Del Amitri - Enmore Theatre

 

Del Amitri
Enmore Theatre
28 February 2023

I was going to be a bit glib with my opening line …

“A bunch of old men trying to relive their youth … but enough about the audience…”

However, there is an element of truth to that dad joke. Not the "trying to relive their youth” bit, but trying to answer the question of how does a rock band age gracefully?

Del Amitri opened their set, on their first Australian tour in 30 years, with When You Were Young. The lyrics spoke directly to the audience.

So look into the mirror
Do you recognise someone?
Is it who you always hoped you would become
When you were young?

They knew their crowd. They knew who they were speaking to. 

Even in their heyday Del Amitri were never cool. They play straight ahead rock music that leans slightly into folk rock territory. So not really cool. But what they do have is a set of songs with catchy hooks and memorable lyrics. Those things never go out of style. The band obviously knew what the audience wanted. While they never had too many hits, they did play all of their most well known songs (Kiss This Thing Goodbye, Nothing Ever Happens, Roll to Me, etc). 

A highlight for me was Always the Last to Know. In our house we have a phrase called the Justin Currie Twist (TM). It comes from that song. In it he starts the song singing

So you're in love with someone else
Someone who burns within your soul
And it looks like I am the last to know

and ends it with

Or if he's cheated on you
Like I cheated on you, oh
You were the last to know

I’ll never get tired of that. I never thought I would hear the band sing it live. It was a bit of a moment.  

The night wasn’t entirely nostalgia. Having released a new album after a 20 year break, they played a good selection of songs from it. You Can’t Go Back and I’m so Scared of Dying were both highlights and showed that they had matured in their outlook and were writing songs for their audience. I hate to say that they were age appropriate… but they were.

At one point in the set an audience member yelled “good one boys”. Lead singer JC deadpanned into the microphone “sorry to disappoint you sir, but it’s a long time since we’ve been boys”
So not boys at all. I think they can be proud of the men they became.

Plini - The Basement

 

Plini

The Basement

1 February 2023

Sometimes it’s the notes you don’t play, rather than the notes that you do.

When a friend suggested we see Plini (an artist I knew nothing about) and described him as an “instrumental prog metal jazz fusion artist” I have to admit that my eyebrows shot up to my (increasingly receeding) hairline.  

I feared I would be faced with an evening of endless noodling on guitar. I imagined an evening of Joe Satriani mixed with Pink Floyd with a tiny bit of Metallica thrown in. It turns out that I was both right and wrong.  

The trick with instrumental music is that you don’t have any vocals to be the focus of the song, so you need to find another way to bring a melodic idea for the audience to hold onto. I think Plini definitely knew this. The 5 piece band (aside from Plini himself there were guitars, bass, drums, keyboards) were all great musicians, but they all knew that the songs were the important thing, not showing off their technique. 

Plini obviously knows the unspoken rule of any guitar solo. It needs to be something the audience looks forward to, not something that shows how fast you can play your instrument. You need to make sure that the listener is interested. In fact the whole set was structured to keep the audience interested.  The danger of playing just “guitar music” is that it could all sound the same after a while.  However, no two songs sounded the same. There were different rhythms, all of the instrumentalists had a turn at being the “lead” instrument. In fact some parts of the set went into jazz territory (while your milage may vary, I thought this was a good thing) and other parts of the set confirmed my initial preconceptions (Pink Floyd, Metallica). So, all in all, it was quite a varied set.

 

I was pleasantly surprised.