2004

Turin Brakes

Fowlers Live

Murray Bramwell

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

Touted as nu acoustica, along with the likes of I am Kloot, …

Joe Jackson
with Joe Camilleri and Bakelite Radio
Thebarton Theatre

Murray Bramwell

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

Blondie
Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

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

With Countdown …

2003

The Go-Betweens

Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

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

2003

Music DVDs reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The arrival of the DVD has been rapid in Australia. We are well-known for our speedy take-up of new technology but the saturation of the market by the digital versatile disc has been particularly swift even by our standards. Probably it is due to the fact that  DVD players, which cost upwards of seven hundred dollars three years ago, now cost less than a quarter of that now. And Dolby digital sound systems …

Bob Dylan
with Paul Kelly

Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

This time he blew in from the West. Still on the Neverending Tour, and back in Australia – three years on, and sixth time round – Bob Dylan has turned his Sisyphean treadmill into a victory lap. At least, that is the report of messengers, posting news of sightings and setlists on Bill Pagel’s Boblinks website. The intelligence has been promising since his European dates last year. England had …

2003

The Blind Boys of Alabama

Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is ten years next month since Brian and Vivien Tonkin took over the licence at the Governor Hindmarsh hotel on Port Road. And in that time it has become one of the busiest, and certainly the best loved, of Adelaide’s  live music venues. Week after week it programs every kind of music – blues, jazz, old rock, new pop, Scottish and Irish music, garage bands and electronica. …

James Taylor
Festival Theatre

Bob Dylan
with Ani diFranco and the Waifs
Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Perhaps no-one epitomises popular music at the beginning of the 1970s more than James Taylor. Along with Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon he was the prototype of the singer-songwriter, not a cult figure like Bob Dylan and the other folkies, but a confessional soloist the way John Lennon had become. By the end of the sixties no-one was supposed to sing other …

Faithless
The barton Theatre
Dirty Three
Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

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

Billy Bragg
with Dave Graney Show
Norwood Concert Hall

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

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