Simply Red
Billy Bragg
Le Rox
Billy Bragg is the busker who turned busker. He used to wander the streets performing with a fifty quid electric guitar and a 60 watt amp on his back. Now he tours the world and performs at Le Rox with a fifty quid guitar and his 60 watt amp on the ground. There is much to be pleased about with Billy Bragg. At a time when record production takes an expensive month of Sundays …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Eurythmics
Memorial Drive
Last time the Eurythmics were in Australia they were Tourists. The
Tourists, it must be said, were never much chop. One of their singles scraped into the Top Ten but no one would have thought that Gorbals rocker, Dave Stewart, and the singer in the Mary Quant tat, Annie Lennox, would do more than sink without trace when the band dispersed in 1980.
Instead, with five hit albums in a row, the Eurythmics are here again …
Continue Reading Back to topJoe Jackson
Thebarton Theatre
When Look Sharp, Joe Jackson’s first album appeared in 1977 all manner of sobriquets were bandied about his distinctive sound – “powerpop” and “spiv rock” among them. Like Graham Parker and Elvis Costello, he offered a churlish wit and a tight rock sound – urgent, knowing and non-sectarian.
Of the three only Jackson has conquered America. Parker sounded too much like a New Yorker to begin with and nobody ever got over Elvis Costello’s ironic …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner; director Bernd Benthaak; with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. conducted by John Matheson; at the Opera Theatre. Adelaide, until June 21. Cast: Malcolm Donnelly, Beverley Bergen, Arend Baumann and Thomas Edmonds.
Commentators have often been swift to chide and slow to bless The Flying Dutchman when comparing it to the consummate accomplishment of Wagner’s later work.
Certainly its mechanical division between aria, recitative and ensemble is typical of operatic form which Wagner himself was later …
Continue Reading Back to topVery few performance artists have made the leap to pop with such spectacular success as Laurie Anderson whose concert in Adelaide’s Festival Theatre opened her Australian tour and coincides with the release of her newest album, Home of the Brave.
All of the paradoxes of Anderson’s achievements are evident in her opening monologue, Progress. The eclectic, hi -tech relativism of her work exactly mirrors the processes she rails against as heartless progress. Anderson’s is a triumph of style …
Continue Reading Back to topSisters
Kate and Anna McGarrigle
Festival Theatre
Kate and Anna McGarrigle first gained attention as songwriters in the early Seventies when Maria Muldaur recorded Kate’s “The Work Song”, and Linda Ronstadt used-Anna’s “Heart like a Wheel” as the title song for her 1974 album.
The McGarrigles began recording their own material in 1975, rapidly gaining attention for their fetchingly artless vocals and whimsical arrangements. On this tour, eleven years later, the McGarrigles are still being whimsical and fetchingly artless and …
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