Live Review: Dan Sultan, Pierce Brothers

There’s that evocative smell of old leather theatre seats as we walk into National Theatre with our glasses of pinot – this is really quite sophisticated! Thanks Dan Sultan, for doing a theatre tour – it’s lovely. And really appropriate for the stripped-back, Dirty Ground solo show he’s spent the last month schlepping around the country. We’ll get to Sultan in a bit. Firstly, Pierce Brothers are incredible! Two, young, hair-blessed twin brothers playing a hectic mix of guitars, harmonica, didge, drums and at times a combination of them all. This scribe has seen these guys busking on Bourke Street and the keenness to entertain that is the busker’s MO really works for them in this theatre setting. Their energy is enormous. They bounce around, buzzing with charm and making sweet, self-effacing jokes and the music’s not too bad either. Whether or not their music is the kind of thing you’d listen to in your own time, the show these boys put on makes that a moot point – they’re amazing. Highlight: when Jack grabs a didge with one hand and plays it while holding a harmonica with the other hand and holds it to Pat’s mouth who simultaneously plays guitar. Amazing. They leave National Theatre’s stage with an enormous vibe of gratitude, which continues when Dan Sultan hits the stage.

The set up tonight is just Sultan, a couple of guitars and a keyboard. The first time we saw him this way was just before the release of Blackbird at Thornbury Theatre. That album is a slickly produced piece of work, so it’s lovely to see him perform it – and other tracks from Sultan’s ever-increasing back catalogue – in an intimate setting. The man’s voice is incredible and, without a full band to distract from it, the delicate bits of Under Your Skin send tingles up spines. It has to be said that Sultan’s in-between song banter has really improved over the last couple of years; he seems to now really enjoy the jokey chit-chat and is in his element when nattering about his favourite football team, The Saints, which perhaps explains why he’s doing this Melbourne gig in St Kilda. He plays a few tracks from Blackbird, and a song about violence against women which is unfortunately topical after this week’s news – this cat-owning feminist is charming the pants off tonight’s crowd one song at a time. Old Fitzroy gets the biggest cheer of the night then he moves to the keyboards to bash out Nyul Nyul Girl, tells a funny story about Paul Dempsey and then plays the song they wrote together, Mountaintop. It’s back to the guitar for a song he co-wrote with Paul Kelly, a sublime version of the title track of his latest EP, then Kimberley Calling. He returns to the stage to play The Same Man, from Blackbird, and finally an awesome, pumped-up, stripped-back version of the song he did with Way of The Eagle, Rattlesnake. We might be in St Kilda sitting down all night, but it’s a cracking gig.