Venue: The Zoo, Brisbane
Date: April 22, 2010
Event: The Revival Tour
Acts: Chuck Ragan, Frank Turner, Tim Barry, Ben Nichols
Anyone even dimly aware of the acoustic collaborative event known as The Revival Tour would have heard the word “organic” thrown around in the street press with a fair degree of abandon.
For the cynical, it’s an invitation to dismiss the concept as pretension piled upon a cliché: how do you top the seemingly inevitable punk rocker desire to — sooner or later — wail away with only an acoustic guitar for backing?
Answer: you grab your best punk rock buddies and play swapsies all night long.
In this particular instance, ringmaster Chuck Ragan has assembled three fellow luminaries from the genre: Ben Nichols of Lucero fame; Tim Barry, Avail’s ever-intimidating frontman; and inimitable UK folk-punkster Frank Turner.
Seemingly having drawn the short straw, Nichols warmed up an early Zoo crowd of middling size. Before long, though, the theme of the night revealed itself as Ragan popped up to add backing vocals and tambourine on Nights Like These.
Such an approach could have easily turned mawkish as the revolving suite of performers overshadowed the music. Here, though, Ragan’s low-key coming and going set the tenor for the evening; each performer given sufficient space to flourish in his own distinctive fashion.
Thus it was Nichols’ taciturn stoicism, raspy voice and deft fretwork that carried all before it on The Last Pale Light In The West, Davy Brown and more.
Barry’s more forthright song-rant-song pattern left punters alternately entranced and amused even as Ragan and Turner took a turn or three with harmonica and second guitar for songs such as Dog Bumped — a wrenching tale loosely based on events that left a friend incarcerated for 28 years.
And English singer-songwriter Turner had a red-hot go at stealing the limelight with a light-hearted performance at odds with the seriousness of his peers — including a cheeky attempt to turn the performer-punter divide on its head by coaxing a random from the crowd to tentatively deliver the harmonica lines for Dan’s Song.
Turner’s tilt at the helm over, Revival maestro Ragan took centre stage and the joint nature of the evening’s entertainment rapidly pushed toward its zenith.
Still, it was hard to identify the true collaborator as Ragan forges through Feast or Famine favourites Geraldine and Do You Pray and Gold Country’s Rotterdam: the raucous, beery vocals of an excited crowd or the added guitar grunt of Turner, Nichols and Barry.
But as all returned to the stage for an explosive finale of California Burritos and The Boat before powering through a gloriously messy rendition of Frank Turner’s rabble-rousing standard Photosynthesis, perhaps that was no bad thing; it was certainly organic.
Author’s note: I am greatly indebted to friend and fellow writer Brittany Rixon without whom I could not have possibly written this review. I have been struggling — and failing — to find the motivation to write reviews the past several months and she has very kindly allowed me to springboard from her own words to put my own twist on the night. So: not all these words are mine! Mostly it was nice to discover along the way that I can still seem to make the words work after a fashion even if I feel very very rusty. With any luck, this little blog thing might be back in action, and more reviews — new and old — of my own work should pop up more regularly. Cross fingers.