Live Review: Paul Dempsey, Nick Craft

The stubbly Nick Craft, formerly of ‘90s alt-rockers Sidewinder, played a solo acoustic set of soft indie-folk to warm up the crowd for Paul Dempsey. The singer-songwriter in a blue button-up easily held the crowd’s attention, playing mostly songs from last year’s record, Minerva.

Paul Dempsey then conducted a sermon for the devoted: the crowd stared transfixed as he played his first solo acoustic set in Sydney in over four years, recorded on the night for Double J’s Live At The Wireless – the stripping away of any and all ornamentation meant the focus was solely on his craft both as a songwriter and as a performer. He’s one of Australia’s finest, captivating the sell-out audience with preternatural ease.

He opened with Bird In A Basement, before taking us through a selection of songs from each of his solo albums, Everything Is True and Strange Loop, the odd cover, and a couple of songs that are likely to appear on a forthcoming Something For Kate album, which had the crowd feeling both joyful and oddly privileged. As he concentrated on his guitar, his sweeping fringe fell into his face, and he wore a blazer for the first half of the set despite Thursday’s high temperature. His faithful audience approached the show with a kind of extreme reverence, softly singing along and gazing up in awe as Dempsey breathed new life into old classics, extending the vocal lines and climbing to higher and higher pitches. His voice became even grander, with more of a kind of strange gravitas in the quietness of the room.

Banter with the audience was minimal, but what’s there is light and easy – he wants to make the crowd laugh. At one point he described the feeling of playing totally solo this way, no backing band, no SFK, as like being the Millennium Falcon detached from the Star Destroyer. He joked that Morningless is basically a personal trainer for him, compelling him to move around the most he does all night, driven by his guitar line’s frenetic pace.

A set highlight came when he ripped into early SFK classic Captain (Million Miles An Hour), no holds barred, his lanky frame folding fully over as he wailed on his guitar, and the crowd sang along at full volume, reaching a blistering crescendo. It was a counterpoint to the way the crowd behaved the rest of the set: weirdly still, calm, albeit enraptured, potentially shifting their behaviour to match the intimacy of Dempsey in complete solo mode. Another similar moment came when he played Monsters – he basically didn’t have to sing into the mike as the whole space filled with the voices of his fans.

Fans were brought together when their favourites were given a run – from his cover of David Bowie’s Life On Mars? to Bats to Fast Friends, which saw this scribe make a couple of her own. By the time of the encore, which included his cover of INXS’ Never Tear Us Apart and Theme From Nice Guy, his button-down was drenched, a sign that Dempsey, sweating under the spotlight, had given the show his all.