The Sex Pistols return to Melbourne in a tour Johnny Rotten describes as ‘karaoke’

MUSIC
Sex Pistols ★★★
Festival Hall, April 5

Many people have told me the Sex Pistols aren’t good. They’re wrong. When I was 15, in the deep Millennial-era Australian suburbs, their single album, Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), represented the promise of punk: social anarchy, relative lack of skill, and branding genius. It’s potent even today, five decades after their flash-in-the-pan heyday.

The Sex Pistols perform on stage at Festival Hall on April 5, 2025. Credit: Martin Philbey

For this tour, the band is back together for the first time in two decades, this time without former lead singer John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten. He no longer gets on with his bandmates. He’s a vocal Trump supporter now, and he’s described this tour as “puppetry” and “karaoke”.

The Sex Pistols without John Lydon is a difficult prospect. To me, his unpredictable screech is what defined the band. It’s INXS without Michael Hutchence, or Queen without Freddie Mercury. He’d hate both comparisons, but he’s not here to protest.

Tonight, the position is filled by Frank Carter, erstwhile singer from Gallows and the Rattlesnakes. In front of an image of two huge speakers marked “NOWHERE” and “BOREDOM”, the band members, aged in their late 60s – apart from Carter, 40 – lead us into a rousing Holidays in the Sun, followed by Seventeen. “I’m so lazy,” Carter sings, not lazily. His voice is more Billie Joe Armstrong than Johnny Rotten, tight-wound and cover-band-accurate to the source material. But is accuracy what we want from a band who promised to rip up rock and roll and rebuild it?

By Pretty Vacant, it’s clear he’s here to compere the old guard and foster a singalong. “The old boys deserve it,” he says. “They f---in’ invented this shit.” They can’t declare themselves “the greatest punk band in history”, but he can. “I’m not an animal,” they shout in Bodies, confined to their stage mics, while Carter is in the audience, crowd-surfing.

The Sex Pistols have reunited for the first time in two decades.Credit: Martin Philbey

The rest of the set, comprised mostly of tracks from their one album, passes without error, and I won’t lie: I sing along, at times screaming. It’s infectious, cathartic. In the encore, Carter leads us in a rendition of My Way, in tribute to the other absent Pistol, Sid Vicious, who allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, before dying of an overdose on bail. The band’s manager sold T-shirts marking her death. They’ve always been a branding exercise.

After the show, most fans I ask are thrilled with the results. The pub around the corner from Festival Hall, the Angry Dog, is full of Sex Pistols fans, and the absence of Lydon is a win. Gail, from Glasgow, Scotland via Perth, WA, describes Lydon as “a right-wing English prick.” I overhear someone else describing Carter as a “wanker”. Better a wanker than a prick.
Reviewed by Will Cox

MUSIC
Cyndi Lauper: The Farewell Tour ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, April 2

Cyndi Lauper walks on stage to an explosion of rainbow confetti and dives straight into She Bop, an ode to masturbation. She’s 71 years old, 160 centimetres tall, and exuberant as hell in blue-green hair, blasting through a recorder solo before chucking the instrument offstage.

Cyndi Lauper performs at Rod Laver Arena, April 2, 2025.Credit: Martin Philbey

The crowd are in tulle skirts, glitter and colourful wigs, which are on sale in the foyer – the money goes to her charity, Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Rights.

Tonight is supposedly part of Lauper’s farewell tour, and she’s going out on top. She still has a voice like a box of crayons, bright, messy, and expressive. She uses everything, with soaring vibrato, sometimes audibly out of breath, imprecise and alive. The set is ’80s-heavy, leaning most on her ’83 debut She’s So Unusual, with some middle-of-the-road ’90s stuff and, to my delight, the song she did for The Goonies thrown in.

It’s a talky night. “It’s not just a bang-bang show,” she says unapologetically in her irresistible Brooklyn drawl (“It’s a paww-deee!”). She tells us about family, the cousin who had a pigeon coop on her roof, the women who raised her and the way they’d cut up old clothes and make something brand new with them.

She does the same with her art, of course. Many of her songs are written by others but she makes them utterly her own. She tells us she recorded I Drove All Night, written for Roy Orbison, because there were no songs on the radio about women driving. “When you get in the car and you can drive anywhere you freakin’ want, that’s a power song.”

Tonight is supposedly part of Lauper’s farewell tour, and she’s going out on top.Credit: Martin Philbey

She cycles through about half-a-dozen costume changes, each with a different hair colour: sparkly, shoulder-padded jackets, asymmetrical suits, underwear on the outside, a floor-length Norma Desmond number, a red jacket with a bright yellow wig. “I tried to dress up faw ya,” she says. As this outfit’s designer Christian Siriano told her: “The gays want glamour.”

For the evergreen Time After Time, Melbourne’s Tones and I joins for a duet that’s like every wedding dance floor you’ve ever been on: messy and beautiful. And she delivers True Colours flawlessly, standing on a small satellite stage in the middle of the arena with a long rainbow scarf metres in the air.

For the finale, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, she’s joined by The Veronicas, who sink into the background in a stage designed in polka-dot tribute to artist Yayoi Kusama.

Even this, her signature tune, is a cover of a late-’70s pop-punk number, sung by a man, but I defy you to listen to that original and think of it as anything less than a sketch for Lauper to colour in and make something wonderful, defiant and punch-the-air fun.
Reviewed by Will Cox

JAZZ
Matthew Ottignon’s Volant ★★★★
The Jazzlab, April 4

Matthew Ottignon’s latest album was conceived during a period of unusual calm for the composer-saxophonist. Back in Sydney after years of touring and performing in other people’s bands, Ottignon finally found time to let his own creativity take flight. That idea of flight – and the freedom it embodies – resonates throughout the album, aptly titled Volant.

Composer and saxophonist Matthew Ottignon.Credit: Greg Sheehan

His current quartet has now adopted Volant as a band name, and it’s the perfect moniker for an outfit that can glide and soar as naturally as a flock of birds. One of the tunes they played at Jazzlab on Friday night (Murmuring) was inspired by the flight of starlings, moving through the sky like an undulating cloud and capable of sudden, instinctive changes of direction. Swift, beating pulsations from Lauren Tsamouras’ piano, Hannah James’ bass and Hayley Chan’s drums created a sense of propulsion and uplift as Ottignon’s sax hovered, then ascended over a fast-moving landscape.

Rolling and Circling exuded a similar energy, though with a more open, expansive feel. Ottignon’s full-bodied tenor swept in circles over the rhythm section’s turbulent sea, surging with soulful intensity before the waves unexpectedly settled and the sea grew calm.

Other tunes demonstrated the group’s ability to evoke atmosphere through subtlety and nuance. Circular Breathing opened with a whisper of brushes on cymbals, arco bass and ghostly overtones from Ottignon’s sax; Naturis conjured an air of mystery via brooding chord changes and an unhurried, rolling sway.

But this is a band that also knows how to groove – even over odd meters and fitful rhythms. Rocky Lux saw the ensemble strutting breezily in a Latin-tinged 7/4; Bilpin set up an exuberant canter that bubbled with vitality; and on the final tune (Jetsetters), the quartet hopscotched nimbly across a stop-start pulse with playful precision, their visible delight radiating outwards and becoming an invisible current on which we, too, could take flight.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

DANCE
Poesis and The Bastard ★★★
Dancehouse, Carlton, until April 5

The latest Dancehouse double bill features two works that differ wildly in their commitments to technique and virtuosity, but which together make for an invigorating and provoking evening of dance theatre.

Gabriella Imrichova’s cheekily titled The Bastard aims to challenge expectations with a surprising blend of theatre, performance art and only little dance. It’s a bit punk and a bit mongrel, but consistently funny.

This is a performance in two halves. First, we get a dry parody of non-dance, a somewhat dated form of experimental dance in which movement is withheld: it’s slow and repetitious and very low effort.

Either side of this performance, Imrichova addresses the audience, simulating apprehension about its reception: about whether it fits the context and whether it works as dance. It’s mischievous but not without charm.

Then follows a wild rant about art and novelty. There were a few walkouts on opening night, but that’s surely a victory for an artist who declares that trolling is a creative practice.

Prue Lang’s Poesis sits more securely within the conventions of contemporary dance. It’s a duet in which the two dancers generate striking compositions from subtle contrasts in form, line and intention.

Both performers are extraordinary. Benjamin Hancock, with his strange elongations, projects a kind of alien grace. And Tara Jade Samaya – returning to Melbourne after a long absence – is all strength and control.

Poesis moves through various phases, the dancers arranging themselves in ways that are unexpected but visually satisfying, mixing traditions and vocabularies, folding themselves together and even improvising with a game of follow the leader.

The costumes exaggerate the effects of counterpoint in interesting ways. Samaya appears in boxing gear while Hancock is in pointe shoes: there are luridly patterned unitards, absurd heels, lots of activewear and some deluxe furry boots.

It’s a little cerebral but nonetheless attractive. Imrichova has the freshness of a new voice, but Lang brings the more serious engagement with contemporary dance and its possibilities.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

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