Wandering into the South Bank Parklands, the sweet tones of a songbird were carried like a feather, tumbling and twirling through the air. Bernard Fanning had brought along some special guests for his ‘Tea & Sympathy’ 20th anniversary tour at On The Banks. That songbird was Georgia Mooney, an artist from Sydney who has been playing in the band All Our Exes Live In Texas, but more recently released her own music. With the velvety tone of Agnetha or Anni-Frid from ABBA and the quirk of Kate Bush, but all her own personality and talent, I promptly fell in love with her music.
In between songs, she delivered such charming chatter that you couldn’t help but be won over, every new word a delightful surprise. Introducing Winter Island, she explained the song was about a visit to Greece, where she was approached by an artist to be his nude model. So she lounged around with strategically placed cushions, they fell in love and got married on a hill before she departed for home. “This is about those disgustingly romantic days…” she said, “It’s important to marry someone you don’t know at least once.”
Her sweet folky sensibility carried her through her songs Could it be This? And Australian Crawl, fingerpicking on our heartstrings with her dulcimer, won in a moment of serendipity in a raffle before she learned to play. She also paid tribute to a famous proponent of the dulcimer, Joni Mitchell, with a rendition of one of the best Mitchell songs, A Case of You, as perfectly bewitching as Mooney’s original music. You couldn’t help but swoon for Mooney and her dulcet dulcimer.
The dreary weather of the morning cleared for a beautiful riverside breeze to spring up in the warm afternoon autumn sun, just like the next act – a warm constant with a playful fresh breath of air.
What iconic Brisbane concert would be complete without Bernard Fanning and everyone’s favourite father-daughter duo Troy and Jem Cassar-Daley. The pair joked that it was bring-your-father-to-work day – no, bring-your-daughter-to-work day! They took turns singing their songs, Jem laughing at how different they were, and yet while different genres, side by side, the songs shared a vulnerability and optimism no doubt imbued by family songwriting tradition.
There is a sense of community in seeing these local artists hit the big stage and tell stories that mention the same landmarks present in your own life, whether it’s the Story Bridge or the Toowong hills.
With Jem on keys and acoustic, her tunes Kiss Me Like You’re Leaving, King of Disappointment, and Front Left Pocket had a flirty sweetness delivered with her clear, unaffected vocals, where her Aussie accent creeps through – she might be a pop artist, but she is connected to her roots. She sang a gorgeous preview of Into Sunsets, “still in the Dropbox” currently, about wanting a true romance from someone who doesn’t feel the same.
Meanwhile, Troy swapped between his telecaster – the definition of road worn – and acoustic, playing mostly recently written songs so catchy that you’d swear you recognised them from decades ago. Like Let’s Ride, where his twangy baritone cranks into gear to sing about an EH Holden from back in the day when he had a girlfriend who he suspected may have liked the car more than she liked him. Or Freedom Ride, written with Paul Kelly about the racism and segregation of Indigenous people in the 60s, or Back on Country, another song written with unity in mind, which featured growling guitar and the drummer really getting stuck into the song.
Most touching was a song Troy wrote about hard days when dealing with grief and losing his parents, called Some Days, Jem harmonising. He sang: “Some days are better than others / Some days, I really miss my mother/ She made me the man I am.”
Five-piece folk-rock Melbournites The Paper Kites bathed the audience in their soothing soundwaves. They got started with their 2018 track Between the Houses, a paean to truth that seems to get more apt with each year. Change of the Wind, off their most recent album, felt a little more country with the tone of David Powys’ strat wistfully crying over the lyrics, “I can’t change it all / But I can change my mind”. Lead vocalist Sam Bentley mentioned how happy they are to be on the lineup, “sandwiched between music royalty”. He pulled out an Epiphone for the resonant, and quietly devastating, Marietta, while Samuel Rasmussen echoed a mournful bass line. Putting on the melancholy, the song evokes long roads and lonely nights.
As the afternoon light faded behind the stage, a dark, thunderous mood took hold of the riverbanks. Not a change in weather, but a sonic change. A bluesy riff and rumbly bass, with a slow, ponderous drumbeat from Josh Bentley framed the soulful vocals of Bentley and Christina Lacy. They played another two tracks off ‘If You Go There, I Hope You Find It’, Every Town and Shake Off the Rain, with more of their trademark contemplativeness.
Paring back the instruments to a guitar, a banjo and vocal harmonies, Bloom, with its tender lyrics “Oh, you fill my lungs with sweetness / And you fill my head with you” from their very first EP brought a moment of stillness as the crowd leant into the sentimentality and nostalgia. They finished the set off with When the Lavender Blooms, a song that makes you want to run into the fields and bask in the sun.
Then, with an aura that hinted that they had just clawed their way out from beneath the hard dirt of the wide red desert at the heart of our country, Kasey Chambers and her band emerged. To listen to Chambers is to hear the embodiment of Australian gothic, a haunting sound that conjures funnel webs and ghost gums, the scratching of leaves in the trees on a still, starlit night.
They played a selection of favourites from her career – hurling out the bravado of Barricades and Brick Walls with her husky drawl, strumming her mahogany acoustic, while Jeff McCormack added the electric lines, contrasted with the stripped back honesty of Not Pretty Enough. Chambers commented on someone at the front of the audience who was passionately singing along – “Nothing makes me happier than a big, bearded guy like you singing Am I not Pretty Enough!”
I have to admit to not being a big follower of Kasey Chambers, but live, her voice blazing out into the night, her unfettered authenticity is arresting. She jokes about the notoriousness of her unique voice, warning them that the next song would be a good time for a toilet break as she yodels her way through Pony, her dad Bill Chambers killing it on the steel guitar. When the audience applauds him, she quips, “That’s enough, he’ll want to start getting paid”. All of this banter delivered with a great big grin on her face that makes you want to laugh along with her.
Rattlin’ Bones, written with her ex-husband Shane Nicholson, is performed with her new partner and talented band member Dingo (Brandon Dodd), who she jokingly refers to as her favourite future ex-husband. Then she pulls on the banjo (“I just play it cause I like the way it looks when I wear it. I only know three chords and they aren’t in this song”, is her commentary on the instrument) for a toe-tapper that has a call and response chorus that get Dingo and Bill onto the mic, with a lagerphone (essentially a stick with beer (lager) bottle tops nailed to it) solo from percussionist Syd Green.
Then, something entirely unexpected. Who would pick Chambers to cover American rapper Eminem’s Lose Yourself? On banjo??? But sing it she did, and made it sound like she’d written it herself. It became entirely hers, and she gave her significantly more slow tempo and plaintive version her all. Playing the first part of the song herself, when the band crashed in at the end with searing guitar solos and thundering drums, you forgot that Eminem ever existed. She finished with The Captain, still as heartbreaking as the day she wrote it.
Bernard Fanning’s silhouette was the first we saw of him, acoustic notes ringing out as he asked us to follow him Down to the River. Already On The Banks, that we had done already. It set the scene for a walk down memory lane. Thrill is Gone, with its cloying and yet alluring discordant mandolin, was next on the bill, and Fanning was here to remind us that he still has a boyish charm, though now matured like a tea well-steeped in sympathy.
In fact, all of these songs have aged well too. Watching an older Fanning sing these songs, it seemed as if an older, more worldly man should have written them. Take Hope and Validation: “Plans and preparations are decided in vain / Hope and validation are united again / Set a new direction for the harvest ahead / Built the resurrection of a bond nearly dead.” Or the melody of Wash Me Clean, accompanied by fiddle and acoustic, as his voice rises chromatically on “clean”, as if he is calling out to the heavens.
In Not Finished Just Yet, Fanning shows that 20 years later, he is still sailing through the tempest with his authentic troubadour sound. Songbird, with the fiddle ringing out, was a real foot thumper. The audience is full of Fanning fans, soaking up every note. He’s still just as outspoken, calling out the buzzing, and in all fairness quite distracting, drone flying above him: “If that fucking drone flies past me one more time, I’ll smash it with my guitar!”
A B-side on the anniversary album, For You and I, Fanning warned, would also have some bootscooting, with plenty of twangy guitar, while the audience got a rare rendition of Further Down the Road, because Fanning could previously never play it and sing at the same time. The Strangest Thing, with its plunging bass line and wandering keys, put us out of tilt, while an animation of a galaxy filled with stars twinkled on the backdrop of the stage. Then, murky, low pitched guitar in Which Way Home? brought out the rockers in the guys onstage.
Fanning took a moment to acknowledge his privileged upbringing in Toowong, and said while homeschooling his kids during COVID, he was thinking about how lucky they were too, despite being “told what to do” by the Australian Prime Minister of the time. He said ScoMo was “always talking about a ‘fair go’”, and yet to him, the concept was a fallacy. “The way we treat immigrants, Indigenous people, women, and the homeless – they just cleared the homeless out of Musgrave Park, they have nowhere to go – it’s a disgrace,” he said.
So, he wrote a song about it called Steady Job. “The lure of salvation, the promise of peace / The myth that if we work hard, we will find release / so I keep on working on the mystery / Pulling the thread, going where it leads / Looking for symbols from an absent God / Spinning my wheels in a steady job.” The song reflected the powerlessness we feel to change things when terrible things happen in the world without our ability to control them.
Then, a special moment as Kasey Chambers and Georgia Mooney joined him to bring their stunning harmonies for Watch Over Me, a song he apparently wrote after watching the Pope’s funeral. More of Fanning’s friends backstage were welcomed on for a singalong of Yesterday’s Gone, and finally the whole lineup came on for a wholehearted performance of The Rolling Stones’ Dead Flowers.
The show was concluded without the usual encore charade – Fanning joked he’d like to see us cheer while he was still onstage, and we obliged. We rocked out to Sleeping Rough before of course, that iconic syncopated riff introduced Wish You Well. It’s such an undeniably feel-good song that had everyone grooving.
Thanks to On The Map PR
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