Mark Seymour & The Undertow @ The Gov, Adelaide 4/5/2024
After Saturday night’s performance, I think Mark Seymour can be likened to a fine wine, because he is getting even better with age! With his band The Undertow – comprising Cameron McKenzie on lead guitar along with John Favaro on bass and Peter Maslen on drum (both ex Boom Crash Opera) – we were introduced to their new album and taken on a journey of their previous albums, Mark’s solo work and, of course, Hunters & Collectors classics.
They kicked us off with the delightful She Burned Her Bridges Down followed by the title track of their new album The Boxer. We had a brief look at the past with a song about a lady called Joanna (from their 2020 album Slow Dawn) before the first of the Hunters hits Say Goodbye from 1986, with the crowd joining in the chorus “You don’t make me feel like I’m a woman anymore…” (I wonder if that was Joanna!).
He introduced the next song, Crying In The Rain as being a sad song about loneliness and isolation where you confront the darkness and come out at the other end – quite a moving ballad. Mark gave driving directions somewhere south of Mildura then north on the Calder Highway to Wycheproof, where the sky turns to Cherry Red. He told us about how lyrics are important and that was highly evident in All My Rage, which is about getting over yourself and getting on with it.
The next one was written as a memory from his childhood when his father took them on a trip “up the side of a mountain in Victoria in 1962 … in a Hillman Imp, before seatbelts … after church on Sunday to Kosciusko. The tempo picked up with The Dogs Of Williamstown from the Slow Dawn album. Before the break, which he said they were “forced” to take so we “could go to the bar, while [they] lay on couches and check the [footy] scores”, we had another song off The Boxer. This song he co-wrote with Linda Bull where the emotional lyrics are about the love for her daughter and standing in the rain Waiting On The Kid.
The second set started with memories of the past and that it is “high time to le Sleeping Dogs lie”. Then about a train journey across the USA, shortly before the decline and fall of Donald Trump, where it became really interesting in Utah and Applewood Road – a great beat to this song, which continued on in Westgate. Another new song followed about the Stars Of Fitzroy – one of the oldest suburbs in Melbourne where he moved to recently.
The crowd went nuts when they went to a couple of Hunters & Collectors tracks: Do You See What I See and Throw Your Arms Around Me. They finished the second set with another one from The Boxer written by singer/songwriter John Prine She Is My Everything – a song that Mark said meant a lot to him.
The encore started off with a beautiful slow song called The Whole World Is Dreaming that he dedicated to “The Governor Hindmarsh – the most notorious venue in Adelaide, the most exquisitely decorated”. Of course, the left arguable the best for last, a song which he said has been “misinterpreted grotesquely over the years, written in a state of confusion and bewilderment in a small room in Richmond” – The Holy Grail.
Overall, an exceptional night of outstanding music. I definitely have to get The Boxer – we were treated to eight of its eleven tracks and they were all damned good! I hope Mark Seymour & The Undertow will grace us again soon – I will definitely be there.
Live Review By John Glennie