Guinness Celebration of Irish Music
Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In its eleventh year, Jon Nicholls’ touring Irish mini-festival is more of an achievement than ever. Like the Barossa Festival and Womadelaide it is a South Australian initiative which has established a format pleasingly familiar, keenly awaited, and widely regarded as a showcase of the best available.

Over a decade the Guinness Celebration has introduced audiences to talents who were already, or have become, major figures in the rapidly …

Stan Ridgway
Dirty Three
Tivoli Hotel

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Stan Ridgway’s set at the Tivoli would have had the significance of the Second Coming – if he’d ever been a first time. Among the modest sized crowd, gathered on day seven of the century celsius, were ticket holders from the cancelled Stan show slated for February 1987. Ten years and one day it has taken us to get to Adelaide, Stan bellows good-naturedly. Yessiree Bob. We may have lost …

1997

Big Day Out

Wayville Showground

Stan Ridgway

Dirty Three

Tivoli Hotel

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In five years Big Day Out, the Australian version of the Lollapalooza roadshow, has become a summer institution. Promoters Ken West and Vivian Lees have officially declared this year’s model to be the last. Big Day Out is no more. Now the legend can begin. And history will be kind to this rite of summer. It has been, in every sense, good value. For …

1997

Laurie Anderson

Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Laurie Anderson is describable in so many ways – performance artist, poet, singer, narrator, virtual diva, legend in her own website- that it is easy to overlook just how accomplished she actually is in all these arts, ancient and postmodern, and sciences, big and minimal.

Her current show, The Speed of Darkness, on loan from the Festival of Sydney, features many new, as yet unrecorded, angles of vision from the …

1997

Andy Irvine

Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Dressed in a Redbacks t-shirt and looking a little weary from day one of the Fourth Test, Andy Irvine fronts an enthusiastic crowd for his Saturday night set at the Governor Hindmarsh. No stranger to Australia, or the music scene here, he is on the summer festival circuit and winds up with the Canberra gathering at Easter.

Irvine remains one of Irish music’s true believers. Youthful devotee of Woody Guthrie, pupil …

Paul Kelly
with Paul Brady
Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly has played here four times this year and each time he’s been full of surprises. The January gig at Heaven brought a five piece line-up plus a set from the Blackeyed Susans. Then, fresh from the Womad train, he played a full house at Festival Theatre with fabled pedal steel player and national broadcaster, Lucky Oceans. The Norwood Town Hall show featured Renee Geyer, whose fortunes have …

Balanescu Quartet
Mountadam Vineyard

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Since the release of their 1992 recording Possessed, the Balanescu Quartet has held a variety of music enthusiasts in their thrall. For some their spirited, rhythmic playing conjured associations with folk and Romany styles. The miked-up sound appealed to the rock and jazz fusion crowd. And their witty re-drafts of composers such as David Byrne and the German proto-techno band, Kraftwerk, made fashion victims of us all.

Attending the Barossa Music …

1996

Marianne Faithfull

with Paul Trueblood

Space, October, 1996

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Marianne Faithfull has gone arty. It is not the first time. Even as a teenage waif, under the murky guidance of Andrew Loog Oldham, she was given to recitations of Jabberwocky and Full Fathom Five. She even returns to The Tempest again in A Secret Life, last year’s disappointing collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti. And, of course, she is no stranger to European cabaret- whether on The …

1996

Festival Centre

Adelaide, October 1, 1996.

Murray Bramwell

As their name suggests, Clannad is a family affair. The Brennans and Duggans. Or more precisely – Maire Ni Bhraonain, her brother Ciaran and twin uncles, Noel and Pol O Dugain, who form the core of a band which has variously included a songwriting brother, Pol, and a singing sister, Eithne, now known to more than thirty million record buyers as Enya.

For twenty five years and over twenty seven albums …

1996

Link Wray

The Tivoli

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It was Plato who said that when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city crumble. He was talking about Link Wray, of course, and the D chord which in 1958 changed everything. The record was Rumble and with its majestic sweeps and menacing repetitions it secured the electric guitar as the twentieth century’s preferred instrument of hedonism.

With brothers Doug and Vern, Lincoln Wray has played every …