Which Australian Act Put On The Best Live Show In 2019?

Yet again, we polled 'The Music' team and contributors to pick out the best of the year 2019. For the best Australian performance, please welcome to the stage Sampa The Great.

The name Sampa The Great is writ large all over this year’s polls. There’s not one eligible category that Sampa Tembo hasn’t snagged a top spot in – The Return comes in third for Album Of The Year, while Final Form took second place for Song Of The Year. And for our writers’ money, when it comes to live and local in 2019, nobody outdid Tembo. After a string of festival appearances early in the year, the Melbourne-based singer hit the road with her debut album in October and the overwhelming response was of awe. This isn’t especially novel. Digging through old reviews, the first time Tembo’s show ended up in our pages was in 2015, around the time of her debut release, The Great Mixtape. Even then Tembo’s charisma and talent were clear, her words flowing with higher themes of understanding, love and connectedness while her beats caused people to get down. Now she’s reached her Final Form, both as one of the country’s greatest artists and this year’s best performer.

Sampa The Great @ Factory Theatre. Photo by Hayden Nixon.

Right behind her is Stella Donnelly, who put in some solid kilometres in 2019. She opened for John Butler Trio and Missy Higgins’ joint tour in February, then for viral sensation turned superstar Maggie Rogers in May, dropping one of the most acclaimed debuts in recent memory in between.

Below that we start to see a few previous winners making appearances - Courtney Barnett, Nick Cave and Dirty Three coming in at #3, #6 and #8 respectively. Barnett only played a handful of shows outside of festival sets, but they clearly made an impact. Anyone lucky enough to catch her MTV Unplugged session won’t forget it anytime soon. Dirty Three only had three dates in 2019, breaking their hiatus to play their self-titled ’94 debut in full, while Cave’s entry marks the first time a talking tour – with musical interludes – has made it into the lists.

Spliced in between are some new faces. Hilltop Hoods hold up the hip hop contingent at #4, while Queensland punks WAAX take five, further proof of Maz DeVita’s building reputation as one of Australia’s fiercest performers. The Teskey Brothers show up at #7 after a fairly surprising exclusion last year and Julia Jacklin, another multi-poll entrant, takes the ninth spot. Tenth place is a mixed bag, the writers splitting the vote between Mallrat, Pagan, Robert Forster and Dean Lewis.