Grace Jones
Elder Park
Adelaide Festival
February 28
Murray Bramwell
When Grace Jones takes to the stage in Elder Park – an unfashionably fashionable 45 minutes late – it is like the arrival of the Queen of Sheba at the Dia de los Muertes, day of the dead. She is wearing a shiny skull mask haloed with long black spikes and a body suit with thick, white skeletal markings that Keith Haring might have personally designed. But if this …
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Welcoming the World
As WOMADelaide prepares to open the gates of Botanic Park from March 9 -12, Murray Bramwell talks with Program Manager Annette Tripodi about the 2018 program.
March is a brilliantly mad month in Adelaide. It is when the city is captured by the Festival and Writers’ Week, the ever-expanding Fringe, the Clipsal 500 Supercar race, and WOMADelaide. Each event has its signatures, rituals and durable traditions – but that seems almost especially true of WOMAD.…
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WOMADelaide Celebrates
Murray Bramwell talks with WOMADelaide director Ian Scobie about the music festival with a difference.
It is now 25 years since WOMADelaide, that strange acronym grafted on to the name of an Australian city, was first heard about. In 1992, as part of Rob Brookman’s Adelaide Festival, negotiations took place between Brookman, his colleague Ian Scobie, and Thomas Brooman, the director of the UK WOMAD (aka World of Music, Arts and Dance) festival. The idea was …
Continue Reading Back to topSufjan Stevens
Thebarton Theatre
Adelaide Festival
February 29, 2016
Murray Bramwell
Last time we saw Sufjan Stevens it was his 2011 Age of Adz tour. Inspired by the paintings of the schizophrenic visionary Royal Robertson, the concert featured massive back projections of Robertson’s ecstatic, vibrantly coloured imaginings while Stevens and a ten piece band produced a symphonic event, festooned with samples, loops and intrepid orchestrations.
For his 2016 tour Sufjan Stevens is in lyric mode. With just four band members …
Continue Reading Back to topMurray Bramwell previews WOMADelaide 2016
It is less than ten days until WOMADelaide opens again for three days and four nights of intriguing and often exhilarating music, performed by 400 musicians from more than 30 countries. From small, but nonetheless impressive, beginnings in 1992 under the wing of Rob Brookman’s Adelaide Festival, WOMADelaide, now in its 20th incarnation and an annual fixture since 2002, has become a major national festival. Noted for its consistent quality, and the depth and …
Continue Reading Back to topAn Evening with Gillian Welch
Her Majesty’s
February 3.
Some things really are worth the wait. And Adelaide has waited a very long time for a first visit from the incomparable Gillian Welch and her brilliant musical partner David Rawlings. It has been eleven years since they last toured Australia and then it was Eastern States only. This time they drove to South Australia from Perth – 28 hours by car, they proudly report, but- with some regret – not …
Continue Reading Back to topAugie March
Her Majesty’s
March 26
Murray Bramwell
It is several weeks on from the Ides of March, now it’s time for the Odes of March. Augie March, that is – back from a seven year hibernation for a national tour featuring their 2014 album Havens Dumb. Led by the prodigiously talented, singer songwriter Glenn Richards, Augie March appeared on the Australian music scene in 1998 and released their first album Sunset Studies in 2000. Now fifteen years and …
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Murray Bramwell
Roses and Bryars
Gavin Bryars Ensemble
March 3. Elder Hall
Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet
and selected orchestral works
March 5. Adelaide Town Hall
One of the highlights of this year’s Adelaide Festival has been composer-in- residence Gavin Bryars. Yorkshire-born, Bryars has been prominent in minimalist music since the late 1960s, with works such as The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet in 1972. Both were first released on …
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