This was published 6 months ago
The Human League put on a classic retro show – but it’s all about that one song
By John Shand, Peter McCallum, Daniel Herborn, Shamim Razavi, Michael Ruffles and James Jennings
The Human League
Enmore Theatre, March 8
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★½
The Human League didn’t so much emerge from the primordial soup of 1980s pop music as cook it up in the first place. The ingredients were all there in 1981 album Dare, the band’s creative and commercial peak, which they played in full before an appreciative crowd at the Enmore Theatre.
Frontman Philip Oakey led the time warp, aided and abetted by longstanding singers Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall, along with a sharply dressed band and gleaming white instruments.
Oakey and co cycled through several hits (and jackets) early, starting strongly with Mirror Man and breaking out the keytar for Tell Me When. The upbeat (Keep Feeling) Fascination and catchy Heart Like a Wheel were a reminder the band’s knack for a hook was no fluke.
The Human League’s Phil Oakey led the synth-pop time warp.Credit: Dave Simpson/WireImage
But it was Dare the crowd had come to hear, and they got it all: the good, the great and the merely OK. The album is well-structured to be played from start to finish live, as it comes out of the gate with three hit singles and climaxes with the world-conquering Don’t You Want Me.
The anthemic opener The Things That Dreams Are Made Of is an ambitious and euphoric mission statement; The Sound of the Crowd was fantastic.
The deeper cuts were more mixed. Do or Die was a fan favourite, and did pay off strongly after a bit of early meandering, while I Am the Law channelled Judge Dredd by way of David Bowie. Seconds borrowed more successfully from Gary Numan while recounting the Kennedy assassination.
‘The hair and make-up has changed, but the synth-pop is just as good as ever.’Credit: Martin Philbey
Everything the Human League has done is put in the shade by the classic Don’t You Want Me. Oakey has expressed mixed feelings about the mega-hit over the years, but showed no sign of ambivalence as he and Sulley delivered the twisted duet with gusto.
The non-Dare songs saved for encore, just quietly, were better. Being Boiled was menacing and moody, providing the best booming and portentous moments of the night, while Together in Electric Dreams was a soaring, uplifting finale.
The hair and make-up has changed, but the synth-pop is just as good as ever.
Yothu Yindi
City Recital Hall, March 8
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★★
Although it’s been 24 years since their last studio album and 33 since they became a household name in Australia thanks to the hit dance remix of Treaty, Northern Territory music collective Yothu Yindi are still going strong.
Bolstered by last year’s induction into the National Indigenous Music Awards Hall of Fame, the band is back on the road reminding us why they’re considered one of the country’s most groundbreaking acts thanks to a fusion of traditional Aboriginal song with rock and dance music.
It’s hard to predict who’ll show up on stage tonight since Yothu Yindi has counted close to 30 members over the years, so it’s heartening for the first face to emerge to be founding member Witiyana Marika, who leads off with a performance of stirring traditional songs accompanied by only yidaki (didgeridoo) and bilma (clap stick).
From there, the show is a steady build of momentum: first a four-piece band and impressive guest singer Rrawun Maymuru take to the stage for the dance-inflected Gapu; then Jodie Cockatoo Creed, a member since 1993, arrives to take the total count on stage to nine.
Beaming, dancing and singing her heart out throughout, Creed is an engaging performer who more than balances out the male energy on stage, urging us to celebrate International Women’s Day before delivering a fun lead vocal on Romance at Garma.
The group deftly mix timeless political messaging on songs like Mabo and Timeless Land with music that makes you want to move; something the mostly older crowd seem reluctant to do until a lone man starts dancing down the aisles, earning cheers and signalling to everyone else it’s OK to let loose.
That moment finally happens when a trio of the band’s best-known songs - Djäpana (Sunset Dreaming), Tribal Voice and Treaty - are played, the latter’s plea to “clap your hands and dance” thankfully taken literally as people rise to their feet and rush to the stage to joyously move to the music.
Although it’s disheartening to realise the political issues Yothu Yindi were raising in songs written decades ago still show little signs of resolution, tonight ends in the best way possible: as a celebration of an important Australian band and what can be achieved when different cultures come together in harmony.
Hannah Gadsby: Woof!
Roslyn Packer Theatre, until March 17
Reviewed by DANIEL HERBORN
★★★★
“A funny thing happened to me on the way to the gig” has long been a hack way for comedians to inject urgency into a tale, but in Hannah Gadsby’s hands, it rings true for once, setting the scene for an inspired last-minute rewrite of their show.
En route to Sydney from Adelaide, they suffered a panic attack in the Riverina town of Narrandera. They scrapped their planned show about grief for this freeform exploration of the different worries that swirled through their mind at that moment. The result is a somewhat messy, unruly thing; obviously embryonic but also obviously brilliant.
Hannah Gadsby’s bemused eye for an odd detail is a highlight of her latest show.Credit: Matt Crossick/Netflix
One train of thought candidly reflects on their fear that their Nanette-fuelled success is changing them. They fret they’re “too old to go viral” and lament their inability to fit in anywhere - not the posh hotels they frequent nor the cultural zeitgeist they inhabit.
With this self-doubt percolating, they decided to step out of their comfort zone for a night-time wander around the small town where they were staying. This choice leads to a well-meaning but misguided local giving Gadsby and their partner an impromptu tour of his property that ends in an anxiety-spiking farce.
It’s singular, deeply funny stuff, elevated as always by Gadsby’s bemused eye for an odd detail and exquisite phrase-turning: they lament being cursed by a “self-choking tongue” and chide their dog as a “pat slut”.
We then get the unexpected detour of this usually perfectionist wordsmith going off script with an audience Q and A. The questions are sometimes inane, but the responses shimmer with genius.
Gadsby even indulges a request for a favourite old anecdote about getting stuck on a waterslide at Magic Mountain. I don’t know what show Gadsby had planned, but I felt fortunate to see this one.
Superbloom
The Song Company
Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House, March 7
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½
A superbloom occurs when arid deserts burst riotously into flower after a rare combination of dryness, rain, warmth and conditions favourable to normally dormant seeds. Singer/composer Jane Sheldon saw one in Death Valley, California in 2016 and parked the impression as a potential musical idea.
That seed finally germinated in this concert, which explores the idea of aridity and lushness in connection with the creative mind, where ideas can lie fallow for years before blossoming, sometimes developing austere strength and sharp clarity in the process.
The concert begins with an unmistakeable flower, a beautifully balanced and buoyant performance by Susannah Lawergren, Amy Moore and Jessica O’Donoghue of an anonymous English 13th- century conductus, Flos regalis virginalis.
By contrast, As Water Bears Salt (1990) by Australian Michael Whiticker created a sense of alienated strangeness using three poems by Federico Garcia Lorca in crystalline, delicately fragile textures for voice and murmuring percussion, with suppressed eroticism just below the surface.
In the Song Company’s 40th year, this was a work from the archives that has stood the test of time.
Forgetting, by American composer Katherine Balch, also combined voices and percussion, and began with stopped utterances and sounds in a state of almost silent inarticulateness and hesitancy. The sonic fabric gradually melted into warm chords, the singers cleverly sliding from one to the other in new-found freedom.
Two madrigals by 16th-century composer Gesualdo explored the lush, almost meretricious, side of chromatic harmonic expression in luminous flowing, expertly pitched performances. Veni in Hortum Meum by UK-based composer James Weeks explored mellifluous polyphonic vocal lines that alighted on delicate dissonances like blown flowers on dry earth.
In Soliloquy, composer Rebecca Saunders, using gnomic text by Samuel Beckett, moved back to the arid end of the spectrum for an extended (slightly overextended) work built on single sustained notes from O’Donoghue as though “attempting speech, failing and going to song”.
In the medieval hymn O nobilissima viriditas by Hildegard of Bingen, bass-baritone Andrew O’Connor provided a falsetto drone that was progressively passed down to baritone Hayden Barrington and tenor Timothy Reynolds until it morphed into a background texture, resembling undulating water, for Sheldon’s work Blumenmuskel.
The words, by Rainer Maria Rilke, describe the “flower-muscle” of the sea anemone, opening the organism to light and fullness as a metaphor for fecundity.
With glass walls and wooden floor, the Opera House’s Utzon Room provided a splendid resonance chamber for the Song Company, giving the listener an intimate experience of their immaculate control, close attention to minute musical detail and glowing balance.
THEATRE
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
The Playhouse, March 6
Until March 30
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½
The rude mechanicals’ play-within-play, Pyramus and Thisbe, can sometimes seem a lame coda to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not here. Peter Evans’ Bell Shakespeare production ensures it crowns all the comedy that’s gone before.
Even Quince’s prologue, so often laboured, skips from the tongue of Imogen Sage on a barrage of laughs; laughs that rise to fever pitch as firstly Matu Ngaropo’s Pyramus and then Richard Pyros’ Thisbe engineer their suicides with an absurdly long sword.
Earlier, when the mechanicals rehearse, Evans has Ngaropo’s Bottom manipulating Ahunim Abebe’s Snug like a floppy puppet in teaching her how to play the lion, and it’s we who do the roaring. Such visual, rich and earthy comedy works a treat, whereas many lighter sources go astray. In fact, a lack of lightness is the abiding flaw, with much shouted anger that could be hissed instead.
Matu Ngaropo and Ahunim Abebe in A Midsummer Night’s DreamCredit: Brett Boardman
This also undermines the supreme lyricism of the verse, Dream joining Romeo and Juliet and Richard II in a hat trick of Shakespeare’s most lyrical plays. It’s verse that clouds the air with magic more than any costume, prop or set. The verse dances, and the rhymes sing – when allowed: there being less lightness here, there’s less magic, too.
Evans’ intent was otherwise, for he starts not with the sombre scene at Theseus’ court, but with Quince dispensing roles to Bottom and the rest. It’s a cute idea: Pyramus and Thisbe now top and tail the play, postponing our encounter with the glowering, murderous Egeus (also Ngaropo). All the actors have a busy time: seven cover more than 20 roles, with only Puck left to stand alone.
Richard Pyros as Thisbe and Ella Prince as Puck, a stern and solemn executor of Oberon’s every whim. Credit: Brett Boardman
Ella Prince’s Puck is no flighty sprite: instead a stern and solemn executor of Oberon’s every whim, and sharing platinum hair and black attire, the two appear cast from the same mould. Pyros seems at first an overly hysterical Oberon, but this is to find a voice that differentiates him from his Theseus. Once you adjust to his maniacal expression of caprice, he flourishes, casting spells with the rapture of the “little western flower/Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound” and “I know a bank where the wild thyme grows” speeches. These are rightly like moments when a violin soars above an orchestra in a concerto.
Prior to that, the first bickering exchanges between Oberon and Titania give no clue as to just how good Imogen Sage will be as the latter when she lights the stage with her lust for Bottom bedecked in his ass’s ears or personifies Titania’s unique blend of regality and weightlessness.
Any humour from the beleaguered mortal lovers – Abebe’s Hermia, Isabel Burton’s Helena, Laurence Young’s Lysander and Mike Howlett’s Demetrius – is left largely unmilked because they are made to be constantly angsty, unappealing people. Yes, they are a riddle to perform, but at the very least, we should sympathise more with Helena’s lovelorn plight.
As good as Ngaropo is as Egeus and hilarious as Pyramus, he just misses something of the quality that should make us all love Bottom so: his equanimity – even when he finds himself half-ass.
Designer Teresa Negroponte takes the many references to “the wood” (as in “forest”) literally and gives us the wall of a dilapidated barn for a set, one filled with cunning holes to come and go and beams about which Puck, Oberon and Titania might leap and fly. And all the while Max Lyandvert’s music chimes and tinkles as if driven by the wind rather than mere mortal intervention.
Angelique Kidjo
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, March 6
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★
The gap between band and audience may be mere centimetres, but until the crowd loosens up it might as well be the Indian Ocean between us. On one shore Kidjo and her band inhabit a vibrant, vital, sweaty dance hall, while on the other we gaze across at a cultural treasure, politely clapping between songs despite her exhortations to ignore the seats and dance.
The mighty surroundings of the Concert Hall are not easily overcome, and it doesn’t help that Kidjo reminds us her current tour has taken her from the Royal Albert Hall via our own grande dame and will end up at Carnegie Hall.
Angelique Kidjo and her band inhabit a vibrant, vital, sweaty dance hall.Credit: Teniola Komolafe
Exasperated at our restraint – a restraint born of a reverence for her contribution to the cultural permeation of (West) African music and to the movement that has evolved into Afrobeat – she chides us not to sing as though at a funeral.
The funeral finally ends and the party begins a third of the way into the set with her cover of Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime. This number – reappropriating, as it does, the cultural influences of the original – provides the link between the Western and African musical idiom and embodies Kidjo’s repeated calls for us to recognise our fundamental unity as a human family.
Time and again, in both lyrics and anecdotes, the appeal to our higher selves rings loud: the need for world peace in Choose Love, the danger of environmental catastrophe in Mother Nature, and the importance of the equality of women and men in her many stories all serve to elevate the night to something more than merely a party.
By the end of the night the crowd was finally on its feet.Credit: Teniola Komolafe
But hers is no dreary sermon, rather a joyous celebration of a 40-year career during which she has learnt a thing or two about getting even the most awkward audience into the groove. By the end of the night, we are all in that dance hall, unselfconsciously chanting along in full-throated Yoruba: Ashe e Mama Africa!
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