming and techno tinkering apparently isn’t our Deborah. I can’t help thinking some of the CD reviews written on the strength of half a listen would read rather differently by now. As in all good relationships, Deborah Conway’s Third Husband takes a little getting to know.

The live show showcases the material well. The arrangements are lean and mostly real time. The single, Only the Bones (Will Show) sounds better than ever, as do the chugging rhythms and dreamy vocals on Everything You Want It to Be. The crowd responds strongly to a shift to more familiar turf. Alive and Brilliant creates a hush as does that other bitch epic, Madame Butterfly is in Trouble. And that opens the way for a knockout reading of the new song Here in My Arms. Conway has now put aside her acoustic guitar to reveal the full glories of her sparkling gown - a heart-shaped see-through panel revealing her abundantly gravid belly. Swaying to Zygier’s gently swooning guitar, Conway re-ignites the art of torch singing.

The new work also has its dark aspect, particularly the edgy Feathers in My Mouth, which only lends emphasis to the perky familiarity of Today I’m a Daisy and Release Me before returning to the densely synthesised gothics of It’s a Girl Thing. The band then pulls out the stops to close with that Do Re Mi classic of maritime misadventure, Man Overboard.

An encore is also a costume change in the Deb Conway Theatre. Elegant in white sleeveless cotton, the singer sings a solo String of Pearls and the band files back to remake It’s Only the Beginning. The show, crisply produced and smartly imagined, reveals Conway is still out there with our very best inscribers of the beating heart. Her voice, whether crooning the simple lyricism ofWhite Roses or the tangled histrionics of It’s Only a Dream , has never sounded better and her stage presence is as well-judged as ever. The musical partnership with Zygier has led Deborah Conway to new and interesting ground. But the latest material is proof that none of the fundamentals have changed. She still prefers fire.

The Adelaide Review, No.171, December, 1997, pp. 32-3.

Mutual Admiration

Published: 1998

Teenage Fanclub

Heaven

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Liam Gallagher has called them the second best band in the world, but don’t let that put you off. Teenage Fanclub, back again touring yet another strong new album, represent with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of talent the best of UK pop. Since their emergence as The Boy Hairdressers in Glasgow back in 1989 the re-badged Teenage Fanclub has produced a succession of highly regarded albums- from the drolly named Bandwagonesque toThirteen, to the 1995 treasure, Grand Prix and now their latest,Songs From Northern Britain (Sony)

They remind me of XTC. Perhaps it is the songwriting strength in the band and the effortless invention they display. But the vocals, and dreamy lyrics hark back to Songs from Southern California -when the Byrds were jingle-jangling under the guidance of Roger McGuinn, who I gather has had some association with the Fanclub in recent times.

Cranking up at Heaven after a solid set from Ammonia, the band is in extremely likeable form. There is a flock of Fanclub fanclub members in respectful homage at the edge of the stage and founder/ leader /writer/ singer Norman Blake is keen to make aye contact with them all. Suitably, Start Again opens their card - the thrumming bagpipe guitar, slappy drum and overbooming bass unfold as the vocals rise. Gerard Love sings lead with Blake blending the kind of magic harmony which has always given the group a sound greater than the apparent sum of its parts.

The other key to the equation is Raymond McGinley. In earnest horn rimmed specs, he out-proclaims the Proclaimers in the Interesting Geek stakes, but as he shoulders his green Fender it is clear not only that he is a major shareholder in the Fanclub sound but he is the Brains generally. I Don’t Care , he croons as his nerd love ballad builds in lovely gathering chords. Then Norman Blake returns to introduce the band’s First Big Single- Everything Flows, a splendid three part harmonic, augmented with tasteful keyboard flourishes from guest member Finlay McDonald.

The list is a nice blend of Fanclub Ancient and Modern. The Cabbage (from Thirteen) gets an airing, as does Grand Prix’ s exultant opener, About You, before they return to the current work. Take the Long Way Round with its lilting hook and fetching vocals from Blake and McGinley is followed by Speed of Light, another elegantly constructed Raymond song with keyboard garnishes, natty drumwork from Paul Quinn and an array of pedal sounds from the bespectacled one. It is his birthday, it turns out and Norman, his lank hair flopping in his eyes, leads the groundlings in a few bars of the nativity song.

It’s that kind of night. Relaxed, utterly unpretentious, and the band plays one two-minute-twenty-second wonder after another. Songs likeVerisimilitude, with its awful Ogden Nash rhymes - attitude/platitude/ veris-similitude. Despite this verbal contortion- or actually, because of it- Raymond’s yearning vocal and the pocketful of words in his brain somehow win over. Planets, another northern song, has a slow, almost country melody expanding into cosmic wheels of perfectly aligned harmony. To finish the set they soar through Sparky’s Dream, sixties West Coast pop if ever you heard it - strains of the Association and Buffalo Springfield, with vox angelus from Crosby, Clark and Hillman never far away.

Inevitably, Teenage Fanclub are enticed back for encores. There is a Graney-ish weariness in Can’t Feel My Soul, with Finlay McDonald on transcendental guitar. And for a big finish, The Concept. It is Abbey Road Beatles, really. Orbiting harmonies, rheumy guitar incantations. and mantric lyrics. It could be Golden Slumbers- segueing into Carry That Weight. Except that it also sounds just like Teenage Fanclub- the second best band in the world.

The Adelaide Review, No.172, January, 1998, p.30.

Nein

Published: 1998-02-01

Nine Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston, Book by Arthur Kopit. Directed by John Diedrich Festival Theatre

It is now twenty five years since Federico Fellini’s 8¹/₂ was first released. A film about a filmmaker making a film, it is bizarre, narcissistic, sexist and cinematically fearless. 8¹/₂ remains a classic not least for the performances by Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale and Anouk Aimee.

Nine is more than fractionally different from 8¹/_2. Despite some good songs and the occasional clever lyric it is somehow inert, still at the good idea stage. That is, if it is a good idea to make a stage musical about bourgeois satyriasis. Writers Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, with translator Mario Fratti have, it seems, created a brainy show without very much thought.

There’s Guido Contini in the middle of the stage, surrounded by twenty one women, singing that his body is nearing middle age and his mind is nearing ten. You have to be careful with that or an audience might think they’ve wandered into Wife Begins at Forty after all. Given the dessicated state of Yeston and Kopit’s writing, for Nine to have gathered all those Tonys in 1982, the New York version must have depended heavily on Tommy Tune’s production and Raoul Julia’s lead performance to give it some style as well as some juice.

John Diedrich’s production, despite an able cast, the orchestra under Conrad Helfrich and Roger Kirk’s natty costumes, fails to be greater than some of its cleverer parts. Desporting on the twin staircases of Shaun Gurton’s restrictive aluminium and steely pink set, the chorus often look like a listless fashion parade, while scenes which call for a real burst of energy - such as when Guido is shooting a scene for his movie - lack purpose and imagination. Since it is its hectic filmic invention that makes 8¹/₂ more than just another auteur’s show-and-tell, Diedrich’s production is by contrast awkward and self conscious. And Fellini’s fetish for whores with eighteen carat hearts, which recurs in movies from 8¹/₂ through to Roma and Amarcord, has a dry prurience in Nine.

Fellini’s sexual disgust·and fascination, doubtless keeps his therapist in regular skiing holidays but at least it has the force of Rabelaisian confession -whereas the bumps and grinds by Jackie Rees as Carla and Caroline Gillmer as Sarmaghina are graceless and derisive. Diedrich’s performance as Guido Contini is likeable but insufficient. This show, like the movie, is so far steeped in male egotism that there’s no way you can do it like a singing mountie. Diedrich’s scruples about the fact that Contini is a weak philanderer can have no place in the show as such. Instead we need to see what it is about the potency and allure of movies that makes Guido such a culture hero and why producer Lilane La Aeur (a good performance by Nancye Hayes but not her best) wants to throw money all over him.

The show itself gives these matters only passing thought. Certainly Maria Mercedes, who gives a promising portrayal of Luisa, Guido’s longsuffering wife, is not given much to work with in songs such as My Husband Makes Movies - her Stand-by-your-Best- Boy anthem. When she later leaves him, along with Claudia Nardi, his protege (stylishly played by Peta Toppano) Guido regresses to mother (Gerda Nicolson) and childhood (with Jamie Wright as Young Guido).

Unfortunately the show then pivots on not-enough as Guido, desolate, suicidal, his emotional and professional life in the blender, is coaxed back into lights and action by little Guido plaintively singing - “knowing you have no one if you try to have them all/ is part of tying shoes/ starting school, scraping knees if you should fall/ part of growing tall.” Really.

By invoking the movies, particularly Fellini’s, and by seeming to deal seriously with questions of personal relationship and the creative mind, Nine invites expectations which it disappoints. For that reason it is hard to fall back to saying that it’s OK in parts.

Even though the original show is probably a three pea trick anyway, John Diedrich’s production, like his own performance, is short of the mark. For Nine to be the ultimate musical it claims to be, it would need to add up to more than this.

“Nein” The Adelaide Review, No.47, February, 1988, p.30.

Lost Blues

Published: 1998-02-01

Will Oldham

Tivoli Hotel

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

After a succession of albums as the Palace Brothers, Palace Music or just plain old Palace, Will Oldham is now travelling under his own passport. With a current CD, Joya (Shock Records) and a compilation Lost Blues and Other Songs, Oldham is presently giving us plenty of opportunity to peruse his singular talents. His music is fragile and perilous. With scraps of elliptical lyrics intoned in his high pitched, mewling tenor Oldham gathers together musicians who scratch and plunk and drone their meandering way through, and under, and beyond, the boundaries of what we used to call songs.

His works are a mix of Appalachian ballad, cowboy lament, private revenges, meditations and cut-up. The music is a tangle of modal loops and shunting rhythms. Will Oldham is the keeper of the minor keys to the kingdom. It is a sound both refreshingly new and strikingly archaically simple. And one that has echoes in early Leonard Cohen, the dour pieties of the Carter family, Ballad in Plain D Dylan, even the winding near-miss voices of the Incredible String Band. If Loudon Wainwright was just starting out now he might well have been a weird little aesthete like this. Somehow it is not surprising to read, in an interview for Grip Monthly, Will Oldham recalling as a kid being nicknamed Will Robinson. After the family in Lost in Space.

At the Tivoli, backed by Jim White and Mick Turner of Dirty Three, along with a keyboard player with Tim Buckley hair, Will Oldham is determined to break every protocol of stage presentation. In his brown suede jacket, skinny levis and Cuban heel boots Oldham is pale and intense, his thinning blond hair damp and his eyes bright and blue. We are reminded that he was once the fifteen year old actor who so brilliantly played the boy preacher-turned- unionist in Matewan, John Sayles’ splendid film about the West Virginia coal mining strikes in the 1920s.

But Will Oldham is not having any of that performance stuff. Ambling onstage Oldham immediately demands that the lights are brought down to a point where he is barely discernible. His microphone has been hauled over to the edge of the stage and from there he conducts the band through a series of improvisations and sketches of his work. Nothing is introduced or explained, the set list seems somewhat approximate. Jim White hastily reaches down to look again at a scrunched up piece of paper before Oldham signals the drummer to lay down some more subtly etched patterns on which to layer Turner’s trickling guitar lines and the tinny plaintive chords from the Tim Buckley guy.

I gradually recognise stuff from the Joya album. Such as O Let it Be. Will is Ferdinand. “I pick the flowers smell like a bull/ sniff at the summer a round nostril full. “ His rhymes are mannered, almost Elizabethan. The piano chimes, Turner’s guitar sounds a bit like Robby Krieger-moving from room to room. Oldham’s voice winds upwards to near falsetto and down again. In the boom of the murky sound mix his words are all but lost. Only the repetitions -“I can do without it. I can live without it”- emerge at all audibly. We are intrigued, we are straining forward. To hear, to see, to work out what is going on as he makes cryptic asides to the band.

Having just brought one song to unceremoniously abrupt closure, Oldham is suddenly strumming on his red Fender to no effect. He pouts, glares at the amp and suggests if we clap and believe in fairies maybe all will be well. Mick Turner, less given to believing in fairies, laconically wanders over to the rig and re-inserts a loose plug. Oldham laughs and pitches into Bolden Boke Boy. It is more upbeat with a whiff of John Wesley Harding about it. The lyrics are characteristically evocative and impenetrable. Then, that final line about not having children has Will Oldham leading a little seminar with himself about the pros and cons of procreation. Be Still and Know God follows, and then a cover - In My Mind, experts tell me, written by bad ol’ David Allen Coe.

It is almost impossible to hear it -the mix seems to be getting worse but Oldham sings with great feeling all the same. And then when it’s finished he interrogates the band about whether it’s a good or bad song. The Dirty Two looked bemused. What the fuck kind of question is that ? Jim White in his tight suit, with the shirt collar folded over the lapels like a fifties bookie, consults his list again. I mean, Warren Ellis- the Dirty Three violin player, currently touring with the Bad Seeds- can be full of surprises, but this Will Robinson is from another planet altogether.

The night has been both invigorating and frustrating. The crowd is on side, but increasingly tetchy. Just sing something, someone shouts, when Will starts rapping with the band again. We can’t hear you, shouts a woman, on the brink, it seems, of exasperated tears. Oldham plays Apocolypse, no (sic) and then New Gypsy. It is a marvellous song. Turner’s guitar lines ripple as White’s peerless brushwork gathers urgency. His percussion, heavy on the cymbalism and snare, is endlessly inventive. And Will Oldham, edgy and preoccupied, entunes his querulous lyrics, gnarled with inversions and dangling half rhymes. “You can lay me out a place/ it’s time I had some love/ have the ladies gather round and do me from above.”

The world is full of singers and songwriters but none quite as rare as Will Oldham. Like Michael Stipe he is a high strung Southerner, all the way from Louisville Kentucky and, as I have said, he makes few concessions to the expectations of the performance circuit. But his music is full of beguiling melancholy and strange truth. And, the more you listen to it, the more- like his namesake Will Robinson- you realise he is nowhere near as lost in space as you first suspected.

The Adelaide Review, No.173, February, 1998, p.38-9.

Kenny Rogers and Reba McEntire

Published: 1998-04-17

Adelaide Entertainment Centre

15 April, 19998.

Murray Bramwell

When Kenny Rogers last toured, ten years ago, he performed with Dolly Parton. Which sure proves that he’s not afraid of a bit of competition. This time, opening his Australian tour in Adelaide, he shares the stage with yet another country pop luminary, Reba McEntire- and it is not hard to see why, between them, they have sold 120 million albums. The Kenny and Reba show has it all. It looks good, it sounds great and the stars make it so durn easy to be there.

After the opening duet, Kenny goes backstage while Reba starts carving up with Why Haven’t I Heard From You. The riff could be Chuck Berry, and her young band- dressed in basic black to highlight Reba’s mulberry, designer-spangled jacket- is already on the mark. After greeting us warmly in a heavy Oklahoma drawl Reba mists up for one of her signature hits. And Still. An intro from a lonely keyboard, some guitar fills and then, with a thud, we hit that plateau of bass and drum from which vocals soar into the aching altitudes of country heartbreak.

Switching us to the big stage screens for some howdies from her family and clips of Reba on American chat shows, the singer gives us familiar TV reference points. This show is like Ricki Lake, with a live band. A costume change to iridescent emerald buckskins, some perky Oklahoma Swing, and Reba moves a little closer to emancipation. Not exactly radical. But Falling Out of Love, The Fear of Being Alone, and Is There Life Out There, suggest that, these days, it’s not just about standing by your Y- chromosome.

Relaxed and affable, a few pounds lighter, his silver beard trimmed back to a goatee, Kenny Rogers takes the stage for a medley of hits and a lot of audience participation. Bringing up the house lights he chats to the crowd. Turning to Malcolm, a good-natured fan in the front row, Rogers offers ten dollars American for every hit he can recognise. Malcolm gets a bit flustered but Kenny pays out anyway, crooning those first editions like Ruby and Reuben James which have been very good to him through the years.

His band is hot, with a top notch horn section. Rogers sings all the way from the forties to this year’s album, with its title song, Across My Heart and the John Hiatt standard, Have a Little Faith. Peeling banknotes off the roll and sending them down to Malcolm, Kenny Rogers breathes life into the mega-platinums -Lucille, Lady, Islands in the Stream and -wouldn’t you just know it ?- some duets with Reba, his grainy old voice mingling with her wonderful vibrant twang. They close with I Feel Sorry For Anyone who Isn’t Me Tonight. And, after the dealing’s done, I’m pretty much thinking the same thing.

The Australian, April 17, 1998, p.16.

Arlo Carte

Published: 1998-05-01

Arlo Guthrie

Norwood Concert Hall

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

You can get anything you want- at Alice’s Restaurant. Just walk right in. It’s around the back, just half a mile from the railway track. When I first read, in1967, in Sing Out, the folkie equivalent of Burke’s Peerage, that Arlo Guthrie, the son of the legendary Woody Guthrie, had just created a sensation at the Newport Folk Festival with a twenty minute song called Alice’s Restaurant, I was intrigued. When the album was released a few months later, I bought it on sight and proceeded to play it to long-suffering friends and acquaintances with as much enthusiasm as if I had written it myself.

By 1967, folk music, and its subsidiary, protest music, was in some disrepair. Times They Are A-Changing had become Blonde on Blonde, Donovan was on acid and Percy Faith and his Orchestra had probably just done a cover ofWhere Have all the Flowers Gone ?. There was Barry McGuire, of course, singing P.F. Sloan’s kitschy Eve of Destruction. And the demented spectre -back in 1964- of Pete Seeger at Newport, restrained by pacifists from putting an axe through the cables when Dylan played his first electric concert.

Arlo Guthrie, with his zany, unlikely album, brought an olive branch between the generations. Raised in a radical household in Brooklyn he was the son of famous parents. Woody, by the mid-1950s stricken with Huntingdon’s Chorea, had almost single-handedly written the soundtrack for the Great Depression. His mother had danced for Martha Graham. Leadbelly used to visit his house, so did the Weavers, Josh White, Cisco Houston and Rambling Jack Elliot. Arlo’s family was mobbed up with the sort of people that made Senator Joe McCarthy froth at the mouth. Commo-nists, and Jewish people who believed in inalienable freedoms.

But Arlo was also a kid of the sixties. Alice’s Restaurant was like a Loving Spoonful jug band song, even if it took him nearly twenty minutes to get to the point. And its catchy little tune started to drive you a bit crazy. Unless, of course, you’d had some reefer, and then it didn’t sound too bad at all. So, here was a way to keep the discussion going, without preaching, without hitting people over the head. 1967 was a bad year in Indo-China and a year later Richard Nixon was coming back from the swamp to be elected President. Things were serious, but Arlo Guthrie also made them fun.

And, amazingly, thirty years on, he still has the gift. Now his unfashionably long curls are as grey as a badger and his son Abe, assisting on electric keyboard, is probably already older than his dad when he hit the big time, but Arlo Guthrie can still make an audience laugh and think at the same time.

After a likeable set from Jodie Martin, including a winsome reading of Subterranean Homesick Blues, the Guthries, pere and fils, take the stage for two hours of the old, the very old and some of the new. Chilling of the Evening for openers, almost waltz tempo with some tasty 12 string playing from Arlo. Then there’s time for some chat. Arlo is, after all, a raconteur, with a folksy, understated style which sits well with an Australian audience. He likes to tell stories- particularly if they are against himself. It’s his most distinctive tactic. Psychologically he is a Gandhian. Meanwhile, Abe, who’s no doubt heard it all before, smiles quietly and, probably, dreams of forming a garage band with the runaway scions of other fifty-something hippies.

While not high profile for a while, Arlo has had a steady output- more than twenty albums on his Rising Son label, a thriving website - Arlonet, and a number of philanthropic activities with the Guthrie Centre and the Guthrie Foundation both based- wouldn’t you just know it? - at that old Trinitarian church in Stockport, Massachusetts where the massacree happened in the first place. Among other projects he has recreated the Alice’s Restaurant album - right down to the cover art. Except now the candlelit diner in the bowler hat is distinctly middle-aged.

Characteristically , Arlo recalls that the same day Alice, which was recorded in one take before a live audience, was released, the Beatles launched Sgt Pepper. Laughing out loud, he marvels at the comparative sophistication of fab four. Then - can you believe this ? -when he put out his remake CD a year or two back, the Beatles gezumped him again, this time with the Anthology releases.

The playlist is a mixture. Percy’s Song from Basement Dylan, a Woody classic- 1913 Massacre, The Motorcycle Song , with its infamously execrable rhymes- “I don’t want a pickle/I just want to ride my motor-sickle” Then, in a sensational display of fingerpicking on his Martin 6-string, Arlo unlocks the mysteries of Big Bill Broonzy with Key to the Highway.

After interval Guthrie performs his magnum opus- all eighteen minutes twenty of it. Except, that it keeps getting longer. Especially when he pauses to tell another yarn. About Chip Carter, Jimmy’s boy, telling him that when the Carters moved in to the White House there was some of the Nixon LP collection still there and amongst it was a copy of Alice’s Restaurant. Weird don’t you think ? Arlo ponders the daddy of all conspiracy theories - that one of the key erasures on the Watergate Tapes was exactly eighteen minutes and twenty seconds long.

The new material is strong but less distinctive. The Vet lament, When a Soldier Makes it Home, reflects a new rapprochement in the post anti-war movement, Wake Up Dead, on an AIDS theme, is all the more moving by being admirably short on sentimentality. Paying tribute to Steve Goodman, Arlo cranks up his 12-string for City of New Orleans and concludes with a long story about being a Guthrie, his mother’s visit to China and a lateral reading of This Land is Your Land.

He mordantly notes that Woody, every day of his life an anti-establishment man, has now become a postage stamp- and not just an ordinary one either. Like, airmail, man. Arlo lives comfortably in a famous shadow, just as the amiable young Abe presently does. If Woody was still around now he’d be doing all kinds of stuff, muses Arlo. He’d probably be down at the docks, singing a song or two.

Closing with the Leadbelly crooner, Irene Goodnight, the Guthries give us a further benediction from the American populist canon. It might be said that Arlo is a lovable relic of a lost cause. But I’m not so sure. There is a steel in that good-humour, and a quiet certainty that the golden rule might still be a good one. Whatever it is, Arlo Guthrie can still get you to take a stroll around an idea before you jump on it. And that’s an art that’s always in short supply.

Coming Up in May

6- 30 May. Master Class. Terrence McNally’s close encounter with Maria Callas. Directed by Rodney Fisher. Featuring Amanda Muggleton. Playhouse.

6- 9 May. The Flight. Restless Dance Company. The Space.

13 May. Steve James. Texas blues wizard. Governor Hindmarsh.

The Adelaide Review, No.176, May, 1998, p.28.

Funtime

Published: 1998-08-01

Neil Finn

Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Split Enz was a highly accomplished cubist band with wonky costumes and a repertoire of angular, elliptical songs when lead singer Tim Finn sent back to Te Awamutu for his younger brother. Enter Kid Eager. Neil Finn. With the sublime melody and harmonies ofI Got You, he showed Split Enz their true colours and propelled them into the Top Ten.

And Neil Finn just kept on going. After the Enz; Crowded House. One of the most successful bands to come from the Pacific rim, gloriously concluded with four albums and a farewell party for a hundred thousand on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.

Some wondered, even some inside the band, whether Crowded House wound up too soon. Maybe there was more to do. Maybe their principal song writer, band leader and driving force would get caught in the cul de sac of unfocused solo projects or versions of the Brothers Finn.

Well that was before Try Whistling This (EMI). Any fears that Neil Finn might be McCartney after the Beatles were blown clean away with a collection of songs as brimful of pop invention and musical layering as he has yet produced.

Onstage for a well-filled if not crowded house at Thebarton Theatre Neil Finn is having a fine time. He is heralded by the theme to The Andy Griffith Show then, with a measure of defiance perhaps, he launches in to Last One Standing. The trademarks are all there. The jingle-jangle acoustic strumming and pattering drum rhythms cresting at the first chorus into perfectly pitched three part harmonies. King Tide follows. Haunting pulsing keyboards are matched with gently keening vocals. The changes come - heavy chords at the bridge and then Finn goes into full cry. The guitar gently echoes that George Harrison vibrato. The White Album is here, there and everywhere but, as ever with Finn- while utterly in the mode- he is never derivative.

After the Crowdie favourite Not the Girl You Think You Are, the Whistling continues. Dream Date -“remove yourself from the past” - his sweet tenor reaching into David Crosby realms while the guitar, rippling with wah wah, toughens into a biting rock sound which, just as it always used to with Crowded House, makes Neil Finn a surprisingly more robust live musician than you expect from the albums. Faster Than Light is encased in solarised wattage, the washes of greens, browns and dense blues designed by Finn’s partner Sharon effortlessly fit the moods and patterns of the music.

This tour is a family affair. Finn’s young son Liam plays a handy second guitar, with Niall Mackin on keyboards doing the fills and links and classy stuff that Mark Hart used to do. After a fine reading of Distant Sun, the stage clears and Finn takes to the piano for a House singalong. The crowd swoons and sways but he can’t get started. he wants to sing Last Day in June but is stuck for lines. Anybody know them ? he calls out, and with instant response a bloke in the second row obliges. He knows them all and Finn, ever more relaxed as the night proceeds, periodically calls him out for further questions. Its Mastermind quips Finn, your special subject The Songs and Lyrics of Neil Finn.

There is nothing big-headed about it. With his olive green shirt, dark suit and his spiky, cocky-crest hair the singer could be related to that ordinary looking kid in The Andy Griffith Show. The one who turned out to be Ron Howard.

It is a full-on playlist. Try Whistling This sounds majestic. Sinner is larger than disk and, in a return to a galaxy not so far away, Private Universe gets the spacy twelve minute treatment. It is guitar/ keyboard rock at its best. And the rhythm section isn’t too bad either, Robert Moore on bass and Michael Barker on drums laying a tight resonant foundation for Finn’s luminous guitar. The set closes with the old Enz fave, One Step Ahead and a meditative version ofShe Will Have Her Way.

It has been high quality stuff and the crowd loves it. Just as well Finn has saved up some biggies for a long encore. Loose Tongue and Twisty Bass ,two rippers from the new CD, I Got You from the mists of time, Don’t Dream It’s Over- what they call in a New Zealand an enthem- and, rather unexpectedly, Addicted, the oddly confessional little coda to the solo album. “So far, we’ve come so far, “he sings. Neil Finn has a new album, a new band and a new lease of life - and it looks like he’s only just begun.

The Adelaide Review, No. 179, August 1998, pp. 29-30.

Time Lord

Published: 1998-09-01

Bob Dylan (with Patti Smith)

Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Last time Bob Dylan visited our part of the planet he had Bonnie Raitt on the bill. Patti Smith is more of a statement. Or, at least she makes it so. In skinny jeans, a crumpled orange top and a shapeless black jacket Smith coils around the microphone stand and opens with People Have the Power- Elephants Memory-style agitprop from her Dream of Life album.

The Widow of Punk is in good voice. There are none of the jitters reported from the Melbourne concerts. Especially as the four guitar piece band swings straight into The Wicked Messenger. Composed by Bob Dylan ladies and gentleman. And a creepy, hard guitar version it is too. Gnarly and black -Dylan out of the House of Usher.

Then Footnote to Howl. Slow, chiming guitars and Smith’s tensile recitative, reminding us that, after all that dreadful poetry and jazz stuff from the fifties, she was the one who really knew how to put words with the lyre. Allen Ginsberg’s Beat classic, always archly self-conscious in his readings, takes on new force, augmented by electrics and Smith’s wailing soprano sax.

Patti Smith keeps climbing. Dancing Barefoot, her top ten hit: Because the Night, a new song - Beneath the Southern Cross and Dead City. For the punk classic Rock’n’Roll Nigger , she tears all the strings off her guitar and plays more barrages of Roland Kirk sax-honk. “This is the only weapon we need for the 21st century “ she bellows, holding up a Fender sprouting broken strings- and, forever young, the band closes the set with Rocking in the Free World.

Will you please welcome- a velvety baritone announces- Columbia recording artist, Bob Dylan. A thirty seven year career, forty- something albums and a Grammy earlier this year. Bob Dylan has, it seems, had several lifetimes- and a near death experience last year makes one more. The big difference between this tour and his previous debacle in1992 is the confidence that comes with last year’s album, Time Out of Mind. As ever with Dylan, just when you start to count him out, he comes back better than ever. It happened with Highway 61, with John Wesley Harding, Blood on the Tracks and Oh Mercy.

But Time out of Mind is something else. It is like Lear. In its plainness and atavistic clarity it could be late Yeats or the unsparing self-portraits of Rembrandt. The comparisons may seem preposterous but there is no parallel for Dylan in popular music. No one has grown old in music before. Chuck Berry hasn’t, John Lennon only started to, Elvis Presley wouldn’t have. Not even the songs of experience we associate with country music take their own pulse the way Dylan does in songs which are both strongly personal and written- as Yeats once put it- in ice and ancient salt .

Bob Dylan’s Adelaide concert is auspicious. It is his 999th on what he himself calls his Neverending Tour. It began in 1988 and it ploughs on, scrutinised by fans and annotated on websites such as Expecting Rain. Dylan’s summer festival appearances in Europe back in July were, by all reports, getting rather eccentric. His Australian tour, beginning in Melbourne with an already legendary two and half hour blast at the Mercury Lounge, shows Bob is back on track.

Onstage at the Entertainment Centre with his four piece band and great clouds of incense, Dylan is looking good. Decked out in black morning coat with white shirt and bowtie he looks like an old rocker. There is a touch of Buddy Holly here, and as the night progresses and he tries a few…moves, that flappy right leg seems to be channelling late fifties Elvis Aron Presley. For openers the band is ripping through Leopard-Skin Pill-box Hat. Lead guitarist Larry Campbell, unperturbed by Bob’s individual sense of tempo, is doing the Mike Bloomfield bits. Like so much else on Blonde on Blonde this is vintage R’n’B.

Long Black Coat, another concert regular, is next. Drummer David Kemper lays a solid beat while Bucky Baxter adds a singing pedal steel. The sound is huge, the mix a bit murky but the band is like a great engine. Dylan snarls out the lyrics, over-enunciating - “someone is out there/ beating on a dead horse.” Well it isn’t Bob, whose version of Cold Irons Bound from the latest CD is even stronger than the recorded one. Tony Garnier’s bass ripples through as Bob and Campbell chug their guitars. A rust brown light sprays across the stage. Dylan’s voice sounds like barbed wire - “I’m twenty miles outside town/ I’m cold irons bound.”

The band goes into a huddle and come out with a wonky reading of I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight. They finish in four and half different places but it’s very likeable. I Don’t Believe You an oldie from Another Side is a surprise while Silvio is not. It is his most performed song on the NE Tour. Regulars say it’s time he ditched it from the set but it sounds like great rock and roll to me.

For a collection of acoustic numbers the band re-arms. Baxter is on mandolin, Garnier on upright bass while Bob and Campbell pick their way through Don’t Think Twice, a Spanish sounding Desolation Row- rather more attentuated than the three minute forty second version Dylan gabbled through back in ’92, a splendid Tangled Up in Blue and a wistful Forever Young. Still an anthem after all these years,Times get a change of tempo but the lyrics only seem to gather in meaning.

A shift back to the electrics, a sturdy version of Till I Fell in Love With You and the band is taking a bow. They have played loud and hard. Led by Dylan, whose vigorous if approximate fingering has dominated the sound, the band has taken up his challenge to come in on familiar songs at quirky angles - finding a victory here, losing a chance there. Songs written thirty years ago have again become sketches and works-in-progress. Dylan has made it abundantly clear. When you are playing a hundred concerts a year for more than a decade you don’t want to be gathering no moss.

Which is maybe why the encores begin with a ring-in. Matchbox. Never before heard from Bob. Carl Perkins out of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Then, Love Sick, Dylan’s weary meditation on courtly love is the last of the new songs we get to hear. For closing the lights come up and Bob capers for the underlings gathered at the edge of the stage. Rainy Day Women in its all ramshackle glory and two final acoustics: It Ain’t Me Babe and somewhat predictably, Blowin’ in the Wind.

It has been a harmonica-free night and Bob has almost done a duck walk. Apart from introducing his band at a speed an auctioneer would have been proud of, Dylan has not uttered a word. He has delivered seventeen songs from a possible four hundred and we are well pleased. After all, there isn’t just one Bob Dylan. There have been, and will be, many of them. They are like time lords, like Dr Who. Some with scarves, some with hats, some hidden from view in anoraks. This time, he wore a bow-tie and boots of Spanish leather. Next time it might be a long black coat. Or a leopard-skin pill-box hat.

The Adelaide Review, No.180, September, 1998, pp.40-1.

Mental Notes

Published: 1998-10-01

Mental as Anything Flinders University Tavern

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Mentals have turned twenty-one and a right old pub crawl of passage it has been. From their nippy beginnings playing on top of a pool table in the Unicorn hotel in Paddington to their current chic in the art scene they have, you might say, done things their way. Even though they were part of an amazing profusion of local bands which included The Sports, Jo Jo Zep, the Oils, Cold Chisel and INXS, they were nothing like any of them. Untouched by the bombast of big guitars or the ferocity of punk, they just steered their own little coracle of fun and made songs that are as fresh now as they were when Regular records first pressed them.

Not that the Mentals came from nowhere. Their exuberant pop has links with sixties bands like Bonzo Dog, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky et al, even the Kinks. There are Ringo echoes, and affinities with later bands like Madness and the Stranglers. But the Mental as Anything mix of tuneful top 40, rockabilly and, what is now called lounge music, remains highly individual.

Always full of beans on Countdown, and notable pioneers of the video clip, the Mentals actually belong to that golden age of pub rock when touring was hectic and highly lucrative. Tonight the crowd at Flinders Uni is small, but devoted- and the band is ready to hit the hits. Too Many Times sings Greedy Smith with his huge, sunny grin and David Twohill (the former Wayne Delisle) and Peter O’Doherty remind us what a great drum and bass sound the Mentals have.

And this is a line-up that has truly endured. All five originals celebrating their twenty one years. They are a band with nicknames which have become household words- Martin Plaza, Reg Mombasa, Greedy Smith- and their onstage signatures rival the Monkees or the Fab Four. There’s Martin, with his rocker pompadour and a jacket made from his mother’s curtains, Wayne- now Dave- looking like a chartered accountant, Greedy, all smiles in a blaze of hedonistic colour and Reg in the official band t-shirt, reminding us that, along with Mr Plaza, he is a founder member of Mambo, Bondi’s answer to William Morris and Laura Ashley.

If You Leave Me (Can I Come Too). Greedy is again on lead with close harmonies from Martin and the O’Doherty siblings. Classic Mentals - heartbreak pop with an absurd premise. Who could forget the clip of the whole band traipsing behind Greedy and his exasperated video girlfriend. Next it’s Money from the excellent new album, Garage (Festival) . “Money won’t make you happy” -that old Parlophone platitude is back again. But, sings a deadpan Plaza, “it sure won’t make you sad.” Reg has a turn with Nigel, a song as weird as the black-edged, Hieronymous Bosch suburbia in his paintings. And Martin Plaza sings his cover of the old Unit Four Plus Two hit, Concrete and Clay. His vibrato soars while Greedy enthusiastically jabs at the keyboard for that cheesy farfisa sound.

The new track Just My Luck is sounding good, especially alongside a couple of greatests- Live it Up and the bouncy calypso of Spirit Got Lost . Then, Mr Natural , a live favourite with strong funk bass lines and let-it-rip Reg guitar, and for a Marc Hunter tribute-I’m Still in Love With You with Martin on lead. Berserk Warriors, Peter O’Doherty’s homage to Abba and all things Viking, gets a whirl and if you squint a bit you can almost see Reg in alfoil re-enacting the infamous clip from Countdown’s past.

The setlist keeps rolling on. Romeo and Juliet - Greedy is in exultant form, Try Not to Break Me and, to close, the Mentals front bar classic, The Nips Are Getting Bigger. Martin Plaza’s Buddy Holly nasal delivery is undiminished by two decades of repetition. But there is no way it stops here. The crowd is bouncing, swooning, singing in full voice. So the Mentals get lateral with the repertoire. Greedy picks away at the Kurtzweil for the shape of Bent Fabric’s Alley Cat. Reg and the rhythm section dissolve intoWipe Out, Plaza pours it on forWhole Lotta Shakin’ and Rock’n’Roll Music and the night ends with a touch of Wreckless Eric andWide Wide World..

Sometimes artists are so much part of the landscape that we forget how original they are. Mental as Anything have produced several dozen first rate songs. They all write, they all sing. They have created inventive, witty video clips and some of the best cover art seen in this country. They anticipated the lounge craze and, through Mambo, have captured the united colours of the Australian bizarre. Playing live they are still more fun than fun. There is no better time to celebrate them.

The Adelaide Review, October, 1998.

Smoking Guns

Published: 1998-11-01

1996

The Sex Pistols

with Skunk Anansie

Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In 1975 the Sex Pistols proved you could sell anything. Now, with their Filthy Lucre Tour they are proving that you can sell anything twice. Never has a band been surrounded by such legend. Despite their best efforts not even Oasis can generate the tabloid loathing and fan fascination that, in their heyday, the Pistols engendered with their chaotic, apparently inept, anti-sound. They are the apotheosis of Punk, lords of low-fi, the stake through the heart of bourgeois pop. They are proof, as their Svengali manager Malcolm McLaren gleefully highlighted, that record companies will do anything to court those they most despise.

Back on the road, the Pistols have re-assembled the original firm - Paul Cook on drums, guitarist Steve Jones, exiled bassist Glen Matlock and of course, singer John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten. Despite their short three year history the band has a lengthy discography of repackaging including the Sid catalogue, the Ronnie Biggs sessions and a swag of bootlegs. It was smart of their current label to release an official tour album from their first Filthy Lucre show- the Finsbury Park concert in June- because already the unauthorised CDs are growing like hydra. As ever, everybody else is making a quid off the band.

Not that the chaps will be doing badly with a top ticket price and a playlist that doesn’t keep them out too late. As the crowds gathered at Thebarton the speculation about who would turn up for a Pistols gig was soon answered. Average age forty. Retired punks, old rogues, a few loonies conspicuous in their Third Reich t-shirts, and ordinary punters out for a bit of fun.

And that’s what they got. Support band Skunk Anansie, led by young black singer Skin, sets the pace with Let’s Get Political and a set from their Paranoid and Sunburnt CD. Selling Jesus, Little Baby Swatikkka and She’s My Heroine all hit home as Skin bobs and bounces among the rest of the band -Ace on guitar, Cass Lewis on bass and Mark Richardson, solid on drums. SA work hard, their musicianship emerging with each number. The highpoint was Skin’s moody femme love song, Weak. Weak as I am, no tears for you.

But, despite the three band support, we were there for the Unfab Four. Ever since the announced tour there have been jokes about the band’s musical proficiency and whether Lydon’s onstage antics would rival the gobbing, sneering, incoherent spleen of the Pistols at the height of their powerlessness.

As the snot-green stage lights reveal an elaborate backcloth of old Daily Mirror headlines, the band saunters on. Jones, with t-shirt and tatts, takes up his guitar. Cook climbs into the drum seat, Matlock still looks weedy under his bass. And then…. it’s Johnny. With a fetching corniced hairstyle in green and orange, a blue t-shirt and baggy black shorts he looks like Pere Ubu in a party hat. He stares imperiously at the crowd and waddles into Bodies, an oldie and a goodie which like the rest of the set comes from the definitive anthology, Never Mind the Bollocks, it’s…

White lights flood the auditorium as Lydon (he is never going to be anyone’s Rotten tonight) high steps backward and forwards to the moshing, waving, blissed-out enthusiasts at the foot of the stage. On to Seventeen (Lazy Sod) he holds the mike out to the crowd for some help with the chorus. It’s community singing. It could be an Arsenal crowd in anticipation of a comfortable win. We’re not worthy, Lydon chortles, prostrating himself as the audience cheers the end of No Feeling and heads into the Pistols’ Number Two hit from 1977, banned from the airwaves of the free world but known in every house of the realm- God Save the Queen/No Future. Lydon is Lord of Misrule, the punk Mr Punch, rolling his unmatched eyes and fluting his distinctive recitative above the three chord thump of what turns out to be a respectably tight trio.

It’s a love affair with the crowd. Lydon is beaming. You’re a fucking sight better than Melbourne, I’ll tell you that, chaps. He’s all flattery and conspiracy. Then it’s Liar and a beaty version of Stepping Stone before the band move into a slowed down rock version of Submission. It’s not half bad. Lydon’s vocals, increasingly dexterous after his PIL stint, are plaintively expressive. The man could be the next Al Bowlly. Holidays in the Sun is also a big favourite. The crowd sings most of it with the house lights up and Lydon full of beans while the band grafts away. Nice town, nice people, coos the former Mr Rotten, and the Sex Pistols close the set with We’re So Pretty and their tribute to a former employer, EMI.

But it wouldn’t be a Pistols show without the A word. In rapturous encore the crowd sings Anarchy in the UK like it were the words to Blake’s Jerusalem. I am a Anarchy. The Jamaican patois mixing in with the angelic chorus of football hooliganism at its zenith. Jones conducts with his index fingers, Cook bangs away on the drums, Matlock looks like Pete Best at a Beatles reunion and Lydon struts about, his once ferretty frame now in podgy middle life.

They finish with Problems and the show is over. Fifty five minutes running time, as the advance publicity had indicated. That’s about a dollar a minute, customers. But no-one’s bothered. In the nineties theme park we’ve just had “The Sex Pistols”. They now play in inverted commas. Not only is there no future, there is also no past. The Sex Pistols have become their own tribute band.

The Adelaide Review, No.158, November, 1998, p.38.

Showtime

Published: 1999

The Dave Graney Show

Flinders Uni Tavern

December, 1998

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Is this Dave Graney ? Sans purple safari suit ? Sans mohair trilby ? Sans that killer band the Coral Snakes ? Well… yes. It is a time of change for the former, self-anointed King of Pop, and a testing time at that. Dave Graney is making some career moves and it is important that he gets them right. Important for him. And, as admirers of his quirky, literate talents, important for us too.

After a succession of albums - let’s not, just for once, call it “a body of work”- Graney has covered some territory. He has lived on the plains, he has been hunter and prey, he has been lured by the tropics. He has even been there when he didn’t wanna travel. He has been soft and sexy and, on one single occasion, kinda sporty.

Song writers have mid-career problems rather like novelists and auteur film makers. Several generations ago Dave Graney, like Paul Kelly or Deborah Conway or Nick Cave, would have been a poet about to publish a volume of selections from his back catalogue. Just as Elvis Costello and Graham Parker are the Auden and Spender of their time, and new talents now would rather be Jarvis Cocker or Beth Gibbons than a new poet on the Faber list, so many of our best writers publish on vinyl and CD.

Which means that the temporary boom time which popular music accords those who succeed is abberant rather than usual. By pop star criteria, most performers are in commercial decline after a third or fourth album. Especially in Australia where it is so hard to build an audience and even harder to keep one. So we should consider-and nurture- the maturing, adventurous work of musicians over thirty in the same way as novelists and arthouse directors. Otherwise we face a drastic reduction in species and unfettered cultural imbecility. The forces of Globalisation would have the whole planet, at any given time, buying the same ten CDs - and the list of last year’s best sellers suggests that when the big media companies do have their way, we have a popular diet so low in protein it is life-threatening.

So here’s Dave Graney with a cut-down band touring a no-frills album - and bloody good on him. It is a hard row to hoedown. The turnout at Flinders Uni is what you might call bonsai and they don’t seem to recognise anything which predates The Devil Drives . But Dave is unfazed. He is relaxed and good-humoured, reminisces on his brief encounter with tertiary studies, checks the room for any of his Coorong cousins and takes the band into some vintage repertoire.

It is momentarily unsettling. Graney, long-term devotee of Serge Gainsbourg, and lounge lizard before the craze, has always liked to sing it soft and soulful. But is this reallyThe Night of the Wolverine ? It sounds like The Wolverine from Ipanema . The band is still getting settled. Partner in life, Clare Moore on drums, Adele Pickhaver on bass- Dave is now an EO employer- and Stuart Perera, adept but restrained on guitar. Graney is up front crooning and strumming his acoustic Maton. In his t-shirt and Ed Harry slacks he looks like a Mitre Ten manager on holiday. No hat, no mutton chops or Mexican moustache, no crushproof, babypoo-coloured bri-nylon threads. This is Graney unvarnished, unplugged and no longer hands free. The Jackie Chan arm and kick movements, the reptile backing band -all gone. And now what’s this they’re playing?Three Dead Passengers in a Second Hand Ford from Ipanema ?

He switches to new material from The Dave Graney Show, the current CD from Festival. No Pockets in a Jumpsuit. Graney code for no pockets in a shroud. You can’t take it with you. Especially on stage. Sometimes even the President of the United States has to stand naked. “There is nowhere to hide/ you can’t go back/ you can’t go forward.” No pockets in a jumpsuit. It is an impossibly arch metaphor but Graney, ever persuasive, can take us there. It doesn’t quite hit the mark tonight though. Dave still needs the pilgrims to draw a little closer so he can sell his snake oil. Your Masters Must be Pleased With You is, similarly, too new and understated to find its critical mass.

So it is Feelin’ Kinda Sporty that gets the show on the road. The band is louder, Perera slashes some more voltage, the crowd starts to bob about and stand close in. Now Dave can mix those spells and potions, weave some stories, run a bit of narrative, you know what I am saying. And now, even the new stuff has some edge -Aristocratic Jive, with an eerie girlie chorus from Moore and Pickhaver, and the Keating-esque I’m Gonna Do You You Slowly. “I’ve seen the future and you’re not there.”

Graney snarls some, but the wit is self-reflexive. And who else has such an ear for the nuances of masculine bluff and counter bluff. Steeped in the tropes of noir fiction, its downbeat despair and laconic nihilism, Dave Graney is smart enough to know where it is he fits. He is not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. He writes about Warren Oates but he is really Kevin Spacey. He is the gimpy one, lurking among the usual suspects. But then, hey, who is Keyser Soze? You know what I am saying ?

As he revisits the canon, that lycra-draped body of work, Dave reminds us of those terrific Graney signatures -You’re Too Hip, I’m Gonna Release Your Soul, The Stars, Baby, The Stars, and Rock and Roll is Where I Hide. There are other strong contenders from the new CD - Between Times, a ballad inspired by James M. Cain. The vocal arrangements from Clare Moore are distinctive, though the live take, without a synth, lacks the lushness and complexity of the recorded instrumentation. On the album, if you listen closely, you can even hear the postman ring twice.

For a cheery encore Dave gets out his blue slouch hat and the band goes hard onYou Wanna be There and The Sheriff of Hell. The intro to The Birds and the Goats gives the former King a chance to wonder, one last time, about the family values of his country cousins and the set ends with You Wanna be Loved. It has been a soft and sexy show, the absence of the Coral Snakes is evident- Gordy Blair’s ruminating bass, Rod Haywood’s tough guitar, Robin Casinader’s cascading piano.

This is like Paul Kelly immediately after the split with the Messengers. It’s a nervy time all round and none of us is easy about the change. But this is Dave Graney’s Show and his new work, like all of his output, takes some listening space to settle in. But it is no time to start getting snickery and writing King of Pop obits. It’s like I said with novelists. The Dave Graney Show isThe Glass Key not The Maltese Falcon, The Little Sister not Farewell My Lovely . And we do want to be there even though Dave is making us travel a little further than last time. You know what I’m saying ?

The Adelaide Review, No.184, January 1999. p.31.

Faithless Heaven

Published: 1999

Tuesday, 11 pm.

Faithless

Heaven

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

UK composite, Faithless has been gaining ground for about three years now. From the debut single, Salvea Mea to their album success, Reverence , the band has been getting regular airplay and recognition for their cross-over success. For cross-over success, read mainstream. Which is why even a stranger to Clubland such as I, might have stumbled over the techno energies and quirky lyrics of their single, Insomnia. And also why I am at Heaven, filing past the metal detectors on a Tuesday night, to join a packed house of Faithless faithful, primed for the white light and some serious dance beats.

The key to the Faithless success might be that they are so multiskilled as to be three bands in one. There is the rapid fire AAAABBBBBCCCCC rhyme scheme of veteran rapper Maxi Priest, the pop ballads from singer/songwriter Jamie Catto and the wall of sound keyboards from former rave DJ, Sister Bliss. And now that we are well used to the disappearance of the author and can go all the way back to Phil Spector for the Svengali Producer, it comes as less of a surprise that the Faithless sound is credited to the musical alchemy of Producer/Mixer, Rollo. It is he, camera shy and refuser of interviews, who is the eminence gris who has brought together Maxi, Catto, Sister Bliss and their respective genres, to create what is in fact, a dance club version of an old style showband.

As the stage colours layer over each other, greens and cerises, drilling through dense white fog, Rollo’s tone poem overture unfolds. The Garden. Twittering birdcalls are fed into a slow synth fugue which then shifts pace to a funk beat. Dave Randall’s acoustic guitar tinkles, Sister Bliss plays some Satie-ish piano chords and the dance floor sways as one. Through the coloured smog eight figures have gradually taken up position.

Now make that nine. To huge applause, Maxi Priest, the lanky English Jamaican vocalist glides along the stage front, his slim arms draped in a stylishly ample lounge suit. He hits the mark with Reverence- “You don’t need eyes to see/ that you need vision”. But Maxi has also covered the waterfront- as he reminds us with She’s My Baby, his gritty confession of precocious sex from their current CD, Sunday 8pm (Festival)

Then Catto and Bliss work away at their anvils for another extended prologue of pulsing beat overlaid with staccatto melodies and synth washes. Add to this percussionist Sudha Kheterpal, the thudding bass from Aubrey Nunn and power drummer Andrew Treacy and it is like the rhythm of a locomotive, that old in-out of piston and valve which has made sexual metaphor of machines since their invention. As Robert Hughes reminds us, this is what Duchamp meant by the Bride Stripped Bare. And it is definitely what Maxi and seven hundred ravers mean byTake the Long Way Home.

Jamie Catto delivers a ballad, Angeline from Reverence , full of nifty guitar trills from Randall and back-ups from June Hamm and Susan Noel. But it is Maxi’s return for Insomnia -“I can’t get no slee-eep…” followed by a torrent of scudding sound- and the hard-edged Bring My Family Back, that is the centre of interest. He is the Faithless sound, and his lyrics, matured by experience and Buddhist calm, are much more appealing than the psychotic hostilities often associated with hip-hop.

Which is why Postcards, Maxi’s diary of life on the road has a casual flair and sense of the particular which is genuinely poetic and, amidst the generic milking-machine sounds of techno, highly distinctive. It is also why Maxi can stand centrestage surrounded by the bombastic drum and bass fanfare of six labouring musicians and announce -“ This is my Church/This is where I heal my hurts/ It’s in natural grace/ or watching young life shape/It’s in minor keys/ Solutions and remedies/ enemies becoming friends/ where bitterness ends/ This is my Church.“

The lyrics are then over-run by a giant tide of pounding beats, pattering rhythms and stitching syncopations that both match and propel the natural pulse and cardiac rate of the Congregation. Tonight, says Maxi without a skerrick of hubris, God is a DJ. That this doesn’t sound merely preposterous, but is instead a rather appealing call to harmonic transcendence is what makes this band worth the visit. A less ironic, intelligent and musically astute outfit would have fallen to earth long before this. So, even if John isn’t more famous than Jesus and God isn’t a DJ, the Faithless crowd is having the time of its life. And, I have to say that two hours in Heaven has done quite a lot to heal my hurts as well.

Commissioned for The Adelaide Review but not published.

Summer Reign

Published: 1999-02-01

Paul Kelly

with Bic Runga

Heaven II

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly is going on a summer holiday. It seems like we all are when he plays a full tilt set of songs from the South. Words and music from the Australian dry season, songs from the beaches and the Torrens end, from car trips on long, straight roads, or sitting on the porch waiting for the nights to cool.

It’s a Tuesday night and Heaven is as hot as hell. The place is full and the smoke extractors are working overtime. The crowd is in early- for Bic Runga, for Kelly, for the Coopers, for the lot. To get, as the poet said in very different circumstances, the beauty of it hot. This is quite a contrast with last year’s shows at Her Majesty’s. Back in the winter, with the crowd stark sober and waiting for the Greatest Hits they got for Father’s Day. The CD had already gone bananas. Now there are two hundred and seventy thousand of them out there, on shelves, in other people’s houses. And Kelly came on stage with three guitars and Don Walker and played a lot of new stuff about somebody called Charlie Owens and he doesn’t even sing Bradman.

In Heaven there are many mansions. The young pub crowd, kids with dodgy IDs who were hardly born when Randwick Bells was written. The old pub crowd, Kelly freaks who go all the way back to the year Dot, and Post, and the Messengers and all that historical jazz. And the Bic Runga crowd. Sitting close in, waiting for the Christchurch chanteuse with her urchin hair, and her sixties shift dress, and her gorgeous youth. She sings from her remarkable debut album, Drive. It is no wonder that it has outsold everything in New Zealand and now here. It oozes talent and poise. She has arrived ready-made, like Tracy Chapman or Rickie Lee Jones. Her plaintive vocals have echoes of Everything But the Girl but these torch songs are all her own work.

Standing three quarters on to the microphone, Bic Runga is every atom the young diva. We get selections from the album - those one word titles. Drive. Delight. Sorry. And the Hit.Sway. Ashes to Ashes is different, a smartly retro reading of Bowie. The band is lean and as jagged as her phrasing. Colin Brooks is solid on drums, Alan Gregg, alumni of the Mutton Birds, the most under-rated band in Australasia, provides a sinewy bass, while guitarist Peter Minn chugs about and then lets rip on Hey. The crowd wants More. Bic says Sorry. There’s Kelly and the band to get gaffer taped in before ten o’clock.

The band opens up with long chiming chords. Rattatattat from Luscombe, sepulchral handfuls from Bruce Haymes, Hadley’s bass climbing up somewhere deep in the ground and Spencer P. Jones winding up his Fender. Kelly sings it slow and long. I was standing in a schoolyard/ I guess it was sometimes in 1965/ Just me and my friends listening to the radio/ And a song came on called I Feel Fine.Words and Music. Spencer extrudes the riff from Norwegian Wood. It’s heavy and hot and the crowd sways like steam.

The list is all recent. I’ll be Your Lover Now, not a favourite but structurally very sound. She’s Rare., the beat throbby and Kelly’s vocal climbing effortlessly. Then, Careless. Spencer dressed in his SP best -jacket and fedora- glides the pedal steel while Kelly steps lightly through lyrics that go a long way back and a long way down. Except not any more. It’s a Sinatra song now. My Way. There is much more invested in Gutless Wonder, its bitter lyric given a sinister drumbeat, slow and mean. Haymes is full of invention, the guitars are spare and hard. Shane O’Mara is currently back with the Empire and, significant as he has been for Kelly’s sound, Spencer is doing more with less.

After some Kelly standards- I’d Rather Go Blind, Love Never Runs on Time, a rapturously received When I First Met Your Ma - the singer picks up a dobro for Charlie Owens’ Slide Guitar and then switches to an open-tuned acoustic for a new song with a melting melody. Was it called I Only Want One Day ? Whatever, it is a beauty and there is certainly no wondering what From Little Things … will lead to. The crowd is in full anthem. It is a great song and it is now part of our national literature. So is The Boys Light Up of course. But the difference is that this song may actually Overcome.

Nothing on My Mind, a minor opus gets the major treatment. The band opens out and starts to fly. I am standing right by the mixing desk. Behind the bowler’s arm. The sound is huge and handsomely proportioned. Even better for the Bic and Paul duet. Not Melting, even though we all are. Instead, brilliantly eclectic.West End Girls .The Pet Shop Boys, with the band laying clubland beats at our feet like a Neil Tennant tribute group. Kelly returns to Words and Music and a pulsing Beat of Your Heart, Peter Luscombe’s bass drum invading our chest cavities while Spencer scatters long ribboning solos. Gravy, a narrative worthy of Raymond Carver, is followed by To Her Door, a raunchy Tease Me and the old Messengers rick-burner, Pouring Petrol on a Drowning Man.

For the encore the crowd croons Dumb Things, then Kelly makes like Junior Murvin forWe Started a Fire before closing with an unblemished Blush. He and the band have blazed through twenty three songs, all Kelly originals. Plus the Pet Shop Boys. There’s nothing for it now but to head out into the night. The summer night with its starry canopy. Big enough for all of us.

The Adelaide review, No.185, February, 1999. p. 30.

English … and Irish

Published: 1999-04-01

Waterson:Carthy

Altan

Governor Hindmarsh

Eliza Carthy with Saul Rose

Big Star Basement

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Their name may sound like a company of chartered accountants but Waterson:Carthy are an old firm of a very different sort. With more than eighty years experience between them, they are the cornerstones of traditional music in Britain. Martin Carthy, his wife Norma Waterson, their daughter Eliza and son-in-law Saul Rose are a family enterprise to rival such great UK singing families as the Coppers or… the Watersons. Which is to say both Carthy, descended from four generations of singers, and Norma Waterson, descended from five, are part of a succession of indigenous English music which dates back two centuries.

But this is not about carbon dating or the obsessive details of folkloric taxonomy. What makes Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson so remarkable is that they approach their vast and varied repertoire as if it had been written just this morning. They are not “folk singers” in that self-conscious way that Greil Marcus so rightly despises in his chapters, inInvisible Republic , on Bob Dylan’s use of traditional material. In fact it was Martin Carthy who taught Dylan the tune to Lord Randall which he promptly swiped for the Freewheeling album track, Bob Dylan’s Dream. And then there is the story of how Paul Simon heard Martin Carthy’s setting for Scarborough Fair and, with Garfunkel providing harmonies, turned four English herbs into more greenbacks than the entire British folk scene has earned in thirty years.

Not that Martin Carthy is anybody’s idea of a forgotten man. His vocal style, his distinctive guitar settings and his willingness to join any enterprise that looks interesting has meant that he has made classic albums with Fairport fiddler Dave Swarbrick, recorded with Steeleye Span and the Albion Country Band, and now, along with his current band CDs, has recently recorded yet another solo venture, Signs of Life (Topic) which includes Heartbreak Hotel, Sir Patrick Spens, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and even the Bee Gees’ New York Mine Disaster, 1941. The album received a five star rating from no less a mag a la mode, than London’s Q.

Norma Waterson career has been equally impressive. One third of the Watersons, which consisted of her late sister Lal and brother Mike, she hails from Kingston-on-Hull and is simply one of the most accomplished singers you could hope to hear. She also has recorded in various abundance, including songs from Richard Thompson, Billy Bragg and Dave Bromberg as well as American tin pan alley, Sankey hymns and airs, laments and work songs from all around the British Isles.

Performing at the Governor Hindmarsh just days after headlining at the Port Fairy Folk Festival, Waterson: Carthy are looking relaxed and making the most of a balmy Adelaide evening. Martin is wearing a sporty blue Mambo shirt covered in big orange stars. Norma, often sombre-looking in photos, lights up when she greets the crowd. And then there’s the young fry. Eliza, her hair no longer in signature pink spikes, is in basic black and fishnet. Brother-in-law Saul wears brown baggies and industrial strength boots to keep the beat while he labours on a variety of accordions, melodeons, squeezeboxes and other musical wheezies.

They open with some bells and hanky Morris tunes. Saul sets up a spry melody to which Eliza adds a vibrant fiddle, Carthy a strummy bass-heavy guitar and Norma a rattlingly strong triangle. There are plenty of jigs and reels but it is the songs and ballads which make the skin tingle. Norma introduces the songs like they are old friends. There is pride in their flair and wry invention. We Poor Labouring Men unfurls like a weary Yorkshire blues. The harmonies from Norma and Eliza are sublime, as they are for the ballad of that high born lady who goes bush, The Raggle Taggle Gypsies-O , a spirited version learnt from the late Norfolk singer Walter Pardon.

It is a program of contrasts. There are Eliza and Saul hornpipes and jigs, with names like Our Cat Has Kitted and Donnington Lads. And there are ballads such as the Napoleonic variant, Bay of Biscay-o, with Norma Waterson weaving her arms as she intones in a lovely contralto about the woes of separated love and press gang politics. Bows of London is another highlight, with Eliza playing a fiddle raga and Martin supplying oaken second vocals. Jacob’s Well , a Sheffield carol with Blakean images of Christ walking the streets of England is splendidly performed, as is Eliza’s solo Bonny Fisher Boy.

Norma sings Black Muddy River, poignant even without the Richard Thompson solos, and Martin, wonderfully dotty and ever generous to his fellow band members steps forward to sing New Mown Hay, a rendition as fresh as its title. The set, as sublime as any I have in some time, concludes with the emigration ballad When I First Came to Caledonia, the American country tune, Midnight on the Water and, as a nightcap a crooning lullaby, Sleep on Lilleyford. And well may traditional British music rest for forty winks with Waterson:Carthy keeping such careful vigil.

As a bonus for the band’s visit a second program has been arranged by Vic Flierl, Big Star Records honcho - and occasional patron of excellent live music. The basement at Big Star in Rundle Street has been made over for a set from Eliza and Saul Rose. Playing selections from her accalimed Red Rice double set, Eliza Carthy, vivacious and good-natured bounds into a set of jigs -Picking up Sticks/Felton Lonnin and -a tribute to her mum- Kingston Girls. Norma isn’t there but Martin, like a proud father on talent night, beams and cheers as he always does, as if the music is fresh minted and he’s hearing it for the very first time.

Eliza has a lovely vibrant voice, less expressive than Norma’s but full and youthfully fresh. She sings The Americans have Stolen My True Love Away and the marriage song, Tuesday Morning, a ballad from the Copper Family called Forsaken Mermaid and the so-fishy-you can-sniff- it, Herring Song. Particular treats also include Fuse , a sombre little song written by Carthy- with slow sorrowful chords from what must have been a keyboard borrowed from the days of The Garden Path- and a terrific version of Ben Harper’s Walk Away.

Closing with the Mighty Sparrow reggae tune Good Morning Mr Walker, Carthy and Rose are cheered from the tiny basement stage.

There are encores, of course- more jigs and hornpipes and then the Bonny Fisher Boy, a tune Eliza had sung the night before at the Gov, with strange atavistic lyrics about erotic capture. The Fisher Boy, sings Eliza with wide eyes, got hold of me. And, for two nights Waterson:Carthy and Subsidiaries have certainly got hold of us.

It has been quite a month for the Governor Hindmarsh as Altan also are playing in Adelaide after appearing at the Port Fairy kneesup. Led by willowy blonde lead singer and fiddler Mairead ni Mhaonaigh they restake their claim as one of the very best traditional Irish acts around. Opening with the haunting tune Suil Ghorn (Blue Eyes) from their latest CD Runaway Sunday (Virgin) they have the Saturday crowd in a pre-St Pat’s Day swoon.

It is a reel and jig-heavy night with Dermott Byrne on accordion, Ciaran Curran on bouzarre, Daithi Sproule on guitar and Ciaran Tourish brilliant duetting with Mairead. They play Cape Breton jigs and Germans, solo whistle medleys from Tourish and some squeezies from Byrne. Mairead sings a Gaelic love song dedicated to Yehudi Menuhin and reminisces about meeting him when we she was a teenage violinist in Donegal.

I would have preferred more song and less dance- especially more from scholarly looking Daithi Sproule, who sings the Sweeneys Men song My Dearest Dear and might well have dipped further into the repertoire he covers in his solo CD for Green Linnett, A Heart Made of Glass. Mairead ni Mhaonaigh sings I Wish My Love was a Red Red Rose, an Ulster version from Sarah Makem said to predate Robbie Burns, and a favourite wedding song from the Altan Harvest Storm album, Donal Agus Morag. But the night is for reeling and rocking and at night’s end we are left with the ensemble energy of Altan and duelling fiddles fit to raise Cuchulain himself.

The Adelaide Review, No.187, April, 1999, p.36.

Heads bang on heavy night out

Published: 1999-04-21

Adelaide Deep Purple Adelaide Entertainment Centre April 19, 1999. Murray Bramwell

1968 was a very good year for big, loud bombastic British rock bands. And they came in a number of wanted colours. Pink Floyd, Moody Blue, Black Sabbath - and Deep Purple. Now celebrating thirty years in the biz and playing in Adelaide for the first time in fifteen, the prototype heavy music outfit delivers trademark hits to a crowd enthralled by these legends of riff and thump. The fans have come from all over. Young dudes born after the golden age of headbanging, old dudes in for some aural viagra, and there are wives, girlfriends, families, suburbanites, battlers -anyone who has ever heard and never quite forgotten Machine Head, Fireball and other Deep Purple classic vinyl.

Dating back to the days when bands were groups, the Deep Purple lineup is amazingly close to the Mt Rushmore cover of the 1970 album, In Rock. Ritche Blackmore has gone, banished back over the rainbow in the early 90s, but lead singer Ian Gillan, bassist Roger Glover, drummer Ian Paice and keyboard player Jon Lord are all still in the saddle. They’ve been in and out of many bands, including rival firm Black Sabbath, Whitesnake, and various solo ventures, but along with now-established regular Steve Morse on guitar, Deep Purple is back in the pink with an anniversary album, last year’s studio release, Abandon, and a whole lot of touring going on.

On stage at the Entertainment Centre the band opens as they intend to continue. Rapid fire guitar from Morse, Gillan’s high pitched grainy vocals, slabs of Hammond from Jon Lord and relentless thud from Glover and Paice. Ted the Mechanic is the opener and the band clears the pipes. The baton changes from Morse to Lord and back to Gillan while the whole thing bounces on Glover’s bendy bass. They sound like the legion of garage bands they inspired when Deep Purple first invented this stuff, or rather, found a way of cranking it up to eleven.

The show is heavy on sound and light on trimmings. Gillan starts out in a military tunic with golden buttons and silk epaulettes but soon discards that for an XL t-shirt which makes him look like, what he is, a genial host at a barbie. Glover in headscarf, Paice in shades and headband and Morse in leather waistcoat are all telegraphing the same semiotic, things may change but heavy metal is immutable. Jon Lord in gunfighter black, his grey hair tied in a bob, wears lenses like two dark pennies. At nearly fifty eight he is chairman of the keyboard, producing riffs and fills that even Wagner would be ashamed of, but the punters love it.

They play some recent material - Almost Human and Watching the Sky but, inevitably, it is those songs, or shall we say, chord changes, that have been very good to them over the years, that everyone has come to hear. Strange Kind of Woman, Woman from Tokyo, a strobey version of Fireball and Lazy all hit the mark. Then the band goes off to have a cup of cocoa leaving Morse to play an extended demonstration of his effects pedals, a medley from Hendrix, Clapton and Page and, now that the old perps have waddled back onstage, segues into Smoke on the Water.

Perfect Strangers is in good form, with the most interesting lighting design in an otherwise unilluminating evening, but Speed King gets so much solo interruptus that you’ve almost forgotten where they came in. Sometimes the band, in showing they can do anything, make you wish they’d just do something.

The encores are full tilt though. Black Night is straight up rock. Jon Lord has finished doing the Sabre Dance and Fur Elise and various other Liberace show stoppers and the sound is solid and heart-stoppingly loud. So, after Highway Star, with the fans blissed out and the band having done an honest and entertaining night’s toil, it seems that, short of infarction or spontaneous combustion, there is nowhere else to go but home.

“Heads bang on heavy night out” The Australian, April 21, 1999, p.14.

New Sounds and Old

Published: 1999-06-01

CDs reviewed by Murray Bramwell

As their inspired name suggests, Melbourne band Weddings, Parties Anything have always been a rough and tumble live act. With a sound driven by Mick Thomas’s gruff vocals, and a battery of accordions, fiddles and guitar, WPA have the same post-punk approach to traditional music as the Pogues, Billy Bragg and Dick Gaughan. But they are also very much of their time and place - best described, such as life, as temper democratic, bias offensively Australian.

After more than ten years and almost as many albums, Weddings have called it a day. But they have not left us empty handed. First there was last year’s nineteen track ‘best of’ entitled Trophy Night (Mushroom) and now, posthumously as it were, a double live set taped last Christmas Eve at Melbourne’s Central Club. They Were Better Live (Mushroom) is a hundred and forty minutes of boisterosity. Mick Thomas belts out classics from the WPA setlist. Opening with Barrett’s Privateers and Away Away, Industrial Town and Hungry Years the performances, taken from seven nights of definitely-the-last-chance gigs, have a discernible home ground advantage.

The band plays a fast, open game. Jen Anderson’s sinuous fiddle, Mark Wallace’s accordion and Michael Barclay’s wristy drumming all provide a nimble delivery for Michael Thomas at full forward. He has written plenty of sturdy songs, most of them distinctive, and all of them brimming with Fitzroy and grey skies over Collingwood. They fit seamlessly with the traditional arrangements - and some excellent covers, especially Wide Open Road , a number from the days of the Triffids and the lamented David McComb. Pub rock is often considered an extinct form these days. They Were Better Live is a reminder of what we are missing.

Renee Geyer has been making records since Mushroom Records was a very small spore. She has always had a great voice and strong material but since her collaboration with Paul Kelly on Difficult Woman back in 1994 she has really dealt herself back in. Sweet Life, produced by Kelly and Joe Camilleri (whose Black Sorrows album, the under-rated Beat Club was one of last year’s best kept secrets) has bags of style and a long finish.

From her own song, Best Times, with its creamy dubbed vocals and funk guitar from Ross Hannaford and Paul Berton, to the soulful phrasings of the Paul Kelly original, You Broke a Beautiful Thing, Sweet Life stacks up well against the sort of classy production work Roger Davies has done with Joe Cocker and Tina Turner. With such musicians as Clayton Doley, John Clifforth, Jeff Burstin, Rick Formosa and the whole of the Kelly Band on board, this album is an A-list occasion. On one track Renee Geyer sings “I want the cake and the candle”. For Sweet Life she deserves both.

Following up their debut album Taken For a Ride, Black Taxi is back at the head of the rank with Saturday Street (Larrikin). Featuring the svelte vocal talents of Leah Cotterell, April Roncivalle, Yasmin Shoobridge and Rachel Kennedy, Black Taxi record under the auspices of the Northern Melbourne Institute of Tafe. With this raft of compositions from veteran Adelaide songwriter Terry Bradford, who in collaboration with Dave Wayman wrote and produced, Black Taxi is right on the button. There are samba rhythms on Mr Greenaway, acoustic folk strains on Gone to Water and brassy swing solos on Don’t Go Thru Town Dave. The closing track, Jubilation, says it all. Black Taxi is smart, jazzy and full of vocal beans.

VAST is an acronym for grandiose. Actually it stands for Visual Audio Sensory Theater, a concept not so much high as tottering. Brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Jon Crosby, VAST (Liberation/Mushroom) is a ragout of the sort of Big Sounds you might get if you crossed Pink Floyd at its most majestically vacuous with Prodigy at its most crashingly lame. Touched, with its arena rock vocals and pretentiously laced with samples from Bulgarian folk music and Tibetan chanting is full of false promise. Pretty When You Cry is teenage misogynism, I’m Dying, Temptation and Three Doors have an awful religiosity, all vague flourishes and pompous allusion. VAST has the sort of production that makes your woofers sound good, but a better title would probably be MT.

UK composite, Faithless has been gaining ground for about three years now. From the debut single, Salvea Mea to their album success, Reverence , the band has been getting regular airplay and recognition for their cross-over success. For cross-over success, read mainstream. Which is why even a stranger to Clubland such as I, might have stumbled over the techno energies and quirky lyrics of their single, Insomnia. The band toured here back in April showcasing material from their latest release Sunday 8 pm (Festival)

The key to the Faithless success is that they are so multiskilled as to be three bands in one. There is the rapid fire AAAABBBBBCCCCC rhyme scheme of veteran rapper Maxi Priest, the pop ballads from singer/songwriter Jamie Catto and the wall of sound keyboards from former rave DJ, Sister Bliss. The Faithless sound is credited to the musical alchemy of Producer/Mixer, Rollo. It is he, camera shy and refuser of interviews, who is the wizard behind the curtain bringing together Maxi, Catto, Sister Bliss and their respective genres.

Sunday 8pm opens with twittering birdcalls fed into a slow synth fugue which then shifts pace to a funk beat. Dave Randall’s acoustic guitar tinkles, Sister Bliss plays some Satie-ish piano chords. We are in Rollo’s tone poem, The Garden. This is enticingly followed by the hard end-rhymes of Maxi Priest, the lanky English Jamaican vocalist/ Faithless frontman. His world “contained in the space between bass and drum” is interestingly personal in focus.

There is the memoir of a fractured childhood, Bring My Family Back and the gritty celebration of precocious sex, She’s My Baby. There are other vocals from Catto, even a guest spot from Boy George. But it is Maxi who is the centre of interest. He is the Faithless sound, and his lyrics, matured by experience and Buddhist calm, are infinitely more appealing than the psychotic hostilities often associated with hip-hop.

Which is why Postcards, Maxi’s diary of life on the road has a casual flair and sense of the particular which is genuinely poetic and, amidst the generic milking-machine sounds of techno, highly distinctive. It is also why Maxi can stand centrestage, as he did recently at Heaven, surrounded by the bombastic drum and bass fanfare of six labouring musicians and announce -“ This is my Church/This is where I heal my hurts/ It’s in natural grace/ or watching young life shape/It’s in minor keys/ Solutions and remedies/ enemies becoming friends/ where bitterness ends/ This is my Church.“

The lyrics, over-run by a giant tide of pounding beats, pattering rhythms and stitching syncopations, are from God is a DJ. A less ironic, intelligent and musically astute outfit would swiftly fall to earth with stuff like this. VAST certainly does. But the driving beats and layers of sound, the sardonic delivery from Maxi and the shrewdly eclectic production from Rollo, ensure that Sunday 8pm is an appointment worth keeping. Faithless are not only an excellent access point to contemporary dance club music, they might just heal your hurts as well.

All CDs kindly supplied by Festival Music.

The Adelaide Review, June 1999.

New Sounds and Old

Published: 1999-06-01

CDs reviewed by Murray Bramwell

As their inspired name suggests, Melbourne band Weddings, Parties Anything have always been a rough and tumble live act. With a sound driven by Mick Thomas’s gruff vocals, and a battery of accordions, fiddles and guitar, WPA have the same post-punk approach to traditional music as the Pogues, Billy Bragg and Dick Gaughan. But they are also very much of their time and place - best described, such as life, as temper democratic, bias offensively Australian.

After more than ten years and almost as many albums, Weddings have called it a day. But they have not left us empty handed. First there was last year’s nineteen track ‘best of’ entitled Trophy Night (Mushroom) and now, posthumously as it were, a double live set taped last Christmas Eve at Melbourne’s Central Club. They Were Better Live (Mushroom) is a hundred and forty minutes of boisterosity. Mick Thomas belts out classics from the WPA setlist. Opening with Barrett’s Privateers and Away Away, Industrial Town and Hungry Years the performances, taken from seven nights of definitely-the-last-chance gigs, have a discernible home ground advantage.

The band plays a fast, open game. Jen Anderson’s sinuous fiddle, Mark Wallace’s accordion and Michael Barclay’s wristy drumming all provide a nimble delivery for Michael Thomas at full forward. He has written plenty of sturdy songs, most of them distinctive, and all of them brimming with Fitzroy and grey skies over Collingwood. They fit seamlessly with the traditional arrangements - and some excellent covers, especially Wide Open Road , a number from the days of the Triffids and the lamented David McComb. Pub rock is often considered an extinct form these days. They Were Better Live is a reminder of what we are missing.

Renee Geyer has been making records since Mushroom Records was a very small spore. She has always had a great voice and strong material but since her collaboration with Paul Kelly on Difficult Woman back in 1994 she has really dealt herself back in. Sweet Life, produced by Kelly and Joe Camilleri (whose Black Sorrows album, the under-rated Beat Club was one of last year’s best kept secrets) has bags of style and a long finish.

From her own song, Best Times, with its creamy dubbed vocals and funk guitar from Ross Hannaford and Paul Berton, to the soulful phrasings of the Paul Kelly original, You Broke a Beautiful Thing, Sweet Life stacks up well against the sort of classy production work Roger Davies has done with Joe Cocker and Tina Turner. With such musicians as Clayton Doley, John Clifforth, Jeff Burstin, Rick Formosa and the whole of the Kelly Band on board, this album is an A-list occasion. On one track Renee Geyer sings “I want the cake and the candle”. For Sweet Life she deserves both.

Following up their debut album Taken For a Ride, Black Taxi is back at the head of the rank with Saturday Street (Larrikin). Featuring the svelte vocal talents of Leah Cotterell, April Roncivalle, Yasmin Shoobridge and Rachel Kennedy, Black Taxi record under the auspices of the Northern Melbourne Institute of Tafe. With this raft of compositions from veteran Adelaide songwriter Terry Bradford, who in collaboration with Dave Wayman wrote and produced, Black Taxi is right on the button. There are samba rhythms on Mr Greenaway, acoustic folk strains on Gone to Water and brassy swing solos on Don’t Go Thru Town Dave. The closing track, Jubilation, says it all. Black Taxi is smart, jazzy and full of vocal beans.

VAST is an acronym for grandiose. Actually it stands for Visual Audio Sensory Theater, a concept not so much high as tottering. Brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Jon Crosby, VAST (Liberation/Mushroom) is a ragout of the sort of Big Sounds you might get if you crossed Pink Floyd at its most majestically vacuous with Prodigy at its most crashingly lame. Touched, with its arena rock vocals and pretentiously laced with samples from Bulgarian folk music and Tibetan chanting is full of false promise. Pretty When You Cry is teenage misogynism, I’m Dying, Temptation and Three Doors have an awful religiosity, all vague flourishes and pompous allusion. VAST has the sort of production that makes your woofers sound good, but a better title would probably be MT.

UK composite, Faithless has been gaining ground for about three years now. From the debut single, Salvea Mea to their album success, Reverence , the band has been getting regular airplay and recognition for their cross-over success. For cross-over success, read mainstream. Which is why even a stranger to Clubland such as I, might have stumbled over the techno energies and quirky lyrics of their single, Insomnia. The band toured here back in April showcasing material from their latest release Sunday 8 pm (Festival)

The key to the Faithless success is that they are so multiskilled as to be three bands in one. There is the rapid fire AAAABBBBBCCCCC rhyme scheme of veteran rapper Maxi Priest, the pop ballads from singer/songwriter Jamie Catto and the wall of sound keyboards from former rave DJ, Sister Bliss. The Faithless sound is credited to the musical alchemy of Producer/Mixer, Rollo. It is he, camera shy and refuser of interviews, who is the wizard behind the curtain bringing together Maxi, Catto, Sister Bliss and their respective genres.

Sunday 8pm opens with twittering birdcalls fed into a slow synth fugue which then shifts pace to a funk beat. Dave Randall’s acoustic guitar tinkles, Sister Bliss plays some Satie-ish piano chords. We are in Rollo’s tone poem, The Garden. This is enticingly followed by the hard end-rhymes of Maxi Priest, the lanky English Jamaican vocalist/ Faithless frontman. His world “contained in the space between bass and drum” is interestingly personal in focus.

There is the memoir of a fractured childhood, Bring My Family Back and the gritty celebration of precocious sex, She’s My Baby. There are other vocals from Catto, even a guest spot from Boy George. But it is Maxi who is the centre of interest. He is the Faithless sound, and his lyrics, matured by experience and Buddhist calm, are infinitely more appealing than the psychotic hostilities often associated with hip-hop.

Which is why Postcards, Maxi’s diary of life on the road has a casual flair and sense of the particular which is genuinely poetic and, amidst the generic milking-machine sounds of techno, highly distinctive. It is also why Maxi can stand centrestage, as he did recently at Heaven, surrounded by the bombastic drum and bass fanfare of six labouring musicians and announce -“ This is my Church/This is where I heal my hurts/ It’s in natural grace/ or watching young life shape/It’s in minor keys/ Solutions and remedies/ enemies becoming friends/ where bitterness ends/ This is my Church.“

The lyrics, over-run by a giant tide of pounding beats, pattering rhythms and stitching syncopations, are from God is a DJ. A less ironic, intelligent and musically astute outfit would swiftly fall to earth with stuff like this. VAST certainly does. But the driving beats and layers of sound, the sardonic delivery from Maxi and the shrewdly eclectic production from Rollo, ensure that Sunday 8pm is an appointment worth keeping. Faithless are not only an excellent access point to contemporary dance club music, they might just heal your hurts as well.

All CDs kindly supplied by Festival Music.

The Adelaide Review, June 1999.

Grounded

Published: 1999-08-01

Dick Gaughan with Chris Wilson Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Dick Gaughan has been in the singing business for thirty years and over that time has produced some classic albums. His burly Edinburgh vocals have breathed new life into Child Ballads such as Willie O’Winsbury and restored urgency to work songs political anthems as well as his own compositions. Born in Leith in the Forth of Firth he has based his career in Edinburgh where, due to a dislike of flying, he has pretty much stayed.

His first tour of Australia, then, has been eagerly awaited. We have seen plenty of collaborators such as Andy Irvine, and proteges such as Billy Bragg but until now no Gaughan. Refusing to fly between cities, he has criss-crossed the country playing club venues with support act Chris Wilson, including the spaciously refitted Governor Hindmarsh.

Accompanied by acoustic guitarist Andrew Pendlebury, Chris Wilson plays his set as though he is being backed by the James Brown band. Despite his excellence as a blues vocalist, hunching over his microphone stand, all histrionics and overstatement, he does his talent no service. This might work with a full tilt r’n’b outfit but in unplugged mode it seems like too much of nothing. It is a pity because The Long Weekend, his CD from last year, shows him to be a gritty performer and a gifted harmonica player. But neither the outlaw pose in People Like Me nor the social comment of Hand Becomes Fist have a chance with Wilson’s over-insistent delivery. And as for the extruded acoustic remix of Willie Dixon’s Spoonful, it is potentially brilliant - but when push comes to posture, the calibration is everything and a sweet spoon becomes a trowel.

Dick Gaughan, in leather vest and his hair tied back in a pony tail, opens with What You Do With What You’ve Got. His guitar style is splendidly nimble, his Scots accent heavy in the diction. The song is a bit naff, but he tells us it is his standard opener. Song For Ireland, written by Englishman Phil Colcloghs, is more like it. Familiar from the early album, Handful of Earth, it is Gaughan at his lyrical best. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a lesser Pete Seeger song follows, preceded by a lengthy explanation of the song’s subject, the futility of war.

The Shipwreck is a Gaughan song, he writes few and not all them are distinguished. This one is not. Surprisingly uneasy as a performer, his endless fiddling with his guitar reminds of the bad old folkie days when re-tuning was a major part of the show. Fortunately Ewen and the Gold from Gaughan’s excellent recent album, Redwood Cathedral, lifts the occasion. The song is about a successful gold seeker’s unwelcome return to his native island of St Kilda, a rather obscure subject from Scots nationalist Brian MacNeill. It needs some glossing because its theme is not self-evident. But warming to the task, Gaughan makes a lengthy prologue of it.

It is now evident that Dick Gaughan, splendidly skilled musician is being supplanted by Dick Gaughan, raconteur and political grumbler. I have always admired Gaughan’s unremitting views on civil liberties, Scottish nationalism and the plight of working people. They are not only legitimate concerns but still timely ones. But unlike Billy Bragg who knows how to be a bit tactical with these things, Gaughan is wearyingly earnest. And as for the Scottish history lessons, we may live at the arse end of the earth but we don’t need to be told that Braveheart is crap and Walter Scott, a fantasist. More to the point, things are changing in Scotland, haven’t they just opened their own parliament ? Some perspective on that would be useful, or even better- a few songs.

There are some lovely moments in the set. Gaughan’s arrangment of Now Westlin Winds for instance is splendid in its phrasing and trickling guitar lines, Ron Kavana’s Reconciliation is also a fine song and the eccentric Richard Thompson tribute to the 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is a nice shift of mood. But Tom Paine’s Bones, and then closing with the turgid No Gods and Precious Heroes and Gaughan’s own unremarkable Son of Man leaves the night low on energy.

Redwood Cathedral makes much of the virtue of singing other folks’ songs and Gaughan visits work by Gus van Sant, the Incredible String Band and even the Everly Brothers oldie, Let it be Me. A more judicious setlist would have served Dick Gaughan better. He has some marvellous songs in his armoury - Parcel of Rogues, Willie O’Winsbury, Crooked Jack, Lal Waterson’s Fine Horseman. Any of those would have done. Then Dick Gaughan would really know which side we are on.

The Adelaide Review, August, 1999 ? Not verified.

Double Bill

Published: 1999-12-01

Paul Kelly and Uncle Bill Governor Hindmarsh Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly is back. And not with something completely different, but not the same old, same old either. Let’s call it a logical extension. With the announcement of Gawd Aggie, his new imprint since moving to EMI, Kelly has been diversifying. In one direction is the funk project, Professor Ratbaggy with his regular band, The Casuals. In another is Smoke, his collaboration with Melbourne string band wiz Gerry Hale and his four piece finger-picking outfit, Uncle Bill.

Kelly has teamed up with Uncle Bill previously -on Graham Lee’s compilation of usual suspects onWhere Joy Kills Sorrow. Then, one thing led to another and from the sparks came Smoke, a likeable mix of new songs and Kelly favourites restrung for bluegrass. Now Paul Kelly is number two on the country charts and he has even made a video clip of Stories of Me - looking for all the world like an out-take from The Night of the Hunter.

It is not surprising that the band might call themselves Uncle Bill, in homage to Bill Monroe. He is not just the Uncle, he’s the Father of Bluegrass. He really is. Paternity is easily claimed, especially in music circles, but without Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys there would be no such thing as bluegrass- that beguiling mix of mandolin, fiddle, guitar and banjo which re-energised country music in the late 1940s.

Because of its traditional sound, one that has wafted from the hills of Kentucky, the Carolinas and Tennessee since the early 18th century, it is hard to believe that bluegrass is more recent than Bing Crosby. But the defining formula was invented by Monroe and the equally legendary, and onomatopoeic, Flatts and Scruggs- Lester Flatts with his bass-run guitar lines and Earl Scruggs’ dazzling three finger banjo picking. Between them, fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist Cedric Rainwater, they created what someone once called country music on overdrive, a hellbent, virtuosic exhilarating sound that became instant Americana.

After an intro from Kelly, rather the way Slim Dusty likes to do, Uncle Bill opens the first show at the Gov with a set of bluegrass standards and creative applications. Jack Jones’ rowdy old The Race is On sets a lively pace, then it is offset by the Monroe weepie I’m On My Way Back to the Old Home - from his extensive

prodigal-return-to-mother repertoire. Lennon and McCartney’s Things We Said Today is a treat, reminding us what splendidly shaped melodies the Fabs used to write. Then the vocals switch from Gerry Hale to mandolin player Adam Gare forSan Antonio Rose and The Small Exception of Me.

Uncle Bill play dinkum bluegrass -tightly managed quartet work between Hale on a variety of guitars, Gare on mandolin, Stuart Speed on upright bass and Peter Somerville, like clockwork on the banjo. They also play genuinely acoustically, weaving around an old style broadcast microphone for solos and vocal harmonies. There is no foldback and no pick-ups, just subtly calibrated live performance steered artfully towards the sound desk. The trouble is that, in the spacious room at the Governor Hindmarsh, the sound is marred by the continual din from the bar. Uncle Bill don’t play pub rock and the Kelly fans who didn’t check their tickets and only came to hear Dumb Things and Forty Miles to Saturday Night are starting to seriously piss off everybody else.

Kelly comes on after the break. Greetings, he drawls, from the Republic of Victoria. The attention improves but unbelievably, the nattering continues. A bloke near me is almost apoplectic and gives out a spray of disapproval. The crowd is starting to split, unhelpfully, into one those stand-up, sit-down, be quiet, kind of congregations. Kelly opens with an unfamiliar choice, Ghost Town. Then, from the Smoke album comesI Can’t Believe We Married and a wonderfully nimble, banjo-driven Taught By Experts . Stories of Me, also comes to life with its turkey chase rhythms and keening harmonies as the band gather round the microphone like a brazier in winter.

Slim Dusty’s Sunlander, Kelly’s contribution to a recent tribute album is followed by the whimsical but rather forgetable Little Boy Don’t Lose Your Balls. Gathering Storm gets a new prognostic charting and, opening a solo bracket, Kelly’s song for Vika and Linda, If I Could Start Today Again, is a tender highlight. The reflective Everything’s Turning to White works well as does the sardonically weary Ev’ry Fucking City. The Uncles return for the Kelly tribute to Ned, My Sunshine . And a new track from the album, Whistling Bird, is my favourite of the night. Buoyed by a cradle rocking mandolin and guitar refrain and garnished by dobro slide it is a re-setting of Corinna, Corinna- and testimony to Kelly’s considerable confidence as a writer, incorporating traditional idiom and making it new.

After nineteen numbers Kelly and the Bill stagger off stage to give their vocal chords and picking fingers some treatment for RSI. Then for afters there is Gravy, with a side serve of dobro and a rambunctious To Her Door. Uncle Bill takes a turn with some Ernest Tubb thumping and a triple fiddle show-off from the Monroe Olympics.

The crowd has moved in close now, hungry for favourites like When I First Met Your Ma, and rewarded with new songs like the sweetly melancholic Night After Night - Kelly’s plaintive vocal nicely counterpoised by the sprightly, get-on-with-it tempo of mandolin, banjo and fiddle. Kelly closes with Glory Be to God, which, translated to the trickling optimism of bluegrass, loses some of the carnal urgency of the Words and Music version. Just as well, probably. Mr Monroe would disapprove of that sort of jook joint talk. And he surely must have been watching. Because, I’m told, for the Saturday night show the punters were as quiet as little field mice.

The Adelaide Review, No.195, December, 1999, p.36.