Posts Tagged ‘live music’
Laneway Festival has announced the first round of bands that will be gracing the stages next year. The current hype surrounding bands like The xx will sell a lot of tickets I am sure, but there is also huge interest in Wild Beasts, Black Lips, as well as Mecury-nominated Florence and the Machine.
The stampede to see Toni Childs.
It’s been three days and the post-blues blues are sort of beginning to fade. The 2009 East Coast Blues & Roots Music Festival was my first Bluesfest, and proved to be a superb way to pop the cherry and chill out in Byron Bay for a few days.
1. Blue King Brown – I’ve never seen BKB live before but the energy and mood of their whole set was simply joyous. Natalie Pa’apa’a was smoking in some short-shorts and a leetle black singlet. I chugged two Smirnoff Ice’s and danced the whole way through.
2. Seasick Steve – what a fascinating man. The 68 year old guitarist still looks like the hobo he used to be (and took frequent swigs of whisky from a bottle under his chair in between songs) but his sound is superb and his stories are humbling. Easily the crowd favourite among the smaller Bluesfest acts. Read more
You don’t get many people going to Nine Inch Nails gigs that are ‘kind of in to them’, or that have picked up a spare ticket from a mate at the last minute so pop along just to see what all the fuss is about. In many people’s eyes (including my own) Trent doesn’t put a foot wrong, not just when producing and performing but also in taking a stance against the traditional music industry and its inflexible distribution model.
Psarandonis at The Barracks Stage
My expectations for this event were stratospheric as soon as it was announced. Either because of the superlative reputation it had in the UK for being a grown-up, chilled out festival, the involvement of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the venue itself or, more likely, a combination of all three. Read more
On Friday night, I headed to Luna Park to catch a highly-anticipated (by me) gig at the Big Top.
First up was Ash Grunwald, who I’ve been listening to lately but have never known much about. I was surprised by the fact that Grunwald is a one-man show. He does the guitars and vocals and operates a snare, kick drum and toms using his feet. Great plan, in theory, but if you break a string and get flustered (and admit that to your audience), you’ve got no one to hold things while you get your shit together. While Ash rocks at what he does, his feet were half a second behind the rest of him. Get a drummer, son.
The OAF is a great venue. It feels like Fabric in 2001/ 2002 and not just because of the industrial set up with open brick- and metal-work. As with (nu skool) breaks 7 or 8 years ago, there was a genuine feeling that we were about to see something a bit new and different.
"I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines."
On Friday night, Kahlee and I headed over to the Acer Arena to see Sheryl Crow’s opening set for John Mellencamp. After a cracker start with All I Wanna Do, Crow delivered a terrific set of old and new songs, plus excellent covers of Cat Stevens’ The First Cut is the Deepest and Crowded House’s Mean to Me. If I’m going to be honest, the brand new song “inspired by the Dalai Lama” pretty much sucked, but hopefully Shazza will leave the political stuff to Rudd in the future. (Xavier, not Kevin.) Read more
Now live music, to me in Sydney has always been great, and there has always been lots of it. But even in the past year I’ve noticed a steady downturn in not only the amount of live music that’s been going on (everyone shout – hooray economic downturn!) but also the amount of people who just don’t even seem to be keen for it anymore.
As someone who used to have a lot to do with all ages live music around the Sutherland show, I saw hundreds of kids pack themselves into a venue to watch local bands do what they do best, for a reasonable amount of money at least once a month minimum. Now, these shows have been canned for reasons beyond the promoters control and the kids just seem to have… lost it? Almost all the kids who used to come to Engadine to see bands they love would have turned 18 by now, but do I ever see any of them out at venues watching the same bands the used to love struggle to hit it in the city scene? No.
And this frustrates me.
