The Pretenders, with
Paul Kelly and the Boon Companions,
The Church, Josh Pyke.

A Day on the Green
Annie’s Lane Winery, Watervale.
January 20.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

While it was a welcome break to the South Australian drought and a boon to the state’s near North where it fell most heavily, the enormous hogshead of rain that unloaded on well-named Watervale, seemed sure to mean that A Day on the Green would be a night in the mire.

It …

Teddy Thompson
Governor Hindmarsh
November 29.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I first came across Teddy Thompson on the I’m Your Man tribute concert album for Leonard Cohen – songs recorded in Brighton, England and at Brett Sheehy’s final Sydney Festival. Featured artists also included Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker, sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Kate’s increasingly celebrated offspring, Martha and Rufus Wainwright.

Teddy Thompson had been around well before that, I discover – his first album released in …

2006

Adelaide Festival

Here Lies Love – A Song Cycle

Music by David Byrne and Fat Boy Slim

Ridley Centre, Royal Adelaide Showground

March 11. Tickets $59 – $20. Bookings BASS 131 246

Until March 14, 2006.

Murray Bramwell

By way of preface to Here Lies Love, David Byrne wonders how people can justify “their nastier behaviours to themselves” – but twenty four songs and a reprise later, we are still not any the wiser. Imelda Marcos is both an …

Jimmy Webb
8 September
Martha Wainwright, with Josh Ritter
9 September
Governor Hindmarsh

Murray Bramwell

We’ve had many good nights at the Gov – last week, two in a row. Songwriter Jimmy Webb is on his sixth visit but, this time, he is spruiking his first album of new material in a while. Dedicated, as he says, “to rebels, outcasts and unruly characters of all types,” Twilight of the Renegades begins with Paul Gauguin in Tahiti and veers outwards from …

2005

In Adelaide for the Foggy Highway Bluegrass Tour, Paul Kelly talks to Murray Bramwell about recent projects.

The A-Z Solo Concerts

They were the opposite of a retrospective for me. I had to do some shows in the Spiegeltent in Melbourne last December and I wanted to do something special. It was always going to be mainly solo. I had one of those middle-of-the-night ideas – four nights, a hundred songs, A-Z with no repeats. Then I realised,  God, …

2005

On the present band The Stormwater Boys

There are a lot of old connections in this band. Jim Fisher who plays mandolin comes from Perth and he and Ian Simpson, the banjo player are in the Sensitive New Age Cowpersons. All these Perth connections weave in and out of my life. I went to WA in late 1975 with my cousin. We were going to work in the mines but I got involved in the music scene there and …

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Thebarton Theatre
18 May

Murray Bramwell

I last saw Nick Cave perform in 1994. It was the time of Let Love In and a slew of songs of almost impossible density and menace. Loverman, Red Right Hand and (I found her on a night of fire and noise ) the fanged and tangled, jingle jangle of Do You Love Me ? – surely, one of the scariest questions ever posed in recent popular music. …

Cream
Royal Albert Hall, London
5 May

Murray Bramwell

When it was first announced in the English press that the 1960s cult group Cream was reforming for four nights at the Royal Albert Hall there was an outpouring, you might say, of dairy metaphors. Would they be as fresh as they were thirty seven years ago ? Would the old enmities between members sour the occasion ? Would they blend, or remain somehow colloidal ? Would they prove to be …

Entertainment Centre
6 April

Murray Bramwell

REM’s Adelaide show, their third here, marks the 25th anniversary of their first gig as a band. And while it may seem like the blinking of an eye to some of us, when we hear that Nebraskan support band Bright Eyes’s lead singer Conor Oberst was one month old at that time, it is a reminder what an extraordinary stretch the REM twenty album history really is.

Not that there is anything backward-looking about …

David Byrne
Norwood Concert Hall

Murray Bramwell

Talking Heads, as their name suggests, were very much a high concept band and, like other Seventies exponents of art pop such as Devo and Kraftwerk, their’s was a studied, highly theatrical persona. So it is not just refreshing, but a complete surprise, to find Talking Head frontman David Byrne so affably direct as he lights up the stage at the Norwood Concert Hall.

With a platinum quiff and dressed in matching grey …