Self-professed ‘legend’ is all show and no go

MUSIC
MGK
Qudos Bank Arena, April 14
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★½

“Funny thing about legends, they don’t set out to be legends. They just burn so bright the rest of us can’t look away.”

So goes the self-aggrandising narration that opens MGK’s first Sydney show in eight years, and while there’s plenty of evoking music legends of yore – sample lyrics tonight include “I’m bad to the bone”, “I was born to walk the line”, and “I’m a rolling stone” (from a song called Cliche, which gives the false hope some self-awareness is at play) – the truth is MGK has about as much depth and originality as a blank sheet of paper. Legend material he ain’t.

Still, it’s easy to see why the man known to the tax department as Colson Baker has drawn a sold-out crowd - he’s a tall, good-looking rooster who can rap, sing and write pop-punk songs that keep the algorithm happy. But for someone who fancies himself as a mythical rock star, MGK’s scant influences seem mostly to be relegated to profane but toothless pop-punks Blink-182, with some numbskull nu metal from Limp Bizkit thrown in for bad measure.

There’s also a stab at trying to sound like Iggy and the Stooges that comes off more like an energy drink commercial (Don’t Wait Run Fast), plus a couple of clumsy interpolations: Starman manages to make the chorus of Third Eye Blind’s upbeat-sounding 1997 hit Semi-Charmed Life sound sullen and lifeless, and Lonely Road’s spin on John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Road is nothing more than a cynical play for the Country charts.

We thought we’d already hit peak cringe, but then MGK puts on a backwards baseball cap to rap on Wild Boy. It’s hard to top his antiquated – quaint, even – idea of what rock’n’roll rebellion looks like in 2026: riding fast motorcycles, giving the finger and smoking durries.

It’s hard to imagine why Bob Dylan, one of music’s greatest wordsmiths, is a fan of MGK, considering his godawful lyrics. Still, you can’t fault MGK for having fun and living out his juvenile, weirdly conceptualised rock’n’roll fantasy throughout this energetic show, even if it all feels as calculated as a mid-career pop-punk pivot.

MUSIC
JON ROSE AT 75
People’s Republic of Australasia, April 12
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

I first wrote about Jon Rose 43 years ago. While I have the misfortune to be 43 years older, his art is not. It is still just as fresh, funny, surprising, beautiful, subversive, inventive and defiant. The defiance is intrinsic. Rose has devoted his life to making music that shuns idiom, most often, as here, via free improvisation.

At 75, he is an internationally celebrated figure, which no doubt warms his heart, but changes nothing when he picks up his violin; when the aural canvas is initially just as blank as it ever was, and every performance is an adventure into the unknown.

Given he has lived in Alice Springs for some years, this was a rare Sydney appearance at the quirky venue of publisher Nick Shimmin’s loungeroom, which he opens to experimental artists and an email list-only audience.

For it, he chose a decades-long collaborator in saxophonist Jim Denley and a more recent one in double bassist Clayton Thomas. Like Rose, both have a virtuosity that climbs beyond mere facility and into the outer reaches of what is possible on each instrument.

To sit only a metre or two from them is to be swept into an intoxicating theatre of sound, since watching them make the music is as enthralling as the music itself. Process and outcome are one and the same. You could variously watch Thomas playing his bass with two bows, sometimes both in one hand, sometimes one in each, above and below the bridge; or Denley using a pot lid on the bell of his alto, making a scraping or vibrating sound while also semi-muting the horn; or Rose using his violin as a percussion instrument of boundless potential.

While all three naturally sought ways to enhance what was happening, Rose, in particular, used his slippery, spidery violin to subvert anything in danger of entering a cul-de-sac of predictability.

It could be music you bathed in, or clung to as it took you for a tumultuous ride, and always it was music of contrasts: of extremes of pitch; of unfamiliar textures; of fragmentary rhythms and elusive tonal centres.

Then would come a moment of blinding beauty, as of a melody heard in a distant, unattainable past. Each player intuitively dropped out here and there to leave intricate duets, and one of these, between Rose and Denley, was so texturally startling it was like music from another dimension.

The interaction was routinely uncanny. Partly, of course, it’s a matter of intense listening to each other, but also of freakish convergences. In one memorable section of the second set, the violin and alto cried plaintively over massive, granite-like pillars of bass sound.

Another section had Denley growling into his saxophone, Rose sounding like a creaky house in a gale, and Thomas a forewarning of the apocalypse, before all three suddenly retreated to the merest wisps of sounds, and then to just the ghosts of those wisps.

MUSIC
Bic Runga
City Recital Hall, April 12
Reviewed by AMBER CUNNEEN
★★★★

It took being far from home for Bic Runga to find the freedom to write her new album. Temporarily relocating from New Zealand to Paris, she reconnected with her muse to create Red Sunset, her first collection of original material since 2011.

This tour is a homecoming to audiences in Aotearoa and Australia, and to herself.

Runga takes to the stage inconspicuously, without introduction, to play drums for support act Silicon (the outlet of creative and romantic partner Kody Nielson). Shrouded in the same soft lighting and projected silhouettes, Runga is indistinguishable from the other performers, save for her red dress and famous face.

Shifting into her own set, she takes centre-stage, still seemingly coming to terms with a return to solo billing. Initially withdrawn at the microphone, she relaxes when handed an instrument (by the end of the night, she’ll skilfully cycle through four) and across the hour, she blooms: Bic Runga, the frontwoman, is back.

Red Sunset is more arthouse and experimental than albums past. Runga is self-aware, if not self-assured, about the shift. She says she hopes we’ll accept the material (and aren’t just waiting for Sway). The set list reflects this. Runga signposts each track as “old” or “new”, rotating between the decades every few minutes. It’s a clever approach. Runga’s vulnerability is endearing and the room is behind her.

Her older music is the better showcase of her talents. But even the songs that fall flat in the studio incarnation of Red Sunset take on a lustre when played live. She glides through the octaves with a distinct clarity on stage, her vocals able to break free of the album’s ambient instrumentation. Nielson is also dynamite on his turn at the drums, propelling the audience through each number.

Drive, performed alone on electric guitar, is magnetic. And for those who did come for Sway – and who could blame them? – the ’90s juggernaut holds up and the audience exults in it.

COMEDY
Glenn Moore: Please Sir, Glenn I Have Some Moore?
Comedy Store, April 9
Reviewed by DANIEL HERBORN
★★★★
Plenty of comedians have a few tried and tested jokes they keep in their back pocket, ready to use if their newer material doesn’t land. UK comedian Glenn Moore has a whole book of these failsafes – expertly-constructed one-liners he has apparently deployed to great effect on shows like Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You.

He’s also got a second book containing the worst joke he’s ever written, to be used if things are going too well. This may sound gimmicky, but Please Sir, Glenn I Have Some Moore? is anything but. It’s built around rock-solid, old-fashioned joke writing, with first-rate observational humour, puns and wordplay arriving at a relentless pace.

The narrative backbone is a road trip Moore took through Death Valley with his cousin Benji some 10 years ago. While Benji is an obnoxious type, Moore is so cowed by more confident people that he once agreed with a waiter that he had indeed given his name as “Greg Moore”.

When Benji ignores Moore’s directions and the pair become dangerously lost and low on petrol, he has to choose between an out-of-character confrontation or meekly accepting the blame. There’s slightly too much emphasis on this simple story when the real draw here is the comic digressions, ranging from why strippers only dress as the most important professions, why Julius Caesar was an overachiever and Moore’s ingenious way to sabotage a rival’s Google autocomplete.

With a bevy of running jokes and callbacks so good they could be used in a masterclass on extracting maximum hilarity through clever structure, this early Sydney Comedy Festival show has this year’s event off to a cracking start. Suffice to say that at one point Moore had to break out his “worst joke ever”, and even that got big laughs.