Harry Styles - Sydney Olympic Park

 

Harry Styles

Sydney Olympic Stadium

4 March 2023

 

 

“Is that what you’re wearing?”

 

The question came from my daughter.

 

She repeats it.

 

“Is that what you’re wearing. I can’t go to a concert with you if that’s what you’re wearing.”

 

Shouldn’t that conversation be reversed? Shouldn’t I be saying that to her?  But she looks fabulous. 

 

I don’t want this to be all about me, but I don’t think I’m too unstylish. It’s not like I wear the clothes that my dad wore (socks and sandals are a fashion crime. Let me just leave it at that).  Anyway, I think my outfit is fine.  

 

You know that you hear people say that things were better in their day? But what if we are wrong? Maybe (and don’t say this too loud) maybe the kids are right? They view their attendance at a concert as a vital part of the show. And you know what? They’re right. On Saturday night they came dressed the part. Feather boas, cowboy hats, sequins, costumes. The whole place was buzzing. There’s no doubt that the atmosphere was fantastic. 

 

When Harry himself made an appearance the excitement level went up a notch or two. I mean, of course he looked fabulous and you might bristle if I call him a singer-songwriter (isn’t he just an escapee from a boyband?). But his songs really speak to the current generation. There are modern concerns such as depression and anxiety mixed with timeless topics like heartbreak, love and loss.

 

The current king of pop (Grammy for album of the year no less) is an old school performer. I don’t know if he cut his teeth in the working clubs in the UK, but it sure feels like it. He can dance, sing, do some comedy and act a little. Yes, he’s your all round entertainer.  

 

The gig really had it all. Aside from "All singing, all dancing" Harry, it featured a duet with Daryl Braithwaite on Horses, a psychic reading and a gender reveal! No, I'm not making any of that up.

 

Special mention should go to Wet Leg. It was great seeing an indie band support such a major pop star.  But the star of the show was definitely Harry. And the crowd. They were singing along to the intermission music. I needed ear plugs not for the band, but for the crowd. 

 

So what was I wearing?  It turns out that I was the most underdressed man in Olympic Park. My daughter was right. Next time I’ll have to lift my game.  

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. 

Cell Block 69 - The Basement Party Stadium

 

Cell Block 69
The Basement Party Stadium
23 December 2022

Is there anything better than seeing the original artist doing the original hits?

Music in the 80s were all about fun and Cell Block 69 certainly know all about fun. But first a bit of background. Cell Block 69 are an 80s covers band. The thing that separates Cell Block 69 from other covers bands is the conceit they bring to the show. You enter an alternative universe when you go to a Cell Block 69 concert. The story is that they wrote all the songs and then they were brazenly stolen by the famous artists who made them (insert booming voice) “international number one hits”. 

Everyone in the band is called Corey or a variation of Corey. You’ve got Duanne Le Corey Micheals, Corey Sambori, Corey RoKK-SiXXXxxXXX, Corey Anne-Kennerly, Kori the Artist formerly known as Corey, Corey Baden Baden Baden Baden Powell, Corey Ography. Not only that, but the band have all the moves and all the costumes straight from the 80s. They’re pretty authentic.

It’s this schtick that brings the audience into the joke and into the show. The band had the audience in the palm of their hands from the first bar. Side note… it’s handy having a back catalogue of all killer, no filler hit songs. Anthemic hits like Girls on Film, Walk Like an Egyptian, Electric Blue. You name it they wrote it!

It’s quite something being in the audience and knowing all the songs and being able to sing along to every word. Not only that, but the whole audience knows every song. I think that’s really the key to this gig. The audience really lean into the 80s vibe with everyone dressing up in 80s gear. I’ve not seen so much neon and taffeta outside of a blue light disco!

So, is anything better than seeing the original artist doing the original hits?  This. This is better. 

The Killers - Qudos Bank Arena

 

 

The Killers
Qudos Bank Arena
19 December 2022

 

 

Comparing The Killers to a school speech is a stretch but hear me out.

It takes a certain confidence to start your show like other bands finish theirs. The Killers opened the final show of the Imploding the Mirage tour like most other bands play an encore.  Streamers, confetti, explosions. Most importantly lots of big hits! It was an impressive opening.

The Killers are one of those bands that span generations.  In fact they’re one of the last of the big bands. Around 2005 when streaming started to take over as the medium of choice the number of bands that were able to make a mark across the wider culture seemed to diminish. That’s not to say that there weren’t great bands that came after this date, but bands like Coldplay, Arctic Monkey and The Killers were some of the last bands that had a cultural impact beyond just music fans. Not many bands since have been able to do that.  

The Killers, at their best, are a mix of U2 and the Smiths, with a dash of Depeche Mode and the Cure thrown in. You can see why I like them. It’s no surprise that I’ve indoctrinated my children into liking the band and they were (more or less) willing participants in attending the concert. I guess it goes to my main point that the Killers are one of the last intergenerational bands. The crowd was full of people of all ages. Sometimes I feel that it is more important who you go to a concert with than who you go to see.
 
If, after such an impressive start, the show flagged in the middle I guess that was understandable. But as my wise companions said, how else do you get to know the new songs if they don’t play them? They had a fair point.

However, when you’ve got songs like Human (given a new electro treatment), Somebody Told Me and main set closer All These Things That I’ve Done in your kit bag things were never really in doubt.

The actual encore of Spaceman and Mr Brightside was enough to make the crowd go wild and have me reminded by my children of some advice that I gave them "when giving a speech as long as you start well and finish well, it doesn’t really matter if you get a bit lost in the middle”. That kind of summed up the show.   

There was something great about sharing this gig with my newest gig buddies. As the Mastercard ad goes, ticket price = hundreds of dollars.  Going with your adult children = priceless.

Nick Cave - Canberra Theatre Centre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nick Cave

Canberra Theatre Centre

28 November 2022

 

I used to see Nick Cave everywhere. When the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra opened, they seemed to have only one painting.  A graffiti portrait of Nick Cave.  It became a bit of a joke between my wife and me. “There’s bloody Nick Cave again”. Every exhibition seemed to find a way to jam in that Nick Cave painting. 

 

The thing was that neither of us liked Nick Cave.

He was never really my thing. It’s not even that he did nothing for me.  I actively disliked him. I always thought that he was just too pretentious. I felt that he was an artist I should have liked but didn’t. Every artist that I like cite him as an influence but he left me cold.  However, one of the things that occurred in lockdown was that I re-evaluated his back catalogue. The excellent Skeleton Tree album was the gateway which then lead me to explore his entire back catalogue.  A strange thing happened.  I first started to admire his work and then I slowly started to really like it! 

 

Seeing him at the Canberra Theatre was a revelation.  It’s a bit of a cliché to say that Nick Cave is like a preacher from an alternative secular universe.  But he certainly brings a religious fervour to his performance.  It was mesmerising.  The performance was very much like being in a church in the deep south where all the emotions that a human can experience have free reign to be expressed.  Not only sadness and grief, but surprisingly joy, levity and wicked humour were also on display. 

 

His latest albums deal with the tragic loss of his son and the show leant heavily on this material. If on record the songs seem like they have the most personal lyrics imaginable, in a live setting the slight changes of delivery bring them to another level.  The holding onto notes and emphasising certain lines make you feel you are literally watching someone process the grief that losing a child must bring.  It is almost too much to bear witness to.

 

There were other moments where you felt you were in the presence of an evangelist preacher and you didn’t want to do anything that might break the spell and others where you felt like if this charismatic front man would ask for your soul, you would willingly give it to him.  Yes, it was that powerful. 

 

It feels like a cliché to say that I’m converted.  But nothing about the performance was a cliché.

 

I feel that I’m a new convert to the Church of Nick. 

 

Spilt Milk Festival

 

The Wombats, Spacey Jane, Genesis Owusu

Spilt Milk

Warning… Old Man alert.

Do you know the problem with the kids these days?  it’s that the like the same music we liked growing up.  Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Journey.  They’re all good bands (Ok, maybe not Journey…) but something feels a bit off.

What they should be liking is music that makes their parents say “Turn off that NOISE”.

Which leads me to Genesis Owusu.  Canberra’s own superstar performed at Spilt Milk to a packed tent in the early evening and… how do i say this nicely … as much as he has rock star charisma (and let’s face it, he does.  in spades) I really couldn’t tell much difference between what he was doing and karaoke.  There were no musicians on stage and while I don’t equate “guitars = real music” I feel that you need something more than just a singer.  Sure, he had 3 dancers - or vibe merchants - that brought a particular “male energy” to the performance.  That’s me trying to say it was quite aggressive.  Maybe i just don’t like that kind of music.

Also, the sound mix was terrible.  All bass. Distorted bass that overwhelmed the vocals. I guess that might be a problem if you’ve pre recorded your backing track. there’s not much a sound mixer can do on the night.  

But the packed tent showed that the kids actually loved it.  So in a weird way that made me feel good.  The kids are alright!

I worked my way to the main stage to see Spacey Jane and they’re a really good indie rock band.  Definitely a cut about the standard indie rock fare.  Sure, we’ve heard this a million times before, but that’s not a bad thing.  They were very good. Obviously it wasn’t just me who liked them as the arena was packed. The kids are alright!    

It’s terrifying to think that the Wombats are not a new band (they released their debut album in 2007) but a band who have a long catalogue of hits.  The great thing was they played most of them.  A band that knows how to please a festival crowd. They were really great. The Wombats, much like the kids, were alright!