The Dissociatives
Thebarton Theatre

Murray Bramwell

Dissociation is an interesting concept. In chemistry it means the separation of constituent elements in a compound. Psychologically, it is when aspects in the personality hive off to form an independent, even multiple personality. For Daniel Johns, rock star since the age of fifteen, to use the term, I take as a signal that he is reclaiming his stable atoms from that very powerful base element, silverchair. And for a young man, who has …

Arlo Guthrie
Norwood Concert Hall

Murray Bramwell

There is something irrepressibly good-natured about Arlo Guthrie and he’s been like that for forty years. Nothing seems to have bothered him – not the overbearing reputation of his father Woody, the celebrated dust bowl populist, not the competition with Bob Dylan, Woody’s acolyte in the folk scene of the early 1960s, not even the threat of inheriting Huntingdon’s Chorea, the degenerative disease which afflicted his father and caused his early death.

Arlo …

Paul Kelly
Her Majesty’s

Murray Bramwell

I like Paul Kelly to stay the same and tend to get tetchy when he changes things around, especially when he tinkers with his band line-up. I couldn’t see why he had to shoot the Messengers or why he would hire hotshot American guitarist Randy Jacobs. Was the Professor Ratbaggy project just a scratch band, and what about that bluegrass Smoke thing ? And, these days, what is he doing with his nephew Dan …

Jackson Browne
Festival Theatre

Murray Bramwell

Fourteen guitars – all in a row. The show is billed as solo acoustic but it looks like the set up for the Eagles. Jackson Browne admits it is “obnoxious” for one person to have quite so many instruments but, he confides, he needs all those special tunings.

He certainly has plenty of special tunes. For more than thirty years and twelve albums, Jackson Browne has had the patent on the California sound which …