Weeks after the cries of “I want to go, but…$170 a ticket?” across Melbourne’s north die down. Days after the Tixel event page grows frantic and then quiet, a crowd gathers at the Arts Centre’s Hamer Hall. Thousands of people in loose suits, check patterns, flowing floral dresses, embroidered shirts and slip-on boots. If Castlemaine went to the Oscars, it would look something like this.

Ever since Polyester Records nominated Gillian Welch’s 2001 album Time (The Revelator) as the greatest of its era, and groups of music fans could be silenced upon learning that one among them had seen Welch at the Prince of Wales in 2004, there has been a deep connection between the Tennessean singer and the World’s Greatest City for Live Music™. Tonight, the rare combination of Welch, and her partner David Rawlings, and Melbourne, is held in the Arts Centre’s delicate, carpeted embrace. This is the first of five sold-out shows, and it’s a safe bet that many here tonight won’t stop at one.

Inside, the stage is decked out simply. A spherical floral arrangement of baby’s breath and wattle sits behind them on a large black box that will soon also host glasses of water from which they sip throughout the night. No support band, no backing band. No guitar pedals, no foldback wedges, no electricity. We could be about to watch a chamber ensemble. The lights dim, Rawlings and Welch appear, waving, striding to the centre of the stage and waiting for the best part of a minute for the adulation to die down.

Once amid the spotlights, they nod to each other and begin one of the highlights from Polyester’s favourite album, Elvis Presley Blues. As with every song tonight, it is anchored by Welch’s right hand. Whether strumming or picking, she sets the pace and tone. Rawlings’ bell-like guitar lines flow like an endless stream, his left hand in constant motion, up and down the neck, rarely pausing to let a note ring. His solos flow into the following chorus or verse, from which Welch’s voice, that gloriously warm and dynamic instrument, wrests attention.

After the rapturous applause ebbs, Welch introduces the third musician, double bassist Paul Kowert, best known for his work with the Punch Brothers. “He was playing a show in Glasgow,” she explains. “Which is just a hop, skip, and a jump from here.” The trio dispatch peerless versions of Rawling’s Midnight Train and Cumberland Gap and Welch’s Wayside / Back In Time. Welch and Rawlings’ honeyed harmonies and musicianship are well known, but what stands out tonight is how their musical relationship exponentially increases the impact of both.

Clustered at the centre of the stage, they stand the perfect distance from each other to hear and listen. Independent but inseparable. Tonight’s show could be a tiny club, and their performance would be identical. Welch’s songs about boxcars, mules and good-time ramblers were written to feel intimate, and the trio kept that feeling throughout the concert.

Never straining, simply working with each other. Welch in a long flowing dress and head tilted back slightly to sing, long grey hair cascading over narrow shoulders. Rawlings in his white Stetson and faded blue jeans and jacket that shakes slightly each time he takes a guitar solo, dancing a little in a way that makes it appear as though he has temporarily lost vertebrae. 

“We left the set list a ways back,” Welch says, laughing, before beginning That’s The Way It Goes and North Country, one of the many tracks of her and Rawlings’ latest album, Woodland. After Rawlings’ Ruby, Let Down Your Hair and Welch’s searing Caleb Meyer, we get a twenty-minute intermission. People gather in groups, and catchups abound. People join queues that move too slowly to prove fruitful and soon the hall is filled again.

To begin their second set, Rawlings takes the lead on Lawman; his frail falsetto, while appealingly warm, seems to be augmented and enriched when paired with Welch’s. Kowert returns to the stage for What We Had before Welch bestows one of her greatest songs, Hard Times, upon a hushed room. Hard Times stands out because it possesses what so many of her songs are missing from their live performance in this format: space.

It’s not until her delicate banjo picks out an arpeggio and she sings this particular song about poverty and animal husbandry that her power really comes into its own. Rawlings, among the greatest acoustic guitarists in the world, is undeniably talented, but his almost ceaseless guitar playing – the same style on the same guitar – tends to flatten the songs. Solos feel interchangeable, and while many deservedly earned a round of applause at their flurried completion, when Welch’s songs are given space to shine, we are reminded why we came.  

The pair close their set with an impossibly graceful version of The Way It Will Be and a storming rendition of Red Clay Halo, which sees Rawlings grab a capo from his pocket, throw it on the neck of his Epiphone Olympic archtop guitar, and peel out another stunningly fluid solo. The first standing ovation draws them back for Monkey And The Engineer and Look At Miss Ohio. The second is a crowd-rousing version of I’ll Fly Away, one of Welch’s contributions to the film O Brother Where Art Thou.

People were already filling the aisles and discussing what a brilliant concert it had been when the pair returned for a jaw-dropping version of Time (The Revelator), and some people had actually left the auditorium and had to rush back to their seats to hear the fruits of a fourth standing ovation, a cover of Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's Jackson. Yes, $170 is a lot for a ticket to see two people play acoustic instruments, but no one else can do this. 2025 is going to have to be a damn good year for music for this concert not to be among one of the best of the year.