KRAM: Alone With You | Adelaide Festival 2022 review

Some tightening up would go a long way to making the Spiderbait frontman’s Alone With You the show it has the potential to be.

KRAM: Alone With You, at The Summerhouse. Picture: Supplied, Adelaide Festival.

KRAM: Alone With You

Contemporary music

ADELAIDE FESTIVAL

The Summerhouse

March 18

There’s a good show within KRAM: Alone With You, but the Spiderbait frontman still has some work to do to find it.

Mark “KRAM” Maher – drummer, singer-songwriter and founding member of one of Australia’s most beloved rock acts of the ’90s – promised to “share stories and songs that have inspired and shaped his impressive music career”.

And he did do that. But he also ran 45 minutes over time in a show that suffered with technical issues and was weighed down by segments that a judicious editor would have cut, or at least reduced in length.

That said, when Alone With You finds its heart – mostly in the parts where KRAM opens up and shows some vulnerability ­– it does hit home.

The show opens with acoustic versions of the Sunnyboys’ classic that lends its name to the show and a rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams ­– simple, hook-laden gems that KRAM says had a big influence on the music he would later make.

Then there are odd karaoke-style renditions of Status Quo’s Deeper and Down and The Doors’ Riders on the Storm before KRAM straps on an electric guitar and hops behind the drums to play both instruments simultaneously in a clever take on Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath.

KRAM: Alone With You, at The Summerhouse. Picture: Supplied, Adelaide Festival

An acoustic rendition of Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy – dedicated to the bravery of openly gay soccer player Josh Cavallo is a nice moment – and a set of Spiderbait songs including Old Man Sam and Buy Me A Pony, complete with their backstories, is revealing.

The most tender moment of the show comes when KRAM devotes solo song Won’t Be Home Tonight to his former partner and mother of his children and reflects on how life as a rock musician was ultimately incompatible with married life.

Then he invites his young son and daughter on to play some tracks, which is lovely but by this point the stage techs are obviously trying to get him to wrap things up.

At the start of the show KRAM admitted that he’d only played through the entire show once, earlier that day, but that should have been enough to see that some bits needed to go if he was going to even get close to running on time.

Some tightening up would go a long way to making Alone With You the show it has the potential to be.