LIVE REVIEW: Max Richter

Photo: Ken Leanfore

Max Richter @ Hamer Hall, February 17, 2025

 

Max Richter is one of the few modern composers equally at home on Pitchfork’s Best New Music page and piped through some surround sound-optimised Bang & Olufsens in a Bentley in Kew. Best known to those who don’t follow post-minimalist composers as “that guy who does the concert you sleep at”, Richter is a composer who most people have heard at some point. You might not know the name of his best-known piece, On the Nature of Daylight, but you or someone you know has probably wept to it while watching the films Arrival, Disconnect, The Trip or Shutter Island or the television series The Leftovers, The Handmaids Tale or The Last of Us where it accompanied a climactic scene of loss and despair. On the Nature of Daylight is a highlight from his 2004 album, The Blue Notebooks, which forms the second half of tonight’s show. First, a sold-out Hamer Hall quietens itself to experience Richter’s 2024 album In a Landscape. 

 

After a lengthy introduction of electronic loops and incongruous puffs of dry ice that linger around the back of the stage like they drifted in from a nearby production of Never Have I Ever, the ensemble arrives. Cellist and Artistic Director Clarice Jensen, violinists Ben Russell and Laura Lutzke, viola player Kyle Miller and cellist Claire Bryant. Behind them strides Richter himself, politely waving to the crowd, somehow pulling off a clothing ensemble of his own that combines a black hoodie under a black suit jacket. His grand piano sits stage left, facing away from the audience, while his laptop, effects, and synthesizer face the musicians. Chairs and illuminated music stands, their manuscripts poised, await the performance.

 

“In this music you get composed music, found objects, acoustic music, electronic music,” Richter says. “The human world and the natural world. The landscape out there and the landscape we all carry inside us. The pieces of space where those things can talk to one another.”

 

As Richter and the ensemble begin to let the music speak for itself, a tall line of lights behind the musicians’ glows and recedes. Throughout the evening it changes subtly with the mood of the music, warm cool, sometimes absent, sometimes blindingly bright. It fits the simplicity of the music being played and feels, as the music often does, simultaneously futuristic and mid-century. The musicians and Richter move through In a Landscape, perfect renditions of the recordings, occasionally pausing to let field recordings or sequences of pre-recorded music play. For most bands and musicians, this slavish adherence to the written note and studio might feel sterile or unthinking. But, just as each musician uses paper manuscripts to play simple songs that they have likely played hundreds of times together before, this faith to the music is a choice that allows them to be wholly present in the moment, and their focus is very much on each other and the audience. This is key to the power of watching Max Richter and experiencing his music live. This connection and what he chooses to do with it.

 

Many songs begin with long slow cello bows, gradually a viola line is added, then subtle violins, and the soft, warm sounds of Richter’s muted piano. The piece builds, swelling as individual parts shift subtly to accommodate other players. This description could fit many modern composers, or pieces by other modern minimalists like Michael Nyman or Gavin Bryars, but what Richter focuses on, as he said, is the communication between the inside and outside world. Here, Richter isn’t only speaking metaphorically. His music entrains the audience; physiologically matching the state of the performer and the listener. Because of the slow tempo and the frequent use of two descending notes looped over a repetitive cello part, our heart rates are lowered to the tempo of the music. The man who pursued this particular power of music to send hundreds of people to sleep at his Sleep series of concerts tonight pulls the venue into a quiet world of contemplation and gentle awe at this simple skill. Once we reach the intermission, the lobby is full of chatter, a refreshingly diverse blend of people reflecting on the experience they shared. 

 

The original album of The Blue Notebooks, released on an imprint of the UK indie label Fat Cat Records, featured the actress Tilda Swinton reading from Franz Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks. In his introduction Richter explains that, along with wanting to write a protest album about the Iraq war, the feeling underpinning the album is one of doubt, a sensation that Franz Kafka was, he tells us, “The patron saint”. Tonight, as Swinton is otherwise engaged, we get the closest thing Australia has to her, Eryn Jean Norvill, the actress best known for playing all 26 characters in Sydney Theatre Company’s 2022 production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Norvill gently and forcefully intones brief diary-like passages from The Blue Octavo Notebooks between Richter’s equally gentle and forceful music. While much of it sounds like it could have been composed any time in the last century, it is hard to imagine it not possessing the same power centuries ago and in any number of culturally diverse environments. Conversely, the electronic interludes that occasionally break up the classical music use sounds that are very specifically early 2000s, reminding the listener of political influence on the album that feel like they could equally apply to the disengagement of most people that allowed the invasion of Iraq to take place, and – particularly in the tumultuous closing piece The Trees – the toll of looking directly at it. A powerful and memorable concert from a generous composer who thinks deeply. 

LIVE REVIEW: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

Photo: Daniel Boud

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings @ Hamer Hall, January 28, 2024

 

Weeks after the cries of “I want to go, but…$170 a ticket?” across Melbourne’s north die down. Days after the Tixel event page grows frantic, and then quiet, a crowd gathers at the Arts Centre’s Hamer Hall. Thousands of people in loose suits, check patterns, flowing floral dresses, embroidered shirts and slip-on boots. If Castlemaine went to the Oscars, it would look something like this.

 

Ever since Polyester Records nominated Gillian Welch’s 2001 album Time (the Revelator) as the greatest of its era, and groups of music fans could be silenced upon learning that one among them had seen Welch at the Prince of Wales in 2004, there has been a deep connection between the Tennessean singer and the World’s Greatest City for Live Music™. Tonight, the rare combination of Welch, and her partner David Rawlings, and Melbourne, is held in the Arts Centre’s delicate, carpeted embrace. This is the first of five sold out shows, and it’s a safe bet that many here tonight won’t stop at one.

 

Inside, the stage is decked out simply. A spherical floral arrangement of baby’s breath and wattle sits behind them on a large black box that will soon also host glasses of water from which they sip throughout the night. No support band, no backing band. No guitar pedals, no foldback wedges, no electricity. We could be about to watch a chamber ensemble. The lights dim, Rawlings and Welch appear, waving, stride to the centre of the stage and wait for the best part of a minute for the adulation to die down. Once amid the spotlights they nod to each other and begin one of the highlights from Polyester’s favourite album, Elvis Presley Blues. As with every song tonight, it is anchored by Welch’s right hand. Whether strumming or picking, she sets the pace and tone. Rawlings bell-like guitar lines flow like an endless stream, his left hand in constant motion, up and down the neck, rarely pausing to let a note ring. His solos flow into the following chorus or verse, from which Welch’s voice, that gloriously warm and dynamic instrument, wrests attention.

 

After the rapturous applause ebbs, Welch introduces the third musician, double bassist Paul Kowert, best known for his work with the Punch Brothers. “He was playing a show in Glasgow,” she explains. “Which is just a hop skip and a jump from here.” The trio dispatch peerless versions of Rawling’s Midnight Train and Cumberland Gap and Welch’s Wayside / Back in Time. Welch and Rawlings’ honeyed harmonies and musicianship are well known, but what stands out tonight is how their musical relationship exponentially increases the impact of both. Clustered at the centre of the stage, they stand the perfect distance from each other to hear and listen. Independent but inseparable. Tonight’s show could be a tiny club, and their performance would be identical. Welch’s songs about boxcars, mules and good time ramblers were written to feel intimate, and the trio keep that feeling throughout the concert. Never straining, simply working with each other. Welch in a long flowing dress and head tilted back slightly to sing, long grey hair cascading over narrow shoulders. Rawlings in his white Stetson and faded blue jeans and jacket that shakes slightly each time he takes a guitar solo, dancing a little in a way that makes it appear as though he has temporarily lost vertebrae. 

 

“We left the set list a ways back,” Welch says, laughing, before beginning. That’s the Way it Goes and North Country, one of the many tracks of her and Rawlings’ latest album, Woodland. After Rawlings’ Ruby, Let Down Your Hair and Welch’s searing Caleb Meyer, we get a twenty-minute intermission. People gather in groups, catchups abound. People join queues that move too slowly to prove fruitful and soon the hall is filled again. To begin their second set, Rawlings takes the lead on Lawman, his frail falsetto while appealingly warm, seems to be augmented and enriched when paired with Welch’s. Kowert returns to the stage for What We Had before Welch bestows one of her greatest songs, Hard Times, upon a hushed room. Hard Times stands out because it possesses what so many of her songs are missing from their live performance in this format: space. It’s not until her delicate banjo picks out an arpeggio and she sings this particular song about poverty and animal husbandry that her power really comes into its own. Rawlings, among the greatest acoustic guitarists in the world, is undeniably talented, but his almost ceaseless guitar playing – the same style on the same guitar – tends to flatten the songs. Solos feel interchangeable, and while many deservedly earned a round of applause at their flurried completion, when Welch’s songs are given space to shine, we are reminded why we came.  

 

The pair close their set with an impossibly graceful version of The Way it Will Be and storming rendition of Red Clay Halo, that sees Rawlings grab a capo from his pocket, throw it on the neck of his Epiphone Olympic archtop guitar, and peel out another stunningly fluid solo. The first standing ovation draws them back for Monkey and the Engineer and Look At Miss Ohio. The second a crowd-rousing version of I’ll Fly Away, one of Welch’s contributions to the film O Brother Where Art Thou. People were already filling the aisles and discussing what a brilliant concert it had been when the pair return for a jaw-dropping version of Time (The Revelator), and some people had actually left the auditorium and had to rush back to their seats to hear the fruits of a fourth standing ovation, a cover of Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's Jackson. Yes, $170 is a lot for a ticket to see two people play acoustic instruments. But no one else can do this. 2025 is going to have to be a damn good year for music for this concert not to be among one of the best of the year. 

LIVE REVIEW: Superchunk, The Meanies, Delivery

Superchunk, The Meanies, Delivery @ Corner Hotel. December 14, 2024

 

Rock and roll has always been tethered to youth. A flashpoint of rebellion, energy, and invincibility that fades as quickly as it ignites. Listeners return to that flame not for nostalgia, but for the raw charge it once offered, a reminder of when life felt uncontainable. Some artists die young, but most simply carry on, acquiescing to age and applying their skills to more pressing concerns. Superchunk, however, defy the usual decline. Decades into their run, they still channel the twitchy, restless urgency of their beginnings while layering in the bittersweet realities of adulthood. Their records from the past twenty years — and their electrifying live show tonight — aren’t just echoes of their youth; they’re bridges between then and now. The Slack Motherfuckers of 1989 delivered Wild Loneliness in 2022, a pandemic era creation which singer-songwriter Mac McCaughan tells us is about “wild loneliness”, is proof that rock doesn’t have to grow up to grow deeper. Since arriving in Australia last week, McCaughan’s Instagram feed has been a steady stream of photos from their first visit in 1992, girding this connection with youth and Superchunk in concert in 2024.

 

Tonight’s show, the last of their five-date Australian tour, is sold as a blend of songs from their 1994 album Foolish, the thematic centre of the bridge. This was Superchunk’s first album since the romantic split of the band's founding partnership of McCaughan and Laura Ballance, both of whom remain creative forces in the band today. They were being courted by major labels and their response was to form their own, Merge Records, and make one of the best, and most overlooked, albums of the decade.

 

Melbourne band Delivery have been generating a great deal of hype since their arrival on the scene in early 2021, the band has focused on vibe and riff over technical prowess. A five piece with the sound of a trio, Delivery is the archetypal “great hang”. No song here is going to change the world, but you are going to hear some big riffs and have a good time. Their closing song, Baader Meinhof, is an organ-driven banger and the clear standout of a fun set.

 

“I’m a little bit drunker than I like to be,” says The Meanies’ charismatic singer Link Meanie. As soon as they launch into their opening song, You Know the Drill, a room of fans, mostly male, mostly in their early 50s, step back for a few seconds and mouth “fuck, it’s loud” to each other. What makes The Meanies’ Ramones and Stooges-influenced punk different from the copious other bands hoping to channel the titanic sounds, is their commitment. Wally, Link and Ringo have been locking in with each other in various forms, on and off, since 1988, while guitarist Jaws Meanie sounds like he has. On top of this, the voices of Link and Wally are right out in front of the colossal mix, and when you have voices that are this powerful and tight, it sounds like every other band who formed after hearing the Ramones and the Stooges wishes they did. Songs like 10% Weird and There’s a Gap, new single Zamboni and the almighty epic closer Keep a Balance are all highlights of a colossal set. Whatever they had, they’ve still got. 

 

Superchunk open theirs with a reminder that they too have lost little in the way of energy and commitment since the mid-90s. Like a Fool begins Foolish, the album they are here to revisit, and its impact is immediate. From the fluid arpeggios that hang in space in the song’s introduction into the crashing arrival of the verse, Mac’s wiry, nervy energy still channels a power few other frontman can summon. He and longtime compatriot Jim Wilbur’s guitars twin and blend seamlessly. Bassist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura King are a perfectly matched rhythm section that invest their own personality into the songs without robbing them of their writers Ballance and former drummer Jon Wurster. Saving My Ticket, Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything and the peerless Tossing Seeds follow, each marrying the fiery energy and Mac’s reedy adolescent voice, an instrument that seemed transient in the 80s and 90s, one that couldn’t possibly survive one concert let alone a tour is, 30 years on, a gloriously expressive instrument.

 

As the closing chords of Package Thief are replaced by another round of applause, Wilbur steps up to the microphone. “We didn’t come here to fuck spiders,” he says with a slight nervousness. “Our friends in Cable Ties taught us that,” adds Mac. “It hasn’t caught on back home yet.” Further highlights from Foolish follow: Kicked In, Water Wings, Driveway to Driveway and The First Part sound as vast as Brian Paulson and Steve Albini made them on record. The band close their set with What a Time to Be Alive, a song that can double as a political lament and statement of intent, before returning with a cover of Sebadoh’s Brand New Love, a song Lou Barlow “wrote the hell out of”, Mac tells us. Over the last hour, Superchunk have proven their superpower is the ability to be youthful while middle-aged. Few songs can underscore this more than Hyper Enough, but one of those is Slack Motherfucker. Thankfully, Superchunk wrote both and saved them for the encore. As Mac thrusts the microphone toward the front rows so we can scream “motherfucker!” back into his delighted face, the band behind him grin widely. The final song of the night is the furious punk rush of Fishing, one of the band’s earliest. Tonight’s rendition sees Mac seamlessly replace King on the drum kit while she takes Mac’s spot at the front of the stage. It’s a simple, fun bit of stageplay, but the joy that it evokes is another testament to how much the band are adored by the crowd. The emptied merch desk is another.

 

 

LIVE REVIEW: Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam @ Marvel Stadium. November 16, 2024

 

Throughout thirty years of interviews, Pearl Jam’s lead singer Eddie Vedder has remained committed to music as a tool for personal salvation. Regardless of what you need saving from, music can do it. For tens of millions of people around the world, few bands could match Pearl Jam's ability to emotionally connect with listeners, and even fewer have their reputation as a live act. Playing live matters a great deal to the band who have released 15 live albums and a collection of 72 “official bootlegs”. Live is where a band who have resolutely fought to remain unaffected by fame can be themselves. It's where the connection is made, and tonight that connection is titanic. 

 

Accompanying their arrival on stage is an oceanic surge of distortion and industrial noise. Within seconds Matt Cameron's virtuoso drumming is joined by Jeff Ament's crunching bass and we're suddenly collectively within their 1991 song, Why Go. Eddie Vedder appears on the giant screens either side of the stage in a trucker cap, waves of shoulder-length dark hair sprouting from its back. Either side of him, guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard engage in seamless interplay, united through to the song's explosive conclusion.

 

As the cheering fades, Vedder, smile on his face, takes to the microphone. “If you could see what we see now,” he says. “We’re feeling pretty fond of you right now. It’s been a long hot day, so we want to pace ourselves and check if everyone is doing OK. It’s a lot better than lightning but it’s really fucking hot," he says, referring to the band's previous Gold Coast show that took place amid torrential storms. "I’m wearing shorts not to be nostalgic, but because it’s really fucking hot.” Vedder, looking as many of his fans did in the early nineties, is wearing knee length black shorts and a blue short-sleeve shirt over black t-shirt. With the energy dialled back Vedder leads the band into Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town which sees an almost ecclesiastical raising of hands and voices in the sold-out stadium: "Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away." 

 

Given to Fly and Hail, Hail follows, but it's the mighty response to Corduroy that evokes what Vedder, and the band do best: confessional, personal stories that spark an instinctive response in their fans. Power in the verse, a euphoric soaring in the chorus. When Vedder sings about misanthropy and disdain, it feels transient. When he sings about overcoming the sources of his angst and anxiety and connecting with a deeper understanding or someone else, it feels triumphant. Likewise, the rest of Pearl Jam have made their livelihoods on direct, live connection with each other, with Vedder and with the audience. McCready and Gossard’s voluminous chords and piercing riffs connect with the back row. Jeff Ament’s bass remains a bright, taught and fluid muscle of sound. We're here for the music but we're also here to connect with Vedder. After a rare outing of an early song, Garden, as requested by a fan Vedder met on the street today, he pauses the set to talk to us again. "Jesus Chris this is a big show tonight," he laughs. "This… this is not rehearsed," he continues. "It blows our minds that we're here tonight. That we've come half way around the world to play to all of you. We're brothers, we're a team, we love each other, but you've made us be close. So, thank you. It's been just an incredible life, and we wanted you to know. So, thank you so much."

 

Borne on the goodwill, the Tom Petty-ish Wreckage follows, a highlight from the band’s new album Dark Matter that they’re here to promote. As the cheering continues, the band blast through new single, the punk-infused head rush of Running before we're back in the early 90s again with maybe the most distinctive crunching eight-string bass riff of all time, Jeff Ament’s opening to Jeremy. Phones aloft, voices in union, this is one of the night’s highlights. Vedder leavens the outro with the addition of “My whole life like a picture on a sunny day,” a nod to fellow Pacific Northwesterners Sleater Kinney's song Modern Girl. The cheering that follows amplifies as the opening riff of Even Flow ricochets around the stadium. McCready disappears into the crowd as he plays his long, atmospheric solo. Gossard, bespectacled and appearing to be the band's visual and musical anchor, remains fixed to the spot, grinding through the riffs, clearly on cloud nine. Ament, looking every part the ageing skater turned outdoor enthusiast, paces the stage in activewear and his waist-high pastel pink bass as Cameron miraculously gives the song everything it needs while injecting it with his own personality. 

 

After a short break, Vedder returns to the stage. Trucker cap replaced by a Stetson, he sits on a stool, dons an acoustic guitar and settles in to give a shout out to his charity, EBRP Australia, a unit devoted to managing and finding a cure for the degenerative skin condition Epidermolysis Bullosa. Some of the researchers are here tonight and Vedder dedicates Just Breathe to them. Like Wreckage, it is a song where Vedder can relax and not try to sound as he did thirty years ago. Despite the extraordinary talent on stage, Vedder’s voice remains the band’s most powerful instrument, and it is a joy to hear him be able to use it like this.

 

After the band return to the stage for Inside Job and Do the Evolution, Vedder takes a moment to notice the younger members of the audience. The camera finds some kids on the shoulders of their parents and the audience cheers. "Is there a girl here called Evie," Vedder asks. Miraculously, the camera finds her. "Like a needle in a haystack, there she is!" he says as the girl is hoisted into the air, smiling and laughing. "Evie's mom told me this was her first ever concert and that her dad was taking here. Evie, you have a great dad," the audience cheers. "So, this next song is about an abusive relationship," Vedder begins before catching himself. "Uhhh, this chorus at least, we can dedicate to Evie's dad, you can't find a better man."

 

With those words, the stadium is on its feet, phones again aloft, bathing the stadium in a sea of light. Even if the song has been played to death on commercial radio over the last 20 years, it still contains an unusual power, a personal song not written with commercial appeal in mind, but one that – again – connects deeply with millions of listeners. After the trench run of State of Love and Trust the opening riff of Alive erupts and the stadium's house lights burst on and reveals what might be the whitest crowd since Kanye West opened for U2 here in 2006. The band's renown cover of Neil Young's Rocking in the Free World begins and it's clear we're at the tail end of the show. Guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, taking a completely understandable break from Jane’s Addiction, joins them. Kids are brought up on stage, Vedder throws tambourines out to the crowd and the house lights illuminate the Oaks Day energy going on in the GA section. This is often where Pearl Jam shows end, but tonight we get the addition of Yellow Ledbetter, an outtake from the band's first album.

 

Over the course of tonight’s set, Vedder sings about a lost father, lost love, doubt, deep and lingering regret. He sings about other people’s trauma, obviously, directly, rarely leaning on metaphor or leaving a song open for the listener to piece together its meaning. Vedder has said that he was able to write and sing so directly on Pearl Jam’s first album, Ten, because, as he told journalist Clint Brownlee, “I was protected by the assumption that no one else would ever hear that shit.”

 

By the time Vedder is lying on stage, exhausted and elated at the end of tonight’s set, a lot of people might have listened to "that shit", but they are still the Seattle band that recorded a demo tape in 1990 that found its way into the hands of a gas station attendant in San Diego who came up with his parts while surfing. As Vedder sings in Scared of Fear, the opening track from Dark Matter and a song we didn't hear tonight: “We used to laugh/We used to sing/We used to dance/We used to believe”. They still do.

LIVE REVIEW: Peggy Frew, Sweet Whirl

Peggy Frew, Sweet Whirl @ Bergy Bandroom, November 9, 2024

 

Outside the Bergy Bandroom, the singer-songwriter Peggy Frew is perhaps best known as an award-winning novelist, or amongst TheMusic readers, as the bassist for award-winning indie band Art of Fighting. Tonight, inside the Bergy Bandroom, she is just Peggy. Here to launch her debut album Dial Up, released several days earlier, the room is a cocoon of family, friends and fans. Her daughter runs the merch table, selling vinyl and tshirts. Her son, Fraser Turner, plays guitar in her band. Numerous people sharing Frew’s angular visage are in the crowd, some in t-shirts that read “Peggy Frew” in a large handwritten font. This is not the kind of environment in which an album launch can fall flat. But, even without the intimate familiarity, Frew’s songs, delivery and stage presence would have made this a very special night. The album, a low-key blend of atmospheric indie rock and muted orchestral pop, is made for headphones and small rooms. As is the music of her support act, Sweet Whirl, Esther Edquist. 

 

“I’m a bookseller,” says Edquist. “So, quite often I will see Peggy in some textual way. It’s nice to see her in real life.” Seated on a tall stool, head cocked slightly toward the microphone, thick fringe over her brow, Edquist cradles her bass guitar on which she begins to gently pluck arpeggios. With a warm, expressive voice that sounds as though it could have come from a sunlit living room in Laurel Canyon, Edquist thrums and picks her bass, moving air around the room as she sings songs about quiet defiance, the ending of relationships and feeling “damned to be a loser and a weirdo”. A swooning, artfully crafted new song that she seems to name Station on the spot, is perhaps the strongest of the set. A majestic in miniature, it is another song strong enough to work with a band, an orchestra or, as it is, just bass guitar and voice. That we see them in such a close environment feels special. “If you’d like to find me in your spam folder,” she tells us, “sign up to my mailing list”. 

 

In the late 1990s, when Art of Fighting were moving from being a camera-shy indie band that only Punters Club Form Guide readers had heard of, to ARIA award-winning, chart-crashing camera-shy indie band that Triple J listeners had heard of, they became known for their ability to transfix a noisy pub with a few spacious chords and the whisper of vocalist Ollie Browne. Twenty years on, and to full throated cheering and applause, Frew finally takes centre stage. Backed by her longtime collaborator Marty Brown, her son on guitar and occasional clarinet, and bassist and backing vocalist Jessie Warren, she opens her set with album highlight Landslide. Frew sings with such delicacy and hesitancy that, as with her former band, you have to lean in to really hear the song. At times it feels as though Frew is singing for herself or the band. Words begin and are swallowed, her eyes closed, or gaze trained on the keys of her synthesiser. Yet, with this setting, the care placed onto the words and the arrangements, everything feels important, like a first confession. Turner’s guitar is so minimal it is almost gestural at times, but those parts he does play are vital and loaded with intent. The set is so quiet at times that the hum of amplifiers almost becomes another instrument.

 

Moving through the album, the single Country House is a standout, as is Off Season, the gently epic Newtown and album closer Whereabouts. Frew’s songs sound like home videos of pivotal moments in her life: Sitting next to an empty dancefloor in a Sydney bar in “August ‘97”, the care given by a friend in the wake of a relationship ending, “$15 in my bank account” ... “We were just kids then.” At times it is almost like sung memoir. Frew ends her set with an unrecorded Art of Fighting song she wrote with the band, a song from the band’s Second Storey album, Where Trouble Lived, and a sparse and moody cover of Roy Orbison’s Blue Bayou before closing with her former band’s I Don’t Keep a Record.

“When I played in Art of Fighting, I would have one song per album,” she tells us midway through the set. “I realised there were more songs than would go on them, so I had to do something else. I didn’t want to sing, but Marty was quietly firm about how things were done,” she says looking back at her collaborator behind the drum kit with a smile. She talks about how personal the songs are, but it is also clear how important they are too. With the pictures she draws across the album and tonight’s songs, the power of writing your own story is at the core of her performance. Hopefully it is also an inspiring one.

 

LIVE REVIEW: Buzzcocks, Modern English

Buzzcocks, Modern English @ Northcote Theatre, November 2, 2024

 

Outside, it feels like summer is finally here. It is a balmy Saturday night and music spills from busy bars and restaurants onto the tumult of High Street. Inside the Northcote Theatre, around one thousand people eagerly wait to be taken back to the London winter of 1982. On stage, is Modern English. The British post punk quintet, who formed in 1979, are playing their first ever show in Melbourne and at least the first three rows of the crowd are in thrall to the men dressed in flattering black. As the band work their way through tracks from their new album, 1,2,3,4, ("we couldn't believe no one had used that title before", singer Robbie Grey tells the crowd), song after song leans in to the icy melodic punk rock they helped invent in the early 1980s. And if you had played a part in inventing this sound, as Modern English did, why would you? It's spellbinding stuff. The band gel, the sound is powerful and the audience, many of whom are here for nostalgic reasons, welcome the surprise in new songs like Long in the Tooth and Not My Leader. Many of these are driven by the work of bassist Mick Conroy whose blend of Peter Hook-style strumming and melodic is an asset. Older songs like Carry Me Down, Tables Turning and Swans on Glass – "our first single on 4AD", Grey informs us – sound excitingly fresh. "There are so many Joy Division t-shirts," he observes, as the room, now almost at capacity, awaits the band's last track. “We’re going to finish with this song that I think you might know,” Grey says. We cheer, and the band dive into the titanic eighties classic, I Melt with You, a song about having sex during an atomic bomb blast, and one not fully appreciated until its inevitable inclusion in the series Stranger Things. A song with a chorus so good, it can sustain a career and bring a band to the other side of the world 42 years after its release.  As the closing chords fade and the band raise their arms to the roof, the guy next to me leans over to share his thoughts: “It really is a banger.” 

 

Arriving to the strains of Thus Spake Zarathustra, best known for announcing the dawn of life in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Buzzcocks arrive on stage one by one, similarly raising their arms to the sky. Partway through the previous set, Modern English singer Robbie Grey warned us, "The Buzzcocks set will hit you like a train." Opening with punk classic What Do I Get? The headliners set about living up to that introduction. Unbridled enthusiasm is what the band is best known for and Steve Diggle, the only member of the band's original lineup, inhabits it like few others. Backed by the impassive precision of bassist Chris Remington, the flawless drumming of Danny Farrant and the notably younger guitarist Mani Perazzoli, the band charge through a brace of short punk classics: I Don't Mind, Everybody's Happy Nowadays and Promises. The songs work, Diggle sells them beautifully, even if one of their greatest qualities, the delivery of sadly deceased singer-songwriter Pete Shelley, is missing. Watching the band prompts some big questions. How do you be a punk at 69? Do you faithfully invoke the past, trust the audience to bring their personal associations to your music and let them complete the performance? Do you fake the emotions that inspired these songs you wrote and played when you were a teenager? Do you find new sources of anger? Do you use the songs as a time travel machine and make it a purely personal experience? Buzzcocks are spared from this conundrum with qualities shared by few of their contemporaries: Pop nous and a sense of humour. Shelley's wry, queer outsider takes on northern English adolescent lives are still so joyous, declarative and honest that the collective act of their performance becomes the answer.  

 

"This next song is for the people of Gaza," Diggle says, now deep into the set and without a hint of exhaustion. As the band begin Autonomy, a song whose title he used for his autobiography, cries of "Free Palestine" and loud cheers echo around the room. The fist we saw raised in welcome when he arrived on the stage takes on a new meaning when he punches the air now. It's a reminder of what other bands on the series of Rock Against Racism concerts of the late 1970s did best: used their profile to highlight struggles faced by others and ensured the door was left open for post-punk to become a far more diverse style of music. 

 

By the end of Autonomy, we are treated to perhaps the biggest singalong of the night and one of the greatest odes to sustaining sexual tension ever written: Why Can't I Touch It? It's a perfect example of how the band capture the frailties of adolescence and elevate them with songwriting for three minutes. Swathes of pop punk enthusiasts have followed in their wake, but none have captured the power inherent in the naive simplicity of a song like this. “It’s Friday night in Melbourne, is everyone having fun?” asks Diggle as another of their hits, Love You More, fades away. The first part of his statement may be wrong, but the second part is spot on. When you can follow any statement with Orgasm Addict and Boredom – two of the greatest punk songs ever written – all will be forgiven. 

 

Why Diggle is wearing an Australian sporting tshirt for the encore and has an Australian flag over his amplifier is never addressed. Perhaps it was, but his Mancunian accent is so strong and enthusiasm so great that most of his banter was reduced to enthusiastic gestures and endorsements of whatever is going on around him. Which is kind of what punk shows were all about anyway. As the band careen toward the end of their six-song encore with the unfailingly great Ever Fallen in Love and Harmony in My Head, a small moshpit bursts to life in front of Diggle, arresting the attention of the security guards who let it play out. Even as he leaves the stage, Diggle is leaping, bounding, full of life, the perfect vehicle for what punk did best, genuine life-affirming music that found a virtue in simplicity and the songs to match it.

 

 

LIVE REVIEW: Teeny Tiny Stevies

Teeny Tiny Stevies @ Northcote Theatre, Melbourne, September 22, 2024

 

Despite being a fixture in the daily lives of millions of Australians, children’s music has always had a difficult path to being taken seriously. Even its famously fickle target audience rarely maintains an allegiance to a band for long as playlists rather than albums remain the medium of choice. So, when something inventive, well written, thoughtfully crafted comes along, like an episode of Bluey or a Studio Ghibli film, it feels like a minor miracle. The sororal harmonies of Teeny Tiny Stevies' Beth and Byll Stephen are one of these. Today’s sold-out hometown concert is to promote the band's most recent release, The Green Album, a collection of songs thoughtfully released back in April to allow its fans to learn the choruses. With a start time of 10am Sunday, (presumably strategically situated between breakfast and naptime), Northcote's High Street is quickly taken over by a long line of families threading away from a slightly bemused security. 

 

After a Welcome to Country that extended to include a welcome to anyone who made it out of the house this morning, Beth opens the show with The Green Album's lead single, Climate Change. Her sister joins for the second verse and by the time the song arrives at its chorus, bassist Cliff Bowden and drummer Benjamin Graham have joined. By the second chorus, much of the audience is on its feet clapping, gazing and slightly stunned at the sight of music coming not from a Bluetooth speaker, but a stage adorned with oversized sunflowers and green fairy lights all beneath a giant mirrorball. The warmly intimate Light as a Bubble and kinetically exuberant Energy follow and the band hits their stride. Fans swarm up to the barrier to pull shapes and leap into the air. With younger members of the audience finding each other as interesting as the band, it transpires that a Teeny Tiny Stevies show is as much about the atmosphere as the music. Songs move between indie folk (Had You to Teach Me), country swing (Baby In Mum's Tummy), 70s sunshine pop (Pre-Loved) and slippery funk (How Am I Different?), all driven by the sisters' imaginatively arranged harmonies. With so many songs about accepting yourself and others, managing anxiety and expectations around milestones such as a new sibling and bodily autonomy, the children respond with an equivalent openness. New songs are warmly received and requests to sing, dance, wear sunglasses and show off second clothes are enthusiastically fulfilled. 

 

Many of the band's songs are sung from the perspective of a kid and hearing young people's concerns filtered through the Stephen's songwriting chops is a powerful tool to create empathy in adults and instant familiarity in children. As Byll Stephen told the ABC in an interview in 2020, “it’s not, ‘Let’s think of a shitter musical idea because it’s a kids song,’ that is not our intention at all. We want to be putting good stuff out there that’s just as good as any adult stuff you’ll listen to.” The complex Wilson-esque harmonies of Pre-Loved, the Talking Heads-style groove underpinning Boss of My Own Body and the verbal dexterity of Babyccino are underserved by the tag "children's music".

 

“Put your hands up if you’ve seen this on ABC Kids,” says Beth as hands shoot into the air. “Put your hands up if you’ve heard this on the radio,” says Byll to more hands. “Unlikely," she frowns, "but OK.” On the Toilet is the song that took the sisters from being a respected folk pop duo, The Little Stevies, to ARIA Award-winning giants of kids’ music with an Amazon television series. Almost the entire room knows the words, everyone who came here to dance is dancing and the collective joy is hard to resist.

 

For many here, born just before or during the Covid pandemic lockdowns, this is their first ever concert. For it to be such a positive experience has an incalculable impact on not only the future of the live music scene that so many people proclaim to care about, but for creativity and the arts in general. The awestruck faces trained on the band as they bring their audience on a journey of boundless goodwill and educative singalongs is, in many ways, the pinnacle of what a live music experience can be. Finishing with the musical equivalent of the cafe sign that reads "unsupervised children will be given an espresso and a puppy", the band close with Babyccino, firing up the crowd all over again. After the band pose for photos in the lobby and their merch table does business that would thrill a major label act, 1400 people swarm back onto High Street in various states of excitement and tiredness. Unlike Bluey or a Studio Ghibli film, a five-year-old fan explains to me, “Teeny Tiny Stevies are real life".

 

 

LIVE REVIEW: Quivers, Juice Webster

Quivers, Juice Webster @ Northcote Social Club, June 30, 2024

 

By the time Juice Webster and her band arrive on stage, the room is three-quarters full and at least ten degrees warmer than Northcote's crowded High Street. As the applause dies down, I hear one woman standing near me whisper, “I love her look, I love her music, I love everything about her.” Since Webster’s arrival on the Melbourne music scene in 2018 as a quietly observant folk pop singer-songwriter, and long before the release of her glowingly reviewed debut album Julia late last year, the Melbourne-based singer songwriter has been growing used to sentiments like these. The audience go from raucous appreciation to a hushed reverence as her band ease into the album's opening track, Returning. Quietly insistent shallow guitar strums are underpinned by a warm rhythm section that moves at the pace of a sleeper’s heartbeat. Last year, Webster featured on Victoria Kozbanis’s podcast Beers & Tears, where the Kozbanis described her music as "a kind of summoning – soft echoes of connectedness and courage; lightweight and all-encompassing", and I'm not sure anyone is going to beat that. There is a virtue in Webster's choice not to lean on dynamic shifts and instead favour a soothing circuitous jangle. Standouts from tonight's set include the quietly incandescent Black Coat, Black Skirt and Headaches, both of which appear on Julia and the almighty, time-shifting closer Wanna Be Held, a song just waiting to make a music supervisor look like a complete genius when they use it to transform the climax of a romantic drama into a wrenching tear-jerking masterpiece. Webster won fans with her support slots for The Beths and her recent free Northcote Social Club show, it's a safe bet she's added to that number tonight.

 

There are few fans a band would want more than Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance. The duo behind the nineties indie titans Superchunk and founders of Merge Records, McCaughan and Ballance discovered bands like Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon and Caribou and the act they want to work their savvy magic with next is the quartet ambling onto stage right now. Quivers mumble bashful hellos to the buoyant room, now packed, spilling into the hallway and bellowing back their appreciation, the four-piece share a nod and launch into Gutters of Love. This turns out to be one of few songs played from Golden Doubt, their 2021 album they toured to great response overseas. Golden Doubt could be mined for a dynamite crowd-pleasing set. Instead, in what seems a bold sign of confidence, the band perform their forthcoming album in its entirety. Anyone wondering why Quivers, whose local profile sits somewhere between the equally excellent The Maggie Pills and Gut Health, were selected by Merge Records, need only listen to the title track and first single from this album, Oyster Cuts. Sung by bassist Bella Quinlan who, along with drummer Holly Thomas, takes a far more prominent role on the new album, the song epitomises many of the album's strengths. Guitars are muted and chug with an authority that allows the melodies to layer and float with a sense of freedom. It's as much a vibe as it is a pop song.

 

Unlike a lot of music that has writers and reviewers reaching to bands like The Go-Betweens and REM to describe their music, Quivers are unabashedly unpretentious. From their music to their between-song chat to the way that singer and guitarist Sam Nicholson seems surprised whenever his sequencer works, you don't get the impression they're doing this on a gap year or to blow off steam until they get through their MBA. You do get the impression they'll be doing this at 60. Songs are built around a sincere confession, some deft yet unpretentious wordplay and a chorus that ends in a singalong that isn't the least bit church-y. Whether it's the regional Tasmanian roots, that they have spent countless evenings eking out a living in what feels like the dying days of the live music scene or that they have a devotion to guitar pop music, they feel unaffected and wholly themselves. There is also a pure sense of joy that comes from the stage when Quivers play. It's there when Quinlan and Thomas share a glance while hitting harmonies on the chorus of new songs Screensaver or Never Be Lonely, in their euphoric cover of Lucinda Williams' I Just Wanted to See You So Bad and when they lock in to anchor three of the greatest pop songs of recent years When it Breaks, Hold You Back and You're Not Always on My Mind. It's also there in Nicholson's dorky enthusiastic one-foot dancing and when guitarist and backing vocalist Michael Panton peels off another guitar break that ends with his right hand a blur and his left hand slipping up and down the neck of his guitar. "This next song is our last," says Nicholson. "It's a song that could fall apart… or it could fly," Of course, it flies. While they close with Reckless, the last song from Oyster Cuts, Nicholson reminds us that this isn't the album's launch. “That'll be in November,” he says. Between now and then the band will be touring the US. That these songs could sound even better for that show is a pretty exciting thought.