There is something deeply reassuring about watching a young pop artist understand that an arena concert can be more than a procession of songs. It can have architecture, character, tension and emotion...

Some venues simply accommodate music. Others alter its temperature, both physical and emotional. Inside the intimate surrounds of Trinity Sessions, Ella Hooper’s Overnight Success found precisely th...

There is a uniquely dark kind of humour gay men have developed around catastrophe. It can be filthy, savage and magnificently inappropriate, arriving precisely when good manners suggest silence. Perha...

There is a delicious irony in Ella Hooper calling her new album Overnight Success . Few Australian musicians understand quite as intimately how misleading those two words can be. Hooper grew up publi...

Some families inherit money. Others inherit stories about who they are supposed to become. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman , the Loman family inherits expectation, a far more treacherous curre...

There was something almost architectural about Jason Derulo’s return to the Adelaide Entertainment Centre. Everything was built for maximum physical impact: bodies in motion, bass felt through the flo...

Nearly fourteen years to the day since I first saw Macy Gray perform at the Sydney Opera House, I found myself standing inside Adelaide’s Hindley Street Music Hall waiting for that voice again. Much h...

A chair, a microphone and a plush red rug. That was almost the entirety of the stage awaiting Julian Lage at Adelaide’s Dunstan Playhouse, and somehow anything more would have felt intrusive. Before L...

Some records seem to understand us differently once we have lived a little more. Waiting for the Day is one of them. Released when Australian pop was crowded with big personalities and even bigger c...

I remember, in the days after the September 11 terror attacks in 2001, Queen Elizabeth II offering a sentence that would eventually outlive the moment in which it was spoken: “Grief is the price we pa...

Ash Flanders’ Commentary understands something particularly uncomfortable about memory: it is rarely an impartial witness. We edit it, justify it, revisit it with information acquired years later an...

A voice can occupy a room, or it can alter the atmosphere within it. Maayan Licht’s does something stranger still. It rises with such startling clarity and freedom that, for a moment, you stop trying ...

There are concerts that impress, concerts that entertain, and then, very occasionally, an afternoon of music finds you at precisely the moment you need it. Lior’s intimate performance at Trinity Sessi...

There is a particular danger in singing Barbra Streisand. The notes are only half the problem. Streisand’s phrasing, wit, dramatic instinct and cultural identity are so embedded in the music that imit...

There is something quietly thrilling about entering a theatre with few expectations and leaving it wondering how many careers might have begun in front of you. Scotch College Adelaide’s production of...

There are famous people, there are icons, and then there are those rare figures who seem to exist somewhere outside ordinary celebrity altogether. Dita Von Teese belongs firmly to the latter. For dec...

Some stories refuse to stay where they were first told. Anastasia began life as a Disney animated film that became part of the childhood soundtrack for an entire generation. Walking into the Festiva...

Adelaide has always struck me as a city with a remarkable talent for hiding itself. We pass through its streets every day convinced we know them, yet beneath the familiar cafés, tramlines and sandston...

Katie Noonan has spent decades building a reputation as one of Australia's most fearless musical voices. Five ARIA Awards only tell part of that story. What has always separated Noonan from many of he...

Laufey has spent the last few years doing something that should have been impossible. In an era obsessed with immediacy, algorithms and fleeting attention spans, she has invited an entirely new genera...

For an album that arrived once, made its statement and never received a follow-up, ‘Bear Witness’ continues to speak with extraordinary clarity.

There are very few artists whose influence extends so far beyond music that they become woven into the cultural fabric itself. Barbra Streisand is one of those rare figures. Across more than six decad...

Reviewing of late, seems to revolve heavily around nostalgia. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing, and for some bands, nostalgia is enough. The songs exist as time-stamped pieces that forever r...

It is a curious thing how time reshapes our relationship with artists. When we are young, they often exist as distant stars whose songs drift through our homes almost by accident. Later, if we are for...

Live music has always functioned as a truth teller. It asks us to be present, to listen, to feel something alongside complete strangers. In an era increasingly captivated by artificial intelligence, e...

It is beyond comprehension to think that more than twenty years have passed since Madonna first delivered her tenth studio album, Confessions on a Dance Floor . Released globally on November 9, 2005,...

For more than six decades, The Beach Boys have existed as far more than a band. They became architects of a musical language. Their harmonies reshaped popular music, Pet Sounds permanently altered t...

Some performers become household names. Noni Hazlehurst became part of the household itself. Long before audiences marvelled at the emotional precision of her performances on stage or celebrated accl...

There could not have been a more fitting finale for the 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival than Postmodern Jukebox. In an era increasingly fascinated by speed, algorithms and artificial replication, the ...

Casey Donovan has spent more than two decades refusing to be confined by anyone else’s expectations. Tonight at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the proud Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti woman celebrated 22 ...

There is something quietly transformative about stepping beyond the familiar. To surrender yourself to a language you do not speak and a musical tradition you do not fully know demands an immense amou...

There are artists who inherit a legacy. Then there are artists who understand that the greatest way to honour it is to carve out one entirely their own. Mahalia Barnes has spent a lifetime doing exac...

There is a deliciously peculiar kind of electricity that fills a theatre when two artistic worlds surrender themselves to one another. It is not simply collaboration. It is trust. At Adelaide Cabaret ...

With her debut LP, Waters’ crafted songs that left listeners not just wanting to tear up the dance floor, but also to smile from ear to ear upon indulging in the euphoric sounds on glorious display.