Belle Phoenix with Jeffery Wegener and Ken Gormly
+ Fabels
Thursday, 4 September 2025
Lazy Thinking, Dulwich Hill, NSW

WORDS: Ed Garland
PICTURES: Keith Claringbold

With her elfin appearance and cat’s eyes, Belle Phoenix, is part musical performer and part Factory girl, and surely would fitted into Andy Warhol’s Bohemian scene of 1966. Her sweet vocal has held her in good stead as a backing singer on other people’s albums, but she’s steadily built an impressive body of work with her own material.

Belle Phoenix’s music would work as a soundtracks to European movies (indeed, she did live in Europe for a time with Finland a home base.) It has hints of the spoken word spirit that pervaded the San Francisco of 1958 when alcohol-fuelled beat poetry nights were all the rage, long before anyone had an inkling of the Summer of Love that was lay ahead.  Yet, Belle can also sing like the angels and produce pure soprano bliss amidst her swamp darkness.

_{Happy Hour at The Gin Palace.}

The Gin Palace
+ Swaggerland
Factory Floor, Marrickville
Saturday 9 August 2025 

On a wet and miserable Sydney winter night, a cosy Factory Floor welcomed around 50 punters to  share an intimate musical experience. It was the long awaited gig to launch The Gin Palace’s online single “Petrichor” and album material from Bronwyn Eather’s latest project  Swaggerland 24.

First up The Gin Palace: A super group of players, with a pedigree drawn from, among others, Crow, Glide, and Copperline, they are a six-piece band and welcomed us with a short set of songs from upcoming album, “The Year of the Dog”. As it turns out, it was a set that was almost too big for this little stage, as The Gin Palace powered through an effortless and positive set of numbers with their unique, euphoric sound.

The Hives
+ Clamm
Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Wednesday, 23 July 2025

In these austere times, a full Enmore Theatre midweek sounds as unlikely as an affordable round of drinks in a Justin Hemmes-owned pub, but there you go: If the joint is full to the gills by 8pm on a Wednesday, it must be a Hives show.

Dunno about you but I’ve been following The Hives since they formed in Sweden in that eruption of Scandi Rock at the start of the ‘90s. The six albums are all top-shelf fun but the live experience had somehow evaded me. So, it’s off to the Enmore on a school night that I must go.

The urgings from people like The Celebrity Roadie not to miss this were still echoing in my tinnitus-scarred ears as I sipped my first beer. The Barmaid had even feigned interest by asking if the band would sing in English (not that she was going) but, really? It’s a self-evident truth that The Hives speak fluent Rock and Roll. Their dialect is universal.

John Cale
Xani
The Recital Hall, Sydney
July 10 2025

Do you remember that annoying kid in Year Nine at school? The one who used to badger you with his arrogance and who raved about obscure songs and artists to prove he was superior? He would rattle off their names like a machine gun, firing off the titles of B sides of obnoxious Rush singles and dropping the name of some obscure European prog band that had elves on the cover of their debut album. 

You, on the other hand, had discovered “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal” by Lou Reed and had proudly made the connection that it had Dick Wagner on guitar who was now playing with Alice Cooper. And the ever-annoying wanker classmate would declare that the Reed record that I had just bought at Ashwood's was "shit" because it was “commercial” before name-dropping someone called John Cale.

John Cale
City Recital Hall, Sydney
Thursday 10 July 2025

John Cale is 83 with a career as wide as it is long. Obscure nooks and crannies abound. You don't know what you're likely to get when you put your money down. If you have favourite songs, they're not guaranteed. Look, if "Waiting for my Man" ain't in the set, it will probably be the encore but that's the exception that proves the rule.

However, in a world of product, such uncertain content is rare and welcomed. Advertising for the show has certainly pointed to a career spanning retrospective performance and it kind of delivers but mostly doesn't. Cale's priority  here is to promote his latest album, "Poptical Illusion". Given his age, it might very well be his last. (Though evidence suggests he's determined to keep busy.)

The New Christs
The On and Ons
Marrickville Bowling Club, NSW
Friday, 6 June 2025

It’s fitting, in many ways, that the New Christs assaulted the beaches of Marrickville in Sydney’s Inner-Western Delta tonight on the 81^st anniversary of D-Day. Your correspondent on the frontline can report that no ammunition was spared in a fiery, two-set bracket show that was their second-last before an August tour of the UK and Europe.

The New Christs pulled a full-house on a cold Sydney Friday night and put on an intense performance that peeled the Copperart panels from the beloved Bowlo’s ceiling.