The morning wind batters the beach hotels. It hammers against the little house that is temporarily ours in Adelaide, Australia. It pummels the psyche, which has already taken a beating from deciding to cancel one of our Nights in the north of the country. The backlash to the cancellation adds to the emotional pummeling, and that’s how we show up to the venue: detonated. We look to each other like a cloud of nerves and shrapnel.
The Night happens in a tavern in an old hotel, a bit of an experiment for us. Tin walls and a tin roof not doing much to keep the busy street sounds from coming in, rain tap dances above, the ventilation fans squeak, and lo and behold we are right under a flight path, jets roaring over regularly. Very regularly. There is no green room…after soundcheck we stand together in a pocket of sun on the sidewalk across from venue as folks file in around the corner through the main entrance. We use the reflective windows of a shop as a mirror to see how put together we are or aren’t. We look like we feel.
We spend a few minutes in the tavern huddled by the door, trying to be there and not be there at the same time. We take our place on the stage. We begin. Simple chords lay the foundation of the night, but they have the whole day in them. The jets roar overhead and I smile every time. An infant cries out once in a while and SJ weaves their cries in. It’s a sold out room and the crowd is a mercifully still bunch.
It feels like triumph, even though the day (and all the days before and before that) have written themselves on us and on what we are trying to do on this night: an unlikely duo doing an unlikely rendering of an unlikely performance in an unlikely place. I finish the last few seconds of the evening with a vocal thing that doesn’t appear every Night…a moment of release, bordering on a scream, Sinead O’Connor swirling in my head, me wanting to get to where she could travel with her voice.
The ride back to our digs is substantially lighter than the ride to the venue earlier, and we are awash in the afterglow of being taken in by the people who came. Properly taken in, them having fully seen the markings of the darker side of our time in on the road since June.
To all you intrepid people of Adelaide (so many came without a clue as to what they were about to be a part of), thank you.
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October 26, 2023, Adelaide.
Gregory Hoskins 