Australia
Veronica Lee
Hannah Gadsby had a memorable lockdown; it was when the Tasmanian comic got together with producer Jenney Shamash. And it's their courtship that forms the basis for Something Special, the wonderful new show by Gadsby which is now a Netflix special, recorded at the Sydney Opera House.Gadsby, whose previous shows have dealt with some pretty serious subjects, including rape, homophobia and misogyny, tells us drily at the top of the hour: “This is going to be a feelgood show. I feel I owe you one.”And yes, it is indeed a feelgood show (based on the previously toured Body of Work). Essentially, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Ten Pound Pom programme (or to use its official title, the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme) was devised to encourage British emigrants to Australia after World War Two. The idea was that the volunteers could escape from drab, rationing-battered Britain to the sun, sea and wide-open spaces of the Great Southern Land, while also helping to boost the Australian economy. Adults paid 10 quid and children travelled free.Notable participants in the project were future Prime Ministers of Australia Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard and Angus and Malcolm Young, later to become hard rock heroes with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With acrobatics at this level, they make it all look so easy, it’s possible for an audience to become complacent. By the time the show Out of Chaos, by the troupe Gravity & Other Myths, from Adelaide, Australia, has finished, the Brighton Dome crowd is so used to the quiet fluidity of humans swiftly leaping onto each other’s shoulders, standing there, walking around, and so on, that it seems quite normal and do-able. Fortunately, there’s a boisterous crowd in, keen to whoop, shriek and offer loud praise for such effortlessly delivered gruelling physicality.The stage is plain, a circuit of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As Australia's greatest comedic export exits the stage, strewing gladioli, a promising contender for that title makes an entrance, trailing a dog on wheels. The dog is the titular Colin from Accounts, for the few who still haven’t tried this exceptional, refreshingly mature comedy. Why has this eight-parter from a husband and wife team seemingly overnight occupied a place in British hearts that even Canada’s Schitt’s Creek didn’t manage until its last year of transmission? And that show had lockdown blues to speed it along. They aren’t unalike: both have a core of geniality cut with Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The act of idol worship is, at one and the same time, both distantly ancient and compellingly contemporary. Whether it is Superman, Wonder Woman or Black Panther, our love of the superhero is both an aspiration and an abnegation. Looking at a star, the fan sees both their own potential and feels their own inferiority. In Olivier award-nominated actor and activist Danny Lee Wynter’s Royal Court debut, the attractively titled Black Superhero, the ambitious theme of black queerness is explored through the conceit of hero worship in a show whose cast is led by the author.Wynter is David, an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Learn to Burn” generates the loudest and most sustained applause. As it was originally the opening track of Robert Forster’s 2015 album Songs to Play, the response is unexpected. It’s preceded by a version of his old band The Go-Betweens’ “Spring Rain,” and this London show follows the February release of his most recent album The Candle and the Flame – which would be an assumed focus of attention. So would an old favourite. This is a dedicated, attentive audience.But still, the reaction is surprising. Just before “Spring Rain” – the set’s sixth song – Forster mutters “it’s going well.” Up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reflections on how the past relates to now suffuse The Candle and the Flame. The album’s closing track is “When I Was a Young Man.” When he was 21, sings Robert Forster, “I wrote songs, I was unsung, unheralded and undone”. His figurative brothers David and Lou showed him the way. Now in his mid-Sixties, he has a considerable artistic inventory to look back on. Including The Go-Betweens, solo albums, his writing. Messrs Bowie and Reed would be proud of what they helped initiate.However, this is not the source of such retrospection. The Candle and the Flame’s opener “She’s a Fighter” lays it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a disconnect between Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett on record and in concert. On record, especially on her latest album, her dryly-stated, touching emotional lyricism is to the fore, but in the live arena you’re as likely to be presented with a scorching rock goddess, playing with her fingers and no plectrum. Her grunge assault on 2013 single “History Eraser”, for instance, has proper garage heft, initially coming on like a Cobain firestorm then settling to something akin to fellow left-handed axe hero Jimi Hendrix. She doesn’t talk much between songs, but she sure Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Much of Amateurs is observational. “Folk Festival” ponders appearing at said event: is the place on the bill right; would fitting in be easier if the lyric’s subject were a different age? During “Market on the Sand”, it’s wondered while browsing whether there is “something here that is meant just for me”.Amateurs, by Australia’s Laura Jean Englert, feels as if it’s the result of a period of contemplation. The album begins with “Teenage Again”, an acoustic guitar-driven mid-tempo folk-rocker with a Neil Young feel. “When I was 17, my mama couldn’t handle me” are the opening lyrics. Approaching Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nitram is an object lesson in how to make a responsible film about a mass shooting, right down to not using the fame-seeking perpetrator’s real name as the title but the mocking ananym given to him by bullies at school.Scriptwriter Shaun Grant has drawn on accounts of the 1996 gun rampage at the heritage site Port Arthur in Tasmania. The 19th century convict colony became infamous as the scene of the worst massacre in modern Australia's history, leaving 35 people dead and another 23 injured. We don’t see the killings – there is no vicarious, visceral horror on screen. Instead Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
In 2019 Australia endured the hottest, driest year since records began and their bushfire season escalated with unprecedented intensity. The fires and pyro-connective storms that swept the country claimed 33 lives (and a further 400 from smoke inhalation); devastated 186,000 km of land; destroyed 3,500 homes; displaced 65,000 Australians; and killed or displaced near on three billion animals.When most of the world entered lockdown in March 2020, barely a month had passed since the final flames of the Black Summer were extinguished: I remember thinking, if we think we’ve got it bad, what about Read more ...
Tom Carr
Away from the spotlight of mainstream music the metal scene thrives, unbothered with how much attention it picks up. When bands like Architects reach number one in the UK charts, it is huge, but unimportant. Instead the scene is preoccupied with its own endlessly shifting subgenres and sounds.Enter Parkway Drive, an Australian metal band who spent the first part of their career firmly within the "metalcore" subgenre. Born from an aggressive merging of metal with hardcore punk, it melds the ferocious energy of hardcore with the intricate riffs and musicianship of metal – a heavy match made in Read more ...