When Boy & Bear take the stage at Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens for the Live At The Gardens concert series on Friday, March 14th, they’ll be leaving nothing to chance. Not just because they’re seasoned professionals by now, but because it’ll be a full-circle moment for their involvement in such an event.

But, let’s back up a bit first. Cast your mind back to late 2016, and you might remember the announcement of A Weekend In The Gardens, a two-day affair created by the team behind A Day On The Green to provide live music lovers with the chance to see their favourite artists in an intimate mat amidst a gorgeous outdoor setting.

Delivering lineups that include the likes of John Farnham, Missy Higgins, Icehouse, and Paul Kelly, the event lasted a few years, leaving countless audience members with precious memories. Fast-forward to 2024, and we saw the launch of Live At The Gardens, a new series that kicked off in November of last year and featured the likes of The Presets, Middle Kids, Matt Corby, Tash Sultana, and more.

Now, it’s back again for 2025, with some truly stunning names, including Lake Street Dive, Groove Armada, The Cruel Sea, Róisín Murphy, and, of course, Boy & Bear. This year, they’ll be turning the Royal Botanic Gardens into a veritable legends fest, joined by Sarah Blasko, Augie March, and De Porsal.

For Boy & Bear’s Dave Hosking and Jon Hart, their Melbourne return comes following a rather busy year which has seen them in high demand.

“We had a busy 18 months, a lot of touring locally as well as overseas in Europe and North America, but it was a really successful period of time for us and more manageable than we've had in the past,” explains Hosking. “So, as much as we love having a break, it's been good timing cause we're just diving back into writing, recording and planning out the next chapter at the moment, which is a lot of fun.”

That hectic period of touring featured the band taking a look back at their impressive back catalogue, specifically their second album, 2013’s Harlequin Dream. The follow-up to their 2011 debut, Moonfire, it was a big moment for the band, giving them their first ARIA #1 and scoring four nominations at the ARIA Awards. Needless to say, it made sense to look back at the album that showed them their initial success wasn’t a fluke.

After a successful run of Aussie shows, they wrapped up the bulk of 2024’s touring with a trip over to the US and Canada, which saw them eschewing the singular album focus to look at the breadth of their catalogue instead. As a testament to their professionalism, though, it wasn’t exactly difficult to swap this retrospective attitude for a more contemporary one.

“We've all been to shows when an artist doesn't play songs you love from theirs, so we don't want to take that enjoyment away from people who have been there from the early days,” explains Hart. “But at the same time, you're trying to keep the evolution of the sound moving.

“It was really easy to slide back into the new material afterwards, and we were over there with our mates Boo Seeka, so we'd done some stuff with them through Australia the previous year, and it sort of felt like we were reuniting into that mode,” he adds. “We just put that glove on for a little while after having the Harlequin Dream glove on, so to speak.”

With only a smattering of live appearances occurring between their international jaunt and their upcoming Live At The Gardens performance, it’s this sort of musical mindset that Boy & Bear will be occupying when they take to the stage on Friday, March 14th. For Hosking and Hart, it’s a special experience across the board, largely due to the very core of the event.

“These sort of shows are a great opportunity where maybe people who might not come to a Boy & Bear show or a Boy & Bear show at, say, at The Forum, to go, ‘Oh, this is a situation where the event itself has a draw to it, and you can put together a really great bill with other amazing artists’,” Hart explains. 

“So, that's exciting for us to be on something where there are people who hopefully like our music, and there are other people who maybe haven't worked it out yet, but they're into it, and we get a chance to win over those kinds of people.

“​​I think the setting of where you play really does make a difference to how people receive the music,” he adds. “Playing a beautiful outdoor setup can really suit a different mood shift that you can do in a theatre. So, I feel like we always enjoy those kinds of changes because it makes it feel a bit more dynamic for us as well.”

While the experience is undoubtedly special for the audience (after all, how often do you get to hear the likes of Feeding Line and Southern Sun in the beautiful surrounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens?), the experience is equally appreciated by the band – largely due to the response that an outdoor crowd brings to the mix.

“It's a different energy that people bring outside, I think,” says Hart. “A manager of ours always said our music is best listened to at sunset, so I think you get that sense of the atmosphere feeling a certain way when you're at a festival or an outdoor thing, and the sun's going down and… I don't know, yeah, we just love it.

“The outdoor thing feels special when it works, and it all comes together. I think you get a certain magic from it.”

When Boy & Bear perform as part of the Live At The Gardens series on Friday, March 14th, they’ll be playing exactly eight years to the day that they performed on the same stage for A Weekend In The Gardens. Back then, they were joined by the likes of San Cisco and a rising musician called Amy Shark. “It was exciting seeing her before she was a thing,” remembers Hart.

Needless to say, they’re not taking the opportunity to perform in such an environment again for granted.

“Not to harp on the age thing, but there were a lot of acts who we loved, and we thought were doing as great things as we started, and I guess it’s quite rewarding and validating to be still in a position where we can put on a show, and people come along,” says Hart. 

“So, I think it's not an easy career choice, but it's very rewarding and satisfying to do,” he adds. “To kind of get back to an opportunity like this in an iconic place in Melbourne, it does feel pretty amazing.”

What else Boy & Bear feel is amazing is the chance to be performing with artists that they respect and admire. After all, Sarah Blasko’s multi-decade career has netted her seven albums and multiple ARIAs, Augie March have topped triple j’s Hottest 100 and are stalwarts of the scene, and the rising De Porsal are on track to follow in those same footsteps.

“Without sounding too indulgent, it's amazing to be on the top of that lineup, if that's the right term,” Hosking admits. “And I say that respectfully because these are artists that we've followed for a very long time, and to be able to share the stage with them is a pretty profound feeling.

“It's a great indicator and just a nice feeling about where the band has gotten to, and we feel very lucky to be able to do these shows and, in this case, kind of headline, if that's the right term,” he adds. “We were lucky enough to play with Sarah on the Harlequin Dream run, and she's so amazing – just brilliant and very inspiring to watch.”

It’s the humble nature of Boy & Bear that adds a little bit of fear into the mix – a palpable sense of ‘how on Earth do we follow that?’

“Even when we were doing the Harlequin Dream tour, I was just really worried Sarah was going to blow us off the stage because she's got such a monster voice,” Hosking continues. “So there was some natural insecurity around that, and I was so surprised and stoked that she came on board for that as such a brilliant talent.”

Though they’re naturally nervous, Hosking and Hart don’t need to worry too much about being upstaged. But it does raise the question: what is it that makes a Boy & Bear gig so memorable? What keeps the crowd coming back? Why are they often described as “uniquely compelling experiences”?

“I’ve never jumped around the stage and we don't have fireworks, although we had biodegradable confetti for the first time at a festival, which was really fun,” Hosking remembers. “I think we're a band that builds momentum through the show, so we don't come out guns blazing; we sort of let the songs do the work and then build the energy throughout it.

“Hopefully, by the end of the set, it's kind of like a train that's just really smashing through,” he adds. “We put a lot of work into our live show and into the harmonies, and thankfully, it feels like there's enough songs in there that have resonated with people. So they're really connected to it.

“I don't think we're doing anything unusual or special. We're really just kind of doing our thing, riding the energy, and maybe not trying too hard to create something that's not real or authentic. And maybe that's the phrase that we come back to: doing something that's authentic and real.”

“I feel like we spend a lot of time on our set list as well and go, ‘Oh no, that song doesn't work there because it doesn't sound right coming out of this’, or, ‘How do we make a bit of a musical moment here where this song could work with this song?’,” adds Hart.

“I think when you go to those shows where it shines light from a slightly different angle on a song you love, I feel like that can be a really deeply satisfying experience,” he adds. “So, I think we're always aiming to create something like that for people.”

With Boy & Bear gearing up for Live At The Gardens next month, it’ll be part of another big year for the group. In May, it will mark two years since their self-titled fifth album arrived and just a matter of months since their latest singles with Boo Seeka. There’s plenty more coming, though.

“We've got a few bits and pieces,” Hosking explains. “We've got another song with Boo coming out at some point in the next three or four months, I think, if it goes to plan. We've got a couple of shows, and then we dive back into recording with our producer, a guy called Justin Stanley.

“We did a bunch of songs in Los Angeles with him when we were there, and he's now flying out, and he'll be working out of our studio, so we’ll hopefully have the record finished in March.”

They’ll likely head back into the studio again after that to continue making more music, emboldened by the work they did with Boo Seeka’s Ben Gumbleton and Jay Bainbridge.

“I think that's brought us this sort of weird creative freedom where it doesn't have to necessarily sound like Boy & Bear, it can sound like something completely different,” Hosking suggests. “So we'll keep doing that and then hopefully have some new music out in the back half of the year. 

“It’s fun just to feel creative and have new music and then start the cycle again and see what happens,” Hosking concludes. “Keep the dream alive,” offers Hart.

Boy & Bear perform at Live At The Gardens in Melbourne on March 14th. Tickets are available now.