Ben Lee | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

Singer-songwriter Ben Lee emerges from a year in Los Angeles armed with great new songs and a fun twist on his classic hits.

Ben Lee

Ben Lee

Contemporary Music / AUS

FESTIVAL

The Summerhouse

March 3

A jovial Ben Lee has been watching the calendar – and other Festival shows – as he counted down the days to his return to the stage: “Are we really doing this?”

He’s had time to “conceptualise” his show, taking on the Foo Fighters and their laser shows with … a JVC single-deck cassette player.

Lee introduces it as his “band” for the night.

For select numbers, he rummages through a pile of audio cassettes, inserts one and presses “play” then waits – the part he likes best – for the synth drums to start before joining in on acoustic guitar.

If this all sounds a bit nostalgic, it is – in the best of ways – but 12 months stuck in Los Angeles has also given Lee time to write a great new batch of songs, some of which he later shares to a rapturous reception.

He starts off with the happy, toe-tapping strum of 2005’s Into The Dark, the lyrics of which name-check the title of Lee’s 1998 breakthrough album Breathing Tornados (a hint at what’s to come).

Adelaide Festival 2021 - Ben Lee. Picture Supplied by Adelaide Festival

Lee’s voice makes the first of its occasional trips into falsetto on Love Me Like The World Is Ending, including a sustained note which earns a smattering of applause. That, in turn, prompts Lee to declare “I’m no Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, my friends,” in reference to the US countertenor who starred in the Festival’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Another ’80s-like cassette drum beat leads into Ache For You, after which Lee admits to being a little traumatised by the emotional and physical extremities of having seen Festival shows A German Life and The Pulse.

A more melancholy, slower, almost Bob Dylan-like rendition of Cigarettes Will Kill You flows on to the anxious emotions of Is This How Love’s Supposed To Feel and then the beautifully romantic, more settled imagery of Ripe.

A bracket of brand new tunes follows, and yet their catchy hooks feel instantly familiar and Lee keeps the audience captivated.

Parents Get High is a trippy, hippie singalong childhood recollection of grown-ups’ parties, while Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll has rapid-fire lyrics about coming to terms with debauchery as an adult.

Lee dedicates a third new track, the feisty, eastern-tinged Born For This Bullshit, to Australian record industry icon Michael Gudinski who died suddenly this week.

“When you heard he was trying to find you, there was this mixture of terror and exhilaration, because you knew you were about to be talked into a great idea,” Lee says.

There’s some more banter as Lee waits for a tape he forgot to rewind, before he launches into the darker, country-edged sound of Gamble Everything For Love.

We are then given a choice of tapes for the next song: Nothing Much Happens or I Am A Sunflower. The audience picks the latter, which comes replete with plinking keyboards and bass on the cassette.

Lee then plays Nothing Much Happens anyway, because why wouldn’t you do one of your biggest hits, and he enjoys playing and pointing out its “weird key change for no reason”.

We mutually consent to do away with the faux “leave the stage and return” routine. Lee goes straight into the encore of two hits which have found renewed airplay and taken on new significance in these strange pandemic times: Catch My Disease and We’re All In This Together, which both had the crowding singing along.

In between, Lee sandwiched the tongue-twister Happiness, repeating its inspirational, comical lyrics with increasing speed and unerring accuracy. He certainly got the recipe right on this night.

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