Running from 6–9 June, the National Celtic Folk Festival spreads across more than 10 venues throughout town, with over 60 acts covering everything from late-night trad sessions to world premiere theatre, heavy athletics, immersive storytelling and an awful lot of mulled wine.

At this kind of spectacular event you can stumble out of an intimate acoustic set into a pipe band competition without walking more than a block.

National Celtic Folk Festival

• 6–9 June, Portarlington, Victoria
• Full program and tickets at nationalcelticfestival.com

Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.

 

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Food, sport and family

On the food front, Irish chef Declan McGovern is running a kitchen serving traditional Irish cooking, including a full Irish breakfast and old-fashioned cook-offs. The weekend market brings local artisans and producers together in one spot, and the foreshore sets the backdrop for the whole thing, with waterfront views, winter air and a warm glass of something to take the edge off.

Sport has a surprisingly prominent role too. Traditional heavy games, including a world championship play-off, run alongside hurling, one of Ireland’s oldest and most exhilarating sports. Pipe and drum bands take over various points throughout the weekend, with massed performances, competitions and workshops filling out the schedule.

For families, Balla Wiin – Spirit of Country is an interactive shadow play experience grounded in Wadawurrung Country traditions, the kind of thing that genuinely works for both kids and adults.

A visiting tall ship is also moored up for the weekend and open for exploration.

The festival has quietly built one of the more interesting theatre and storytelling programs in the regional calendar too.

Acclaimed performer Michael Veitch presents HELL SHIP, a personal account of survival and migration that has been generating serious buzz ahead of its Portarlington run.

A brand new Australian work, Never Always Ever Was, gets its world premiere here, developed through the festival’s ongoing creative partnership with C21 Theatre in Ireland.

The music!

The Australian music contingent is equally well-considered.

Neo-trad outfit Amaidí are reliably explosive in a live setting, while award-winning band Austral do something genuinely distinctive, weaving didgeridoo and driving fiddle into Celtic-influenced sounds that feel unmistakably Australian.

Hat Fitz & Cara bring a raw, roots-driven energy shaped by years of international touring, and Dan Musil pushes things further still with a blues-infused take on Celtic sounds that shouldn’t work as well as it does.

Crowd favourites Claymore, Double Shot Maggie and The Maes are back alongside a strong showing from emerging artists including Lucy Wise, Maggie Carty, Out of Hand and Homebru.

The international lineup is worth the trip alone.

Connemara siblings Séamus and Caoimhe are among the most talked-about acts in Irish folk right now.

The pair took out Best Emerging Artists at the RTÉ Folk Awards and followed it up with a run on Riverdance’s 25th anniversary tour in New York.

They’re joined by Dublin’s Saltaire, whose contemporary folk sound sits somewhere between haunting and cinematic, and The Bath Street Boys, a rising Irish trad outfit bringing serious technical firepower to the stage.

From Scotland, harp and fiddle duo Rebecca Hill & Charlie Stewart offer something more refined and exploratory, while Amy Henderson & Luc McNally bring a deeply expressive, heritage-rooted sound to the mix.

Then there’s Astro Bloc, a new-wave act that treats Celtic tradition less as a rulebook and more as a launching pad, genre-bending in ways that actually work.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to get out of the city this long weekend, this is probably it.

For more information, head here.

This article was made in partnership with National Celtic Folk Festival. 

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June is also peak time for intimate fringe shows and independent dance pieces in smaller venues across the city, giving audiences a more raw and exciting experience. Whether you’re after emotional storytelling, cutting-edge movement, or spectacular production values, catching a show in Melbourne this winter is one of the best ways to soak up the city’s world-class arts culture.

Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.

The Glass Menagerie

 

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• Until 5 Jun
• Southbank Theatre

The final performances of Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Tennessee Williams’ haunting memory play are happening this June.

Alison Whyte plays Amanda Wingfield, the heartbreakingly hopeful mother clinging to the past while trying to control the future, with Tim Draxl as her son Tom, teetering between obligation and escape. MTC’s first staging of the work in two decades, this is an intimate portrait of a family held together by illusion and slowly falling apart under its weight.

Waitress

 

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• Until 19 July
• Her Majesty’s Theatre

The Australian premiere of Broadway’s smash-hit musical continues its Melbourne season with Natalie Bassingthwaighte as Jenna, a small-town waitress and expert pie maker longing to escape her rocky marriage.

Featuring an uplifting score by Grammy winner Sara Bareilles and direction by Tony winner Diane Paulus, this feel-good story of resilience, friendship and second chances is brought to life by a trailblazing female-led creative team. Gabriyel Thomas, Mackenzie Dunn, Rob Mills and John Waters round out the cast in a production that has been packing the house since May.

House of Rot: Grey Gardens

 

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• 18-20 Jun
• Malthouse

Paul Capsis and Adam Noviello bring a cabaret invocation of Big and Little Edie to the Merlyn for three nights only. Created by Dino Dimitriadis and Victoria Falconer for Green Door Theatre Company, this is part unholy communion, part elegy in heels, centred on two eccentric recluses living in a house slowly falling in on itself.

Capsis (Cabaret) and Noviello (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) are two of Australia’s most magnetic actors – together they promise something between devotion and derangement. Beauty fades, madness sings.

Pride and Prejudice (*sort of)

 

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• From 18 June
• Athenaeum Theatre

The Olivier Award-winning musical comedy sensation makes its Australian premiere. Five women take on every role in Isobel McArthur’s irreverent but affectionate retelling of Austen’s most iconic love story, set to pop classics including Young Hearts Run Free, Will You Love Me Tomorrow and You’re So Vain.

Amy Lehpamer, Zoe Ioannou, Kaori Maeda-Judge, Ruby Shannon and Teo Vergara star in a production that has been described as a joy-bomb of heart, humour and unstoppable energy. Melbourne gets it first before it heads to the Sydney Opera House.

Bangarra Dance Theatre: Sheltering

 

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• 18-27 June
• Arts Centre Melbourne

Bangarra’s 2026 national tour arrives in Melbourne with Sheltering, a triple bill of works that honour the company’s past while looking to the future. Keeping Grounded explores our energetic connection to ancestral land, Brown Boys is a moving meditation on First Nations masculinity, and Sheoak draws on the resilience and deep cultural meaning of its namesake tree.

Led by artistic director Frances Rings, the company arrives at Arts Centre Melbourne fresh off being awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance at the Venice Biennale – the first Australian and first First Nations company to receive the honour.

Australian Ballet: Romeo and Juliette

 

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• 6-16 June
• Regent Theatre

John Cranko’s beloved adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy returns in all its sweeping, heartbreaking beauty. Prokofiev’s dramatic score powers the fierce family clashes and the luminous flare of young love, while Jürgen Rose’s opulent medieval Verona contrasts the heavy splendour of the older generation with the billowing fabrics of doomed teenage romance.

Performed with Orchestra Victoria, this is one of the great narrative ballets of the 20th century and among the Australian Ballet’s most defining works.

Australian Ballet: Copland Dance Episodes

 

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• 23 June – 2 July
• Regent Theatre

See the Australian premiere of New York City Ballet resident choreographer Justin Peck’s first full-length ballet – and the first time the work has been performed outside New York. 30 dancers perform across 22 episodes set to Aaron Copland’s vivid music, with set designs by Choctaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson and costumes by former NYC Ballet dancer Ellen Warren.

A joyful explosion of colour, athleticism and contemporary energy performed with Orchestra Victoria, this marks one of the Australian Ballet’s final productions at the Regent Theatre before its return to the refurbished Ian Potter State Theatre.

The post The best dance and theatre shows on in Melbourne this June appeared first on Beat Magazine.

Vika & Linda

• Fri 5 Jun – The Cube, Wodonga
• Sat 6 Jun – Riverlinks Eastbank, Shepparton
• Sun 7 Jun – The Capital, Bendigo
• Sat 13 Jun – Recital Centre, Melbourne
• Thu 18 Jun – Town Hall, Kyneton
• Fri 19 Jun – WPACC, Wangaratta
• Thu 25 Jun – Town Hall, Horsham
• Fri 26 Jun – Her Majesty’s Theatre, Ballarat
• Sat 27 Jun – Arts Centre, Frankston
• Fri 10 Jul – PRACC, South Morang
• Sat 11 Jul – Play House, Geelong
• Sun 12 Jul – The Round, Nunawading
• Wed 29 Jul – Drum Theatre, Dandenong
• Thu 30 Jul – Bunjil Place, Narre Warren
• Fri 31 Jul – Burrinja Cult Ctr, Upwey
• Fri 7 Aug – WGAC, Warragul
• Sat 8 Aug – Forge Theatre, Bairnsdale
• Fri 21 Aug – PAC, Hamilton
• Sat 22 Aug – Lighthouse Theatre, Warrnambool
• Fri 4 Sep – Clocktower Ctr, Moonee Ponds
• Sat 5 Sep – Union Theatre, Wonthaggi
• Sun 6 Sep – Town Hall, Queenscliff

Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.

 

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When you look at that track record, it may make Vika’s reaction to the nomination seem strange:

“There’s probably a lot more people who deserve to be on there before us.”  Linda adds, “Just to be recognised for our contribution is really lovely. I didn’t realise that there were only 14 women inducted into the Hall of Fame. So for this year to have lots more women involved is really another bonus.” 

Their disbelief at being included is sweetly humble, yet strange given their beyond-impressive track record, which continues with their upcoming studio album, Where Do You Come From?

“Linda’s always said, we always look forward, never back,” explains Vika, “And it’s always, what are we going to make next?” Our responsibility is to keep singing and to sing great songs. And never stop until we die.”

Nine albums, however, is a lot. Inspiration can wane, no matter what your situation may be. For Vika & Linda, an invitation to the Whitsundays Songwriter Festival, a yearly event that invites a select group of songwriters to collaborate and perform on Ngaro and Gia land in North Queensland, sparked confidence and inspiration. 

“The great thing about the Whitsong Fest was that it was just the right bunch of people who had come together. The freedom of that was really great for Vika in particular, because we aren’t normally great with people we don’t know. Sitting down and trying to lay your deepest feelings with a total stranger was weird. But for some reason, this one worked. We wrote eight songs, and four of them are on this record,” explains Linda. 

The duo were in impressive company at the festival, working with songwriters like Mark Sholtez, Francesca de Valence, and the one-and-only Toni Childs. “She was like Renee Geyer on steroids,” mentions Vika, “She was very intimidating. She comes in and goes, ‘I want to know who you are, who you really are.’ We’d only sat down for 10 minutes and she goes ‘Sing. Because I want to hear who you are.’ We sang a gospel song, and she goes, ‘No, that’s not who you are.’ She really made us get back in touch with our roots.”

This experience and songwriting session helped Vika & Linda create what they explain as their most personal work to date. “Our motivation is not to sing bullshit,” explains Vika. “We’re not really afraid anymore to say what we want to say and sing songs we want to sing.” Linda adds, “This album is about life. It’s about birth, death and everything in between. In the past, we were always afraid to tell our own stories; this time, the motivation was that we got to do it ourselves.”

The duo’s track record of songwriting collaborations reads like a greatest hits of Australia’s finest. Starting in The Black Sorrows, the sisters have written songs with names like Paul Kelly and Kasey Chambers, so it’s understandable why there may be some trepidation about songwriting on their own.

The record explores themes like identity, ancestry, motherhood, ageing, grief, and joy, and is a snapshot of the current situation for specific members of our community, according to Linda. “If you’re interested in identity and where you are in Australia and what Australia looks like right now for 55-year-old women, this is a really good record for you. 55-year-old women who aren’t white, I should add.”

Vika & Linda’s ninth studio album, Where Do You Come From?, will be out Friday, June 5th, and the duo will be performing at the Melbourne Recital Centre on June 13th with their band The Bullettes.

Tickets are available now.

The post “Our motivation is not to sing bullshit”: Vika & Linda are getting personal on their ninth album appeared first on Beat Magazine.

The Pride Month Stargayzing Show is a special presenter-led planetarium experience running every Saturday in June at Scienceworks’ Melbourne Planetarium in Spotswood.

Pride Month Stargayzing Show at Scienceworks

• Saturdays 6, 13, 20 and 27 June, 3pm to 3:45pm
• Melbourne Planetarium, Scienceworks, 2 Booker Street, Spotswood
• Tickets here

Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here. 

 

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The Pride Month Stargayzing Show takes visitors on a fulldome journey through the night sky, exploring LGBTQIA+ stories hidden in the constellations, planets and other corners of our solar system. Each 45-minute session is presenter-led, meaning no two shows are identical since the content shifts depending on which stars and planets are actually visible that night.

The show runs four Saturdays across the month, on 6, 13, 20 and 27 June, with sessions from 3pm to 3:45pm. Tickets are affordable across the board, with concession and under-16 pricing both sitting at $10, making it a solid option for a wide range of visitors.

Tickets are available now through the Museums Victoria website. Members get in for $8, so it’s worth checking whether a membership makes sense if you’re planning to visit more than once across the month.

For more information, head here.

This article was made in partnership with Museums Victoria. 

The post Scienceworks is exploring LGBTQIA+ stories in space every Saturday this June appeared first on Beat Magazine.

The gothic rock heavyweights, known for blockbuster hits like Bring Me to Life, My Immortal, and recent smashes Afterlife and Who Will You Follow, will deliver a career-spanning set that spans two decades of anthems.

Evanescence 2027 Australia Tour

• Friday 5 March – RAC Arena, Perth
• Sunday 7 March – AEC Arena, Adelaide
• Tuesday 9 March – Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne
• Friday 12 March – Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney
• Tuesday 16 March – Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane
• Saturday 20 March – Spark Arena, Auckland

Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.

Following their 2025 support slot on Metallica’s M72 World Tour and 20th anniversary Fallen celebrations, this headline run marks a full-scale return to arenas. Presented by Triple M in Australia, the tour promises the band in their full live glory with powerful visuals and emotional intensity.

With Sanctuary fresh in the charts and the band riding high off multiple #1 rock singles, fans can expect a dynamic show blending nu-metal energy, haunting ballads and new material. Presales kick off next week, with Vodafone, Mastercard, Artist, Sanctuary pre-order, Live Nation and Spotify presales running from Tuesday 9 June before general tickets drop on Friday 12 June at 1pm.

This tour cements Evanescence’s enduring status as one of rock’s most influential acts. Amy Lee and the band continue to evolve while staying true to the dark, dramatic sound that made them global superstars. Limited tickets are expected to move fast for what will be one of the biggest rock tours of 2027.

For fans who grew up on Fallen or discovered them more recently, this is the chance to experience Evanescence at their absolute peak in proper arena settings.

Tickets to see Evanescence on their 2027 Australia tour go on sale on sale Friday 12 June at 1pm local time. Get them here.

The post Evanescence announce massive 2027 Australia and New Zealand arena tour appeared first on Beat Magazine.

The show is the result of years of research at the intersection of art and science, examining how landscapes been altered by colonisation, urban sprawl and climate pressures. At the beginning of their research in Dandenong, Bae and Lawler also consulted with Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation and the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (Cranbourne), grounding the work in the specific ecological history of the region.

Primary Succession – Dandenong

• Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre, Dandenong
• 6 June – 15 August
• Wednesday to Saturday, 11am–3pm
• Opening event: 6 June, 6pm — includes a Welcome to Country by Bunurong Elder Uncle Mark Brown, a music performance by Ai Yamamoto, and an in-conversation with the artists and curator
• Register here

Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here. 

 

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Inside the gallery, visitors move through sculptural forms, immersive installations, and atmospheric environments built from lighting, sound and experimental materials, including mineral and crystalline elements that slowly shift over the course of the show.

Rather than hitting audiences over the head with doom and gloom, the work leans into regeneration: ecosystems rebuilding, biological and technological systems learning from past damage, and natural processes quietly reasserting themselves.

The grey-headed flying fox threads through the exhibition as a kind of guide. Often misunderstood, these animals are actually critical to ecosystem health. As pollinators and seed dispersers, their survival is deeply tied to the regeneration of entire landscapes. Bae and Lawler frame them as emblems of adaptation and shared survival in an uncertain future.

Alongside the gallery show, a companion public artwork titled Field of Future Ecologies will be installed in Harmony Square in central Dandenong. An illuminated glass cube housing growing crystal formations, the work lets passersby watch slow natural processes play out in real time. As the sun goes down, ultraviolet light transforms the cube, turning it into a shifting field of colour.

Greater Dandenong City Council’s Arts Curator Dr Miriam La Rosa said the exhibition offers a way of thinking about ecological change that moves beyond pure loss. Rather than dwelling solely on what’s gone, Primary Succession frames regeneration as something ongoing, quiet, collective and continuously unfolding.

Primary Succession runs from 6 June to 15 August at Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre, with the opening event on 6 June at 6pm.

For more information, head here.

This article was made in partnership with Arts in Greater Dandenong. 

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Sonically,  it’s a narratorial undulation from shifting driving house beats and euphoric electronic production to melting piano riffs and LINA’s abyssal melodies and lyrics. Weaving the eclecticism of the album together is a consistent and velvety-warm undercurrent – a musical representation of the care applied to the macro and the micro.

Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here. 

With two singles already shared – the journeying Can You Feel the Rhythm and the crescendoing anthem Still So Young – the full album is set for release on Friday, 26 June.

The album is being pressed onto vinyl too, with pre-orders now open for a lucky-dip range of colours. To celebrate its release, Lina is hosting an intimate and unique listening experience at Tender in Brunswick on Wednesday 17 June.

 

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It won’t be your standard listening party, though. She will be facilitating a 30-minute gentle yoga session that will flow into a meditative absorption of the full album. The evening will pair these two passions for LINA in a collaboration inspired by the connections she has formed over the years.

“My friend Lily and I had run a Sofar Sounds gig where I live-soundtracked ambient music to her teaching a yoga class,” states LINA. “The seed was planted in that moment, and since then, I’ve become a yoga teacher.

“With the softness, warmth and slowness in a lot of these songs, it’s going to be a great way to showcase the album as well as integrate both of those worlds. We exist in a fast-paced attention economy where we are constantly giving, and so I hope this event can offer people an opportunity to slow down, be with their breath and themselves and enjoy my music.

“I couldn’t think of a better way to premiere the album than through both of my great current loves: movement and music.” The sound of the album lends itself suitably to such a listening experience – one that has come about through the pursuit of authenticity.

“As my taste continues to expand, I’ve started to integrate ingredients from other people’s songs that I really like into my own music,” LINA outlines. “And the chill, dancey, housey tracks are something that I’d wanted to make for ages, but I didn’t really know how until it happened.

“For some of those songs, I actually used this program called Splice, which allows you to sift through different samples. Using that as a launch pad was really creatively enabling. You can almost hear the fun that I’m having in the Can You Feel the Rhythm and Defrost (ur soul).”

As a whole project, she danced between engaging with the individual songs in their uniqueness and constructing the broader idea as a whole.

“I think I had to zoom out enough to see that it was going to eventually be a whole album, but then in order to get each song done, I had to zoom in and focus on it track by track, recognising what was most important to me in the moment.

“When I was sitting down to piece the body of work together, it all became this harmonious revealing of a thread – a through line that rather unintentionally flows throughout. 

 

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“During the whole process, I’ve been very intentional about the lightness and the darkness in the album – expressing a mid-twenties existentialism paired with falling in love, falling out of love, realising you’ve got work to do, all the while putting myself in the shoes of my friends who are mothers.

“The album weaves all that love, grief and joy, exploring the highs and lows, through upbeat moments as well as darker melancholy moments.”

Ultimately, much like the themes LINA has explored throughout SUCKER, the project has involved so much giving. It’s only been since finishing it and listening back to it that a reciprocity has emerged.

“It’s taken a lot from me, but it’s now starting to give a lot back. When I sit and listen to it, I realise the hard work is paying off, and that I’m able to let go of past chapters.”

As much a process of catharsis as an emergent expression of creativity, SUCKER is a serpentine journey through the possibilities of humanhood. It acts as an honest and evocative introduction to LINA, ahead of what will likely be a life spent in music.

SUCKER will be out on 26 June. For tickets to LINA’s debut album listening party on 17 June at Tender, head here. 

The post LINA fuses light and dark on shimmering debut: ‘It all became this harmonious revealing of a thread’ appeared first on Beat Magazine.

The City of Melbourne’s popular free event returns to Harbour Esplanade with over 130 performers, including fire artists, musicians and roving entertainers, promising a fiery escape for locals and visitors alike.

Firelight Festival 2026

• Free event running Friday 3 to Sunday 5 July at Harbour Esplanade, Docklands
• New laser and fountain spectacular plus fire performances each night
• Glow-in-the-dark pickleball, silent discos, 30 food trucks and venue specials

Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.

 

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This year’s program turns up the spectacle with a brand-new large-scale laser and light show featuring 20 choreographed water fountains and 30 laser projectors spanning nearly 90 metres across the waterfront. Synchronised to music, the installation will light up the harbour twice nightly at 6.30pm and 8.30pm, set against the striking Echo installation of illuminated marine buoys.

Festivalgoers can also enjoy glow-in-the-dark pickleball tournaments at Docklands Community Hub Reserve, silent discos at MPavilion, and plenty of family-friendly activities.

30 food trucks will serve up winter warmers, from s’mores and hot chocolate to hearty street food, while local bars and restaurants offer special deals including fire-themed cocktails, two-for-one drinks and discounted dining packages.

Presented by the City of Melbourne with support from Development Victoria, Firelight Festival is expected to draw over 100,000 people across the weekend, breathing fresh energy into Docklands during the school holidays. With AFL games, waterfront views and plenty of hospitality options nearby, it’s the perfect excuse for a full winter night out.

Lord Mayor Nick Reece described it as Melbourne’s brightest winter event, while Tourism and Events portfolio head Cr Mark Scott highlighted its role in keeping the city vibrant year-round. Whether you’re chasing flames, lasers or just good times, Firelight Festival delivers a much-needed dose of warmth and wonder to kick off the July school break.

For more information about Firelight Festival, head here.

The post Firelight Festival returns to ignite Docklands with lasers, lights and live music this winter appeared first on Beat Magazine.

Over the years, the tribute has toured several times. Yet the upcoming Melbourne show  marks its Australian debut, commemorating the 10th anniversary of Vega’s passing. Why  now? 

Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here. 

“Why not bring it to Australia now?” Lunch challenges. “Usually in Europe, I do it with  Mark Rutano, but doing it with Andrew brings a different, sexier, more sinister side to that we’re doing. And of course, doing [the So Real it Hurts] shows with Tex Perkins, a rock and roll hero. I cannot wait. And also, I love coming to Australia, let’s face that.” 

There is a comparison to be made between New York and Melbourne — both locales which never sleep, one eye open to subversion. Aesthete cities such as these are often the most honest. They do not shield their inhabitants from the harsher realities of urban  life. Rather, their counter-cultures are a sponge drenched with the violence of the street. 

“Anybody that grew up in a former penal colony probably has something to give that is not based on that perversity,” Lunch reasons. “Hence the sensitivity of someone like  Rowland S. Howard … Yet also the brutality of someone like the Beast of Bourbon[’s] Tex  Perkins.” 

Lunch herself has long shared an affinity with Melbourne’s underground lineage. 

In 1982,  she collaborated with Rowland S. Howard on a reinterpretation of Lee Hazlewood and  Nancy Sinatra’s Some Velvet Morning. Howard played the strung-out narrator, grumbling through the haze of a hangover; Lunch, the enigmatic “Phaedra” figure — destructive and  seductively vivifying all at once, as much an exposé on stage as the mythological  theatricality and constructed aesthetic the character itself implies. For her, contradictions  have never cancelled each other out. 

There is something distinctly New York about Lydia Lunch as New York is distinctively her.  These sensibilities are shared with fellow citizens Valerie Solanas and Martha Rosler: all of  whom are uninterested in sanitising experience. Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)  feels spiritually aligned with Lunch’s cookbook The Need to Feed, with both assessing the  kitchen as a performative space loaded with social meaning. 

Given this mutual attitude, it  is unsurprising that at age 16 Lunch found a home in Suicide and the Big Apple.  

“Suicide [was] the first concert I saw after running away the second time to New York,”  Lunch recalls. “I’m like, ‘I’m in. These are my peeps.’ And I was younger than Martin Rev’s  son. They kind of adopted me at that point. And he would give me vitamins, which would  make me turn red like niacin.” 

The Suicide material shares thematic terrain with Lunch’s own work and, as a  consequence, becomes newly forthright through her female perspective. Her covers  become a means of inserting herself into the narrative and continuing it; freedom rather  than mere imitation for someone who once described herself as “chronically misunderstood”. Frankie Teardrop in particular takes on a different power in her hands. 

“I think my version is even more intense than the original,” Lunch declares. “After all, there are very intense females as well, and we have intense relations, we have intense  feelings, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be expressed, even if they were originally  written by a man … There is so much room for me to proselytise my own words.” 

Lunch’s reputation precedes her. She has long been labelled a diva, aggressive,  obnoxious; a self-avowed “verbal boxer”. Yet why shouldn’t she be expressive, angry? 

“I’m not professing a fucking dogma philosophy,” she says. “I’m proposing a variety of possibilities. I’m not a solutionist. I am here to propose what the problem is … I am rap without the beat. The beat is what I’m going to give you with my tongue.” 

Lydia Lunch encapsulates the resonance of the spoken, sung and screamed word — art’s  ability to articulate feelings we ourselves do not know how to. The sentiments of Suicide and her own work remain as relevant as they are united. To witness the raw power of  them first-hand is a gift Melbourne is lucky enough to receive.

For more information on Lydia Lunch, head here.

The post Lydia Lunch: ‘I am rap without the beat. The beat is what I’m going to give you with my tongue’ appeared first on Beat Magazine.

So, of course it was John who pioneered the symphonic rock concert – which he did when he partnered with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for a major tour of Australia in 1986.

MSO: The Music of Elton

• Thursday 1 to Sunday 4 October
• Hamer Hall
• Tickets on sale here

Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here. 

Elton John first toured Australia in 1971, and he returned once every few years up until his retirement from touring in 2023. But the 1986 tour was John’s biggest run of shows around Australia. He performed for three-and-a-half hours every night, backed by his band during the first half, and joined by the 80-piece MSO during the second half, with John dressed in a Mozart wig.

The setlist included songs from John’s then-recent albums, Ice on Fire, Leather Jackets, and Breaking Hearts, as well as fan favourites from his back catalogue, including the climactic closing sequence of Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, Candle in the Wind, Burn Down the Mission, Your Song, and Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.

A recording taken at the Sydney Entertainment Centre on 14 December 1986 was released as the live album and concert film, Live in Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, in 1987.

It’s now 40 years since the tour, and the MSO are marking the anniversary with a series of shows at Hamer Hall this October. Longtime John Farnham collaborator Chong Lim is the show’s musical director, while Jason Dean will be on lead vocals and piano, backed by his band, Superband.

Prudence Davis, who has held the position of principal flute with the MSO since 1980, was part of the original tour. She has nothing but the fondest memories of the six-week stint travelling the country and performing with Sir Elton.

“It was one of the happiest times for the whole orchestra,” Davis says. “It was probably the best tour that we’ve been on.”

Film composer and former rock keyboardist James Newton Howard composed the arrangements for the tour. The MSO rehearsed the songs in Melbourne before flying to Sydney to pick up John.

“We stayed on the plane and Elton got on the plane and then we flew to Brisbane because that’s where the first performances were going to be,” Davis says. “And he came around the whole cabin and said hello, introduced himself to each one of us.”

By 1986, Elton John was already guaranteed a place in pop music history. But he was extraordinarily nervous about the collaboration with the MSO.

“He’s a perfectionist, of course,” says Davis, “and he was very intimidated playing with a symphony orchestra. I don’t know why he felt that way, but that’s just him.”

John’s nerves didn’t stifle his gregarious spirit, however.

“The night of the first performance, we had a dinner provided for us. But before the dinner, he called each of us into a big green room and presented us each with a bottle of Moët et Chandon champagne, which in those days was a really big deal, and a handwritten card.”

 

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The MSO’s annual schedule now includes frequent collaborations with rock and pop acts – recent examples include the Hoodoo Gurus, Lime Cordiale, Birds of Tokyo, Electric Fields and Sigur Ros. But in 1986, a classical orchestra going on tour with a pop musician was a genuine novelty.

“It was the first venture into such a thing,” Davis says. “And so we took it up and it was just such a brave thing for the MSO to do, but it turned out to be so incredibly successful…”

“After that, a lot more [offers] came, but Elton was the first. And he took such care of us. After the gigs, maybe there’d be a bar somewhere and he’d turn up and he’d shout the bar and he’d buy all the drinks and bring in a whole lot of champagne. He was just very generous in that way. He was really looking after everybody.”

Find out more about the MSO’s The Music of Elton performances here.

This article was made in partnership with MSO. 

The post The MSO to celebrate 40 years since their history-making tour with Elton John: ‘It was probably the best tour we’ve been on’ appeared first on Beat Magazine.