A quick scroll yet another stunning Clancestry lineup – the iconic event that has become a firm fixture in QPAC’s calendar for the past 12 years – and the name Electric Fields demands attention; for they are a band that simply guarantees an electrifying show.
Tonight, the duo of vocalist Zaachariaha Fielding and keyboardist Michael Ross are backed by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, lead by renowned conductor Vanessa Scammell and with orchestral arrangement by composer Alex Turley. It’s a combination on paper sure to produce special results, and one that more than delivers in person.
All the band’s known and loved tracks are there; from early highlight ‘Shade Away’, the spine-tingling ‘Lore Woman’, and the Hermitude collaboration ‘Glorious’. It’s a beautiful moment when Eddie Mabo’s granddaughter Kristal West joins the band for ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’, with a sample of the voice of the great Vincent Lingiari woven neatly in, which then flows into ‘Tjitji Lullaby’ and a humorous Fielding anecdote about wanting to share songlines but also needing to “keep sh*t to ourselves”.
Later, Fielding isn’t happy with the audience’s seating arrangement; cajoling and encouraging until they’re up and dancing to the likes of ‘One Milkali (One Blood)’ and the outstanding closer ‘Don’t You Worry’, and given they are eating out of the singer’s hand by now, it’s an easy command to follow.
Ross, when not thanking the audience for taking part in a happy birthday singsong dedicated to two family members present, jokingly laments the “positive trauma” of the band’s Eurovision experience, while Fielding brushes off that particular chapter in their history with a laugh-inducing “Who gives a f**k?”.
At no time do the duo feel overpowered or outgunned with an orchestra as their house band for the evening. In fact, it only serves to lift their evocative, ethereal soundscapes to something approaching biblical. For theirs is music meant to be raised high, to soar across rooftops, to be exalted above the everyday with raw excitement and pure joy. And having just picked up the 2025 AIR Award for Best Independent Classical Album or EP for their ‘Live in Concert (with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra)’ LP, it’s not like they don’t have a track record with this kind of thing.
What a triumphant evening of music by one of Australia’s best bands.
It was a wondrous and wild evening for jazz lovers as the Emmy- and two-time Grammy-nominated Kamasi Washington returned to Brisbane for the first time since 2022 at QPAC’s concert hall on Thursday evening (12th June).
What transpired was a journey of a thousand trips: a musical expedition that built up, crescendoed, climaxed, and broke down again multiple times, with high points a-plenty and too many triumphant moments to even try to describe.
For the music of tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington has to be felt as well as heard; his band’s musicianship seen to be believed. This was a show that was such a grand exploration of what music can truly be, that over an hour and 45 minutes containing just a handful of tracks this eight-piece collective seemed to have pulled just about every combination of possible notes out of their respective instruments and voice boxes to leave them exhausted, shot, broken.
Washington, when not letting rip on another scorching sax solo, was a softly spoken frontman, whose love for the power of music and family shone brightly.
“Music is such a powerful and beautiful tool we have as humans,” he said. “It can travel across time and space. Some of my best friends died a hundred years before I was born.”
Before ‘Asha the First’, Washington shared a delightful anecdote about his four-year old daughter learning to play the piano and help him write the song, before a searing keys solo by Brandon Coleman. Similarly, before the slower ‘Together’, Washington jokes about how writing a love song and lighting a vanilla candle meant he ended up fathering a child and trombonist Ryan Porter showed his significant skills throughout the track.
It was during the theme for ‘Lazarus’, the Shinichirō Watanabe’s anime series for which he has written the soundtrack, that Washington let rip with one of several almost unfathomable sax solos that builds and builds, and just when you think he can’t go any more, builds even further. ‘Lie In Memory’ allowed drummer Tony Austin and double bass player Miles Mosley to flex their respective jaw-dropping skills, while vocalist Patrice Quinn starred on ‘Vi Lua Vi Sol’ to close out a special show.
Ultimately, this was as impressive a display of musicianship as you’re likely to see – anywhere, any time. It’s clear to see why Kamasi Washington is considered one of the leading saxophonists of our time and this super-talented band made the show simply smoke.
Jazz has an exhilarating future if these guys are at its heart.
With the memories of a cyclone mostly behind us and Brisbane’s cultural precinct relatively unscathed, it was back to business with the outstanding Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power at QPAC Concert Hall on Wednesday night (12th March).
As part of her ‘Cat Power Sings Dylan’ tour, Marshall performs Bob Dylan’s landmark ‘Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert’ in full; a pivotal moment when the folk master was infamously heckled for switching from acoustic to an electric set of songs with backing band The Hawks (later The Band) for the second half of the performance. Dylan took the heckling on the chin and made history in the process.
It’s a milestone Marshall has been re-living for some time, having recorded and released her own version of the album from a performance at the Royal Albert Hall in 2022. It would be easy to roll off clichés to describe tonight’s performance with words like “making the material her own”, “paying homage to a master at the peak of his powers”, “honouring heroes” etc., and each would be entirely pertinent. She is a clear devotee of the music and the man, bringing many subtle interpretations of her own, and is a hugely engrossing performer in her own right.
The lengthy ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘Desolation Row’ allow Marshall to get lost in the material, and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ receives the biggest response of the first half of the set. ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ is a big highlight of the second half, while Marshall implores us to “get our dancing shoes on” for ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’. There’s no exclamation to play closer ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ “f**kin’ loud”, as Dylan did in 1966, but they do anyway.
Marshall makes adorably rambling small talk between songs, musing on the state of global politics, the joys of young love, and her hilarious failings as a stand-up comedian. It all adds to the charm and the cosiness of the evening’s performance, drawing us closer to her despite the size of the venue.
Ultimately, tonight’s show brings about a revived appreciation of not only Dylan and The Band but, of course, Marshall herself. In this wonderful mix of moments, everyone’s star shines brightly.
There’s a distinctly English thread to the audience pouring through the gates tonight; less tea-and-muffins and more aggro bulldog in heavy face make-up and Union Jack waistcoat topped off with Keith Flint-circa-‘Firestarter’ hairstyle. Throw these ingredients into a thick soup of humidity, sweat, and weed smoke and the Riverstage cauldron is bubbling.
The anticipation for the Prodigy is palpable as the stage goes dark before swirling lights, lasers, and noise build up the tension. When the band arrives on stage and launches into ‘Breathe’, it feels like an explosion. And when Maxim sings “Come play my game, I’ll test ya,” we don’t need convincing of his sincerity. “Are all my party people here? Are all my f**king party people here?” he demands. Brisbane gives him the response he wants.
‘Voodoo People’ is next, and while at first it feels conspicuously risky to toss off a couple of absolute bangers this early in the game, the rest of the show never suffers as a result. The thing about the Prodigy is they not only have an extensive, 35-year discography to pull from, but this gig feels like it could go in a hundred different directions at any moment and either one would be just as entertaining. Is this a dance party? A rave? A rock show? A psychedelic wig-out? It’s not at all clear. And it also doesn’t matter one single bit.
Talking of absolute bangers, by the time ‘Firestarter’, alongside a visual tribute to Keith Flint, comes around a couple of tracks later, the crowd is eating out of Maxim’s hand. For a dude approaching his seventh decade on the earth he’s making this all look ludicrously easy and doing it with bags of style to boot.
‘No Good (Start the Dance)’ evokes the early-‘90s for those old enough to remember those hazy and halcyon days and the intensity doesn’t let up through ‘Invaders Must Die’ and ‘Diesel Power’.
After a brief stage exit, Maxim, Liam and the boys stroll back on, and we all know what’s coming next. ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ has often been simultaneously hailed as one of the greatest dance compositions and one of the most lyrically dubious tracks of all time. The simple truth is, 28 years after its release, it still slaps hard. No pun intended.
As the gig finishes and the Riverstage cauldron spills over into the streets and parklands all around, there’s a feeling of having witnessed a performance by a band that continue to write the rule book exactly how they want it. The Prodigy have earned the right to do whatever they like. And long may that continue.
With his band’s ‘Black Betty 20th Anniversary Tour’ mere days away, Spiderbait’s Kram is feeling nostalgic.
“I think I’m a quite a sentimental person and very reflective by nature,” he says. “Especially if you manage to survive [as a band] and if you’re lucky enough to prosper in this mad, mad world. Whenever we have these milestones come up, it certainly makes me feel really stoked that we are still lucky enough to have the success that we’ve had but, more importantly, we’re proud of the work and the connection we have with each other and our fans, which is a beautiful thing.”
The ever-popular hard-rocking trio will play 12 dates across Australia from August to October to celebrate two decades since their single ‘Black Betty’ was unleashed into the world. The fact that it was a cover version that provided the band their biggest hit to date came as a surprise to everyone involved.
“We always loved the Ram Jam version of the song that was released in 1978 or 1979,” Kram says. “We’re all big fans of the pop show ‘Countdown’, which was a really big influence on us as country kids. Every Sunday, we would watch it on the ABC, and you would see what music was on top of the charts, and who the latest bands were. I think it was a number one hit in Australia and we just loved the song, and it was actually quite a while after that that I found out that it was written by Leadbelly back in the 1930s and it was an African American blues song. Then, when we started putting it together, I thought it could be a really good thing to record and it was pieced together by us and our producer Sylvia [Massy]. When the thing was finished, we thought it sounded sick and it was really very similar in its energy to the Ram Jam version. We didn’t expect it to be the big hit that it was.”
The song went to number one on the ARIA charts and brought the band significant exposure in the States; the place where its parent album ‘Tonight Alright’ was recorded.
“It was great to go and make a record in the States,” Kram says. “We’d never made a record in another country before. Janet [English, bassist] had a really bad fear of flying in the early days and when we got offers to tour in America, we were a bit reluctant because it was very difficult for her to be able to travel outside of Australia. We loved working with Sylvia; she was the first woman that we’d ever worked with as a producer, and we just loved her energy and the bands that she’d worked with. We were always picking her brains about how she used to be an engineer for Prince. She’s a very spontaneous sort of creator, and I can really relate to that; it was such a wonderful energy she had. But the best things about the record, I think, are Janet’s songs. I think all of Janet’s songs are awesome. And one of the best things we ever had about that song is when it became a hit in America, we were contacted through email by Lead Belly’s family and descendants. And they told us they really loved the track and that we’d done a really good job. We were really blown away by that.”
Even after two decades of Spiderbait’s version of ‘Black Betty’ being rocked out to all over Australia and beyond, the song continues to find new audiences.
“We did Groovin’ the Moo a couple of years ago,” Kram says. “That was a really young crowd and a lot of kids had never seen us before, but the energy of that song just made them go nuts. The same thing happened when we did the track together with Dom Dolla at the Myer Music Bowl last year. We did a signing on a tour once and this woman came up to me and said that the song had really saved her so many times because she had had some bad stuff in her life. She had had depression and she would put that song on and get into her Commodore and burn down the highway at 250km an hour. It would be her way of burning through the darkness. Maybe in a similar way to how we thought it was a Ram Jam song, people will now think it’s our song, but you’re going to have to do the research about Lead Belly and the legacy of African American music. It’s really important to tell that story.”
The ’Black Betty 20th Anniversary Tour’ kicks off in Brisbane on 13th August and includes two nights at the Forum in Melbourne before finishing up in Canberra on 25th October.
“The tour is going to be kind of like a combination of our greatest hits, but I think there’ll be a few different things thrown in,” Kram says. “It’s always weird when we have such a big body of work to choose from. When you do a tour there are so many different places that you can go, so we’ll just see how it’s going to pan out as we as we start working through rehearsals which we’re at now. And we’ll be culminating in celebrating ‘Black Betty’. It’s a weird thing when you do someone else’s song. You try to make it your own and get into it in your own way, but also pay tribute to the person who wrote it.”
So, when the ‘Black Betty’ celebrations are done and dusted and Kram’s nostalgia is set aside, at least until the 25- or 30-year anniversary comes around, should Spiderbait fans be expecting something new?
“I bought a new guitar a couple of years ago,” Kram says. “And ever since I bought it, I’ve just been writing for a new Spiderbait recording. It’s been riff-o-rama; basically, that’s the constant. I’m fully into the energised, heavy-as-fuck kind of space. John has got some awesome songs as well, so we’re piecing it together. But the plan is that after this celebration [of ‘Black Betty’], to release a new record next year and head on into the future.”
How do you mark 25 years since one of the best albums of the ‘90s made the musical landscape a better place?
For singer, songwriter, rapper, and record producer, Ms. Lauryn Hill, the answer is to announce two huge arena dates in Sydney and Melbourne to celebrate the milestone.
A quarter of a century since its release, ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’ is still considered one of the best albums of all time and has sold over 20 million copies. It received widespread critical acclaim on its release, and its legacy has only grown as years have passed.
At the same time, Hill’s status as a hip hop icon has grown too. She was the first rapper to appear on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine and has been hailed as an influence by stars like Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Drake, and Nicki Minaj, among others.
She has also been recognised for her humanitarian work, has had multiple successful acting roles, and even influenced the worlds of hair and fashion. She is a true pop culture icon whose music still stands tall among the rest.
“’The Miseducation’ album has been a consistently special artwork that has allowed me to tour for 25 years, sharing the message and energy with its loyal appreciators,” she said via press release. “I’m not even sure if it feels like 25 years have gone by to me.”
The Australian tour will be Hills’s first appearances here since 2018.
“I’m excited to celebrate this landmark anniversary with the fans in Australia,” Hill said. “I look forward to this time capsule experience. The music itself was born to be anachronistic, at the same time reclaiming precious jewels from the past and infusing them with the potency and energy of the present, in order to enrich it and the future. Revisiting the album live has renewed my love and appreciation for the music and the period in which it was born, when hip hop was ripe with potential and uncomplicated enthusiasm.”
A member of the Fugees since her teens, Hill and bandmates Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel put in the hard work on the long road to commercial success. But when the trio were thrust into the international spotlight with the runaway success of 1996’s ‘The Score’, it was the beginning of the end for the band.
“It’s really hard to express in words the impact it makes [on you] when you come from East Orange, South Orange, New Jersey, and now there are people [worldwide] who feel you just as much as people on your street or on your block,” she told The Music Factory. “It was a big, big thing. I never really adapted; I was just Lauryn Hill. It was important to me that I just continued to be Lauryn Hill.”
Following the dissolution of the Fugees, each member of the trio went on to work on solo projects, and ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’ was born.
Recorded between 1997 and 1998 before being released in August 1998, it features such classic cuts as ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’, ‘Ex-Factor’, ‘Everything Is Everything’, ‘Lost Ones’, ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, ‘To Zion’ and ‘Nothing Even Matters’. It also featured collaborations with Carlos Santana, Mary J. Blige, and D’Angelo.
Its influence is still threaded through popular culture today.
“Lauryn Hill, being such a fierce rapper and such a soulful singer? It was almost unattainable to me,” rapper Lizzo told Billboard. “She set the bar. I was always afraid of being a singer, but then when I heard Lauryn Hill, I was like, ‘Maybe I can do both’.”
Maggie Rogers recalled being similarly inspired by the album in the same retrospective.
“I remember going to class one day and hearing my professor play ‘Miseducation’,” she said. “My jaw dropped. I knew every single word but had no idea what it was. It’s like smelling a smell that you know from your childhood. Lauryn is just woven into my fibre of my musical DNA.”
“’The Miseducation’ album is like an old flame,” said English songwriter Jessie Ware. “You never really leave each other. All the memories come flooding back as soon as you put it on.”
The album won five Grammy Awards and led to a huge, worldwide tour.
“With ‘The Miseducation’. there was no precedent,” Hill told Rolling Stone. “I was, for the most part, free to explore, experiment, and express.”
“I also think the album stood apart from the types and cliches that were supposed to be acceptable at that time. I challenged the norm and introduced a new standard. I believe ‘The Miseducation’ did that and I believe I still do this.”
Just a few short years after the album’s release, Hill had retreated from the spotlight and music almost entirely. She hasn’t released another studio album since, despite fans clamouring for more. The singer has fiercely defended her independence ever since.
“I was being way too compromised,” she told Essence. “I discovered people could only acknowledge red and blue and I was somewhere between. I was purple. I had to fight for an identity that doesn’t fit in one of their boxes. I was a young woman with an evolved mind who was not afraid of her beauty or her sexuality. For some people that’s uncomfortable. They didn’t understand how female and strong work together. Or young and wise. Or black and divine.”
The Australian shows in October will see Hill appear with support from 23-year-old, Grammy-Award-winning Jamaican reggae star, Koffee.
The exclusive concerts, Hill’s only headline appearances in Australia, will also feature classic tracks from the Fugees; most likely the timeless ‘Ready or Not’, ‘Killing Me Softly’ and others.
“My goal is to feel confident and free on stage,” Hill said via her website. “My performances are heartfelt and authentic.”
What better way to mark 25 years of ‘Miseducation’?
Fans of bold pop hooks, lyrical authenticity, and celebratory good times unite: Chappell Roan is set to bring the bangers to Brisbane’s Melt Festival.
Direct from her sold-out North American tour, Roan will land in Australia to play the Brisbane Powerhouse-based festival on Saturday 25th November.
The Missouri native has just released her debut album, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess’, to strong reviews, including it being heralded as “bold and uproarious” by Pitchfork. Her appearance at Melt will see her perform fan favourites alongside brand-new music.
Melt Festival, back for its eighth edition in 2023, is an annual celebration of queer art, artists, allies and ideas. Alongside music acts, the festival will feature theatre, photography exhibitions, textile art and installations.
It will get underway on 15th November with an official opening party in the Powerhouse’s main hall platform including appearances by Nigerian house/dance singer-songwriter Kah-Lo and emerging Wiradjuri and Bundjalung artist Djanaba.
Also appearing at the festival will be UK dance artist Aluna, previously half of AlunaGeorge, electronic producer and songwriter KUČKA, alt-pop collective Alter Boy, Canadian indie-rockers TOPS, and Brisbane’s own Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra, among others.
At 17, Roan (born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz) signed a deal with Atlantic Records after uploading tracks to YouTube and garnering major industry attention, with her early music being described by Interview as a “pop sound infused with a dark and unsettling tone that underscores intense, sombre lyrics”.
Roan’s Brisbane appearance comes eight years after being signed to a major label, but with many career peaks and troughs already behind her, her career has been more colourful than many. Still just 25, she has weathered the emotional storm of being dropped from her record label and moving home to Missouri from Los Angeles to start her career from scratch.
Making the transformation from an introverted midwestern girl growing up on a farm to a glitter-soaked queer icon performing all over the world hasn’t been without its challenges, but in artistic expression Roan found her freedom.
“I grew up on Christian rock,” she told The Line of Best Fit. “And I will say, with my whole chest; it’s the worst music I’ve ever heard. But I was a teenager at an incredible time; Lorde had just dropped ‘Pure Heroine’, Lana had just dropped ‘Paradise’ and ‘Born To Die’, Kesha was in full swing, and Gaga had come out with ‘The Fame Monster’. ‘Teenage Dream’ and Drake was just started to gain momentum and I was obsessed with it all.”
It was, ultimately, in pop music that Roan found her sweet spot for songwriting. Her 2020 breakout hit, ‘Pink Pony Club’, tells of a strait-laced Tennessee girl who moves to Los Angeles to become a stripper.
“Pop was shining a light on a part of myself that I was trying to dim,” she told DIY. “But it was always deep down inside. I was just scared to be that version of myself – it seemed too big and loud.”
“I think Chappell’s a drag-queen version of me because it’s very larger-than-life,” she told Vanity Fair. “Kind of tacky, not afraid to say really lewd things. The songs are kind of the fairytale version of what happened in real life. I think that the project has allowed me to be a part of the queer community in a deeper way because I’m not observing from the outside anymore. I feel like I’m in it. I am the queer community – it’s allowed me to just feel queer, feel like a queer person, and feel freedom in that.”
Now comfortable with her sexuality and celebration of glitzy pop, Roan uses her position to support the queer community wherever possible, including booking local drag acts to open for her at every show and encouraging fans to send them tips.
“For me personally, it’s all about giving back and re-distributing money,” she told NME. “Like, a portion of every ticket on my spring tour went to a black trans charity. I told everyone at the show, like, ‘You’re not just coming to have a fun night – you’re here supporting the queer community.’”
As fans here prepare to witness the joy of Roan’s appearance at Melt Festival, one thing to be certain of is the promise of good times and party vibes.
“Like, if I hear Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj on a playlist, it instantly takes me to this place of ‘Yeah, party!’,” she told NME. “And that’s the place I want to take people to as well. I want to give them that emotion of ‘We’re here, bitch; we’re here and we’re queer’”.
Call the cops and twist my melon, man: the Happy Mondays are bringing the party to Australia in October as part of their ‘Twenty-Four Hour Party People – Greatest Hits Tour’.
The shows will be their first in Australia in over four years; having last played a run of headline concerts as well as a slot at Golden Plains festival in early 2019.
It will also be the band’s first appearances here since the death of bassist and founding member Paul Ryder last year aged only 58.
“We’re thrilled to be heading back to Australia and New Zealand,” frontman Shaun Ryder said via press release. “The fans there have always shown us so much love, and we can’t wait to give them a show they’ll never forget.”
The Manchester band, formed in the early 1980s, achieved significant global success as leaders of the ‘Madchester’ scene, fusing elements of indie, acid house, ‘60s pop, and psychedelia alongside like-minded bands including the Stone Roses, the Charlatans, and James. Drugs, particularly ecstasy, and fashion, particularly the ‘baggy’ look of flared jeans, became almost as important to the scene as the music.
These days, the Mondays are re-living the songs and moods that still captivate audiences across the world 30 years after the fact.
Following on from the band’s previous tour, which saw them play their classic 1990 album ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches’ in full, the greatest hits set will see the sextet pull chart smashes and deep cuts from 1988’s ‘Bummed’ and 1992’s ‘Yes Please!’; the album that ended the band’s original incarnation.
“We may even go out and play ‘Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)’,” Ryder told UK Music Reviews. “The tracks on that album, I haven’t heard since 1986.”
The band, and most especially Shaun Ryder and dancer/percussionist Mark ‘Bez’ Berry, were known almost as much for their kamikaze-level hedonism as their hit music through the late-‘80s and ‘90s. Ryder’s autobiography describes him taking LSD every day for a year, downing ecstasy for breakfast, and prepping for a headline festival set by smoking heroin for 48 hours.
“When we recorded ‘Yes Please!’ in Barbados, I often found Shaun either upside down on a road somewhere or offering another piece of furniture he’d stolen from the studio to swap for crack,” Berry told the NME. “It was fun at the time, but the islanders weren’t too pleased, because we were on the news when we left. The first day we got there, the leading dignitaries were out to welcome us, and by the time we left everyone from the Chief of Police to the Prime Minister were readying the flaming torches.”
The 2023 Mondays may have cleaned up in middle age but remain determined to bring the party on their Australian tour.
“People always ask if I miss the drugs and the partying,” Ryder told the Guardian. “I’m a 58-year-old man – no, I don’t! It was great when I was 18 but things are fucking great now. They’re better now.”
“We are playing better than ever,” he told the Big Issue. “We are older and wiser, and the bullshit is gone. We go on stage and do a professional job because the sex and drugs have gone out the window. It’s just pure rock and roll.”
Multi-Grammy-winning Texan country-pop juggernauts the Chicks will make a triumphant return to Australia in October alongside special guest Elle King.
The band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, made up of Emily Strayer, Martie Maguire, and Natalie Maines, is making its first appearances in Australia in six years, following sold out 2017 Sydney and Melbourne shows and a headline slot at CMC Rocks in Queensland.
A generous run of arena and winery concerts across Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Geelong, and the Hunter Valley has been lined up, before the group heads to New Zealand.
A recent Guardian review described the Chicks live experience in 2023 as “barn-burning virtuosity and cut-glass vocals”, so come to these concerts ready to party.
“Our fans are fantastic,” Maines told the Houston Chronicle. “It feels awesome to have grandmothers through little kids there. I think we get a little worried at the start of every tour if the crowds are going to be the same, are they going to stand up the whole time and sing every word. And they do.”
Since forming in 1989, the band has had many successes while facing considerable challenges as renegades of country music. The thing that has held them together is the bond the trio has always had, says Maines.
“For me, there’s a comfort and a trust,” she told Elle. “It’s never hard to be around each other. You can really feel free to say, ‘No, that’s not good, but what about this?’ ‘You’re a little out of time.’ ‘Can you re-sing that, you’re a little pitchy?’ Nobody’s getting their egos bruised. You’re never walking on eggshells. That’s what makes working together an easy place to always go back to, and a great place to always go back to.”
The shows will the band’s first in Australia since dropping ‘Dixie’ from its name in 2020. It was a move to extricate themselves of the negative connotations associated with slavery in the former confederate states of America and came in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the intensification of civil rights movements across the US.
An official press release at the time simply stated, “If your voice held no power, they wouldn’t try to silence you”, while 2020 album ‘Gaslighter’, the band’s most recent and their first in 14 years, was critically acclaimed and commercially successful.
This followed years of being outspoken on political and social issues, including an early-2000s critique of George Bush’s push towards war in Iraq which saw the band caught up in a media backlash and receiving death threats.
However, there was a positive side to many notoriously conservative country music fans turning on the band.
“It set us free,” Maines told the LA Times. “It got us out of this box of country music, which we never wanted to be in and never felt like that’s who we were. We didn’t have to do any of that bullshit anymore.”
They may have been one of the first victims of cancel culture before it was even a thing, but the band has learned to take it all in their stride.
“These days, everybody’s saying anything and everything that crosses their mind and people are getting cancelled left and right,” Maines told iNews. “I’m kind of proud to have been the first.”
With the imminent release of his long-awaited fifth studio album, Dan Sultan is healthy, happy, and creatively firing on all cylinders like never before.
A period of personal turbulence culminating in a much-publicised 2018 fall from grace saw the Melbourne singer-songwriter take time to reflect and recharge. Now, five years sober and with the support of a loving family, the 40-year-old is back doing what he does best.
“Lately I’ve been feeling really fulfilled artistically, which is a really beautiful place to be as a writer and artist,” he says. “I’m not subjecting myself to the same expectations that I might have in the past, so I’m pretty chilled. Feeling fulfilled is a result of the peace [that I’ve found]. That peace is something, for me, that comes along from living your life and finding yourself in a good place. Things go up and things come down but finding that serenity and certainty in life is a good place to get to. I’ve still got ambition; I’m a father and I want my record to do well. It’s nice when I hear good things about it but I’m pretty chilled.”
The self-titled album sees Sultan reflecting on life, love, and sobriety, and was a chance for the songwriter to team up with Joel Quartermain, who shared production, songwriting, and playing duties across 11 tracks.
“It’s my favourite album that I’ve done,” Sultan says. “But that being said, anything that I’m working on at the time is always my favourite. At the same time, I can definitely feel the growth and evolution as a writer and as a person in this record. I’m in a really great spot and I feel really good about things. Feeling like that has allowed me to go to places artistically I haven’t been able to go before. A year or so before I started writing this record, I was really focussed on the more positive side of life, and it’s turned out well.”
Opener ‘Story’ is an intensely personal song with an autobiographical tale about the racism Sultan faced growing up as an Aboriginal person in Australia. It’s a story he has been waiting to tell his whole life.
“I’ve worked with really talented producers and writers in the past who know what that song is about,” Sultan says. “And they’ve told me it’s a great song and I’ve got to record it. It just came along with everything else that was happening in my life. A part of that was sobriety, but it was more than that. Through that comes a lot of self-esteem issues, and, if you’re doing good work, you start to feel better. A lot of it comes down to confidence and bravery. You don’t know how it’s going to go or how it’s going to feel but when you’re feeling brave you just do it.”
Another standout is ‘Fortress’ featuring Julia Stone.
“Julia is a good friend of mine; I’ve known her a long time,” Sultan says. “She’s a really great producer, songwriter, and performer. She asked me to be on a record with her at the end of 2019; a record of her friends doing Australian songs to raise money for the bushfire appeal. We were hoping to write a song for this record. Joel and I had this song [‘Fortress’], and we were doing a bit of show and tell in the studio and Julia was like, ‘Well, I wanna be on that!’. She went away and wrote a bridge that wasn’t there before, and we finished it off in the studio.”
A healthy and happy Dan Sultan, with new songs, a tight band, and support act Wilsn in tow, will be hitting the road to play Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne in September and October.
“I’m really proud of all the work I’ve done, and I’ve been able to achieve a lot,” Sultan says. “From where I have been in the past, I’m much happier and much more able to be brave now.”
Australia is, in many ways, a fucking twisted place. Simultaneously a stiflingly conservative quagmire, bewilderingly racist dumpster fire, and a country too often so barren of good ideas that it’s enough to tempt one to move to New Zealand. It’s proudly home to a deeply misguided national identity, inability or unwillingness to come to terms with a history of colonial interaction with Indigenous peoples that has involved treatment up to and including genocide, and ongoing suppression of refugees and asylum seekers that surpasses the sadistic. Who would have thought that the happy-go-lucky sunburnt country Down Under could be so fucking cruel? And yet, as if by some middle finger to the dark and miserable forces that would work both behind the scenes and under our very noses to suppress and misinform those who would seek to soothe the soul of a nation, sometimes sweet, glistening glimmers of light shine through the cracks at the end of the dreary tunnel that make up this weird and wonderful culture. Halle-fucking-lujah. It must have been during one of these rare but glistening moments that the creative force behind Melbourne rock/post-punk quartet RVG was spewed forth. Somehow, several years ago, many billions of atoms and sparks of righteous electrical impulses coalesced in a series of miraculous accidents to form Romy Vager; a songwriter of such unflinching honestly, vulnerability, and uniqueness that you can’t help but be hooked on every lyric that comes straight from the Melburnian’s heart. Pressing PLAY> on the likes of ‘Common Ground’, ‘It’s Not Easy’, and ‘Nothing Really Changes’ simply makes the musical landscape – and the cultural landscape of a nation – an instantly better place. This album, the band’s third, is 100 per cent essential.
A weed cloud dense enough to snuff out every mosquito in the Boondall Wetlands and the plethora of ’19 Crimes’ adverts behind the bars are sure indicators of things to come: tonight’s gig is going to get loose.
Here for his rescheduled ‘I Wanna Thank Me’ tour and performing in Australia for the first time since 2014, the rap legend promised a show that will be “all about the music”. So how did Snoop Dogg’s triumphant return go down?
First up were multiple support acts, beginning with DJ Malo, who, despite the early start, plays to an already half-full arena and does so with style.
Next were Irish rappers Versatile, who have “come all the way from Dublin, Ireland to buzz in Australia tonight” on their first visit here. Settling into the local ‘culture’, Casper and Eskimo Supreme volunteer to do shoeys upon footwear being hurled to the stage (you didn’t have to do it, lads). That aside, the group get a big response from a pumped audience and will most likely be back under their own steam soon.
Versatile
DJ Invisible is next and, having been a master of his craft for decades, sets about upping the class and style of the evening’s proceedings with a masterclass in turntabling. Ripping off his shirt to reveal a t-shirt adorning the Aboriginal flag and receiving a huge cheer as a result was a nice moment.
DJ Invisible
A short time later the veteran DJ was joined by D12’s Kuniva and Swifty McVeigh. Despite the ability to get an entire arena of people to raise their pistol fingers to the air, their set is ultimately one of good vibes and a whole lotta love; especially for ex-bandmate Proof. ‘Nasty Mind’ goes over particularly well, as does a brief appearance onstage by Quaden Bayles.
D12
When it comes time for the man himself, the audience is just about ready to unleash an unstoppable tidal wave of adulation and joy. Snoop strolls onto the stage, surrounded by dancing girls, gesticulating dancers in monkey suits, and perhaps the loudest and most enthusiastic audience the Entertainment Centre has hosted for some time. ‘The Next Episode’, ‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’, and ‘Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang’ are a dynamite start, and the reverberations of love and joy between rapper and audience only increase in intensity when he asks/demands, “So, y’all wanna get fucked up with the Dogg tonight?” to rapturous response, before ‘Gin and Juice’ cranks the dial even higher. Kudos to the security staff at this point for doing a stellar and almost impossible job of policing the smoking laws inside the arena. ‘Beautiful’ follows shortly, which is dedicated to “all the beautiful women Down Under”, while ‘(Smile) Living My Best Life’ and ‘Snoop’s Upside Ya Head’ keep the flow going, and ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’ features late on as expected.
Snoop Dogg
Covers feature throughout, including Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ (complete with an excerpt of the Beach Boys’ similarly named banger), and tracks from House of Pain and DJ Khaled. But it’s the eclectic mix of Snoop Dogg’s own tracks and the fact he doesn’t actually need pole-dancers and bouncing monkeys to put on a rap show of the highest level in 2023 that are testament to the longevity, diversity, and quality of the 51-year-old Californian’s career and certified place among rap royalty.
It’s been over 30 years since the release of their debut album, 24 since the release of their most recent, and 13 years since their last shows in Australia. So how is Pavement’s return to Brisbane going to go down on a Tuesday evening in Fortitude Valley?
First up is Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. They are a seriously bloody good band, and are having a “good Tuesday”, says singer-guitarist Tom Russo, having been plucked out of their Melbourne hometown to play warmer climes up north.
Rolling Blackouts C.F.
The quintet’s eight-song set is a gloriously sunny collection of Australian indie-rock of the highest order, with highlights ‘Mainland’ and ‘Talking Straight’ sounding perfect for a balmy mid-week evening and closer ‘French Press’ finishing in a long and stylish jam not unlike something you might hear at a War on Drugs gig.
With almost no fanfare from band or audience, almost as if they are unsure of what to make of each other after so long apart, Pavement take to the stage and begin what turns out to be a somewhat sprawling, at times chaotic, and at times discordant set from across the Californian quintet’s relatively short recording career – and they do it while seemingly enjoying each other’s company at the same time.
‘Spit on a Stranger’ passes by without any real reaction from the as-yet unsure audience, unlike ‘Harness Your Hopes’. “We first played here in ’93. It’s good to be back. This song is from that era,” is the introduction to ‘Angel Carer Blues/Mellow Jazz Docent’, but it’s during ‘Stereo’ that it truly feels like singer-guitarist Stephen Malkmus and his crowd are relaxing into the evening, and each other, although there is an ominous feeling that the set may have peaked with less than 15 minutes gone.
Thankfully ‘Gold Soundz’ provides another predictable peak a few songs later, as does the reverberating melancholy of the chorus of ‘Range Life’. ‘Conduit for Sale!’, ‘Major Leagues’ and ‘Cut Your Hair’ also feature late-on in a 25-song set that bounces around like an off-kilter pinball.
Among the handful of highlights, the evening threatens to fall apart at any moment, set to the sound of unintelligible drivel backed by a band of the standard of your average high school talent show act thrashing at their respective instruments while simultaneously and somewhat pathetically rooting around in a skip bin filled with metal cans.
Is a Pavement show in 2023 the sound of a band being intentionally oblique? Possibly. Is the wonkiness still a major part of the appeal? Probably. Is it at times painfully tedious? Absolutely.
On their first Australian headline tour in 18 years and with more than 40 million albums under their belt, punk-rock stalwarts the Offspring have both nothing to prove and everything to prove on a balmy Brisbane school night at a sold-out Riverstage. So how did the much-lauded Californians’ set go down?
First up was Sum 41; the Canadian pop-punk quintet wasted no time getting boneheaded with a series of their greatest ‘hits’ mixed in with some clinical annihilations of classic rock standards and painfully contrived and contradictory audience requests ranging from “Let’s get crazy motherfuckers!” and “Let’s get a circle pit going!” to “Let’s look after each other tonight and make sure nobody gets hurt!” courtesy of dufus frontman Deryck Whibley.
Early-career lowlights ‘Motivation’, ‘The Hell Song’ and ‘Over my Head’ kicked off proceedings; the latter during which Whibley attempted to get the aforementioned circle pit happening (which wasn’t quite getting past first gear on a hot South-East Queensland evening), before the singer urged the audience to get their phone torches out for dirgy ballad ‘Walking Disaster’.
‘All Killer No Filler’ singles ‘In Too Deep’ and ‘Fat Lip’ had the capacity audience breaking (even more of) a sweat, but perhaps the most drippy moment came when Whibley & Co. showed their only flicker of a sense of humour for the evening with excerpts of ‘Smoke on the Water’ and ‘Seven Nation Army’, and the execution of a crime against musical majesty with a brutal demolition of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’.
The headliners are, thankfully, immediately classy from the off; it was clear the Offspring were here to play like the seasoned musicians they are, but not take themselves too seriously and be smart enough not to try to be too smart, despite the assorted PhDs and tertiary qualifications famously sported by various band members.
Early setlist highlights included ‘Come Out and Play’, ‘Want You Bad’, and the Trump-baiting recent single ‘Let the Bad Times Roll’, which fitted among earlier career tracks particularly well. ‘Original Prankster’ felt like it had been thrown away early at only 8:50pm but went down a storm before the silly mid-show ‘Noodle Plays With Himself’ section saw guitarist Noodles thrash through an entertaining medley of excerpts of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, ‘Back in Black’, ‘The Trooper’, and Edvard Greig’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’. It was all deeply silly and infectiously good fun; just like the guitarist himself, who claimed “It’s hard to tell where Jimi Hendrix ends and I begin”, with tongue firmly in cheek.
The fun continued with an appropriately high-octane cover of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ (excellent choice), and career classics ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?’ and ‘Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)’ caused all phones in the vicinity to be held firmly aloft, and ‘The Kids Aren’t Alright’ provided the big finish before the band exited stage right to a Riverstage reverberating with appreciation.
With the venue’s infamous council-enforced 10pm cut-off time looming, there was no time to waste, and the Californians return to complete a deserved encore including ‘You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid’ in a big finish.
To bastardise a soccer metaphor, it was a gig of two halves with one side ultimately coming away with the plaudits, just like 9,000-odd Queenslanders likely came away sweaty and satisfied.
It’s been an age between drinks for Tame Impala and Brisbane, and with a sold-out Entertainment Centre clamouring to greet Kevin Parker and the boys, what couldn’t go perfectly right?
First up was local legend-in-the-making Sycco who looked born to do it on a stage this big and received a huge response from an already half-full Entertainment Centre for her efforts, most especially on final track ‘Dribble’.
Sycco
Next came Genesis Owusu and a lesson in owning a stage by sheer presence and force of personality alongside an energetic vocal performance and some killer lyrics. It’s hard to nail down just one thing that makes the Ghanaian-Australian such a powerful act when he seems to have it all; recent track ‘GTFO’ went down particularly well and lyrically could be Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’ for a new generation. There’s absolutely no stopping this guy based on this performance.
Genesis Owusu
The members of Tame Impala saunter onto the stage amid a retina-searing light display, dense dry ice, and reverberating screams of appreciation from a heaving Entertainment Centre, with Parker looking entirely unfazed by the circumstances in which he found himself. This is a band that has grown from its relatively humble WA psych-rock roots to be the international festival headliner it now is, so it’s easy to see why this experience is all in a day’s work for the multi-instrumentalist master. His show takes a simple approach: give the audience what it wants, do it in style, and do it BIG.
Tame Impala
This is the ‘Slow Rush’ tour, so that album’s songs feature heavily at all the big moments, including opener ‘One More Year’ and early tracks ‘Borderline’ and ‘Breathe Deeper’. However, having been around for over 14 years and with a back catalogue that most bands would die for, Parker and the gang can pull from all corners of their varied career and strike a chord with anything they pull out of the bag, as with ‘Nangs’, ‘Apocalypse Dreams’, and ‘Elephant’, before which Parker enquires of the crowd’s willingness to “get a little wild” – which it does in spades.
It was during an extended ‘Let it Happen’ that one of the band’s trademark moments comes with the launch of the confetti cannons at the drop, before a chilled-out ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’ provided a cool counterpoint. This left only the need for a big finish to top off the show, which came in the form of ‘The Less I Know the Better’ and ‘One More Hour’.
It was all a truly mind-melting visual experience; the lighting was simultaneously mesmerising, trippy, and, at times, almost difficult not to turn away from. But in terms of Australian music, this band’s live experience is up with there with the very best. It definitely wasn’t slow; it definitely WAS a rush.
Paul McBride 