2000s

Gothic Revival

Published: 2000

The Cure

Adelaide Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

With his back-combed black thatch, his scarlet lipstick and his dark drecky outfits Robert Smith, founder and undisputed leader of The Cure, has been the Edward Scissorhands of pop music for nearly twenty five years. It is strange to think that I have listened to The Cure since the Faith album back in 1981 and yet, apart from boppy singles like Boys Don’t Cry, The Love Cats and The Walk, I can still hardly tell one track from another.

It is as though their twenty or so albums are all one song. The Cure sound is as distinctive as it is undifferentiated. Over the kitchen pot lid drumming come those thrummy lead bass lines, and of course Smith’s oddly febrile vocals. Listening to them now the early songs are so obviously part of the power pop sound of their time and yet that voice and the nervy, bony bass were already signatures good for two decades of hypnotic, highly successful Goth pop.

Touring, it is generally believed, for the last time, Smith - along with longtime bassist Simon Gallup, guitarist Perry Bamonte , drummer Jason Cooper and keyboard player Roger O’Donnell - is not only in good, if somewhat portly form but also has plenty of puff. Having dispensed with a support act the band plays a non-stop show lasting just under three hours. The setlist ranges across the entire Cure canon but the new album Bloodflowers is the jumping off point.

Through the murky stage lighting, a swirling wurlitzer sound and thudding drum beat ushers in the almost opaque Mr Smith. Strumming on a 12 string acoustic he lays down the rhythms before the plaintive vocals begin. Out of This World. Words out of the bedroom diaries of endless adolescence. We always have to go back to real life/ one last time before its over/one last time before we have to go back again.

There is a banality in these simple repetitions. The band used to be called the Easy Cure and you can understand why. This is Joy Division without the pain, suburban inertia cloaked in the romantic pose of melancholy. But the Gothic was always a languid delusion. Look at Thomas Chatterton, that marvellous Pet Shop boy, or Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, drinking vinegar to keep his skin pale. Robert Smith, intoning his mesmerically blank verse is no less evocative. So what if he acts like Heathcliff and sleeps safe in his bed in Thrushcross Grange.

After eight minutes or so Out of This World morphs into the churning slow dirge Watching Me Fall - slipping out the ordinary world into someone else’s life. Smith’s command of the occasion is unmistakable. His vocals have a relentless insistence and an eerie authority. The crowd, Cure fans -the truest of true believers, signatories to petitions enticing Smith to leave the house, to travel on aeroplanes, to grace us with a visit to our fatal shore - is in his thrall. Some are in Goth regalia, like petals on a wet black bough. The band toils to create a dense rhythmic storm, layering guitar chords over the brooding bass and thunderous drum. It is a massive sound, impeccably managed.

The band takes a wild mood swing with Want, following with Fascination Street and Open from the Wish album. The Loudest Sound has a long and winding intro before Smith steps forward through the thick stage lighting, sprays of purple and yellow, to ponder aloud about having nothing left to say. Pictures of You gets the crowd animated as do the catchy riffs of Shake Dog Shake, Simon Gallup hunched like a whippet as he thrashes out bass figures you can hear through your sternum.

The stage lighting has gone Sargasso for an extended reading of From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, the band submerged now in a fluid, intuitive performance that is almost seamless. In Between Days gets the punters revved and Smith, taciturn except to say people say he should speak more on stage, confides that it was reading Patrick White which inspired White Cockatoos.

This is a marathon event covering nearly thirty songs. Highlights include The Kiss, garnished with wah wah pedal and Smith strapping on yet another black guitar - this time a Rickenbacker. Then there is One Hundred Years, 39 and the current title song, Bloodflowers. The encores come in clusters- There is No If, Trust and a very together version of Disintegration. From Pornography comes Cold and the title track, from the mists of time comes Play For Today, Just Like Heaven- and, to conclude, a long unfurling version of A Forest.

As they leave the stage Robert Smith salutes the crowd and vanishes backstage. He and the band have played us to a standstill. It has been a technically accomplished event with great sound and artfully integrated lighting. But despite the sheer scale of production and the skill of the band the show is strangely distant. Smith has recited his feelings, his anxieties, his hostilities, we might even say his yearnings.

But there is something glassy, something numb in the experience. We are back to the bedroom boredom again, the simulacrum of angst. The incantations have driven away nothing, because no danger was imminent. For all their songs and albums named with abstract nouns like Faith and Trust and Wish and Want and Treasure and Doubt there is very little curiosity or depth or insight or actual meaning. This is the secret of the band’s success and also their great limitation. The Cure were never meant to heal our sickness, only to bring us near perfect analgesia.

Commissioned by The Adelaide Review but not published.

ZZ Does It

Published: 2000-05-01

ZZ Top Adelaide Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

After fifteen years, Texas blues funk trio, ZZ Top are back in the country. On tour before headlining at The East Coast Blues Festival they are among the more curious fixtures in the curious world of rock and roll. Delivering basic refried John Lee Hooker riffs, garnished with whatever studio production accessories are currently in the mode, ZZ Top have, with a lot of guile and apparently none at all, always managed to give the folks just what they hadn’t realised they wanted .

Formed in 1969 they have had a couple of serious bursts of fame and substantial fortune. Their Worldwide Texas Tour in 1976, it was said, sold more tickets than Presley, played to bigger crowds than Led Zeppelin and sold more records than the Rolling Stones. Then, seven years later, their album Eliminator mixed a blues base with pop and dance beat influences and found them a whole new audience- thanks also to a series of leery and self mocking videos featuring highly buffed hot-rod cars and deeply tanned Californian pulchritude.

Still on the road and performing their new album XXX - a sly reference to their thirty year career with the same line-up - guitarist Billy Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard are working the same old motherlode. On stage at the Entertainment Centre, Gibbons and Hill front the occasion with their trademark dark glasses and weird wispy ginger beards. Dressed in tailored black leather frock coats with rhinestone vests, Hill sports a black beret while Gibbons has his African sombrero, a woollen beanie bulging with coiled up hair.

They open with Got Me Under Pressure and the troops are happy. Up in the nosebleed seats - Section 13, Row N, seat 189- I am getting the Entertainment Centre blues. The sound is all bass and muddy drum thud and Billy Gibbons’ vocal and guitar is oddly under-driven. I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide, an old fave from Deguello, is a welcome choice but those contrapuntal gear changes are not as energised as they used to be. Gibbons plays a great faux harmonica feed on his guitar but the boys don’t seem particularly bad or nationwide .

Pincushion, bristling with double entendre, is also vintage Top but, when the guitarists take up position either side of Beard’s drum kit and start pacing on treadmills going nowhere, I have the uneasy feeling that I am looking at unintended metaphor. Gibbons greets the crowd with a friendly if somewhat weary Texan drawl and introduces a cluster of songs from the new album. Fearless Boogie is likeable but hardly brave new territory. 36-22-36 is a bit of rock and roll viagra and Poke Chop Sandwich is a sound bite from the lewd old dirty dozens. More interesting is the re-working, sung in a Dusty Hill baritone, of the Elvis Presley hit, Teddy Bear.

I’m hoping for some old stuff like A Fool For Your Stockings. So Cheap Sunglasses hits the mark, especially as Gibbons and Hill range about like a couple of extraterrestrials in their own black goggles. Gimme All Your Loving and Sharp Dressed Man gets the fans bopping and, pausing to strap on fluffy z-shaped guitars, Billy and Dusty close the set with Legs.

Returning for an encore in black sequinned stetsons, it is greatest hits time. Tube Snake Boogie, with its Hooker/Canned Heat riff is accompanied by synchronised duckwalking and then the house lights come up to egg on the front rows for Tush. I been bad, I been good. Dallas Texas Hollywood. The ZZ Top Triple X tour has plenty of bells and whistles, the trio even has some interesting augmentation from the desk, but at ninety six minutes when the show comes to a business like halt, it all seems rather unsatisfactory.

What with the murky sound and the unspontaneous grind through the setlist I feel these jokers were not ZZ Top world tour best practice tonight. I need to go home and listen to the CDs that made me like this band despite their hotrods and their wacko beards. A few tracks of their catchy guitar rock at its best- and maybe I’ll be a fool for their stockings once again.

Commissioned for The Adelaide Review May 2000 but not published.

Recent and Revisited

Published: 2000-08-01

CDs reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Anyone who knows their polypeptides will tell you that endorphins are a little gift from your brain to you. And because he offers a beguiling equivalent in musical analgesia, electronics composer Eric Chapus, aka Endorphin is well-named. Skin (Columbia/Sony) is his second album, after goodly numbers of Australian fans wrapped themselves around his debut work, Embrace.

Chapus, born in France and widely travelled, has been based in Kuranda in Northern Queensland before recently relocating to Sydney. He has toured with Massive Attack and Portishead and is slated to appear again in Adelaide later this month, when Moby comes to town.

Skin warms up fast with the Cosmix take on Blue Moon. Not the Ludwig van Moonlight swoony piano of the single version, but a beaty hook into an album as edible and layered as Rollo’s work with Faithless. Anguish is a confection of piano cascades, grim and grungy chords and the stained glass vocals of Tammy Brennan offering little drops from the heart. Stella One Eleven singer Cindy Ryan takes Afterwords to a less ethereal plane as Chapus surrounds her grainy vocals with nervy rhythms and menacing faux guitars.

Time has more than its share of bass and drum moments but the piano garnishes are faithfully Sister Bliss, while Red, driven by Charlie McMahon’s didgeridoo, Grey -le couleur de la ville- a gallic response to Sydney in winter and Heat, all tuned drums and Moroccan pipes- not only capture the geography of the skin, they get further under it every time you listen.

Console, the sonic vehicle for Martin Gretschmann, operates far less symphonically lush territory. Rocket in the Pocket (Matador/Festival) ruminates on its own little techno syllogisms- worrying themes and repeating them with sparsely hypnotic curiosity. Gulls Galore crawls out from short wave radio to set up ratchetty beats. Pigeon Party has marimba colourings and Crabcraft has- doesn’t everything ?- debts to the Elderly Uncles of Kraftwerk.

Gretschmann began with Bavarian band the Notwist and the international release of Rocket includes Console’s poppy single 14 Zero Zero. It is clumsy marketing since, for it all its catchiness, it is banal and- amongst more intrepid works such as the final suite Walk Like a Worm- sticks out like balls on a Pet Shop boy.

Dynomite D’s By the Way (Trifecta/Festival) is full of scratch but not much sniff. Kid Koala features but the trip-hop beats, the pulses,and the samples have a dulling predictability. Cold Rock is undeveloped, while Bombin Subways is just old graffiti. Alki Beach Drive with seagulls, surf and keyboard wah wah from the days of Zawinul has considerably more appeal- but out there in the ruck Dynomite D need a lot more bang to warrant attention.

Fusebox from Jolly Mukhertee with the Madras Cinematic Orchestra (Palm Pictures/Festival) on the other hand, is seriously intriguing. Film composer and arranger King Jolly is a leading figure in Bollywood, epicentre of the Indian film industry -and with this project -enlisting the aid of mixers such as State of Bengal, The Underwolves, Badmarsh and Shri, and the Madras Musician - has added techno to his trademark lush and spicy sound.

The Underwolves’ Bhatiyali has sublime strings gliding over phat saturated beats while Bhairau uses traditional flutes and mandolin with stately orchestrations in a mix of Morricone and John Barry. I leapt on this as major kitsch when I first heard it. But not so now. It is fascinating in its eclecticism. Take home some tandoori and beef korma and give it a good listen.

Senan’s Haggart is the self-titled project from Adelaide based Irish fiddle players Tim Whelan and Bartley O’Donnell, formerly of The Counting Room. Joined by bass clarinetist and saxophonist Lauren Pittwood and Luke Plumb on mandola, the band is named for Whelan’s late uncle Senan and his haggart ,or house garden, in County Clare.

Featuring two lengthy tracks, Senan’s Haggart play a modal, trickling music which has a lovely gathering nuance to it. Sporting Nell has Plumb’s mandola repetitions underpinned by a haunting clarinet, both lifted and lilted by Whelan and O’Donnell’s gently dueling fiddles. The second suite Sean Ryan’s opens with a familiar Irish air on mandola but , almost immediately, Kronos-like strings take you into altered space.

There is none of that nought to ninety full tilt aspect that leaves much Irish traditional music with nowhere to go but busier and flashier. Plumb has likened the band’s music to Terry Riley and Miles Davis and the comparisons are neither pretentious nor misplaced. This music is every bit as interesting and accomplished as the recent Joshua Bell and Edgar Brand excursions. Watch out for Senan’s Haggart , they are something special. If you can’t find the CD contact them direct at P.O.Box 368, Hindmarsh SA 5007.

Singer-songwriters, those owner-drivers of music, came to the fore in the late sixties and early seventies. In fact the recent compilation Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village in the 60’s (Astor Place/MRA) is a terrific tribute to the Tims and Toms, Bobs and Erics who wrote and sang so winsomely. The style continues with the likes of Ron Sexsmith, local pretender Ben Lee and the real McCoy talent of that bonny prince of palace, Will Oldham.

But selling a lot more units has been Jeff Buckley. Son of the charismatic Tim whose morning glory was cut short by heroin when he was in his late twenties, Jeff’s death was, if anything, even more tragically random- drowning in the Mississippi River on a summer’s night in Memphis in1997 at the age of thirty. By the time he died he had recorded only one studio album, the much praised Grace in 1994.

A posthumous collection of demos and outtakes -Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (1998) hinted at what the second album might have been and now Buckley’s mother Mary Guibert has overseen the release of Mystery White Boy, tracks performed live in Europe, the US and in one of his earliest audience strongholds, here in Australia.

It is impossible not to feel melancholy that Buckley and his tightly focused band had so little time to make what would have been the kind of mark on late nineties American suburbs music that Kurt Cobain made five years earlier. His searching, expressive vocals, the diarist lyrics and the carefully managed dishevelment of his garage guitar are all there on these recovered tracks. But, like the crumbs from the Hendrix vault or the cryonic production of the Lennon vocals on Free as a Bird, Mystery White Boy reminds us most keenly that, even at his most vivid, Jeff Buckley is no longer present.

Elliot Smith, the Good Will Hunter from Portland, Oregon is, however, alive and well and able to make the kind of moves that make popular music as responsive to cultural ripples as frogs in an ecosystem. Figure 8 (SKG/Universal) is his latest release and like Beck, particularly on Mutations, Smith knows that the past is not just another country but the future as well.

From the perky Son of Sam, with its McCartney vocals and Garfunkel harmonies to the Paul Simon sweet-sadness of Everything Reminds Me of Her with its George Harrison guitar vibrato I’d have to say of Figure 8 that everything reminds me of Northern Songs, Pet Sounds and voices leaking from sad cafes. But unlike the image from Bleecker Street, these are not shadows touching shadow’s hand. Elliot Smith, who is rumoured to be touring in October, has taken the best of pop and made the best of pop.

And speaking of revisitations, Festival have revived their Interfusion label to market a swag of back catalogue jazz, blues, lounge and world music material. When Fantasy records began , now some fifty years ago, Max and Sol Weiss enjoyed early success with the likes of white jazz boys such as Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan. Then the acumen of Saul Zaentz brought later success with Creedence Clearwater Revival. The profits were well invested. Fantasy bought out a number of smaller labels such as Prestige, Milestone and Riverside, taking ownership of the richest back catalogue in jazz.

It is some of this material that Festival is releasing at a pre-GST $14.95 mid-price. There are some treasures here- Miles Davis with MJQ vibraharpist Milt Jackson and Thelonious Monk on piano, Jackson and his own band playing Ellington live at Ronnie Scott’s. Dexter Gordon, recorded with James Moody in New York in the late sixties, Chet Baker crooning in 1958, Andre Previn with Red Mitchell and Shelley Manne, Tony Bennett with Bill Evans. From Fantasy’s own vault are recordings of Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar, the formica cool of Arthur Lyman’s Hawaiian vibes and some fine blues - from the early fifties, John Lee Hooker and from the mid-seventies a very robust Joe Turner with Pee Wee Crayton on guitar.

The Adelaide Review, No.203, August, 2000, pp.26-7.

Recent and Revisited

Published: 2000-08-01

CDs reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Electronica et al

Anyone who knows their polypeptides will tell you that endorphins are a little gift from your brain to you. And because he offers a beguiling equivalent in musical analgesia, Endorphin aka electronics composer Eric Chapus, is well-named. Skin (Columbia/Sony) is his second album, follow up to his debut work, Embrace.

Chapus, born in France and widely travelled, has been based in Kuranda in Northern Queensland before recently relocating to Sydney. He has toured with Massive Attack and Portishead and appeared again in Adelaide recently as support act for Moby .

Skin warms up fast with the Cosmix take on Blue Moon. Not the Ludwig van Moonlight swoony piano of the single version, but a beaty hook into an album as edible and layered as Rollo’s work with Faithless. Anguish is a confection of piano cascades, grim and grungy chords and - offering little drops from the heart -the stained glass vocals of Tammy Brennan. Then, in Afterwords, Stella One Eleven singer Cindy Ryan moves to a less ethereal plane as Chapus surrounds her grainy vocals with nervy rhythms and menacing faux guitars.

Time mixes has slabs of bass and drum but the piano garnishes are faithfully Sister Bliss, while Red, driven by Charlie McMahon’s didgeridoo, Grey, a Gallic response to Sydney in winter and Heat, all tuned drums and Moroccan pipes- not only capture the geography of the skin, they get further under it every time you listen.

Console, the sonic vehicle for Martin Gretschmann, operates far less symphonically lush territory. Rocket in the Pocket (Matador/Festival) ruminates on its own little techno syllogisms- worrying away at themes and repeating them with sparsely hypnotic curiosity. Gulls Galore crawls out from short wave radio to set up ratchetty beats. Pigeon Party has marimba colourings and Crabcraft has- doesn’t everything ?- debts to the Elderly Uncles of Kraftwerk.

Gretschmann began with Bavarian band the Notwist and the international release of Rocket includes Console’s poppy single 14 Zero Zero. It is clumsy marketing though, because for it all its catchiness, it is banal and- alongside intrepid works such as the final suite Walk Like a Worm- irritatingly discrepant.

Fusebox from Jolly Mukhertee with the Madras Cinematic Orchestra (Palm Pictures/Festival) on the other hand, is seriously intriguing. Film composer and arranger King Jolly is a leading figure in Bollywood, epicentre of the Indian film industry and with this project -in cahoots with mixers such as State of Bengal, The Underwolves, Badmarsh and Shri, and the Madras Musician - he has added electronica to his trademark lush and spicy sound.

Featuring two lengthy tracks Senan’s Haggart play a modal, trickling music which has a lovely gathering nuance to it. Sporting Nell has Plumb’s mandola repetitions underpinned by a haunting clarinet, both lifted and lilted by Whelan and O’Donnell’s gently dueling fiddles. The second suite Sean Ryan’s opens with a familiar Irish air on mandola but, almost immediately, Kronos-like strings take you into altered space.

There is none of that nought to ninety full-tilt aspect that leaves much Irish traditional music with nowhere to go but busier and flashier. Plumb has likened the band’s music to Terry Riley and Miles Davis and the comparisons are neither pretentious nor misplaced. This music is every bit as interesting and accomplished as the recent Joshua Bell and Edgar Brand excursions. Watch out for Senan’s Haggart , they are something special. If you can’t find the CD contact them direct at P.O.Box 368, Hindmarsh SA 5007.

Singular Voices

But selling a lot more units has been Jeff Buckley,son of the charismatic Tim whose morning glory was cut short by heroin when he was in his late twenties. If anything, Jeff’s death in 1997 at age thirty was even more tragically random. He drowned while swimming in the Mississippi River on a summer’s night in Memphis . At the time he died he had recorded only one studio album, the much praised Grace in 1994.

Elliott Smith, the Good Will Hunter from Portland, Oregon is, however, alive and well and able to negotiate the kind of moves that make popular music as responsive to cultural ripples as frogs in an ecosystem. Figure 8 (SKG/Universal) is his latest release and like Beck, particularly on Mutations, Smith knows that the past is not just another country but the future as well.

From the perky Son of Sam, with its McCartney vocals and Garfunkel harmonies to the Paul Simon sweet-sadness of Everything Reminds Me of Her with its George Harrison guitar vibrato I’d have to say of Figure 8 that everything reminds me of Northern Songs, Pet Sounds and voices leaking from sad cafes. But unlike the image from Bleecker Street, these are not shadows touching shadow’s hand. Elliott Smith, who is rumoured to be touring in October, has taken the best of pop and made the best of pop.

Out of the Vault

And speaking of revisitations, Festival have revived their Interfusion label to market a stack of back catalogue jazz, blues, lounge and world music material. When Fantasy Records began , now some fifty years ago, Max and Sol Weiss enjoyed early success with the likes of white jazz boys such as Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan. Then the acumen of Saul Zaentz brought later success with Creedence Clearwater Revival. The profits were well invested. Fantasy bought out a number of smaller labels such as Prestige, Milestone and Riverside, taking ownership of the richest back catalogue of jazz anywhere in the world.

It is some of this material that Festival has released in the mid-price range. There are some treasures here- Miles Davis with MJQ vibraharpist Milt Jackson and Thelonious Monk on piano, Jackson and his own band playing Ellington live at Ronnie Scott’s. Dexter Gordon, recorded with James Moody in New York in the late sixties, Chet Baker crooning in 1958, Andre Previn with Red Mitchell and Shelley Manne, Tony Bennett with Bill Evans. From Fantasy’s own vault are recordings of Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar and the formica cool of Arthur Lyman’s Hawaiian vibes. There is also some fine blues - from the early fifties, John Lee Hooker and from the mid-seventies, a very robust Joe Turner with Pee Wee Crayton on guitar.

CDs kindly supplied by Festival Records, Sony Music and Universal Music.

Return Journey

Published: 2001-05-01

Emmylou Harris with Buddy Miller and Kasey Chambers

Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Emmylou Harris is surely one of the true Daughters of the American Revolution. And she has been at the centre of not just one, but several, musical insurrections. The first was in the early seventies when she teamed up with Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman and others of their Burrito brethren to make what soon came to be called country rock. After Parsons’ death, it was Emmylou Harris who avenged the grievous angel with her debut treasure Pieces of the Sky. The rest is history - The Byrds, Linda Ronstadt, the Allmans, Doobies and well, yes, the Eagles. Nashville acquired a permanent chic and for twenty years Emmylou Harris gathered eminence measured out in Grammys and Grand Ol’ Opry awards. That would have all been fine and dandy enough, but then, in 1995, she took to her career with a Wrecking Ball.

Teaming up with producer Daniel Lanois, she co-wrote new material and gathered an assortment of songs from Neil Young, Hendrix, Dylan, Anna McGarrigle, Steve Earle , Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch. The Wrecking Ball album was faithfully Emmylou, the shimmering voice sounding better than ever, but the mix was new. Swirling layers of grungy but sweetly melancholic guitar replaced that old Nashville twang, the drumming was more limber, and the vocal harmonies sounded as though Phil Spector had taken over air traffic control. It was, and is, an intriguing, haunting sound and it opened up the country idiom for all kinds of new experimentation.

It is very fitting, then, that Emmylou Harris is touring with innovators such as guitarist Buddy Miller and rising Australian singer Kasey Chambers. In fact, it is Buddy Miller, mainstay of Harris’s band Spyboy, who opens the proceedings with a short set drawn from albums which tell it all -Poison Love, Cruel Moon, Your Love and Other Lies. Nobody gets out alive in country music. In his denim shirt, his grey tufty hair sticking out from under his trucker’s cap, Buddy Miller is as down to earth as he is distinctive. He has been called the Richard Thompson of country music and the tag fits.

Kasey Chambers follows, accompanied by father Bill, and Adelaide guitarist Kim Walton. Dressed in red crushed velvet, her hair in a punky thatch, Chambers is the new wave of country music. Her vocals have the assurance of a singer steeped in the sounds from an early age, a junior Dolly Parton with even that touch of helium in the upper register. Chambers starts from the heartbreak repertoire - Cry like a Baby and The Flower and then the band hits the pedal with Barricades and Brick Walls, the title song from her forthcoming album, and a full-tilt Freight Train. The set closes with The Captain, of course, and We’re All Gonna Die Some Day. Well, some day. But before that happens, the talented Kasey Chambers is heading for some serious success .

Spyboy takes the stage and Emmylou joins them. She is still a striking figure - belle of the wrecking ball - in her calf-length rhinestone boots and black ruffle skirt. Toting an ornately decorated Gibson she opens with The Pearl, one of her new songs from last year’s Red Dirt Girl. The guitar lines from Buddy Miller are restrained, the drumming from the flamboyant Brady Blade is so thoughtful to be almost pedantic. Harris sings her hallelujah chorus in that distinctively clear voice but - and maybe it is because they are still fiddling with the levels- her performance is just a little weary. When she played in this same venue back in May 1996 the Spyboy adventure had barely begun and everything sounded minty new. Certainly it was one of those mythic events which defy comparison. This time the music, lovely and conscientiously performed though it is, has lost a little of its intensity.

The Lanois song, Where Will I Be, helps to consolidate the band and then things lift quite a few notches with the Gillian Welch classic, Orphan Girl. Though a recent work, it is splendid distillation of the primitive glory of American mountain music and while the vocal is mixed down a touch and the tunings are more orthodox than they used to be, Harris’ bell-like voice has all the arcs and curves of Appalachian lament.

The Red Dirt Girl is less of a singular joy than the orphan one, despite some tasty pickings from Buddy Miller. It is simply not as good a song and the instrumental decoration can’t quite conceal that. I have warmed a lot to the new album and the singer’s commitment to composition is courageous, but neither My Baby Needs a Shepherd -sung in duet with Kasey Chambers- or Bang the Drum Slowly, sung solo, really holds a candle to the early career tear-jerker Love Hurts or Harris’s reading of the traditional song, Green Pastures. And the clunky Patty Griffin tune, One Big Love fares poorly alongside the fetching harmonics of Anna McGarrigle’s Going Back to Harlan.

I Don’t Want to Talk About It Now is a more upbeat original which has Brady Blade adding some choppy cross-rhythms and Miller discreetly reaching into his effects bag for some wah wah funk. The Spyboy band is terrific - and they particularly like the chance to bang the can a bit - as they do on Rodney Crowell’s I Aint Living Long Like This and the Wrecking Ball highlight Deeper Well which has Harris’ almost throaty vocal riding above a no-prisoners contest between Miller and drummer Blade. Buddy Miller is a huge part of the success of the night, his versatility on every kind of electric shortneck, eight-string, twelve string, mando-whatsit, is astonishing and his playing is never self-serving or obvious.

There are few returns to the early catalogue - Hickory Wind is one, the Burritos’ Wheels another. Surprisingly it is the country rockers that seem to engage Harris most - Born to Run has an energy that the Leonard Cohen-ish Michaelangelo never quite manages. The Maker, rolling on bass lines from Tony Hall and more Miller fills, has Emmylou Harris in memorably plaintive voice but, in the extended version, things start to get rhetorical with the obligatory drum and bass solos, adept though they are, taking us too far out of the territory.

Fortunately, to re-orient, Emmylou Harris takes her bearings from Boulder to Birmingham, as sweet a piece of prairie and sky as you could hope to hear. The Spyboy trip has surely been a demanding one and the absence of a capella items suggests the singer is guarding her voice more than before. She didn’t sing Calling My Children Home or the beautiful Jess Winchester tune, My Songbird. But Emmylou Harris still has the voice of nightingale and with friends like Spyboy she is still ahead of the parade.

The Adelaide Review, No 212, May, 2001, p.36.

Back to Beguinnings

Published: 2001-07-01

Roger McGuinn Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I first heard of Roger McGuinn when he was known as Jim. He was the serious young ectomorph in the houndstooth coat and little black lozenge spectacles on the cover of the first Byrds album. Foppish in their American Carnaby gear, singing harmonies four and five deep, the Byrds swooped on Bob Dylan songs and showed there really was another side to them. They layered and enriched the sketchy sound of early acoustic Dylan and with their careful diction raised up his poetic lyrics like jewellers setting gemstones. And the sound they added, like a dozen golden hammers, was Jim McGuinn’s chiming Rickenbacker twelve string guitar.

McGuinn already had a career before the Byrds. As a kid barely out of high school he had been recruited to both the Limeliters and the Chad Mitchell Trio, riding high on the hootenanny craze of the early sixties. Growing up in Chicago he had been drawn to the folk scene, had attended the Old Town School of Folk and, at clubs such as the Gate of Horn, learned from such luminaries as Bob Gibson, Josh White and Odetta.

Performing at the Governor Hindmarsh, Roger McGuinn’s solo show is a return to his folk origins, a mix of songs from his long and varied career, garnished with a likeable amount of reminiscence and commentary. Dressed in black t-shirt and jeans, sporting a goatee beard, and looking a good deal less than his fifty-nine years, he opens with Chimes of Freedom. His Rickenbacker ringing like a hurdy gurdy, McGuinn adds his distinctively reedy tenor, not a strong voice but memorably plaintive, and, in times past, the perfect foil to the more orthodox sweetness of David Crosby and the sturdy refrain of Chris Hillman. Another Dylan song follows - The Ballad of Easy Rider, written by Bob on a paper napkin with the tune provided by McGuinn.

Taking up his twelve string he sings a Brill Building classic - Goffin and King’s Wasn’t Born to Follow - a reminder that McGuinn himself wrote songs for Bobby Darin and later The Turtles. Then, delving back further, he sings several songs from the Harry Smith Treasury which McGuinn, like a musical Johnny Appleseed, has recorded for free downloads from his website. The first is from Rabbit Brown -James Alley Blues, the other is an homage to the original twelve string mastro Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly.

Generous to his old comrades from the Byrds, McGuinn pays tribute to the late Gene Clark with I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better and the lesser known B-side My Love She Don’t Care About Time. Readily charmed by his relaxed manner the Gov crowd is drawn into some singalong with Dog named Blue and even Hey Mr Spaceman. The excellent David Whiffen song, Driving Wheel is given a lovely reading and also on twelve string, the poignant coalmining anthem Bells of Rhymney. McGuinn notes that thirty years after first recording this Pete Seeger song the people of the town told him it is properly pronounced Rhumney, which he now dutifully remembers.

Another Dylan song, My Back Pages, is a reminder of the Byrds’ pre-eminent claim to his material, demonstrated even more amply by, first an acoustic, then a full throttle Rickenbacker version of Mr Tambourine Man. Turn Turn Turn follows, with a splendid twelve string solo and a strong sense, as with Bells of Rhymney that McGuinn has himself turned full circle to become, like Pete Seeger, an advocate for the preservation of American folkways. There is perhaps no more apt song to close the set than the trippy classic Eight Miles High, the Clark, McGuinn, Hillman composition that surely rates with Pet Sounds Brian Wilson and Beatles of the Revolver period.

Roger McGuinn takes several encores - So You Want To be a Rock and Roll Star and King of the Hill, co-written with Tom Petty - but he closes with the traditional Irish blessing, May the Road Rise to Meet You. May the road rise to meet you/ may the wind be at your back/ may the rain fall soft upon your face/ may God hold you in the palm of his hand. Certainly Roger McGuinn, in the excellent and ever hospitable surroundings at the Governor Hindmarsh, has held his audience spellbound with both his amiable conversation and his accomplished musicianship. Like that much mentioned tambourine man, it was a jingle jangle evening well worth following.

The Adelaide Review, No.214, July, 2001, pp.29-30.

Single Bill

Published: 2001-11-01

Billy Bragg with Dave Graney Show Norwood Concert Hall

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The prospect of The Dave Graney Show on the same card as Billy Bragg made this event doubly appealing. But I am sorry to report Mr Graney ‘s opening set is a disappointment. Perhaps he is diligently not wanting to steal the show. If so, I for one would not have been sorry if he’d taken that risk. Instead he’s looking uncertain and understaffed, even his raffish homburg, flared safari suit and spotted cravat have become tentative ironies.

With partner Clare Moore ever inventive on drums and Adele Pickvance steady on bass, Graney now handles all the chores on guitar and the result is the kind of thin lounge sound that he has always carefully steered around. The newer material - numbers like Anchors Aweigh and Don’t Mess With the Blood have a croony but somewhat anaemic charm and Son of Maggie May makes us wonder whether the joke is really on Rod at all.

Dave makes quite a few Lleyton Hewitt victory gestures but he is very far from pumped. His excellent Three Dead Passengers in a Second Hand Ford is edged out with an almost samba rhythm and a newer work, Leaving the Mount covers the same ground less crisply. I Held a Cool Breeze is closer to the gravy days, I try to imagine the Coral Snakes at his back in an arc of electric sound - it is a good song, like so many he has written. In these cut-down times we are all on skeleton staff, I know, but at the moment Dave Graney is travelling too light to even find his mojo, let alone his inner wolverine.

Billy Bragg also faces these tasks of continuity and renewal. What do you do when you have outlived your targets, when it is Blair not Thatcher, when the Wall is down, when you are an industrial citizen in a post-industrial world ? The boy from Barking has learned to keep his powder dry. His is the socialism of the heart. After all, he was always the milkman of human kindness and the ups and downs for boys and girls were ever his text.

On stage and nearing the end of his solo tour, Billy Bragg is looking like a geezer in his forties. There is a little grey in the quiff and with his flattened nose and his cupid bow lips he looks less like the young Trevor Howard and more like the older George C Scott. But he is chipper and still holds an audience like the consummate busker he once was, his customised Burns electric slung from his hip and his London patois laced wiv wit. Petrol rationing is over and I’ve got rid of your premier, is there anything else I can do while I’m ere ? Well you can sing us a song, Bill. Which he does - A Lover Sings, from the old hymn book, and Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key, music by B. Bragg, words by Woody Guthrie.

The Mermaid Avenue project, set up by Guthrie’s daughter Nora, put Bragg to work setting tunes to a trunkful of lyrics and poems that Guthrie, the radical American folk music legend of the thirties and forties, who was struck down by Huntingdon’s Chorea in the mid-1950s, left unfinished during his long and disabling illness. Way Over Yonder in a Minor Key is a charming song, its tune as catchy and partly purloined as any Guthrie might have written, and proof that the project was not as fanciful and contrived as it first seemed.

Between cups of tea, served by a roadie he calls Baldrick, Bragg sings the love song The Price I Pay and introduces a new song, St Monday, a ballad of the working week much enjoyed by a Sunday night crowd. The edgy Little Time Bomb from the Workers Playtime album is followed by the sombre and timely Rumours of War. Then, for the singalong component, some familiar Bragg anthems - There is Power in the Union and a jangling, spirited, strummy, Milkman of Human Kindness.

A likeable raconteur, Bragg entertains with stories of his tour, obsessional detail about wildebeest from his refuge from CNN, the Discovery Channel, and, because, this is, after all, an evening with Billy Bragg, some heartfelt comment on asylum seekers and international compassion. The set concludes with a Bragg classic, the ballad of Winstanley and the Diggers, World Turned Upside Down.

For encores he adds in Ingrid Bergman, a quirky glimpse of another side of Woody Guthrie, the droll self-portrait, Waiting For the Great Leap Forward and the rather wet, Dolphins. He sings a song about the Melbourne weather, the St Kilda football club and homesickness for watching West Ham in the London rain, and finishes with the Billy Bragg oldie and goodie, A New England.

Billy Bragg is in good form, even in interesting times. He wears his talent and doctrine lightly and can read a crowd with all the radar of a regional comedian. He remains an original - although in many ways Billy Bragg, with his Essex vowels is in a long line of music hall heroes, a mix of George Formby and John Lennon, and a forerunner of such successfully sensitive new lads as Nick Hornby. He’s not as red in the wedge as he once was, but he has not lost touch with us-down- pit. Even though he doesn’t ask us quite so often, we still know which side he is on.

“Single Bill” The Adelaide Review, No.218, November, 2001, pp.31-2.

A Little Night Music

Published: 2002-05-01

Faithless The barton Theatre Dirty Three Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is three years since Faithless were last through and they were also a late scratching from the 2002 Big Day Out. So there is a strong sense that the Wednesday 9.15 show at Thebarton is overdue. The Faithless faithful certainly think so as they pack in, moving close to a stage bathed in thick red light - drum kit, percussion rig and a double stack of keyboards all ready to fire.

Faithless are a House showband - a composite of trip hop, dance beat and prog pop, and as English as a country summer. Their faux pastoral sound has been enhanced by the breathy vocals of Dido and Zoe Johnston and the pastel washes of producers Rollo - and the Queen Bee herself, Sister Bliss. Add to all this the burred vocals of Maxi Jazz, the Nat King Cole of rap, and you have a winning sound. It may not be what the club wars of the early nineties were fought for, but for tourists like me it is all very edible.

It is Donny X to open. Heavy ripples of live drum and percussion and a pulse of bass begin, then a scream goes up as Sister Bliss takes her place at the Roland, jabbing the keyboard for a mix of foggy chords, and the kind of funky accents we used to hear from Joe Zawinul when Weather Report ruled the fusion world back in the seventies. The follow up is Muhammad Ali and Maxi Jazz makes his entrance - thin as a whip, he moves suavely in his trademark black suit and orange tee shirt, enunciating a literate toast to an African American role model while back-up singers ooh and ah and Bliss adds some Shafty brass on synth.

The crowd is up and awake for the opening bars of a Faithless signature - from the monster mix, Insomnia. Slow portentous intro from Bliss, and then Maxi begins his accented lament : “greasy insomnia please release me, I can’t get no …sleep” . Which, as anyone will tell you, is the cue line for the bony syncopations of Sister Bliss’s full-tilt keyboard riff, a thundering solo as distinctive in club music as the hook line in Layla is in rock. The punters go wild as white lights swivel across the stage and pour into the shimmering auditorium.

Mirroring the ying and yang programming of their Outrospective album, the band switches to the raindrop textures of Zoe Johnston’s Crazy English Summer, the singer stepping forward, only to return to the backline as the band pounds through Not Enuff Love and Maxi gets sinister for Tarantula, with Bliss laying a puttering rhythm, spiked with heavy splashing chords and high hat disco cymbals.

A cluster of oldies - Dirty Ol Man, the only track from Reverence, is followed by by a croony, understated version of I Want my Family Back. There is none of the cavernous architecture from the last tour. Similarly with Take the Long Way Home. Instead, the band pulls out the stops for We Come 1 - with deafening audience participation and much pointing in the direction of disco heaven. Sister Bliss, cool as blonde ice, whips up the momentum for the collective One, pausing gloriously to restate her Imsomnia trope, fanfare for the common clubster. It is a live dance classic - Maxi’s message of peace and solidarity, Sister Bliss- all synthesised sound and light, the rest of the band an engine of rhythm.

That is the end of the set, but the crowd has barely begun. Postcards opens the encore, followed by a version of The Garden with an extended acoustic guitar solo, a kitschly lyrical interlude before the Big Finale. Then, another fanfare and a thunder of drum and percussion as Maxi intones like the voice of Orson - “this is my church, this is where I heal my hurts”. Sister Bliss hits overdrive and the gathering is ready for rapture. Faithless give us eight minutes of God is a DJ and, while nothing actually transcendent takes place, with their impeccable production values, their likeable stage presence and the careful orchestration of their music-making, they more than secure their claim to being the snazziest live dance band we can expect to see here for some time.

A long way from the smooth confections of Faithless are Dirty Three. Well. at least A Thousand Miles - the composition from Horse Stories which opens their Sunday night set at the always excellent Governor Hindmarsh. Just out of the recording studio in Melbourne and celebrating ten years together, Dirty Three and their unique form of grunge jazz are as marvellous as ever. Drummer Jim White, guitarist Mick Turner and violinist Warren Ellis have a devoted following, but like the other alt.groups they have been associated with, such as Low and Will Oldham’s Palace Brothers, they deserve much more acclaim, here and internationally, than they have yet received .

Of course Dirty Three’s great appeal is that don’t give a bugger about such things and have continued to make music which is splendid on CD, and a total revelation when heard live. At the Gov they are in fine form. Having got the sound levels to where he wants them, Warren starts plucking his violin while White sets a deceptively simple percussive beat and Turner begins his mesmeric, understated guitar patterns. Such is the dominance of the posturing, blaring lead guitarist in contemporary music that the disciplined work of Mick Turner is almost incomprehensible in its intricacy and restrained dynamic. Yet it is the essential binding agent in the band - especially when Ellis begins the ascent into such ragas of winding melody as Some SummersThey Drop Like Flys (sic).

Warren Ellis is like some intense Romany fiddler, skinny and hunched over his miked-up violin. His curly hair is unfashionably long and he wears an old frayed shirt. He is friendly to the attentive crowd and even plays a request - track seven from Ocean Songs - Sea Above, Sky Below - although he seems to be calling it Chicago. Dirty Three titles vary anyway, and usually have some Warren expletives added - just his way perhaps of not getting himself confused with the Kronos Quartet , with whom - I believe in all seriousness - they are in comparable musical company.

Other highlights include Hope, also a Horse story, which begins with a melancholy figure played to straining point on violin, to a perfect slackfooted beat from White, and opening out into an exquisite melody repeated with almost unbearable intensity. Sue’s Last Ride, a concert favourite is also superbly performed, its straggly beginning only belying the eventual cohesion of the piece.

Dirty Three play for nearly two hours with an encore including Everything is Fucked from their first CD, and a long, unidentifiable love song whose title either got Warrenised on the night, or it is from material just recorded and yet to be released. Whatever it is, it takes us even further out into the badlands - past the cactus and the mesas and the gila monsters - to the preferred habitat of Dirty Three, some of the most interesting and accomplished musical guns in the west.

The Adelaide Review, No.224, May, 2002, p.21.

Fire and Hard Rain

Published: 2003-03-01

James Taylor Festival Theatre

Bob Dylan with Ani diFranco and the Waifs Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Perhaps no-one epitomises popular music at the beginning of the 1970s more than James Taylor. Along with Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon he was the prototype of the singer-songwriter, not a cult figure like Bob Dylan and the other folkies, but a confessional soloist the way John Lennon had become. By the end of the sixties no-one was supposed to sing other people’s songs, and songwriters were expected to sing their unvarnished own. Neil Diamond came up on stage, as, after taking singing lessons, did Jackson Browne and the Brill Building princess herself, Carole King.

From a talented, well-to-do Boston family James Taylor was a preppy, poetic, regressed young man. Good grief, he invited the comparison himself with his cowboy lullaby, Sweet Baby James. With handsome looks and a prodigious talent there was also more than a whiff of doom about him being both the first American to record for the Beatles’ Apple label and a heroin addict at the age of twenty.

His best songs had a wistful quality, melodic and airy, but they were, unsurprisingly, also tinged with danger. These epiphanies were provisional and regretful - none more so than Fire and Rain, his best known song, and among the finest elegies in recent American literature, set to one of pop’s most sublime tunes. Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you, he plaintively keens - and if ever a singer was also headed for the fast pony ride that took away Gram Parsons, Tim Buckley and a dozen others, it was James Taylor.

Which is why his presence on the touring circuit, particularly in the last five years or so, has been so gratifying. Anyone who has seen the DVD of his New York Beacon Theatre show from 1998 or the more recent Pull Over DVD of his 2001 US tour will know how revitalised Taylor is - and was likely to be for his current Australian shows. Promoting a new CD, October Road, one of his best in some time, his show at Festival Theatre is proof that he is not just in fine fettle, he is as fresh as he has ever been.

It is a long show - and it is all James Taylor. Fronting a five piece band including duet singer Arnold McCuller, Taylor , now bald and in his early fifties, in LL Bean cotton shirt and chinos, looks like a fitness conscious architect. Here is someone totally unpreoccupied with mystique, and relishing the freedom of it. He sings a cluster of songs including Copperline and October Road before warmly greeting an Adelaide audience already in an advanced state of rapture. Then, after a droll but very well-rehearsed intro, he sings Frozen Man, one of the most lilting and lovely of his more recent compositions. Larry Golding provides a glacial synth fanfare before Taylor begins harmonising with his own trickling guitar line as he narrates the story of William James McPhee, a mariner buried in the northern ice and exhumed for medical examination a hundred years later.

For the times Taylor sings Slap Leather, a satiric song written, he notes meaningfully, for the previous Bush and the previous Gulf War. Also, before interval, he sings a spirited version of Ric Von Schmitt’s Mighty Storm with rip-snorting guitar from Michael Landau, and a lovely reading of Fire and Rain, splendidly paced and as achingly sad as it has ever sounded. The second half is also a mix of old and recent - On the 4th of July ,with a samba rhythm from longtime session drummer Steve Gadd and Carole King classics - Up on the Roof and, with fluttery funk bass from Jimmy Johnson and the rich tenor of Arnold McCuller, You’ve Got a Friend. Carolina on My Mind is sounding as good ever, Taylor’s voice as clear as a liberty bell, and if anything, stronger and more centred than his younger self.

For an encore his blues send-up Steamroller gets some over-serious hyperbole from the band, eager perhaps to get beyond the low-key groove. But that’s the key of James Taylor and that’s where he is at his absolute best. He finishes with a solo crooning of Sweet Baby James, perfectly pitched and beautifully phrased . After that, there is nowhere else for little dogies to go but home.

In stark contrast to the managed ambience of James Taylor’s carefully turned craftsmanship is the raggedy existential dice throw which is the latest visit from Bob Dylan and his Neverending touring band. The 2001 Adelaide show was a blinder - a wonderfully limber country string band playing at full-tilt. This time Bob gives us a shorter show with more wattage. It is a long evening though, with a likeable set from the ubiquitous Waifs, including their radio hit London Still and an intense turn from the introverted Ani diFranco which, much the way Patti Smith did with a Dylan show about five years back, rapidly divides the crowd between fans of her particular brand of here’s-a-page-from-my-journal music and those who long for a semblance of structure.

But, as she observes, if anyone made it possible to meander in music it is Bob Dylan. And out comes the sixty something roving gambler. Along with all the other tragics I have been following the set lists on Bill Pagel’s Bob Links - the most assiduous website devoted to the micro-reporting of Dylan performances- to see which of the canon was going to be fired this time round. And, as in earlier Australian shows the emphasis is on the recent album - beginning with Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Dylan is wearing a black shirt with red braid piping accompanied by a gold neckscarf . He looks like a slightly unhinged Gene Autry or even Quentin Crisp in a cowboy moment, but what the hell - he’s in exceedingly good spirits, standing stage right at electric keyboard while the band, in grey Murph and the Magictones suits, set a cracking pace.

Bucky Baxter switches to pedal steel for I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, while Bob squawks on harp and growls amiably through one of his good-time tunes of old. Highway 61 is revisited in a raucous rocking version - Bob back at piano, muttering out vocals so grainy they make Howling Wolf sound like Frank Sinatra. Tony Garnier and David Kemper on bass and drums produce an enormous sound. Tonight they could be auditioning for the Bad Seeds. I’ll Remember You is a surprise from Empire Burlesque followed by Things have Changed, one of Dylan’s less notable compositions, but an Oscar winner nonetheless. The opening bars for Cold Irons Bound are chaotic but, when that great riff beds in, Dylan,complete with jangly lead guitar, creates unchained melody.

The highlight of the show is a full band acoustic version of Masters of War which, along with It’s Alright Ma, is sung with such conviction and emphasis that we can have no doubt that forty years on, and in a time of dying, Dylan still stands by his words. Some songs are of love - Girl From the North Country and a skittish version of Lay Lady Lay - others are of theft like the Leon Redbone-ish Bye and Bye and Summer Days.

The band has played hard and loud, and guitarist Bill Burnette has filled the large shoes of Charlie Sexton. Bob has had a good night as Mr Piano. For encores, only two - a pleasing, if brisk, version of Forever Young and an incendiary All Along the Watchtower, with Hendrix feedback and a weather eye on wildcats in the distance. Bob Dylan is sixty two and a force of nature. He serenades us and he capers like the old bojangles he likes to think he is. But there is gravity and authority in his manner as well. Tonight he has sung Masters of War loudly and clear. You that hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks, I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

“Fire and Hard Rain” The Adelaide Review, No.234, March 2003, pp.23-4.

Published: 2003-05-01

The Blind Boys of Alabama

Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is ten years next month since Brian and Vivien Tonkin took over the licence at the Governor Hindmarsh hotel on Port Road. And in that time it has become one of the busiest, and certainly the best loved, of Adelaide’s live music venues. Week after week it programs every kind of music - blues, jazz, old rock, new pop, Scottish and Irish music, garage bands and electronica. There is something on all the time - whether it is a good-timey singalong in the front bar or high profile acts in the now- extended lounge space.

Australian acts such as Paul Kelly, Renee Geyer, Tim Rogers, Chris Wilson, Tex Perkins, Ed Kuepper, and Rebecca’s Empire have given some of their most memorable performances at the Gov. So have a raft of international artists. Some that spring to mind are Roger McGuinn, Glenn Tilbrook, Andy Irvine, Waterson Carthy and Jimmy Webb. But you only need look at the listings for the last two or three months for a sample of the venue’s range and quality. First we saw John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Tony Joe White and the dynamic Ellen McIlwaine. Then in March the Irish accordion marvel Sharon Shannon, another great set from Dirty Three, and a show from Scottish legends Teenage Fanclub that had the faithful in a sustained swoon. The Necks performed, so did Brendan Power, Spencer Jones and Irish singer songwriter Paul Brady.

If anything, last month was even more frenetic. With the Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival came a rush of touring overseas acts - Flook, Sam Carr’s Delta Jukes, Michelle Shocked, Angelique Kidjo, Tuck and Patti , Grant Lee Phillips, Womad favourite Bob Brozman and the notorious, dentally challenged former Pogue, Shane McGowan.

]

Also, in for a second time to Adelaide, are the Blind Boys of Alabama, the gospel singing group founded in 1939 and enjoying considerable chic since moving several years ago to Peter Gabriel’s Real Music label and collaborating with musicians of the calibre of David Lindley, Ben Harper and Robert Randolph. They have won Grammys two years running and their latest CD Higher Ground includes material from Prince, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield and Funkadelic.

It is late Wednesday morning and at the Gov there is something of a situation. The Blind Boys are due to play that night and advance ticket sales are looking very ordinary. In an unprecedented move Richard Tonkin has emailed journalists and other Gov regulars with an SOS to circulate electronic flyers in a bid to improve numbers by showtime. The fee for Clarence Fountain and his band is substantial and if things don’t improve the Tonkins are likely to take a rinsing - and it sure isn’t going to be in the blood of the Lamb.

It is not the best moment to be interviewing Brian Tonkin about life at the Gov. Not that he seems to mind. A soft spoken, animated fellow with grey whiskers and a wry laugh, Tonkin, with his wife Vivien, has run pubs all his working life. The Governor Hindmarsh, he tells me, they set up for live music in Adelaide.

“ We were at the end of our commercial lives - and we’d made a fair bit of money so we decided to set up the Gov to pay back all the musicians who supported us over the years.”

A long time member of the South Australian folk scene, Tonkin is a musician himself. He is very diffident about it - preferring to talk up his son Richard instead. But the five string banjo is Brian Tonkin’s instrument and he talks intensely about regular visits he makes to the Appalachian mountain region to meet musicians, many of whom are now friends, and make music. He is passionate about the nexus between music and community and, while I want to talk about celebrated headliners at the Gov, he prefers to steer the emphasis back to grass roots action. The Frances Folk Gathering is one of his pet projects - a summer music camp in regional South Australia which is less about watching and more about everybody pitching in and trying. He is mad keen for more music programs in schools and has plans to push for musicians in residence especially for primary pupils to listen to and learn from.

While he is convening a wide range of music styles at his venue Brian Tonkin has strong views about the effects of commercial production. He regrets the way music has become fixed in the aspic of recording, causing artists to endlessly replicate their own work. Bob Dylan gets full points for making his songs new again with variant arrangements and instrumentations. Tonkin also is critical of the tendency to ape American accents and the limited range of subject matter in current songs. You’d think, he muses, that the only experience in life is a broken romance.

For Brian Tonkin community music is the thing. People coming in to his pub with instruments and starting to play. “I’d like to have a pub which would become a mecca for musicians and we’d end up with crossover music out of the friendships which would develop.” He knows it’s a pipe dream but he’s puffing on it anyway.

And he has had to stand up and be counted to protect his idea. Over the past several years clashes began between developers of new housing in the inner city and live music venues. The Gov had to face down a bid to curtail activity when some adjacent apartments were being built. With a mixture of obstinacy, nerve and the shrewd tactical use of influential friends, Tonkin and his circle rallied support and eventually legislation was enacted ( and proclaimed in the front bar of the Gov) which has become the model for live music protection throughout the country.

As we talk in the front bar of the Gov, phones are ringing, glasses are chinking, Irish pipes are keening through the tannoys, and furniture is being moved in optimistic expectation of the night’s, as yet, sparsely ticketed show. Among it all, Brian Tonkin is unfazed, intent on getting his message through - that music is not just a bit of pleasant distraction, it is central to the species, it heals individuals and communities. And if it is blues music in Chicago or street music in New Orleans it can also revitalise tourism and the commercial sector. But that’s another whole thing Tonkin is into - reporting on his numerous music pilgrimages in the US, Mexico and Ireland…

It is now later that evening. By 9.15pm the show begins. A young Adelaide singer named Nuala Honan takes the stage. She’s eighteen and only got the call to play late that afternoon. She’s a little daunted and yet is full of charming confidence. She wears a floppy hat and sings with surprising strength, her phrasing angular, her guitar laconic. This is what Brian Tonkin believes in - local singers performing in their own city. There is a ton of talent around, he’s the first to say, it just needs an audience. Nuala Honan asks if anyone has a camera. Her first gig at the Gov and she wants a photo. Someone obliges and she beams with pride. The audience, now a very respectable size, is warming up.

The Blind Boys of Alabama are led onstage. The two originals - singers Clarence Fountain and Jimmy Carter- take up positions, one seated, one standing sublimely still. Blind drummer Ricky McKinnie settles in while the younger sighted band members bring on their guitars. In what look like woodgrain vinyl suits the band is quite a sight - dazzlingly kitsch and otherworldly as well. The singing begins with Fountain’s grainy baritone and the bell-like tenor of Jimmy Carter. The rhythm pounds and the vocals soar - Jesus is good enough for me. This is what makes gospel music, that mix of rhythm and blues and charismatic church hymns, so irresistible. The crowd is in rapture in no time and, in the intimate layout at the Gov, everything is very up close and spiritual.

The Blind Willie Johnson song Nobody’s Fault But Mine is next, followed by the sweetly phrased Ben Harper song I Shall Not Walk Alone. The harmonies are electric even if the band wants for either keyboards or the textures of the gospel style pedal steel provided on the Higher Ground CD by Harper himself and the prodigiously talented Robert Randolph. The Blind Boys sing the celebrated Amazing Grace, set to the tune of House of the Rising Sun and also from the Spirit of the Century CD, Soldier (in the Army of the Lord). The sound tech is kept busy supplying hand mikes and Ricky McKinnie on drums forms an invincible alliance with Caleb Butler and Tracy Pierce on rhythm and bass guitars.

It wouldn’t be a Blind Boys show without some crowd surfing and Jimmy Carter, led by Butler, is lowered in to the audience for some whooping and hollering, some meeting and some greeting. It goes on for a power of a long time, with the band whipped up and the frail, elegant Carter pirouetting as he preaches the gospel blues, Look What You Brought Me From. Both Fountain and Carter groove for the crowd who are upstanding throughout the upbeat Last Time and settle back down for the soulful strains of Deep River.

The band perform several encores for a crowd which, summoned by email and roused by righteous music, is in no hurry to be done. Lead guitarist Joey Williams shines with fine solos on The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow and the entourage leave the stage once more, returning for the final song - Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground. It starts with a deep moan and then hits the beat. Joey Williams winds in some wah wah guitar and the singers in four and five part harmonies sing triumphantly about keeping on climbing to that higher ground. It is hackles of the neck stuff and a heaven of a good way to bring things to a close. The numbers are good enough for near break even, the Tonkins have been deservedly supported. Another good night at the Gov - and not just a matter of blind faith either.

The Adelaide Review, No.236, May 2003, p.22.

Heart in the Highlands

Published: 2003-06-01

Bob Dylan with Paul Kelly

Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

This time he blew in from the West. Still on the Neverending Tour, and back in Australia - three years on, and sixth time round - Bob Dylan has turned his Sisyphean treadmill into a victory lap. At least, that is the report of messengers, posting news of sightings and setlists on Bill Pagel’s Boblinks website. The intelligence has been promising since his European dates last year. England had been brilliant, the Portsmouth bootlegs proof of the pudding. And the stats for February and March, as closely scrutinised as the Nikkei or Dow, indicate that he has played seventy eight songs from a trove of more than five hundred, and Tangled Up in Blue is holding at number nine.

This is Bob Dylan in the 21st century. The time lord continues, through incarnations and near death experiences, his travelling Tardis going ever backwards from Tom Baker to William Hartnell. We have seen many more than seven ages of Dylan - the hobo youth aping Woody Guthrie, the elfin boy with tumbleweed hair glaring from the cover of Blonde on Blonde, the Amish family guy of New Morning, the gypsy of Desire, and, much more recently, the eccentric ruin peering quizzically out of the aptly named Time Out of Mind. Now, sporting a pencil moustache and wearing a riverboat gambler’s tie and hand carved boots, Bob Dylan is thin and frail. He could be an ageing Midwestern poet from the school of Robinson Jeffers, he could be Sir Ian McKellen, vamping as a whisky judge.

Whatever he mercurially is, Bob Dylan continues to fascinate. His mystique is managed as endlessly as he tours. He doesn’t give interviews, his minders keep him out of the papers. He is reclusively private and yet he performs as many as two hundred concerts a year. Standing on stage, he maintains the enigma. Bob Never Speaks. Bob Only Sometimes Smiles. He is there right in front of you, but who is that masked, and unmasked, man ?

Out in Networld, the virtual entrails are examined. Daily, concert stalkers drink his wine and web managers plow his earth. Hoping, somewhere along the line, they will know what all of this is worth. The vivisection, the trainspotting, the flow-charts, the obsessive spirit of AJ Weberman lives on. And Bob plays along with this, and then he doesn’t. True to prediction, he does play Tangled Up in Blue at number nine in the set. But at his concerts, unlike the legendary gigs by the Grateful Dead, surreptitious tapers are hauled out and told to leave. He travels continents, including our own, without uttering a word - and then speaks whole sentences on the Academy Awards, expressing Actual Gratitude and thanking every last corporate good old boy at Columbia Records.

Paul Kelly, Bruce Haymes and Vika and Linda Bull have played an elegantly-judged, thirty minute opening set which begins with Cities of Texas and ends, warmly, with Wintercoat. Now, onstage at the Entertainment Centre, will we please welcome Bob Dylan. The band is in place and the singer appears. But nobody is expecting Bob to welcome us, of course, or to start telling us about an afternoon visit to the koalas at Cleland. We know the drill. Bob does not Speak. Instead he is straight in to Duncan and Brady - I’ve been on the job too long. It is loose, but the sound is very promising. Larry Campbell and Charley Sexton are on acoustic guitars, Tony Garnier on upright bass and on drums David Kemper plays with careful restraint.

The Times They are A-Changin’ is next and everyone is on to it. Dylan croons the lyrics like a wistful lover and the guitars sound slack-stringed and Spanish. There is an airiness in the sound and a precision. It’s Alright Ma is also deftly done. Dylan’s diction is studied but not snarly, and his tendency, as with many songs tonight, is to an almost automatic upward inflection. Switching to electrics for If You See Her Say Hello, Seeing the Real You and an exhilarating version of the Big Pink, Rick Danko classic, This Wheel’s On Fire, the band retains the fluidity and lightness of touch of the acoustic songs. This is not rock music, heavy on the beat, leaden in its rhythms, it is vintage rock and roll - Elvis Presley, circa the 1955 Sun Sessions. And Bob, wiggling to the beat, splays out one bandy leg as if to show that, he too, has to serve somebody …

Ring Them Bells, one of the finest tracks from Oh Mercy is garnished with a spray of pealing notes from Larry Campbell on lap steel guitar. It is a highpoint. Masters of War is lightly delivered with Campbell on mandolin but Dylan’s lyric still carries its sardonic disdain. A wonderfully ,snaggletoothed Tangled Up in Blue comes in at nine. Then, after Watching the River Flow, Drifters Escape, set in Kafka’s courthouse, is an eerie miscarriage of justice made creepier by Charlie Sexton’s minimalist guitar. The first set is topped off with that Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat, a barrelhouse blues which just gets better each time Dylan puts it on.

The band takes a bow - or rather a stand and stare. There is a touch of panic that Bob wants an early night. But nothing is further from the truth. The seven song encore section begins with Highlands, the lyrically rich final track from Time Out of Mind. Some fans have braved the edicts and moved to the edge of the stage and Dylan begins to serenade them with his cracked old croony voice - My heart’s in the Highlands/only place left to go. Sexton and Campbell play a sweet rockabilly swing, Garnier thrums his bendy bass and David Kemper rolls the drums with a discerning minimum of thump. The album version runs nearly seventeen minutes, this one runs maybe nine or ten but it is still an extraordinary performance. This is a very fine moment - Dylan as Whitman and Hank Williams, Roy Rogers and Hammerstein.

Other standards follow, Like a Rolling Stone, that wacko lounge swinger If Dogs Run Free, a spine-tingling, post-Neil Young trip along the Watchtower, a stately, keening dirge of I Shall Be Released which reminds us that it is already a treasure of the American canon. Sexton plays a cherry red Gibson and Garnier a big blind bass. Another round of electrics are very easily done for Highway 61 Revisited and Dylan closes with a surprisingly emphatic Blowin in the Wind. The crowd wants more, even though we have already had our fill. We’ve seen the best concert Dylan has given here since 1986 - and he sang Highlands. Perth had Visions of Johanna, Melbourne, Blind Willie McTell. But Adelaide has had its heart in the Highlands, gentle and fair, honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air…

The Adelaide Review, No.211, April, 2001, p.33

Audio with Pictures

Published: 2003-06-01

Music DVDs reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The arrival of the DVD has been rapid in Australia. We are well-known for our speedy take-up of new technology but the saturation of the market by the digital versatile disc has been particularly swift even by our standards. Probably it is due to the fact that DVD players, which cost upwards of seven hundred dollars three years ago, now cost less than a quarter of that now. And Dolby digital sound systems are also far more affordable than component stereo units of, say, twenty years ago. Essentially, for a couple of thousand dollars you can fill your living room with speakers and still have a fat sub-woofer behind the sofa.

Now the DVD player is genuinely multipurpose, playing CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, VCDs, DVDs, MP3s - you name it, it can do it. Probably if you fed a beer coaster into one, it would play that too. And there is no need to buy a separate CD player any more - even an inexpensive DVD player will produce gratifyingly clear and rich sound.

So it is not surprising that an increasing amount of DVD program material is being released. Not just the ever-expanding back catalogue of movies and a burgeoning sell-through market which is challenging video rentals, but also the increasing availability of every kind of music. DVD is the perfect form for opera for instance - giving immaculate visual clarity matched by the richness of the soundtrack. It is also very well-suited to popular music and jazz.

For a time, music DVDs have offered fairly prosaic transfers of video material to disc with little in the way of enhancement and extra features. There have been notable exceptions however. The Eagles’ reunion concert Hell Freezes Over (Warner Vision) which dates back to 1994 is still high on the Amazon.com lists for best DVD sound. Even if the Eagles aren’t your cup of tequila sunrise, the density, clarity and volume of the DTS format is impressive and remains a benchmark.

Other fine examples exist. James Taylor’s 1998 release Live at the Beacon Theatre (Sony) deserves honourable mention as does Roy Orbison’s Black and White Night (Warner Vision) a year later. But more recently a number of music DVDs have offered better and more. Increasingly, with discounting bringing prices down below twenty five dollars DVDs start to look like better value than a conventional music CD. If you were looking for a greatest hits package for instance, The Pretenders DVD (Warner Vision) which includes twenty clips and a forty five minute documentary has a running time of two hours, while the matching CD at a similar price has fewer tracks and, of course, no other extras.

Similarly, Cure fans pounced on a Greatest Hits DVD (Warner) which included additional acoustic tracks as well as a bunch of those hidden extras known as Easter eggs. Australian band Something for Kate’s A Diversion (Sony) put together a collection of videos, live tracks and other materials which totalled more than three hours while David Bowie’s Best of Bowie (EMI) is a double disc set which includes forty seven tracks with a running time of four hours eleven minutes.

But never mind the width what about the quality ? In the past six months or so there have been a number of releases which combine the highest standard of digital sound with quality, letterboxed vision. Alt. Country singer Gillian Welch is well known for her contribution to the highly successful soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou ? as well as to the spin off concert and documentary DVD Down From the Mountain made by Nick Doob, Chris Hegedus and the legendary D.A. Pennebaker.

Her not so recent CD Time (The Revelator) has now been augmented by a DVD entitled The Revelator Collection.(Acony) Consisting of three videos and nine live performances it is directed by Mark Seliger in elegant retro monochrome. Featuring Welch and her collaborator, the gifted guitarist David Rawlings, the anthology has a pleasing visual continuity with a sparkling audio quality. The titles include the jauntily phrased My First Lover, the title track, April the 14^th and their signature tune I Want to Sing that Rock and Roll. Also added are previously unreleased performances of Wichita, Billy and Townes van Zant’s White Freightliner Blues. This Revelator is a revelation.

I mentioned James Taylor earlier and now his latest concert length DVD Pull Over (Sony) merits attention. Smoothly filmed and in letterboxed format it captures performances from his tour in 2001, showcasing new material from last year’s October Road album and ,over two hours and twenty three songs, offering an extensive retrospective of his whole career. With an tight band including brass and horns and four back up singers, Taylor breathes new life into Carolina in My Mind, Copperline, Fire and Rain and others. The Carole King hit You Got a Friend is there , as is Taylor’s own Frozen Man. The sound is large and lush and the visual style is appealingly low key. This is a DVD to add to your list.

Another live concert DVD worth checking out is Herbie Hancock’s Future2Future (Sony) Like all Herbie Hancock projects it is technically ambitious and stylishly achieved. Ever at the leading edge - from his pioneering electric keyboards in the late sixties and seventies to his proto-hiphop experiments with Rockit in the 1980s - Hancock has assembled a band including drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, keyboardist and programmer Darrell Diaz, bassist Matthew Garrison, turntablist DJ Disk and trumpet player Wallace Roney.

The venue is The Knitting Factory in Los Angeles and in a full set running one hour forty four we can enjoy the visual and aural tones of a remarkable ensemble. Hancock is back to his funk and fusion repertoire with Virtual Hornets, Chameleon and a revamped Rockit. DJ Disk’s dexterity is highlighted in duets with Hancock as well as with the Miles-inflected Wallace Roney. Carrington is superb on drums especially on the tribute Tony Williams and the extended twenty minute jam Dolphin Dance.

This DVD, produced by Zane Vella, is in DTS and Dolby digital format and includes MX multiangling which enables you, should you so wish, to home in soloists or stay in long shot. I’m not sure it’s all that illuminating but, as ever, Herbie Hancock, still young at sixty three, is using every available opportunity to make it new and very cool.

The Adelaide Review, No.237, June, 2003, p.23.

The Old Firm

Published: 2003-07-01

The Go-Betweens

Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I don’t know what The Go-Betweens went between when they started out in the late Seventies but now they are marvellous emissaries for a period when popular music really got its mojo back. It began in 1977 in New York and London with punk and power pop, but Australia was also in the hunt with bands such as Nick Cave’s Birthday Party, The Saints, Laughing Clowns, Radio Birdman and, Brisbane’s answer to Talking Heads - The Go Betweens.

There has always been a spark in the combination of the band’s songwriters, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, and they still rate with the best of the dynamic duos - Partridge and Moulding of XTC, Difford and Tilbrook of Squeeze, even middle period Lennon and whatsisname. They rescued the perfect lineaments of three minute pop from the meanderings of prog rock and the excesses of the synthesiser and, over twenty or so albums and a sizeable number of memorable singles, The Go-Betweens defined their own sound.

It has been a turbulent time, of course. After the first half a dozen LPs, the spark turned to fizzle when the band disintegrated in the late 1980s. The various members went on to productive solo careers - only to reform again around the Forster McLennan axis ten years later. Now, the Go Betweens are really back in business with a steady line-up and, recorded last year, a strong new album.

Match fit from a month touring in Europe, followed by performances in Japan, the Go Betweens are in Adelaide for a night at The Gov, supported by whimsical Melbourne art band, Architecture in Helsinki. As Forster leads the band on stage there is an air of foppish irony about him. A tall lanky figure, his hair parted in thick Wildean clumps, he peers into the crowd from under heavy eyebrows. There is something distracted looking about him and in a floral shirt with high rounded collars and a pair of winklepicker shoes, the like of which I haven’t seen since 1963, he is elegantly eccentric. Grant McLennan, in contrast, is inconspicuous in manner and moleskins..They worked out, long ago, who does what in the performance department. Bassist Adele Pickvance and drummer Glenn Thompson are notably younger and quickly get down to the rhythm business.

The set is a nice mix of Go-Between standards and new material from the current Bright Yellow, Bright Orange CD. Forster’s songs feature first, including Make Her Day. She’s got eyes that really know how to sting, Forster intones while Pickvance and Thompson lay down jabby beats and McLennan picks out lively acoustic runs in breezy conjunction with Forster’s electric riffs. It is a boppy, sunny sound in contrast to the sardonic lyrics. Thank you Adelaide hipsters, Forster deadpans to a rapidly warming crowd. Then with a lookaway stare he sets off into German Farmhouse with its dreamy geography and warm thrummy basslines. Grant McLennan steps up for lead vocal on This Girl, Black Girl - the two musicians working effortlessly on harmonies and guitar. Touring has made the band supple and confident and the time is right for the gentle satire and classic pop of Surfing Magazines.

Two new songs, Caroline and I and Poison in the Walls, the first sung by Forster, the latter by McLennan, each highlight the fact that the band’s material has never been stronger, more subtle and intriguing. And like junior siblings who know big brothers are watching, the accomplished Pickvance and Thompson click straight in to complete the picture. Streets of Your Town, the famous single, never sounded fresher or more tender. This is not an obligatory greatest hit but a celebration of a younger spirit and signals in both Forster and McLennan (they sound like Cambridge spies) renewed pleasure in their music. Forster, evidently enjoying the vibe at the Gov, introduces Too Much of One Thing, another track from the new album, played with an airy string band pace that almost echoes Dylan, circa Tangled up in Blue. With McLennan and the rest of the band smoothly taking the corners and guitar changes, Forster croons his confessions of a crowded hour.

The Go-Betweens are having a new golden age - not only with strong current material, but a lineup that is nimble, thrifty and as appealing as any around. The old echoes are there - a tip of the Velvets, the brightness of early 80s English pop - but there is also … a mellow fruitfulness, you might say. Listen to the encores - The Clock, Spring Rain, Was There Anything I Could Do. They have never sounded better or more crisply intelligent. And how, if you are a Go-Between, do you say goodbye ? - with a Bachelor kiss and a panegyric to glamour. I love Lee Remick, she’s a darling. Forster is in heavy lidded rapture, and a grinning McLennan is briefly back on the bass.` Back to the very beginning, Forster observes, as they take a final bow. Yes, and, at the end of exploring, knowing the place for the first time.

The Adelaide Review, No.238, July, 2003, p.22.

Parallel Worlds

Published: 2003-09-01

Blondie Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Video may have killed some radio stars but it was the absolute making of Blondie. From their first appearance in 1977 at the height of the Punk and New Wave incursions, this New York pop band not only made their mark but set their own agenda for success. Hopping genres from arthouse pop to disco, reggae and even rap, Blondie not only ruled the airwaves but the cathode rays as well

With Countdown and Rock Arena the main sources of pop music on Australian television, the release of Blondie film clips was an event. Surely there is no greater classic than 1978’s Heart of Glass from Parallel Lines. The opening bars of rippling disco bass, the robotic movements of Chris Stein, Jimmy Destri and Clem Burke with their faux Mod haircuts and then, backlit and ravishing, the insinuating vocals of Debbie Harry.

Already in her early thirties, with several bands in her CV, as well as a stint as a Playboy Bunny, Harry, with her shag-cut platinum hair, her peachy skin and delectably lidded eyes re-defined pop beauty. There had been plenty of fetching women singers before, and plenty who challenged the girlie stereotype altogether. But Debbie Harry had glamour. She was up there with Harlow and Marilyn Monroe and, when we heard her cooing, unformed voice on the radio we also summoned up after-images of those look-away eyes and the corona of light that transformed her into something close to an encounter of the third kind.

More than twenty five years on, Debbie is now Deborah, and a mature fifty eight years old. After the split-ups and the lawsuits, Blondie has been reconstituted for a world tour and are heralding a new CD, The Curse of Blondie, due, after some delays, for release in a month or two. The line-up, for the first tour of Australia since In the Flesh jumped into the charts in 1978, includes Blondie originals - keyboard player Jimmy Destri and drummer Clem Burke.

Conspicuously missing is Chris Stein who is claiming family commitments. Interestingly, it is only when Stein is absent that we can recognise how necessary he is in the band’s semiotic. Like Pete Townshend, what he lacks in looks he makes up for with a sort of charisma of indifference. Stein, of course, carried the title of World’s Most Fortunate. As The Boyfriend, he and Debbie Harry were the Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe of pop.

Now the focus is very much on Harry herself - and with a more ample figure and a relaxed outfit in orange accents, she is telling us that life is good without the need for high glamour. The trademark platinum hair remains, as do those legendary cheekbones and cupid’s bow lips but now Deborah Harry is straight into the music. The set opens with two new songs, sounding true to Blondie but with the heavy bass and beats of current dance culture. The crowd is hyped , crouched and waiting for a gold plated hit. Harry smiles like a cat and tosses out Dreaming. Clem Burke does the fluttery drumming, Destri the synth fanfares and Deborah Harry trills those witty rhymes and repetitions - meet, meet, dream, dream. This is the essence of Blondie. The spirit of the Chiffons and the Shirelles, now in New York quotation marks, the artless sound of art pop.

The band is riding a thudding wave now, and the hits unfold. Hanging on the Telephone, Call Me and then, all cascading disco bass and chiming guitars, the anthem to instant gratification … tonight, tonight - Atomic ! Abba harmonies, yes, but something more … sardonic. The band stretches out and displays some of the new talent in bassist Leigh Foxx and one of the Stein stand-ins, Paul Carbonara - introduced at the end of the set only as ‘Delicious’. The other ring-in, Jimmy Bones, is a skinny kid with a Guns ‘n’ Roses headband and a great deal more guitar licence than he deserves. Blondie have always had a whiff of satire but this joker is mainline Spinal Tap.

The new single, Good Boys, gets a solid workout and Harry and the band may get to chart in their fourth decade yet. The torchy Maria is the cue for composer Destri to lay out some keyboards, assisted by Kevin Topping. But it is the dance numbers - Accidents Never Happen., The Tide is High and the intriguing X Offender - that have the fans swooning. Union City Blues, one of Harry’s more substantial songs, features Clem Burke to good effect and the set closes, only to be immediately re-ignited, with the first encore - Rapture, a remarkable work of pop cannibalism, with its syncopated rap interlude ten years before its time. The surreal video clip comes to mind, Harry dancing in front of graffiti walls with a loping partner in top hat and tails. She is in terrific voice with those sassy lines of urban desire.

There is still a feeling that something has been missed - is it One Way or Another ? Well, yes. But, no. Heart of Glass is, of course, the finale - fluting vocal, unabashed disco beat, Destri, under-used on synths, brought to centre stage. Forget the guitar hero just concentrate on the Old Firm - Harry, Burke and Destri. No look-away glances this time, not quite as ravishing , tempus has been somewhat fugit. But there is something fabulously unrepentant here - all in their fifties, playing shameless, coquettish postmodern confections that would bury any other band under its own pastiche. That’s Blondie - too good for Dagwood , and still too good to be quite true.

“Parallel Worlds” The Adelaide Review, No 240, September, 2003, p.23.

Jumping Joe

Published: 2003-10-01

Joe Jackson with Joe Camilleri and Bakelite Radio Thebarton Theatre

Murray Bramwell

I’ve always thought of Joe Jackson as part of that triumvirate which also included Elvis Costello and Graham Parker. They were the Auden, Spender and MacNeice of the late seventies. Their lyrics mordantly capturing the spirit of the age just as Auden and his fellow poets had in the grim times of the 1930s. Costello wrote the dense punning lyrics, Parker burned with the gem-like flame, and Joe Jackson wrote smart infectious pop.

Jackson’s career has been long and varied - pop singer to cabaret to chamber music composer and now, full circle, to the original Joe Jackson Band. With drummer Dave Houghton, guitarist Gary Sanford and bassist Graham Maby Jackson has got the band back together. And not just for a tour. The group has recently recorded Volume Four, a set of new songs named for the fact that, although Jackson has made umpteen albums, this is only the fourth with the old line-up.

For the Thebarton show, Joe Camilleri and his fellow Bakelite Radio members, guitarist Claude Carranza and bass player Steve Starr, open the proceedings with an excellent set featuring all the Jo Jo moves from Poor Boy Blues to The Chosen One. He gets a warm welcome and deservedly so. His return, with the Falcons, to the Gov late this month will be well worth catching.

Joe Jackson shows have a reputation for their finesse and quality. Many would rate his Night and Day and Big World gigs as among the best they’ve ever seen and that expectation is not disappointed with the Volume Four show. It is as neat as a pin. Just the four players, unlike the ten and twelve piece bands Jackson has travelled with before - and everything is well, …sharp.

The top-spots spray down on Joe, curtaining out the rest of the band as he hits the keyboard for the signature bars of Steppin’ Out. There are no high fretting notes from Graham Maby’s bass - that is yet to come. Instead it is Jackson sweetly keening in a duet with those chiming piano chords. It is a beguiling start but this is not the Joe Jackson lounge act . For One More Time he is draped over the microphone for those old post-punk, beat crazy moves of Joe the Young Dog. At not-quite fifty he is still unworldly looking - like Tin Tin, with a hint of Mr Squiggle. Tall and lanky and all angles in his dark frock coat, he capers with the band as they get into the groove.

Interspersing the very appealing new material - Awkward Age, Bright Grey and Love at First Light - are the Big Hits. Fools in Love sounds terrific with Houghton’s thumping drum and Graham Maby’s marvellously nimble, bony bass and the crowd does a bit of a gasp as Jackson segues into the Yardbirds’ classic For Your Love before getting to that great punchline - I should know, this fool’s in love with you. Is She Really Going Out With Him ? is given a sprightly, boppy reading before Jackson takes to the piano for some solos. It is all strong stuff - the splendidly melodic Will You be My Number Two ? A spine-tingling cover of Graham Parker’s You Can’t be Too Strong and a well-judged version of Real Men, a song that sounds more like a masterpiece every time you hear it.

More new material follows but it is the less distinguished Dirty Martini and Dogs R Us. Better instead, the vintage satire of Sunday Papers and I Don’t Wanna Be Like That. The tempo is a tad slow - Sanford provides great power pop guitar but we want them to really let rip. This happens with Got The Time - ticking in your head ! Joe is jumping like a nutter and Maby is resplendent in a shaft of light for his famous solo. It is a great crest to finish on. The encores are suitably short and sweet. Look Sharp and I’m a Man, both delivered in the fast and furious (and wonderfully loud) style of their heyday. The usually introspective Jackson is looking pleased. He natters amiably to the crowd, the band is on song and it’s a brand new day for Spiv rock, jumping jive and looking very sharp.

The Adelaide Review, No.241, October, 2003, p. 27.

Music from the Clear Blue Air

Published: 2004-02-01

Turin Brakes

Fowlers Live

Murray Bramwell

Just three days into January and we may already be seeing one of the year’s best. UK band, Turin Brakes, on the rebound from the Falls Festival, are playing to a tiny but attentive crowd at Fowlers Live and showing just why they have gathered such a big reputation since their exceptional debut album, The Optimist, first appeared in 2001.

Touted as nu acoustica, along with the likes of I am Kloot, Kings of Convenience and Starsailor, co-writers Ollie Knights and Gale Paridjanian, have now taken the obscurely named Turin Brakes ahead of the pack, especially since the release of their new CD, Ether Song, with its appealingly spacious sound and intricately layered arrangements.

There are many things to like about these serious young insects. Their gorgeous, keening vocals for a start - and the confidence and drowsy numbness of their elegantly constructed songs. There are notable influences. Some, they admit, come from poring over folk rock albums in their parents’ houses - all that Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Crosby, Stills and Nash and so on. But there is also something of the operatic, surrealistic style of Cream’s Jack Bruce (and his lyricist Pete Brown), as well as links with such contemporaries as Badly Drawn Boy and the late and much lamented Elliott Smith.

In the limited confines of the Fowlers stage the duo, plus bass, keyboards and drums, trade a few wan remarks about the near forty degree heat and, with no further ado, take airy flight into one of their ether songs. Long Distance - I let somebody get under my skin. The vocals, fired up by Knights and then welded into bright metal with the intensity of Paridjanian’s harmonies, sound unearthly even in the limited acoustics of the venue. The band provides a staunch beat while the vocals entwine in hypnotic unison. We are getting all the new material - Five Mile, with loud splashy guitar and hurdy gurdy keyboard, and the slowly unfurling Stone Thrown - with filigree bottleneck from Gale and dreamy crooning from Ollie.

The new songs sound good - Self Help, Panic Attack - but the devotees crowding up to the stage really come alive for a cluster of Great Ones from The Optimist. Future Boy sets a prescient note but it is the radio hits - Emergency 72, Underdog, and the introspective Feeling Oblivion - that hit all the buttons at once. The singers inhabit this older material with accomplished ease and the touring band is also having fun. I think if Turin Brakes had only ever written Underdog they would have deserved a place in heaven.

But there are others in their firmament - the UK summer anthem, Painkiller closes proceedings before the band, encouraged by the conspicuous enthusiasm of the fans, come back for encores. Blue Hour and a very boppy version of Little Brother bring to a close what has been a magic little set - melodic, intense and yet memorably understated. If there is any justice in the world this will be a very good year for Turin Brakes. With talent like this, there should be no stopping them.

“Rewards for the Optimists” The Adelaide Review, No.245, February, 2004. p.24.

Fairground Attraction

Published: 2004-03-01

Big Day Out Wayville Showgrounds

Murray Bramwell

This year’s is the twelfth Big Day Out and I think I’ve been to all but four. Nevermind that I wasn’t cool enough to see Kurt Cobain back in 1992, the BDO has been just the thing for a music tourist like me. Every food group in popular music is represented from high protein to extreme carbohydrate and - with seven venues running in parallel universes - for the price of a ticket you get more than seventy hours music in the space of twelve.

Big Day Out gives us the past, the modish present and always a glimpse of the ineffable future. The Prodigy, bridesmaids in 1996, were the lords of all they surveyed the following year. Last year the virtually unknown White Stripes played a small side stage, now they are the New Carpenters. But it is the chance to see zany little bands like Osaka’s Shonen Knife or those Mormons in alfoil, Rocket From the Crypt, or bands of the calibre of Dirty Three, Wilco and yes, Coldplay, that makes the event so engaging.

Not that it is just the music. Big Day Out is a significant spot in the religious calendar. Universities no longer even try to enrol on that day and government schools brace themselves for a pandemic of truancy on the first Friday of term. Perhaps it is this sense of stolen mischief which give the event its buzz, or maybe, in among the rides and exhibition halls of the Royal Show, it carries the promise of the funfair.

Certainly it is a friendly old place, even with its mix of tribes. Skaters and surfers, wilting Goths, ravers and hepcats, even bewildered seniors such as myself - all are waiting patiently while some 28,000 of us step through the turnstiles. BDO is smooth in its admission and security procedures and local organisers - Dianne Joy, Sacha Sewell and the team - demonstrate yet again that they know how to run a raffle.

Many of us are in early so as not to miss The Darkness. Led by the flouncing Justin Hawkins in a variety of glam rock jumpsuits The Darkness are the Next Big Thing. They are, it is said, turning the page on electronica and back to rock - or at least that species of fop rock that Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant and Mick the Lips all did rather well. The Darkness are actually all piss, wind and pastiche - and likeable for it. But they are symptomatic, I fear, of these washed out times of recycle and spin.

Rocking hard seems to be the thing this year. Everyone is thrashing - as if they think The Darkness and The Strokes and oh yes, headliners Metallica, will make everyone else look cissy. The Datsuns and Sleepy Jackson were at it, as was Muse, who trashed the subtler sound of their albums into disappointing sludge. Blood Duster, Lost Prophets and Poison the Well were born to sound like angle grinders of course, so I preferred the Persian Rugs, aka the Hoodoo Gurus, who played some goodtime rock and roll, and hiphop stars Black-Eyed Peas who showed their considerable flair with a set including What is Love and Shut Up. The Mars Volta played their Floyd-like Drunkship of Lanterns but when they began to go murky I wandered off to the Boiler Room and the esoteric ambience of Aphex Twin.

The treat for me was Peaches doing her one woman send-up of the whole day’s proceedings. I had to sacrifice the Kings of Leon but it was worth it. Flanked occasionally by two women assistants complete with leather phalluses, Peaches gave us performance art karaoke. New Yorkers Karen Finley and Penny Arcade woulda been proud of this girlfriend when, complete with her stage prop axe delivered by an abject male technician, she strutted and swaggered and guitar-synched, and generally reminded us how close to the border of Spinal Tap this whole electric music business runs.

The Dandy Warhols are only a recent discovery for me and I notice they have a devoted local following for their friendly strummy sound, garnished with electronics and trumpet voluntary. I am going home to get better acquainted with those 13 Tales of theirs. Also pleasing and surprisingly poppy are The Strokes. They open with a Clash cover and do their Take it or Leave it thing. They sound like the Rascals when young, and like many of the New York harmony bands before them. Singer Julian Casablancas gets a bit jittery near the end of the set and, as if it’s something we said - or didn’t say enough- it comes to what seems like an abrupt halt.

Oh well, a few extra minutes to get up close to Metallica - if you are one of the orc army, dressed in regalia ancient and modern, marching into position in front of the Blue Stage. This is a big occasion for the metal-lickers - two hours of the Great Ones. The atmosphere is what they used to call - palpable. For me, I stay long enough to hear James Hetfield sweet-talk the crowd like a Vegas lounge act. Unctuous isn’t in it. Then he talks about the music as a vehicle for expressing anger - did I hear that right ? Are they in the anger management business now ? Whatever it is, by the time they got to Search and Destroy I made my retreat while the band prowled about the stage hefting their instruments like they were the recently dismembered limbs of a woolly mammoth. I walk through the crowd which is having a blissful encounter of the Third Kind. Me, I can’t quite forget Napster and all that corporate spiel. So it goes.

Felix da Housecat plays some beats to get me through to the real high point. The Flaming Lips, riding high on memories of jelly and a spiffy new CD Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, they are a non-stop party. Balloons, flickering big screens, confetti, what looks like a hundred and thirty people in animal suits and the main man, the Lead Lip, taking us over the hill to the Emerald City…

Well, actually to the gate and home. Not as braindead as in the heat wave years and in the benign company of the only mildly inebriated. No bad scenes, no warnings about the brown acid, BDO shows that the world can live as one. Or as a series of demographics and focus groups ready for the next round of commerce. I take off my guest wristband - it has little black dinosaurs all around it. Is it is sign, a portent ? I am afraid to enquire whether I am the only one to have one like it - is it some kind of geriatric code ? I decide that I am being just a little paranoid. After all, we are all dinosaurs here. But I like being one of those Flaming Lips herbivores, I think. That Metallica stuff is too much for me.

“The Gathering of the Tribes” The Adelaide Review, No.246, March 2004, p.39

Running on Plenty

Published: 2004-05-01

Jackson Browne Festival Theatre

Murray Bramwell

Fourteen guitars - all in a row. The show is billed as solo acoustic but it looks like the set up for the Eagles. Jackson Browne admits it is “obnoxious” for one person to have quite so many instruments but, he confides, he needs all those special tunings.

He certainly has plenty of special tunes. For more than thirty years and twelve albums, Jackson Browne has had the patent on the California sound which so dominated music in the latter half of the 1970s. A star for David Geffen’s Asylum label, his songs of literate, melodic introspection were framed by the kind of smooth country arrangements which we also associate with the Byrds, the Burritos and Gram Parsons - and would make megastars of the Eagles.

Jackson Browne embodied the poetic soul of American pop - especially with his boyish good looks, his skinny frame and hippie brown hair. At seventeen his songs were being picked up by folkies like Tom Paxton and Tom Rush and pop acts like the Jackson Five. Unkind critics called him chilled white whine, but for many Browne represented, and still represents, the late Sixties spirit under siege in the decades which followed. Jackson Browne kept on singing of high Western skies and the shape of the heart, as well as on behalf of citizens concerned about nukes and Contragate, rainforests and the collective follies of the Bush family tree.

His current tour, it would seem, is especially devoted to connecting with the fans. Travelling for the first time without a band, Jackson Browne is solo and vulnerable. No hot session musicians to provide that LA studio sound, no David Lindley with his splendid lead work. Just the singer, his famous repertoire, and fourteen guitars plus one piano lined up for whatever may be.

It is a relaxed Jackson Browne who greets us with a gidday and, from Looking East, The Barricades of Heaven. That sweet tenor voice is still in very good shape and at fifty five this man is still unbelievably youthful. Shifting to the piano he plays Rock Me on the Water and then, after dithering with an untuned guitar, goes back to the keyboard for the sepulchral opening bars to For a Dancer, a classic Browne song with its melancholy minor chords and his keening vocal - this time eerily bereft of the sweet harmonies on his records.

It becomes apparent that there is no setlist and the singer starts to take requests from the audience. This is all very democratic but the show starts to lose momentum as it appears we are hostage to the craziest person in house, or at least the noisiest. Someone bellows out “you decide!” but even after Something Fine, Jamaica Say You Will and Running on Empty the first half ends with some fine performances, but not a settled set.

It is after interval that things really lift with For Everyman and, after a short and sharp preamble on current American foreign policy, a cluster of protest songs - the excellent Lives in the Balance and Steve Van Zandt’s I am a Patriot. Early songs My Opening Farewell and These Days still stand strong, as does his lament for the ideals of youth, The Pretender. He follows with a highlight, Sky Blue and Black, from his tellingly named I’m Alive album. Played with dirge-like pace but beautifully phrased with churchy keyboards it is only matched by what is surely one of his very best - Late For the Sky. Warren Zevon’s Mutineer is the only other cover of the night, so nicely captured Browne should do more such departures.

It is fitting that he might conclude with Take it Easy, not the Spanish rap version he briefly demonstrates but a cut down reading with Browne on busker guitar. And for a final encore - another mid-seventies favourite, Before the Deluge. ”Now let the music keep our spirits high” - and the rapt response from the audience suggests that it has. Jackson Browne only played with six of his guitars but he played with all of his singular talent and he is still running on plenty.

The Adelaide Review, No.248, May, 2004, p.28

Kelly’s Newest Gang

Published: 2004-06-01

Paul Kelly Her Majesty’s

Murray Bramwell

I like Paul Kelly to stay the same and tend to get tetchy when he changes things around, especially when he tinkers with his band line-up. I couldn’t see why he had to shoot the Messengers or why he would hire hotshot American guitarist Randy Jacobs. Was the Professor Ratbaggy project just a scratch band, and what about that bluegrass Smoke thing ? And, these days, what is he doing with his nephew Dan and where are Hadley and Haymes, his bass and keyboard henchmen ? Clearly, if it was up to me, Paul Kelly would still be back at the year dot.

Now, of course, the Live at the Continental CD is one of my favourites, especially with Jacobs belting it out on Dumb Things, and I have definitely got the hang of the esoteric dub funk of Ratbaggy. And so, comes Kelly’s current double CD, Ways and Means, with all its confident accomplishment. Showcasing yet another new line-up, Paul Kelly has got it right once again.

The band is not all new - the staunch Peter Luscombe is still on drums, joined now by brother Dan on guitar and keyboards, Bill McDonald on bass and the young Dan Kelly, also guitar, and co-writing songs with his uncle Paul. The result both in the studio and on stage is impressive. They are touring a very strong set and they know it.

It is impressive how well Paul Kelly steers and shapes, not only his music, but the way he presents it. A live show is never just knocked together, Kelly is good on the micro-management, and the details are always careful - whether it is his choice of support act, the pre-show incidental music (selections from Harry Smith Americana to Sinatra) or even the band’s outfits. And, of course, this extends to the order of service. Kelly takes the art of the setlist almost to the point of curation.

The show at Her Majesty’s, midway through a national tour and following on from the international circuit, sees Kellly returning to the hometown faithful and a venue that very much suits him. After a raggedy but likeable set from Dan Kelly and his (not very) Alpha Males, Kelly and the band start out with the Morricone styled instrumental Gunnamatta, the overture to Ways and Means, followed by the strong country rock number Oldest Story in the Book. The new songs are sprinkled through the show and they scrub up well - Big Fine Girl, the slow, bluesy Curly Red and Beautiful Feeling.

It is a mix of Kelly ancient and modern here - as far back as Don’t Harm the Messenger , Before Too Long and the silvertop favourite, To Her Door. Highpoints include a strong reading of Cities of Texas, and the outstanding Wintercoat, Kelly on guitar with Dan Luscombe at the piano. The band is in fine form - McDonald playing a vibrant, sinewy bass and Dan Luscombe splendid in his fluid, understated guitar work. They are valuable inclusions and with guitar garnishes from Dan Kelly and the deft, unobtrusive drumming of Peter Luscombe, the unit has that nimble string band sound which has served Bob Dylan so well lately.

Paul Kelly is in high spirit. In a snug black suit with an open necked white shirt, he and the band are dressed in what might be called SP bookie 1963. At one point he asks the audience whether anyone knows what Andrew McLeod is doing running about on the half back line. But mostly it is the business of business - twenty four songs with a few solos and plenty of full throttle country rock. Whether veering towards Tex Morton with Young Lovers or the more modish grooves of Ratbaggy’s Love Letter, Paul Kelly is in open stride, proud of his accomplishment and, with his present band, not only has the ways but the means, to keep it very much alive.

The Adelaide Review, No.249, June, 2004, p.26.

You Can (Still) Get Anything You Want …

Published: 2004-07-01

Arlo Guthrie Norwood Concert Hall

Murray Bramwell

There is something irrepressibly good-natured about Arlo Guthrie and he’s been like that for forty years. Nothing seems to have bothered him - not the overbearing reputation of his father Woody, the celebrated dust bowl populist, not the competition with Bob Dylan, Woody’s acolyte in the folk scene of the early 1960s, not even the threat of inheriting Huntingdon’s Chorea, the degenerative disease which afflicted his father and caused his early death.

Arlo has always ridden his own road and it has always been the high one. Just when the folk world of the mid-sixties was at its most sanctimonious, along came Arlo Guthrie’s comic talking blues with its maddeningly catchy little riff. Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, his zany account of getting arrested for littering and then finding this felony exempted him from the draft for Vietnam, became not just an anthem for the anti-war movement but a welcome breath of fresh satire.

On stage, with his son Abe on keyboards and pedal steel player Gordon Titcombe, Guthrie still carries the world lightly in his hand. His thick hank of hair is now as silver as a senator’s but he is as much fun as ever. Opening with Chilling of the Evening, one of his earliest folk rock songs, he follows with a string band ditty from the Oklahoma hills. Guthrie, ever the raconteur, is also historian to the great days of American music. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Josh White, the Weavers, they all visited the Guthrie house where Woody and his wife Marjorie, herself famous as a bohemian dancer with the Martha Graham troupe, held court. Without affectation, Arlo recalls singing St James Infirmary with Cisco Houston as a kid of thirteen.

The ample set is a mix of the old and the very old. Bob Dylan’s When the Ship Comes in, Darrell Adams’ version of Portland Town, Arlo’s own hits such as Coming into Los Angeles and City of New Orleans, The Motorcycle Song with its fabulously banal rhymes and a subtle and witty account of not remembering the words to Alice anymore. He talks politics and about his life, his family and the musicians he has known. He plays guitar with a lovely light ragtime touch and his fellow players give him all the room he needs.

It is a powerful moment when he sings Woody’s This Land is Your Land, with a sardonic sense of the empire it also describes. “I’m nowhere near the threat I hoped to become,” he says, reminiscing about his brush with security in LA, way back when he was caught with some grass in his pocket. But Arlo Guthrie has done OK. He has managed his own little non-violent revolution, and it still ticks over, just like that refrain in Alice’s Restaurant. In its good humour, its sense of fairness and its fidelity to some last century American progressive values, it remains welcome - at Alice’s Thanksgiving dinner, or any time.

The Adelaide Review, No.250, July, 2004, p.34

Young Man, Old Man

Published: 2004-07-01

The Dissociatives Thebarton Theatre

Murray Bramwell

Dissociation is an interesting concept. In chemistry it means the separation of constituent elements in a compound. Psychologically, it is when aspects in the personality hive off to form an independent, even multiple personality. For Daniel Johns, rock star since the age of fifteen, to use the term, I take as a signal that he is reclaiming his stable atoms from that very powerful base element, silverchair. And for a young man, who has himself told us he has been on the edge of psychic disintegration, becoming a dissociative must seem like a safe new place to enjoy having any kind of personality he feels like.

The link between Johns and dance mensch Paul Mac is both surprising and entirely likely - even if they are half a generation apart, and one comes from teenage grunge, and the other from the Very Cool end of the club scene. They met when Mac produced a silverchair mix back in 1997 but now, in the Dissociatives, they have a new symbiosis which makes them interesting and equal partners.

Taking a studio project on the road has its challenges - and the Dissociatives’ Thebarton show is very like a recital. Running not much more than an hour, Johns and Mac perform the album with assistance from second keyboard, bass and drums. They keep the songs in the same sequence as the CD release with the addition of a couple of new songs (no titles given) and two covers (The Fauves and Tom Waits).

There is plenty of fan squealing and great affection for Johns, bobbing around in a beanie and shades, especially when he fawns about Adelaide audiences. But the music, despite its thuddy bass end and Johns’ frequent use of effects, is neither silverchair rock nor clubby dance groove and the fans find themselves strangely still. The songs are carefully constructed studio artifacts and they stay that way - no extended jams, no big solos, close to script and game plan.

Much Preferred Customers with its pulsing, lapping beats and Johns’s plaintive vocal opens up an hypnotic groove emphasised and enveloped by foggy lighting in strong reds and blues. Then the radio favourite, Somewhere Down the Barrel, with its Beatle-ish harmonies, strong chorus of nah-nah-nahs and Paul Mac’s insistently chiming piano, registers as an oasis of familiarity before the chaotic hurdy gurdy complexities of Horror with Eyeballs.

There are some very well wrought compositions here - Forever and a Day, Thinking in Reverse and the self-referential Young Man, Old Man. Daniel Johns uses guitar sparingly but always to good account and vocally he runs the gamut from whistling to a kind of Marilyn Manson dry howl that I am still not sure is him or an effects button someone pushed. For the sake of his sweet larynx I hope he had some help.

I am intrigued by the Dissociatives. Between Johns’ dense, often impenetrable lyrics and Mac’s carefully layered arrangements this music certainly takes its own time and I am not sure whether it will repay the effort of repeated acquaintance or will end up sounding … dissociated. But in this ambitious, carefully managed concert, it is clear that not only is the talented Daniel Johns refreshed and enjoying himself again, but his musical explorations have only just begun.

“Opposites Attract” The Adelaide Review, No.250, July, 2004, p.30.

Goat Leg Soup

Published: 2004-09-28

Muse Thebarton Theatre

Murray Bramwell

It is only eight months since we saw UK band Muse at Big Day Out, but now they are back with more fans and a lot more fanfare. Their stocks have risen with the release of their latest album, Absolution, a recent tour with The Cure, and their steady determination to prevail. There have been comparisons - with Radiohead, for instance, and the latter end of Britpop - but increasingly, Muse is taking inspiration from such brazen exhumations of the flamboyant as The Darkness and the We-Will-Rock-You community singalongs of the Queen revival.

And, as a trio, they carry the time-honoured imperative to make a sound grandiose enough for twenty. There are legendary exceptions (or do I mean exemptions ?) such as Hendrix and Cream - but mostly the power trio is an exercise in overkill. Emerson, Lake and Palmer, of course, come horribly to mind. There is no doubting that main Muse-ician, Matthew Bellamy is a clever fellow and, as songwriter, guitarist and guest Rachmaninov, he is a model of diligence, but there is something about the band that doesn’t summon up the Nine Goddesses their ponderous name implies.

Taking the stage at Thebarton some twenty four hours later than originally scheduled, the band, bathed in a spray of purple light, takes up positions. On raised platforms are drummer Dominic Howard and (match-fit after a broken wrist) bassist Chris Wolstenholme, while Bellamy, in frockcoat, is down close to the amps ready to conjure feedback and effects of apocalyptic proportions. They open in a thunder of drums with, what I take to be Butterflies and Hurricanes - although, in the age of the Buried Vocal and the transferable nature of the Muse riff, I am not completely sure. Bellamy’s near-falsetto rises over the cavernous rhythm and, with those catchy chorus hooks, the front rows are already in a tidal rapture of waving arms.

Matthew Bellamy then occupies the keyboard for another Muse signature moment - the choppy Sabre Dance figure from Microcuts - which would have had the punters ready for all-night cossack dancing had the Maestro not traded the Roland for some white-noise guitar. The set is unfolding at frantic pace - Stockholm Syndrome, is it ? (If not the song, it is certainly the concept) Citizen Erased and, another riffy favorite from the first album, Muscle Museum. After the particularly kitsch keyboard cascades of Screenager, Bellamy abruptly leaves, while the other two Muses - Calliope and Polyhymnia, perhaps - puddle some thinking music for several minutes.

“Fooking goat leg I had last night,” confides Matthew Bellamy on his return - in his first and only exchange with the audience. It seems the poor fellow has got the shits. I am wondering whether playing that tosh in Screenager might not have contributed also. Anyway, something has been released, because the veil has fallen from in front of three vertical back-projection screens and, spelling out the lyrics of Ruled by Secrecy, begins the most sophisticated digital visuals I’ve yet seen. There are cameras everywhere, picking up the musicians - especially, with fish-eyed, reverential close-up - Matthew Bellamy caressing the ivories for Bliss, readying for Sunburn and breaking into the gloriously anthemic strains of Time is Running Out.

Back for two encores - Apocalypse Please and Plug in Baby - Muse call in time of death at just on eighty minutes. They have worked flat stick with some clever pop and some (belatedly) glitzy production and if the fans get any happier they’ll melt. But I find the discrepancy between the music and the introverted presentation all too … bemusing. I prefer the Way of The Darkness - prop one leg on the monitor and look as fooking bombastic as you sound.

The Adelaide Review, No.253, September 28, 2004, p.25.

I See a Lightness

Published: 2004-10-15

Bonnie “Prince” Billy Governor Hindmarsh

Murray Bramwell

The last time I saw Bonnie “Prince” Billy was at the Tivoli at the beginning of 1998. He was trading under the name of Will Oldham then and, like Will Robinson, another of his aliases, he was a little lost in space. It was a brilliant set, but also exasperating and a little worrying. Oldham huddled at the side of the stage avoiding the spotlight, mumbling to himself, and the band (which included the Dirty Two, Jim White and Mick Turner) looked increasingly perturbed, as though it was turning into a bad night in Roswell.

Even from his earliest Palace days there has been a fragile strangeness to Will Oldham. With his wispy lyrics and shunting rhythms he has been more alt. than alt.country and the most poetic of the singer songwriters. Like a bipolar mystic, with roots in the courtly, weird balladry that migrated to the Kentucky hills from 17th century England, “Prince” Billy is a time lord with wise blood.

Onstage at the Governor Hindmarsh Will Oldham looks like a man more at ease with his dark gift. He wanders to the bar before the show, happily greeting a slightly awed crowd, many well-versed in his work. His delicate features, immortalised in his cameo as the boy preacher in John Sayles’ classic film Matewan, are now covered with such an unfashionably full beard he could pass for one of the Kelly Gang. Perhaps the Bonnie Prince has found a new way of staying incognito.

Certainly there are fresh signs of confidence in his recent recordings. Master and Everyone is more sprightly and tuneful than earlier work and he has even caused consternation with the smoothed-over Nashville sound of his Greatest Palace Music re-recordings. It is as though Will Oldham would like some profile - a bit of success and recognition for his singular talent.

Fronting a four piece band, featuring his brother Paul on bass and Matt and Spencer Sweeney on guitar and drums, “Prince” Billy is very much in charge as he opens with the rippling guitar chords of Ohio River Boat Song. It has a sweet, spare melancholy, with harmonies from Matt Sweeney and singer Cindy Hopkins blending with Oldham’s artfully expressive off-note vocals.

It is a varied setlist - Oldhams, ancient and modern. Ease on Down the Road from the second Billy album, old Palace drinking songs with beautiful garnishes of accordion from Hopkins, and new work such as Pushkin and Joy and Jubilee. Highlights include After I Made Love to You and Even if Love. Oldham’s phrasing is assured and reflective with Cindy Hopkins adding a strange childlike yowl of a harmony that hangs just under the line, like the sound of an especially tuneful owl. We Are One With Birds, they aptly sing later, along with the oddly affecting Come In and O Let it Be.

His Bonnyness is generous with encores - the jaunty early favourite I am a Cinematographer, Horses (with some Neil Young-ish guitar from Matt Sweeney) and the plaintive recent song The Way, again, beautifully framed by Cindy Hopkins accordion. But the call is for I See a Darkness and Will Oldham obliges.

It is like a letter from the lower depths - “Did you ever, ever notice/ the kind of thoughts I got/ well you know I have a love / a love for everyone I know/ and you know I have a drive / to live I won’t let go/ can you see its opposition/ come a rising up sometimes/ that its dreadful and possession /comes blacking in my mind/ and that I see a darkness”.

The words look meagre and archaic but the song is terrible in its directness and beautiful in performance, guided by the constancy of Sweeney’s guitar and the eerie call and response with Hopkins. It is also greatly heartening, what William Blake would call a Song of Experience. Will Oldham, now Bonnie “Prince” Billy, has come back from the wilderness - to report that it is full of light.

“A Revival by any other Name” The Adelaide Review, No. 254, October 15, 2004, p.25.

History Repeats After All

Published: 2004-12-10

The Finn Brothers with Missy Higgins

Entertainment Centre Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is a sense of full circle here. Who said our beginnings never know our Enz ? Neil and Tim Finn are touring a new album, ripe with harmony and turbid with memory. On stage at the Ent Centre, the flickering home movie of squinting kids on the front porch in Teasdale Street, Te Awamutu sets an expectation, but it is certainly not nostalgia. The Finns have a lot of history and, in middle age, they are starting to sift through it.

They have called the album, Everyone is Here and that includes a ghost or two as well. Even the cover photo, by the legendary Marti Friedlander, tells a story. Siblings looking uneasy in a familiar landscape - the Waikato River behind them, steely under a louring North Island sky. These songs, like the little Super 8 film which opens the show, document a particular time and place but, unlike their previous 1995 collaboration, the puckishly parochial Finn, Everyone is Here is - like the best of Paul Kelly, the Oils, Mutton Birds and others - regional art for a world audience.

The Finns are match fit for these Australian shows, having just come off a tour of the UK and New Zealand. Anything Can Happen is, suitably, the opener - Neil on electric 12 string, Tim at the Steinway. The signature vocals merge like elements in a compound as Neil’s open-hearted tenor infuses with Tim’s more studied, ambitious harmonies. They may be brothers but there are two bandleaders here, as well as a six year gap in age. Neil has inhabited his considerable fame with a degree of indifference but it is clear that Tim is glad to be back in the light. Won’t Give In, with its faint echoes of Little Help From My Friends, seems to sum it up and Tim’s vocals soar - “I’m coming round today/ to gather up the pieces.”

After a tetchy moment when Tim gives the front row photographers the flick (it is Neil who finds the soothing joke) they greet the Adelaide crowd with recollections of past visits; the Enz in 1975 and Neil on the Try Whistling This tour. The bloke in the audience who had helped out with the words for Pineapple Head that time, is in again tonight, as is a contingent from Whyalla. The show is mellowing, there is even fleeting comment on the cricket.

With thumping rhythm from bassist Tim Smith and drummer Jeremy Stacey, Tim picks up a tambourine and leads a rain dance for Poor Boy, much to the crowd’s delight and reminding us that those Split Enz maniacs can do strobe dancing even without strobes. But the new work is strongly evident - a vibrantly sung Edible Flowers, very much a Tim song, the rather puzzling Nothing Wrong With You and All the Colours, a tribute for their late mother to whom the new recording is also dedicated. Another strongly personal composition, Disembodied Voices, about brothers whispering in the dark, is a duet with acoustic guitars and the stage lights blacked. It is a perfect Finn song, beautifully sung, with just a flicker of sentiment and more impact than you expect.

With such a large repertoire to call on, the choices are interesting. Dirty Creatures, Tim’s account of his battle with depression, is played with new buoyancy - Neil going with very a different kind of funk and lead guitarist Paul Stacey, brilliant all night, doing wonders with the effects pedal. Other favourites bubble up for the latter part of the show - Crowdie classics like Distant Sun and selections from the 1991 Woodface album .

There have been hopes that the new CD would match that lucrative burst of Finn invention but, listening again to the show’s encore hits - It’s Only Natural, Weather With You and, turned into a wonderfully rambling community singalong, Four Seasons in One Day - there is a sense that those sunny harmonies, like the dada pop of I Got You, are a part of simpler and younger times. Showcasing a layered, meditative, accomplished new album, the Finn Brothers can now think of Woodface as their Rubber Soul. Good songs come harder-earned these days. Tim Finn, hunched over the piano, his badger-grey hair falling forward in Wildean tangles, sums it up with his own celebration of keeping on - “ I was ready for another try/` But I needed you to set me free / must be I’m the Luckiest Man Alive.”

The Adelaide Review, No. 258, December 10, 2004, p.20.

Keeping it in the Family

Published: 2005-02-18

Rufus Wainwright with Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Martha Wainwright

Dunstan Playhouse 4 February

Murray Bramwell

We probably have Leonard Cohen to thank for the chance to see, at the one time, so many members of the Wainwright - McGarrigle clan. In Sydney recently for a tribute concert to the legendary Canadian poet and singer, Kate and Anna McGarrigle have included an Adelaide date for the first time in some years. Their son and nephew, Rufus Wainwright is listed as top of the bill - for many of us in the audience, though, he may be the icing but he’s sure not the cake.

Emerging in the mid-Seventies, when their songs were memorably covered by Maria Muldaur, the McGarrigle Sisters produced a number of classic albums that stand among the very best of Canadian folk and country music. And through her marriage to Loudon Wainwright III, Kate McGarrigle has also raised a musical family with son and daughter, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, becoming well-known with their own projects. Rufus especially has produced four albums for Dreamworks and registered a flamboyant and highly original presence.

It was in 1998 that the various members of the family got together to record the delightful McGarrigle Family Hour, where Loudon, Kate and Anna, kids and friends put together a varied mix of old-timey music, original compositions, show tunes, hymns and greatest hits. It was just like the Carter Family, except that the eccentric and dysfunctional Wainwright -McGarrigles represent the realities of the late 20th century family - divorce, regret, recrimination - all candidly described in songs that are distinctive to them and familiar to us. Kate wrote about her babies in her songs and Loudon famously celebrated his infant son at his mother’s breast with the song Rufus is a Tit Man.

“Welcome to our parlour,” Anna McGarrigle says, early into the ambling proceedings at the Dunstan Playhouse. And that is how it feels with the dotty informality of the playful sisters, dressed down in jeans and homespun, their grey hair defiantly askew, sitting at the side of the stage with guitars and accordions, bemused at Rufus’s earnest efforts to establish his authority. It is still about boundaries here - mother and son, sister and brother, sister and sister, mother and daughter. There is undoubtedly love, but also an edge of rivalry and insecurity, and hints - or more than that - of discrepancy. The family that plays together may stay together, but it has its frictions.

The set opens, brilliantly and pre-emptively, with Heart Like a Wheel. Instead of having to wait for the hits, we have the jewel first-off. Anna and Kate’s vocals mingle with alchemic harmony while Rufus, with his distinctively operatic tenor sings the lead flawlessly. He sounds like Loudon but stronger, more confident (often over-confident ) and has a fluency that can be breath-taking. Then Kate and Anna - with piano and accordion - sing Matapedia, the title song from their excellent mid-Nineties CD. Their musicianship is a delight, assured and beautifully judged.

Rufus, in contrast, likes to be more histrionic. Singing Vibrate (from Want One) with ornate piano accompaniment, his voice is too strong for the mix, as it often is when he is at the keyboard, and, in white suit and foppish scarf, he seems agitated and self-conscious. Martha follows with an unannounced song of her own. She also has a formidable voice but the composition is undistinguished unlike the later, torchy You’ve Got Away With Me. The sisters return for Anna’s theme song from Bridget Jones and a delicious ballad in French, and then the whole group, including Don Falzone on upright bass, produce a marvellous reading of Who By Fire, a Leonard Cohen call-and-response classic.

After going excessively Over the Rainbow, Rufus sings the title song from Poses, the fearlessly explicit Gay Messiah, and also from his recent CD, The Art Teacher. These songs have an awkward structure often and the lyrics are frequently lost. It is the traditional material that seems better to bring his indulgences to heel - for instance the sublime version, by the whole group, of Green Green Rocky Road - and St James Infirmary Blues (mutating in and out of The Streets of Laredo) His Cigarettes and Chocolate is a fine song, though, and Martha also produces a show-stopper with a poignant song to her father, very un-poignantly entitled You Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.

It is hard for the young fry in a show like this - and, although we will no doubt hear much more from them, it is not really their night. Kate and Anna’s version of (Talk to Me of) Mendocino is so beautifully and thriftily crafted it is a revelation and the final encore, the traditional song Hard Times Come Again No More, sung in splendid four-part harmony, reminds us that simple gifts are best - and carry most feeling.

The Adelaide Review, No 262, February 18, 2005, p.26.

Remaining in Light

Published: 2005-03-04

David Byrne Norwood Concert Hall

Murray Bramwell

Talking Heads, as their name suggests, were very much a high concept band and, like other Seventies exponents of art pop such as Devo and Kraftwerk, their’s was a studied, highly theatrical persona. So it is not just refreshing, but a complete surprise, to find Talking Head frontman David Byrne so affably direct as he lights up the stage at the Norwood Concert Hall.

With a platinum quiff and dressed in matching grey shirt and slacks, the impish Byrne looks like a rather natty locksmith as he greets a seriously adoring crowd of late forty-somethings, primed for a close look into the eyeball of one of late 20th century culture’s more interesting Heads. He is going to open, he tells us, with a tune used for the soundtrack of Dirty Pretty Things - Glass, Concrete and Stone, from his highly-crafted Nonesuch CD Grown Backwards. The band is as sharp as a pin - Paul Frazier on bass and vocals, percussionist Mauro Refosco and drummer Graham Hawthorn - all tangling with a relaxed and agile Byrne, while the Texas- based Tosca Strings, as young and beamish as they are accomplished, bow up a storm.

The set is a mix of old and new, arcane and lovingly familiar. Byrne delivers staccato Dada (I Zimbra ? ) from Cafe Voltaire and The Great Intoxication from the under-rated Eyeball album, and then it is back to the Golden Years - Road to Nowhere, the arcadian And She Was and the irresistible riff of Once in A Lifetime. Those hardwired to songs about buildings and food are in a swoon. One zealot seated behind me is treating the occasion as his only personal karaoke much to the outrage of those nearby. A major dust-up is only averted by the broad-shouldered gentleman next to me reaching back and restraining the unwelcome soloist until security comes along.

David Byrne is oblivious to these finer details of crowd control. Instead he is investigating everything from vernacular opera - a charmingly crooned Un di Felice, Eterea from La Traviata - to esoteric Hendrix (One Rainy Wish from Axis Bold as Love) and Cole Porter’s (theme for our fifth row vocalist, perhaps ) Don’t Fence Me In. But it is the Heads material that kicks in - Psycho Killer - a fafafafafafa better thing, the recent treasure Like Humans Do, and, from the Naked album, a prophetic howl of New York City paranoia, Blind.

With the band in a fluent groove and the Toscas stringing along in perfect sync the music is fast, loud and light. David Byrne does some of the old moves - reverse marches and back-of-the-stage duck walks - only to reappear to sing Heaven, with vox angelica, and the X-Press 2 club hit, Lazy, with enough style and clever irony to show that David Byrne is not just the Same as He Ever Was, he is growing forwards as well.

“Kicking Heads” The Adelaide Review, No.262, March 4, 2005, p.24.

REM with Bright Eyes and Little Birdy

Published: 2005-04-15

Entertainment Centre 6 April

Murray Bramwell

REM’s Adelaide show, their third here, marks the 25th anniversary of their first gig as a band. And while it may seem like the blinking of an eye to some of us, when we hear that Nebraskan support band Bright Eyes’s lead singer Conor Oberst was one month old at that time, it is a reminder what an extraordinary stretch the REM twenty album history really is.

Not that there is anything backward-looking about REM, especially mercurial lead man Michael Stipe. REM is clearly an all-for-one and one-for-all outfit. They have always split song royalties equally and when drummer Bill Berry decided to leave the band there was no permanent replacement. In performance each member is crucial - Mike Mills on bass and piano, filling in the high harmonies, Peter Buck, one of the most under-rated guitarists around, hefting his Rickenbackers and that danged banjo for Electrolite; and then there is Michael Stipe.

At 8pm a lanky figure in a t-shirt comes on stage at the Ent Centre. It is Stipe introducing Perth support band Little Birdy, he came back and did the same for Bright Eyes. Later he spruiked the Amnesty and Oxfam tables in the foyer and sang happy birthday to Brett the sound mixer. Stipe is no ordinary rock star. He has helped forge a band with powerful mainstream radio appeal but he himself is one of the Outsiders he sings about. He is the Boy in the Well, The Man on the Moon. He speaks for the unconventional kid, the besieged Tennessee goth, he knows the Way to Reno. And he knows that sexual preference is many-splendoured and nobody’s business but yours.

Working their way through several dozen of the treasure trove that is their song list, REM gives plenty of space to their excellent current album Around the Sun - Leaving New York, The Worst Joke Ever and Electron Blue, made even more luminous with lighting comprising of vertically suspended fluoro tubes which dripped and flared like candle tapers, turned orange for the Crush and red, white and blue for two strong songs of dissent against the Empire : I Wanted to be Wrong and Last Straw.

But, of course, it is the radio friendly hits that has the crowd in a swoon of recognition - Losing My Religion, Imitation of Life and Bad Day. Stipe knows about outsiders, he also knows about provincial cities. Parakeet is really about Adelaide as well as Brisbane he confides. And when the names of the hundred city tour appear on the widescreen on the lighting rig the countdown to Adelaide brings a rapture of civic complacency.

In every aspect of performance Stipe creates a curious intimacy. It is in his physical strangeness - that vulnerable shaven pate, and, tonight, the stripe of blueish paint masking his eyes like a Soviet silent movie actor. Then, there is his repertoire of disinhibited stage movements - the microphone crouch, the unlicked-calf stagger, the bending spoon, the I am a Tree, the whole rubber man array of I-am-having-a-good-time-my-way that makes Stipe both endearing and liberating to watch.

It is a beautifully managed show - strong clear sound, inventive lighting, accomplished support musicians including Scott McCaughey on guitar and Bill Rieflin on drums. And those marvellous other-worldly REM songs - What’s the Frequency Kenneth ? with distressed guitar from Peter Buck and Everybody Hurts, sung like a keening lullaby by Stipe (whose voice generally seems to have dipped half an octave). The encores are singalongs - everyone is pushing elephants up the stairs in The Great Beyond and, then, we are in lunar mode with Andy Kaufman, patron saint of the Crazy Astronauts. That great bridge - “if you believe they put a Man on the Moon” - with Stipe’s rising vocal, Mills’s sweetening harmony and Peter Buck’s Byrdsong guitar, reminds us that REM has spent twenty five years getting us to look at the stars and they are still succeeding.

“The Man on the Moon” The Adelaide Review, No 266, April 15, 2005, p.21

Getting the Band Back Together

Published: 2005-05-27

Cream Royal Albert Hall, London 5 May

Murray Bramwell

When it was first announced in the English press that the 1960s cult group Cream was reforming for four nights at the Royal Albert Hall there was an outpouring, you might say, of dairy metaphors. Would they be as fresh as they were thirty seven years ago ? Would the old enmities between members sour the occasion ? Would they blend, or remain somehow colloidal ? Would they prove to be long life, or go to powder ?

Word of the reunion first came from the guitarist, Eric Clapton, when he blurted the news on Radio 2 back in December last year, and, when tickets went on sale in March, all four concerts sold out in a matter of hours. Since then, rumours have been rife of tickets on e-Bay going for upwards of two thousand quid. On the night I attended there were dozens of scalpers briskly pacing the circumference of the Albert Hall looking to buy, sell and trade the hottest ticket in London.

There are many reasons why a Cream reunion should be such an event. Hailed as the first supergroup - meaning, the players came from already successful bands - Cream, modestly named by Clapton to indicate their calibre, were, in 1966, something completely different. Their first album, Fresh Cream, with a cover depicting the band in aviator leathers while the title graphics formed a white psychedelic droplet in the right hand corner, suggested a new hybrid - musicians with peerless blues credentials (Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Graham Bond’s Organisation) were also picking up signals from the acid rock scene in the American West.

Songs like Sleepy Time Time and I Feel Free - high harmony pop, with weird gear changes written by bassist Jack Bruce, rubbed up against incendiary readings of the greatest of the Delta Blues - Skip James, Muddy Waters and the legendary Robert Johnson. By the second album, Disraeli Gears, the mix was even more apparent, with a blazing cover by ex-pat Australian Martin Sharp, rivalled only by Peter Blake’s art-work for Sergeant Pepper as the finest of the sixties lysergic Renaissance.

Cream lasted barely two years, with four albums, including the double masterpiece Wheels of Fire. They sold 35 million records for Polydor and Robert Stigwood’s RSO label, and rated highly with audiences and critics on both sides of the Atlantic - even in the face of competition from the new genius, Jimi Hendrix. In 1968 Cream separated with more speed than atomic particles - the heavy touring, creative rivalries, drugs and other excess, sent the fresh young aviators into a tailspin, everyone had had enough. Except the audience of course. And the Farewell Concert in the Albert Hall on November 26, 1968 only fuelled the longing that Goodbye (their “posthumous” album) might just be au revoir.

Interestingly, the 1968 Albert Hall concerts were filmed by Tony Palmer for the BBC. Famous later for a series of idiosyncratic music docos, Palmer’s film of Cream’s last hurrah - at a time when very little music was documented beyond appearances on Top of the Pops - offered a serious (sometimes too earnestly serious) analysis of the band’s music. The concert footage, featuring long frenetic jams and intricate solos, was interspersed with interviews with the players. Bruce talked about his formal training as a cellist in Edinburgh, Clapton, just twenty three at the time, demonstrated signature riffs which would serve him for nearly forty years and Ginger Baker produced polyrhythms, counterpoints, and cymbal and bass drum dialectics which made you want to double-check the number of his arms and legs. Palmer’s film, shown widely on television provided an enduring record of the band and further perpetuated the kudos of the trio by depicting them as virtuosi, like chamber or jazz musicians. In its nerdy way the program was signalling - in the same way that the Beatles were being reviewed in the Guardian - that popular music was becoming very interesting.

So when Cream stepped out for four nights in May this year, their return was not like any other. For a start, because of the mutual ill-feeling, it had been deemed so unlikely - although they had played briefly at the Hall of Fame induction in 1991. Even when things were finalised, Clapton very recently confined the number of gigs to four, vetoeing an extension when other Albert Hall cancellations made a longer residency possible. For another reason - there is no other band from the sixties of Cream’s stature that is still standing. The reaper has claimed fifty percent of the Beatles and the Who, the Doors are down to three, and Hendrix died in 1970. There’s Pink Floyd - but even with the acrimony between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, their bands still regularly tour the material.

Onstage in that eccentric, ornate cake tin, that Quangle Wangle’s hat, the Albert Hall, Cream are not the messengers of liquid psychedelia they once were. But unlike the Stones did at last week’s press conference, they don’t look ludicrous either. Clapton, the youngest at sixty, is relaxed in a blue short sleeved shirt, Jack Bruce, although frail after serious health problems resulting in a liver transplant two years ago, is looking intent and alert, while Ginger, sixty six and sporting the official event T-shirt, looks as droll as ever. The audience, well lit throughout the show (for the purpose of the DVD filming, of course) is the demographic you’d expect. Portly persons of a certain age, just like me, except with German, French, American and Geordie accents. All come to see one of the half dozen great bands of rock’s most creative decade and buying up every speck of merchandise to remember the occasion by : the shirt, the mug, the poster, the book, everything but the zimmer-frame.

Opening with I’m So Glad, Cream are well rehearsed and note perfect. Clapton, the most match-fit, is at his fluid best , Bruce’s vocals are less emphatic but he gathers impressive strength as the night proceeds. Ginger, rumours of osteoarthritis aside, is back in the seat, the most inventive of his peers - a big- sound drummer but with more texture than Moon or Bonham - and a capacity to flow with the brilliant, high stepping bass-lines of the exemplary Jack Bruce.

The blues repertoire is favoured first - Spoonful, with great dollops of Eric best Fender work, and Outside Woman Blues, Eric on lead vocal and then for the solo, going for that slowhand glide, head thrown back, face in a frown of concentration, his right leg flapping to the beat in absent-minded rapture. Ginger, a crowd favourite from the first, takes the mic for Pressed Rat and Warthog, which like Anyone for Tennis, I always thought sat uneasily in the Cream repertoire and belonged instead with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. The crowd loves it, but I am more into Jack Bruce’s lead on Sleepy Time Time and then the unleashing energy of his duets with Clapton for NSU.

There are many high points. When Clapton pauses for that seeming eternity before he leans forward and Hits the Pedal for the wahwah solo in Badge, when Jack Bruce snarls Pete Brown’s mordant lyrics to Politician (on election night for Tony Blair’s not so New Labour) and when they sing that marvellous line from Born Under a Bad Sign - if it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. Bruce plays ghostly harmonica on Rolling and Tumbling and sings with full operatic pathos on We’re Going Wrong. He is one of the great pop vocalists. Clapton is the God of guitarists, but Jack Bruce was the brains in this band. Perhaps that’s why Eric, a very successful bandleader for all these years now, finds himself ambivalent about a Cream reunion.

Clapton reprises Crossroads, but more in the style of his recent Johnson tribute than the blazing fuzzbox guitar of Wheels of Fire, everyone does White Room proud and Eric has another crowd-gasping Pedal Moment. Then Ginger rolls up his sleeves and settles into Toad. Drum solos have been lampooned since well before Spinal Tap, but Ginger, at sixty six is inspirationally adept. This is up there with Jack deJohnette or Tony Williams or any of the jazz fusion guys. Nick Mason, from Pink Floyd says he would never have taken up the drums if not for Ginger. Meanwhile Jack and Eric are sitting to the side of the stage quietly chatting as Ginger proves once again that a Toad can make a prince.

The audience goes wild. No coronaries are reported but in some cases it must have been close. Perhaps the single encore, Sunshine of Your Love, the Bruce/Brown/Clapton classic is enough to rejuvenate us all. With its erotic lyricism, its strange brew of harmonies and its sunburst guitar it completely captures the spirit of the late sixties - especially combined with the melting solar collage of Martin Sharp’s imagery. In this performance Cream has lived up to its name, and its legend. We may, or may not, see them pass this way again. If not, we can say: we were there - then, in 1967, and now, in our weird, baby boomer dotage. We can say - we were the cats that got the cream.

The Adelaide Review, No.269, May 27, 2005, p.13.

Hammerklaviers of the Gods

Published: 2005-06-02

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Thebarton Theatre 18 May

Murray Bramwell

I last saw Nick Cave perform in 1994. It was the time of Let Love In and a slew of songs of almost impossible density and menace. Loverman, Red Right Hand and (I found her on a night of fire and noise ) the fanged and tangled, jingle jangle of Do You Love Me ? - surely, one of the scariest questions ever posed in recent popular music. Cave and the Bad Seeds played at Thebarton. The show was in every sense extraordinary and, I thought, very probably unrepeatable.

But any hesitations at seeing Cave play again when he returned to Thebarton last month were cast aside even before he appeared on stage . The support set was from the Darling Downs, a crooning rockabilly duo who looked more like insurance salesmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses than musicians. Armed only with a guitar and a set of histrionic hand gestures they pitched a set which only became stranger and more beguiling with each number. More astute observers than I later identified the players as Kim Salmon and Ronald S. Peno - from the Scientists and Died Pretty respectively - but on the night they remained incognito.

Nick Cave himself has always worked with this kind of stealth and ambiguity. While he rose with his celebrated Birthday Party at the height of punk and the thrash avant garde, and established impeccable credentials by association with Einsturzende Neubauten and their guitarist Blixa Bargeld, his songs also have the mood and melancholy of Leonard Cohen, the ashcan lyricism of Tom Waits and the consumptive pallor of Hank Williams.

His newest album, the double feature Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus , tells us all we need to know of the Nick Cave yin and yang - and many of these seventeen songs form the heart, and sometimes perfidious soul, of this latest concert. It is Abattoir Blues to open - and the engine that is the Bad Seeds is immediately apparent. Do you see what I see dear ? sings Cave with courtly gruffness while the Seeds, earthed by twin drummers Jim Sclavunos and Thomas Wydler and the thunder of Martyn Casey’s bass, begin. Each is integral to the intricate and relentless sound - Mick Harvey’s sparse guitar and the rhyming keyboards of Conway Savage and James Johnston who spend the night slumped like trolls, building those layers of repetition and terrible portent that makes the Nick Cave sound into a sort of Gothic carnival.

The set unfolds at ferocious pace with Get Ready for Love and a screamer version of Red Right Hand. Cave stalks and prowls the stage, every word audible, every phrase an accusation, a confession, an extortion. In his skinny black suit and winged white shirt he is matched by the band - they look like SP bookies from the fifties, or like they have just come back from Shelley’s funeral. They could be a scene from Schiller’s The Robbers. The music is a series of explosions, of crescendos rising and vanishing like a seizure, or dry lightning.

The new songs fit seamlessly with the standards. Hiding All Away, Supernaturally, and Breathless - concluding with the merest exhalation. But not before a majestic reading of The Weeping Song and a galvanising re-iteration of Do You Love Me ?. The Mercy Seat, surely lyrically and musically, Cave’s masterpiece, begins with Cohen-like understatement, before the wild rumpus begins - that rising sound like a huge, inexorable wheel, taking us exhilarated, into the hobs of hell, or that point of self-recognition that Artaud dreamed of in his Theatre of Cruelty.

The encores include new material - O Children, given gospel truth from the powerful quartet of back-up singers, There She Goes My Beautiful World, Cave’s splendidly elliptical Song to the Earth with bouzouki and wild violin from Dirty Three’s elvish Warren Ellis, now standing in for the Archangel Bargeld, and then the band goes sanctified with the mischievously deadpan God is in the House. The last word though, goes to Staggerlee. Mister Motherfucking Staggerlee, too mean for the world, too bad for the Devil. Cave’s performance is a revelation of narrative, of wit and celebration. This is the Coyote, and all the other Trickster myths - and a jump beyond Jack Flash and two bit rappers like Fifty Cents. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are amazing - poets, shamans, sturm and drangers - and the best band that ever came out of Melbourne.

Commissioned June 2 , 2005 but not published by The Adelaide Review

Paul Kelly - Q and A

Published: 2005-08-01

On the present band The Stormwater Boys

There are a lot of old connections in this band. Jim Fisher who plays mandolin comes from Perth and he and Ian Simpson, the banjo player are in the Sensitive New Age Cowpersons. All these Perth connections weave in and out of my life. I went to WA in late 1975 with my cousin. We were going to work in the mines but I got involved in the music scene there and one of the bands I used to see was The Outlaws who were hot country bluegrass players. Jim was lead singer and the band made a big impression on me. He plays mandolin, dobro and guitar on this tour. Paul Gadsby , who was in my first band the Dots, plays upright bass and Mick Albeck plays fiddle. They are jaw-droppingly good musicians .

On the Current Australian Tour

I have been to most of the places before but some not for ten years. Broome I’d been to but Karratha, Port Hedland, Derby I hadn’t. Esperance, we hadn’t for twelve years. We did a lot in the West - Kalgoorlie, Fremantle, Perth then worked our way up - Alice Springs, Darwin, on to Cairns and then down. There were a mix of theatres . People sitting down where you could here a pin drop, beer gardens, loud pubs, we did an outdoor show on the grass at Magnetic island off Townsville. Sometimes its been a battle with noisy crowds but mostly its been pretty good. A lot of people would never have seen a bluegrass band. Audiences, used to loud snare drums and heavy bass, sometimes yelled out “turn it up” But all they have to do is turn themselves down and they’ll hear it.

The A-Z Solo Concerts

They were the opposite of a retrospective for me. I had to do some shows in the Spiegeltent in Melbourne last December and I wanted to do something special. It was always going to be mainly solo. I had one of those middle-of-the-night ideas - four nights, a hundred songs, A-Z with no repeats. Then I realised, God, I’ll have to practice, I can’t remember all those songs. It was a really good thing to do because I went back and met some of my old songs again.

I did those shows in Melbourne then Julia Holt invited me to Adelaide for the Cabaret Festival in June and I am going to do them again in Sydney in December. My idea now is to make it a regular thing, the way Weddings Parties Anything used to do their Christmas shows.

It has been a revelation because it’s given me a whole new way of working. It is the performer’s dilemma - always between the new songs you want to play and the old songs the audience want to hear. I hadn’t realised until I’d done it that this A-Z format totally short-circuits those problems. It takes it out of chronology and totally into the alphabet. It gives the audience something to play with - will I go the first night and miss Wintercoat or To her Door ? or go to more nights ?

It was hard work and I had to do a fair amount of rehearsal. For Melbourne I spent about a month. I realised the show needed some storytelling. I had to write some script. I’m not a naturally off the cuff person.

What’s next ?

More bluegrass shows in Tassie, the Gympie Muster and Tamworth in January. But this month I have to work on the score for Ray Lawrence’s new movie Jindabyne. It’s based on this Raymond Carver story that keeps following me around - So Much Water So Close to Home. I met Ray not long after he made Bliss. He asked me about the song based on the story - Everything’s Turning to White and I lent him the Carver collection. We lost touch and fourteen years later he called me and said I’ve got this movie Lantana, do you want to do the music ? Since then he has got the rights to the Carver story and the film has been shot - Jindabyne features Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Leah Purcell, John Howard and Chris Haywood. I’ve seen the rough cut, it looks great. The music will be built around voices - keening, humming, women’s voices, men’s voices, lots of drone. There’s a strong landscape presence in the film and it’s going to need a really good soundtrack, so the pressure is on…

Draft for The Adelaide Review, August, 2005.

Paul Kelly - For the Record

Published: 2005-08-05

In Adelaide for the Foggy Highway Bluegrass Tour, Paul Kelly talks to Murray Bramwell about recent projects.

The A-Z Solo Concerts

And still to come ?

More bluegrass shows in Tassie, the Gympie Muster and Tamworth in January. But this month I have to work on the score for Ray Lawrence’s new movie Jindabyne. It’s based on this Raymond Carver story that keeps following me around - So Much Water, So Close to Home. I met Ray not long after he made Bliss. He asked me about the song based on the story - Everything’s Turning to White and I lent him the Carver collection.

We lost touch and fourteen years later he called me and said “I’ve got this movie, Lantana, do you want to do the music ?” Since then he has got the rights to the Carver story and the film has been shot - Jindabyne features Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Leah Purcell, John Howard and Chris Haywood. I’ve seen the rough cut, it looks great. The music will be built around voices - keening, humming, women’s voices, men’s voices, lots of drone. There’s a strong landscape presence in the film and it’s going to need a really good soundtrack, so the pressure is on…

The Adelaide Review, No 274, August 5, 2005, p.18.

Songs from the Heart

Published: 2005-09-16

Jimmy Webb 8 September Martha Wainwright, with Josh Ritter 9 September Governor Hindmarsh

Murray Bramwell

We’ve had many good nights at the Gov – last week, two in a row. Songwriter Jimmy Webb is on his sixth visit but, this time, he is spruiking his first album of new material in a while. Dedicated, as he says, “to rebels, outcasts and unruly characters of all types,” Twilight of the Renegades begins with Paul Gauguin in Tahiti and veers outwards from there. Some of Webb’s new material is disappointingly thin but that is partly because he is in competition with the masterpieces of his own back catalogue.

In concert he is an affable raconteur, a rangy Southern gallant with an easy style, a shrewd wit and modesty that is downright unexpected. A success from the age of seventeen when Up, Up and Away went stratospheric for the Fifth Dimension, Webb’s achingly melodic songs are a notable part of late sixties pop music, capturing both the romance and the uncertainty of those times. And back they come - as he croons the Glen Campbell hits, Galveston and Wichita Lineman and, the song that gave its name to the group comprising Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and the other hoarse men of the Apocalypse - Highwayman.

The songs still have their evocative singularity – Webb uses place names in the same artful way as Chuck Berry – and with his mellow voice and florid piano he sings tributes to old friends, including such lamented renegades as Harry Nilsson and Richard Harris, Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney. With good-natured charm Webb reflects wryly on a lucky life, and - with those marvelously pompous chords from McArthur Park - how he has not only had his cake but, also, left it out in the rain.

Last time we saw Martha Wainwright was in January, along with others of her gifted, dysfunctional clan – mother Kate McGarrigle, Aunt Anna and brother Rufus. Now, with good support from the talented Josh Ritter and accompanied by musical collaborator, Brad Albetta, she is touring a self-titled album which is among the best released this year. Wainwright has many of the family traits – a pensive lyricism from Kate, an acerbic stroppiness from father Loudon and a precocious operatic virtuosity like sibling Rufus.

Opening the set with two fine songs, Factory and Far Away, Wainwright is skittish and intense in her denim skirt and dolly-bird white boots. She is calling for her guitar mike to be turned down, but it is her vocals that sometimes overpower her songs. Nicely framed in Albetta’s production on her CD, in a live performance her voice can be shrill and the effect, especially in more shapeless compositions like Jimi, and Ball and Chain, is histrionic.

But there are some sublime moments – her torch ballad You’ve Got a Way With Me, the reading of Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song, her Katrina tribute ( father Loudon III’s Pretty Good Day ) and the sweetly lyrical single with the Adult Concepts title, Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole. Martha Wainwright has a ton of talent whether delivering French chanson or the memorable Year of the Dragon from the McGarrigle Family Hour CD. Her parting song is the haunting Don’t Forget. We won’t – and, next time round, if there is any fairness in this world at all, many more people won’t be forgetting Martha Wainwright either.

The Adelaide Review, No. 277, September 16, 2005, p.20.

A steel butterfly still emerging

Published: 2006-03-13

Adelaide Festival

Here Lies Love – A Song Cycle

Music by David Byrne and Fat Boy Slim

Ridley Centre, Royal Adelaide Showground

March 11. Tickets $59 - $20. Bookings BASS 131 246

Until March 14, 2006.

Murray Bramwell

By way of preface to Here Lies Love, David Byrne wonders how people can justify “their nastier behaviours to themselves” - but twenty four songs and a reprise later, we are still not any the wiser. Imelda Marcos is both an interesting subject and an unlikely one, and that is the potential appeal of Byrne’s idiosyncratic project. He is proposing that Imelda is no more the sum of her shoes than Jackie Kennedy was just a collection of pillbox hats.

We get plenty of backstory – her origins in genteel poverty, her doting nanny Estrelle, her Scarlett O’Hara determination to get ahead in the world. She wins second prize in a beauty contest and declares herself the winner – rather like Ferdinand Marcos’ rigged election. Ferdy courts her in eleven whirlwind days as, destined by fate, they become the King and Queen of Hearts. Imelda is kitsch and cruel, enterprising, and in her “handbag diplomacy” - visiting Gaddafi, Kissinger, and a string of US presidents - politically astute.

In a venue set up as part dance club, part conventional theatre, Byrne narrates Imelda’s story in a series of off-the-cuff links between songs that are, at once, disarming, unfocused and time-consuming. A barrage of photo images unfolds on the large screen behind the concert stage where an excellent band, featuring percussion and keyboards, supports impressive vocalists Dana Diaz-Tutaan (Imelda) Ganda Suthivarakom (Estrella) and the impish Mr Byrne himself. The songs, while co-written with Fat Boy Slim, bear strong Byrne signatures – catchy tunes, punchy rhythms and animated vocals.

But there is little evidence of director Marianne Weems here. Is Byrne’s casually consulted clipboard a rejection of the slick narrative connections that are the dreary convention of the usual cabaret biog, or evidence of a show underdone ? The abundance of new songs is a treat for David Byrne admirers – but many cover similar threads in Imelda’s early life and her abandonment of the faithful Estrella, leaving us to make large inferences about the complicity of the American government in the Marcos story and no time to reflect on the downhill ride. There are intriguing ironies in David Byrne’s approach to Imelda but we need more perspective and contrast. Here Lies Love is a likeable concert – full of good tunes and unfathomable ambiguities. It may yet be a terrific show, with perceptive themes and liberating anti-theatrical elements, but at the moment, the festival is hosting an uncertain work in progress.

“A steel butterfly still emerging” The Australian, March 13, 2006. p.16.

Son of a Gun

Published: 2006-12-15

Teddy Thompson Governor Hindmarsh November 29.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I first came across Teddy Thompson on the I’m Your Man tribute concert album for Leonard Cohen - songs recorded in Brighton, England and at Brett Sheehy’s final Sydney Festival. Featured artists also included Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker, sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Kate’s increasingly celebrated offspring, Martha and Rufus Wainwright.

Teddy Thompson had been around well before that, I discover - his first album released in 2000. His latest, and best CD, is Separate Ways. There is an EP explosively entitled Blunderbuss and he’s contributed songs (including a chirpy version of King of the Road) for the soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain.

He also is the son of famous parents. While Martha and Rufus carry not only McGarrigle genes but the quirky DNA of Loudon Wainwright, Teddy is the sandy haired scion of English folk-rock legends Richard and Linda Thompson who have both produced remarkable music over nearly forty years.

To say that Teddy, Martha and Rufus, have had big boots to fill, is beyond obvious. But each, in their developing careers, has prevailed against odious comparison by taking strides in new and distinctive directions – Rufus with his operatic romanticism, Martha by out-confessing Loudon, and Teddy by sounding nothing like his father, and indicating that he too is a singular and gifted performer.

On stage at the Gov, Teddy cuts a slim but commanding figure in his dark gunslinger shirt, and with few preliminaries, opens with selections from Separate Ways. Shine so Bright establishes his signature vocal – sweet, keening, and as tensile as it is true. The songs are distinctive, well-crafted and streaked with tuneful melancholy. I Should Get Up has a skiffle rhythm and Think Again, a mesmerizing lilt and guitar line reminiscent of such British minstrels as Bert Jansch, Donovan and Nick Drake. Separate Ways, the strong title track, is a highlight.

There is a sea shanty, Sally Brown, and the mordant Blunderbuss irony of Turning the Gun on Myself. While mending a broken string Teddy wryly alludes to the cricket (at that stage only the First Test woes were apparent) before embarking on another catchy original –Everybody Move It and the dreamy No Way to Be. The slow ballads can get perilously Jim Reeves-slow at times, but Thompson is confident enough to stake his ground and hold it. When he sings Sorry to See Me Go – we surely are. It’s separate ways now, but we will be hearing more from Teddy Thompson.

The Adelaide Review, No.307, December 15, 2006, p.15.

Pretenders Rule in the Rain

Published: 2007-02-02

The Pretenders, with Paul Kelly and the Boon Companions, The Church, Josh Pyke.

A Day on the Green Annie’s Lane Winery, Watervale. January 20.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

While it was a welcome break to the South Australian drought and a boon to the state’s near North where it fell most heavily, the enormous hogshead of rain that unloaded on well-named Watervale, seemed sure to mean that A Day on the Green would be a night in the mire.

It had rained the night before, flooding shops in the main street of Clare, and this continued well into the next afternoon as undaunted fans arrived with hampers, folding chairs and a ready thirst for Annie’s Lane own drop. But, providentially, sometime through The Church’s set (probably around the time of their memorable rendering of Under the Milky Way) the clouds not only parted, but blue sky came out to play.

If ever there was a portent this was it. And the show that followed, performed (if I may mangle my metaphor) in the teeth of imminent deluge, seemed especially nimble and sweet. Fellow headliner, Paul Kelly, performed with three Boon Companions, including a slightly uneven Ash Naylor guesting on lead guitar and the ever constant Pete Luscombe on drums. Opening with a solo crooning of They Thought I was Asleep, Kelly’s set ranges from crowd favorites such as To Her Door and Before Too Long to less performed material such as Blush and Won’t You Come Around. As always he judges the occasion well, throwing in some new songs and gliding through When I First Met your Ma and Gravy. The crowd is yelling for more but the set closes on a prompt, but fortunately unprophetic note, with Deeper Water.

It is clear that it is The Pretenders’ night and so when Chrissie Hynde slips on stage unannounced and fifteen minutes before schedule, it is as if she is some kind of magical apparition. In her white leather regency jacket, and skin tight pants, trademark hair with a curtain of fringe down to her panda mascara eyes, she represents timeless and ageless rebel girl pop. Slim as a whip, relaxed and interacting closely with the adoring (and wine-cranked) groundlings, Hynde goes shoulder to shoulder with fellow guitar-slinger Adam Seymour for a note perfect dash through Night in My Veins. It sets the pace and the standard as she moves into that distinctive aching vocal for Don’t Get me Wrong and Dylan’s Forever Young.

The fast punk early standards are on display. Talk of the Town, The City was Gone and middle period rockers like Back on the Chain Gang and Middle of the Road – Chrissie on wailing harmonica and Seymour, one the best in the business, scintillating and succinct on lead. Kid – “You’ve turned your head/ you’ve dropped your hand” - is dedicated to Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott, both dead from overdoses in the early eighties (who can forget the band’s doom-laden Festival Theatre gig in Adelaide only months before their demise, Hynde ragged with anxiety and half the band on the nod.)

This is what makes this gig such a marvel of rock and roll survival. Hynde’s marvelous songs sound the more exultant, classics of the crash and burn of youth and romantic hazard. Original drummer Martin Chambers, enigmatically behind a perspex screen, is there too - the other witness from the lower depths. The Pretenders’ name is even more ironic these days, There are no more legitimate monarchs of eighties rock than them - witty, fast on their feet, a mystery achievement of their own. The set closes at seventy five minutes with the immortal Brass in Pocket. It is all too soon, but in itself apt - a fabulous stolen moment before the heavens close and the rains return.

The Adelaide Review, No 309, February 2, 2007, p.14.

Rock Art

Published: 2007-02-16

Roger Waters Entertainment Centre February 7.

Eric Clapton Entertainment Centre February 9.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It has been a busy time at the Entertainment Centre with two of the biggest names in British rock playing within two days of each other and The Scissor Sisters getting in for their snip as well. The word is that the current world tour is a victory lap for Roger Waters – victory, that is, over the other seventy five percent of Pink Floyd, led by guitarist David Gilmour, who have claimed the Floyd trademark and repertoire and set the standard for massively spectacular state-of-the-art live shows. Waters began his response somewhat diffidently. His In the Flesh Tour performances in New York in 2000, I thought, were undistinguished and the cut-down scale placed uncomfortable demands on Waters to carry the show.

On stage with a massive light and sound rig, a flash band and a well balanced repertoire, Roger Waters is now looking match-fit and in charge. After a blistering version of Mother, he set the controls for some antique Floyd and a poignant Crazy Diamond tribute to the late Syd Barrett. The strong anti-war themes, always present in Waters’ songs, are especially apt in Fletcher Memorial and Leaving Beirut, an undistinguished new song - but a brave attempt to humanise the Middle Eastern conflict. Later, a huge pink pig floats through the ether inscribed with messages in support of David Hicks and habeus corpus.

The performance of The Dark Side of the Moon is an expected highlight, full blast and all the songs in the right order. Money has its unexpected irony - given the lucrative nature of heritage rock shows like this - but with a rousing version of Another Brick and a scathing attack on the Coalition of the Willing with Bring the Boy Back we are left anything but comfortably numb. And yes, since pigs do fly, a Floyd reunion is likely - but not in our town. Not to worry, we have already seen the best.

Eric Clapton had a reunion of his own when Cream settled their curdled differences for some Albert Hall and Madison Square shows in 2005. Perhaps that’s why his setlist is notably short of staples such as Badge and Sunshine of Your Love. Instead Clapton returns, with a nimble band and a strong blues emphasis, to early solo tracks like Let it Rain and a cluster of songs from the Dominoes period, Little Wing, Tell the Truth and Key to the Highway – featuring two support guitarists Doyle Bramhall III and (a new Derek ! ) Derek Trucks, whose splendidly fluid slide guitar makes Layla a triumph and must surely have summoned the smiling shade of Duane Allman.

The sit-down section, with the band on acoustic and National steel guitars, turns Nobody Knows You When You are Down and Out into an ensemble treat, as does the full-tilt electric jam on Queen of Spades with Grease Band veteran Chris Stainton featuring on piano. It is interesting to see Clapton, himself in top silky form, sharing the tasks so freely with his band. Not like Muddy Waters, in his latter days, glaring at anyone stealing the thunder. Eric is relaxed - some might think a little too off-hand for such a pricey ticket. But the fact is, he played a hundred and ten minutes of amazing music, put blues firmly back on the agenda and proved, with the discovery of Derek Trucks, that there may not only be a god, there might be a pantheon.

“Rock, Sprites and Tenors” (Roger Waters /Eric Clapton, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) The Adelaide Review, No.310, February 16, 2007, p.14

Single-minded

Published: 2007-08-17

The Cure Adelaide Entertainment Centre August 6.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

With his back-combed black thatch, his scarlet lipstick and his dark drecky outfits, Robert Smith, founder and undisputed leader of The Cure, has been the Edward Scissorhands of pop music for the best part of thirty years. In that time he, and various permutations of his band, have produced more than twenty albums and an enviable list of boppy, instantly appealing singles. This has created two tiers of loyal fans – those fond of the catchy radio hits and those who favour the extended prog-rock excursions which have characterised later albums such as Bloodflowers and Trilogy, the DVD of the epic Berlin concerts in 2002.

When The Cure last toured here in late 2000 there were strong indications it would be Robert Smith’s last hurrah. Back then, we were told, it was only after plaintive petitions from fans that he had agreed to tour at all, let alone leave his house long enough to visit the Antipodes. But now, something has shifted for Mr Smith – he has been touring copiously in recent years and the current visit comes off one of the most extensive list of concert dates yet.

Certainly there are signs of rejuvenation – or perhaps (much the same thing) a return to basics. The Cure began as a trio and became a quintet. At present they are a quartet - with guitarist Porl Thompson returning to the fold for the first time since the early 90s. Bassist Simon Gallup remains in the line-up, but absent for the moment are long-time multi-instrumentalist Perry Bamonte and keyboard player Roger O’Donnell – and with them have gone the expanded synth washes and tinkling piano fills which have more recently counterbalanced the familiar Cure trademark.

After all, The Cure sound is as distinctive as it is undifferentiated. Over Jason Cooper’s metronomic drumming come those high bendy lead bass lines, and Smith’s oddly febrile vocals. Listening to them now, the early songs are clearly part of the power pop sound of 1980- and yet that voice, and that nervy, bony bass, have endured for another twenty five years of musical invention.

It is those lively early Eighties beginnings that dominate the thirty five item setlist for the current show. After a burst of stage fog and some noodling ambient atmospherics, the band takes the stage – Gallup hunched like a scrawny whippet over his low-slung bass, Thompson coolly detached, and Smith, as self-conscious as ever, lolling about the stage in head-to-foot black like a smudged and sooty version of Paddington Bear. But the likeable indolence is deceptive. Robert Smith sings and performs note perfect, and in complete command, for the best part of three hours.

The opening lines of Fascination Street have the swarm of fans in the general admission section in rapture. The selections are a mix – A Night Like This and The Walk, several from the most recent album, then a terrific cluster from Disintegration – Lovesong, Pictures of You and Lullaby. Cooper’s drumming is relentless, and Thompson peels chords off his guitar like ribbons of hot metal. It is a monstrously loud sound, but also a revelation as Smith’s voice climbs over a roiling sound of bass and distressed guitar.

The singles appear with greater rapidity – Never Enough, The Kiss, Friday I’m in Love, performed with freshness, energy and flair. And after the main set concludes with One Hundred Years, the encores are peppered with more early stuff – Let’s Go to Bed and Close to Me - before spiralling back to the very beginning with five from Three Imaginary Boys. The band closes with Killing an Arab, its Meursault theme now with a different kind of political currency.

The Cure have played themselves – and us – to a standstill. For me, though, the highpoint is the splendidly murky meandering in From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea. I’m sorry that there’s nothing from Bloodflowers – not a skerrick, not a petal, not a corpuscle. But that’s the way it is. This time the Fenders, next time the Korgs and Wurlitzers. And, judging by the almost-perceptible spring in his step, this will not be the last we see of Robert Smith and his mercurial band.

“Single-minded” The Adelaide Review, No.323, August 17, 2007, p.28.

Alias Bob

Published: 2007-08-31

Bob Dylan Adelaide Entertainment Centre August 21

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

On his seventh time round, and his fourth since the Never-ending Tour began in 1989, Bob Dylan, the time lord, is back. Much has happened since we last saw him. First he published the first volume of his Chronicles, then there was the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, including some of most extensive and candid interviews with Dylan ever seen. Things have changed, as he himself might say. After more than forty years of silence, Bob Dylan, the mystery carefully wrapped in an enigma, is even doing interviews for 60 Minutes. But this has always been his paradox. Personally elusive though he is, for nearly twenty years he has played as many as two hundred concerts a year. He must be trying to tell us something about the music.

And that hasn’t stopped. Dylan, like Johnny Cash in his later years, stands astride American Heritage music. As if it were not enough that he transformed sixties folk music, reinvented rock and roll, and popularised country music - now in late middle age, he is challenging expectations all over again. His last three albums, Time out of Mind, Love and Theft and Modern Times, are not only astonishing in their assured blend of traditional balladry, swing, rhythm and blues, even Tin Pan Alley, but they demonstrate that Bob Dylan is still writing great music. With the notable exception of Neil Young, none of his peers - not Paul McCartney, Paul Simon,Joni Mitchell, you name them - is able to match the spark and originality of their early work the way Dylan can. He is like Yeats in his autumn years, or Picasso, full of spry invention.

Dylan has had many aliases - the hobo youth, part Woody Guthrie, part Verlaine and Rimbaud, the elfin boy with tumbleweed hair on Blonde on Blonde, the Amish guy from John Wesley Harding, the gypsy on Desire. His alias this century seems to be a version of Sir Ian McKellen - if you can imagine him with pencil moustache, Tex-Mex trimmings and a white Durango hat.

On stage and surrounded by his latest band - all veterans of the most recent recording sessions - Bob is looking fresh and frisky. The set opens with Cat’s in the Well, a jaunty tune with brooding lyrics only emphasized by Dylan’s rasping voice, which is sounding under siege. All those concerts, all those yards of lyrics, will it hold out, we wonder. Dylan is on guitar and the band slips into the rockabilly groove. They are in grey with black trim, Bob gets the white hat and natty red silk cravat. You look again - and everyone, except fiddle player, Danny Herron, is also sporting a hat and pencil moustache. This is spiv rock and roll, a slightly ludicrous form of cool.

Dylan is still getting started. Lay Lady Lay an up-tempo throwaway with Bob snapping at the lyrics like an unappetising meal. The Basement Tapes’ You Ain’t Goin Nowhere is more genial and It’s All Right Ma has him settling in - Herron excellent on violin and Bob marvellously quizzical in his invective. Especially, with that line for all seasons - sometimes even the President of the U-nited States has to stand nak-ed.

The shift to keyboards improves the vocal mix as he and the band move into Modern Times. The Levee’s Gonna Break - with its chugging R ‘n’ B stride, guitarists Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball in perfect sync, drummer George Receli on the beat. Bassist, MD and Never-ending Faithful Retainer,Tony Garnier, is as always, keeping things together, craning vigilantly towards the maestro, explaining the harmonic ways of God to man. Dylan is hunched over the piano, almost in profile, slowly grooving. Beyond the Horizon gets its first live performance. The tempo is up and Bob is now crooning with ease, gliding with the band in the old-timey highlight of the night.

The award-winning Things Have Changed is sounding good, as is the peerless Texas blues grind of Cry A While. But it is the anti-war songs that stand out. A spine-tingling reading of John Brown, and (once again in Adelaide, home of the Collins class submarine) Masters of War, sung with Dylan’s wolfish disdain, lips peeled back across clenched teeth, the words spraying like hot rivets. Lighter offsets include an airy stroll through Ain’t Talking and the flat-out jive of Summer Days, Denny Freeman, once again, nimble on rock and roll guitar.

Thank you friends, mutters Bob at the close of set, ceremonially introducing the band. The encores are Thunder on the Mountain and a deconstructed Blowin in the Wind. A quirky end to a terrific show - full of strong new material, and vibrantly electric, like Alias himself.

The Adelaide Review, No.234, August 31, 2007, p.28.

CD Review

Published: 2007-09-28

Space Travel

Stephen Cummings

Liberation Music

Stephen Cummings has always been a bit of a space cadet, so his latest release Space Travel is just the sort of out-there quirky lyrical journey of the heart you’d want him to take. There is something heroic about Cummings’ persistence as an artist – novelist, songwriter, and power pop legend from The Sports - and with this album (astutely produced by Bill McDonald) he shows, with his fine-grained vocals and memorable tunes, that he is still a contender. With top musicians, including Shane O’Mara, Billy Miller, the Luscombe boys and Rebecca Barnard, he traverses acoustic ballads, slow blues, and even a little rock and roll.

Murray Bramwell

The Adelaide Review, September 28, 2007

Tall Stories and Go-Betweens

Published: 2008-09-01

Robert Forster Governor Hindmarsh August 6.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

At the first show of a three week tour which was eventually to meander back to Sydney, Robert Forster is looking benign and bemused. It is a cold wet Wednesday, the open fire is banked high and the crowd at the Gov is sparse but keen. There is an air of rehearsal to this out of town try-out, Forster’s first gig since the release of his excellent new CD The Evangelist and the first in Adelaide since he toured with the old firm, The Go-Betweens.

Before opening his set Forster had already ambled out on stage several times, fidgeting with the stage monitors and chatting to punters at the front tables. He is a disarming sight, this tall, somewhat improbable rock and roll performer. Dressed in a navy, v-necked jumper, winkle-picker shoes and red tartan scarf, his hair parted in long Wildean hanks, he could be a foppish solicitor or a very out-there chemistry teacher. The heavy eyebrows and distracted air give a stern impression but he is all affability.

The opening solo stuff is a bit loose, sketchy and under-done. He introduces one title as The Girl Lying on the Beach but the rest is unfamiliar. It is only when ten year collaborator and fellow Go-Between, Adele Pickvance, brings on her bass and pealing voice, that Forster hits his stride with If it Rains, one of the many highlights from The Evangelist, followed (now with Glenn Thompson joining on keyboards) by Demon Days, one of two songs on the solo CD co-written with the late Grant McLennan, whose sudden death in May 2006, even now, gives the event an inescapable melancholy.

Forster makes no specific mention of his long-time musical partner, he has already paid eloquent tribute, both in the spirit of the current album and in his memorable tribute in The Monthly. Instead he draws on the rich vein of such solo albums as Warm Nights and Danger in the Past. My Rock and Roll Friend turns up early on, Heart out to Tender and I Can Do feature in the encore segment. He gives a self-deprecating intro to the Patti Smith-inspired When She Sang About Angels and returns to The Evangelist for Pandanus and the elusive Did She Overtake You.

But it is that striped sunlight sound of the Go-Betweens that carries much of the night. Energised by new young thing, Matthew Harrison’s crisp and thrifty drumming, Pickvance’s bony vibrant bass and Thompson’s Casio noodlings, Robert Forster gets into the groove with such latter-day selections as the irresistible Too Much of One Thing, Surfing Magazines and Here Comes a City . Gazing into the middle distance, Forster strums his slack-stringed rhythms as he breaks into his famously weird, loose-hipped shuffle. In perfect sync the band carries that airy, infectious, boppy sound that has made the Go-Betweens indie cult legends for thirty years.

There is much to savour here – Darlinghurst Nights and Here Comes a City from Oceans Apart , German Farmhouse from Rachel Worth. The Evangelist material is in surprising short supply and we don’t get Bachelor Kisses or The Streets of Your Town. But we do get a cover of The Hampdens’ Vampire Weekend and, on a cold wet August night, a harbinger of another season - Spring Rain. This is Robert Forster’s pop art that conceals art, with its smiley rhythms, singalong choruses, and a breezy lyricism - unexpected from such a tall and serious-looking fellow.

The Adelaide Review, No.343, September, 2008, p.27.

Siren Songs

Published: 2008-12-01

Martha Wainwright The Gov November 21

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is more than three years since Martha Wainwright last played the Gov. She was supported by the excellent Josh Ritter and showcasing her self-titled first album, plus an adult concepts single, Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole, a musical arrow pitched plaintively at her famously absent father, Loudon Wainwright III. The family is a bit like that – hearts on their sleeves, lyrics dripping revenge and no stone unturned for the sake of a plangent melody. The famous daughter of famous parents – there’s Loudon, (who played a brilliant set at the Gov back in March) and her mother, Kate McGarrigle, of the sisters from Montreal. Then there’s older brother Rufus, singing a garland around Carnegie Hall.

Now, with a new album, and a new husband producing it, Martha seems to be jostling less in the family stakes and enjoying much deserved recognition of her own. To a warm welcome at the Gov, she and her band mix recent songs with previous favourites.. Accompanying herself on guitar she opens with the slow melancholy of I Wish I Were – her strong aching vocal extruding the ever-present Martha themes of rejection and insecurity. Those titles tell us much – Bleeding All Over You, Ball and Chain. Her voice is nimble, the band – partner Brad Albetta on bass, and guitarist Oren Bloedow (woeful earlier as the solo opener) adding some stylish fills.

So Many Friends, the singer adding filigree acoustic guitar, is an early high point, the song and its memorable bridge stronger than much of Wainwright’s own, sometimes undistinguished, material. New songs - the trickling rhythms of Jesus and Mary and The George Song are appealing, but it is the return to early work – the eerie Factory, Jimi and the American Songbook echoes of New York, New York, New York which provide depth to the list.

And the covers are welcome – even if she blanks on the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s The Traitor, she is more than match for a great standard. Such as the encore version of Stormy Weather, a Martha favourite in performance for very good reason. She sings it with such startling range and emotional depth that you wonder why she delivers so many masochistic little ballads in that Sadie Thompson-on-helium voice that she affects in more histrionic moments.

Relaxed and happy in a blue dress given her by Julia, of Angus and Julia Stone, Martha Wainwright closes with a ragged version of See Emily Play, Syd Barrett’s miniature pop masterpiece, turned into a frat party singalong. Martha Wainwright is a fine talent but she needs to shape her repertoire with more care. Stormy Weather was the place to call it a night - and a very fine night it would have been.

December, 2008. Commissioned but unpublished by The Adelaide Review

Keyboard shortcuts

Music Reviews