The Whitlams Orchestrated Next Stop Adelaide…

The Whitlams have taken their orchestral collaboration to audiences across Australia with Adelaide next up. The Whitlams has spent two decades reshaping its catalogue for the concert hall. What makes these shows remarkable is not just their scale, but how the drama of small moments is magnified by the beautifully written arrangements into something deeply poignant. Stories of friendship, romance, grief, and humour are conveyed by eight unique composers who each deploy the full arsenal of large ensemble dynamics in their own way, from the delicacy of twenty piece strings to the all-in power of the more grandiose moments, the effect of which Tim Freedman has likened to “being hit over the head with a velvet hammer.” Tim Freedman talks to Hi Fi Way about what’s in store for Adelaide.

How exciting is this tour coming, equally challenging and ambitious in a lot of ways?
Yeah, we’re two-thirds of the way through it. It’s been very exciting. We’ve got twenty dates with symphony orchestras around Australia, so… I’d say it’s the biggest orchestral tour an Australian band’s ever embarked upon. So, very ambitious. But we’ve done twelve dates, I think ten have been sold out, and we’ve still got Adelaide, Canberra, Toowoomba and Perth to go.

How have those shows gone so far?
It’s been a joy. We’ve probably played with one hundred and ninety musicians so far and I haven’t done it for seven years. I find that a larger percentage of the orchestras are younger than us now, whereas it used to be, we felt very ginger with these eminent, august orchestral musicians. Now it feels more like a natural fit. I think more of the orchestra have actually heard of us, which helps.

Do you feel the pressure playing with such elite players?
No, not anymore. We’ve done this sixty times, I think, now, since 2004, it’s fascinating to see the differences in the orchestras. They have different senses of time and we’ve also had a few different conductors, so we watch very carefully at rehearsal to lock into their sense of rhythm. Every orchestra’s different. Some of them, they’re a little bit after the beat, and they flow more, and we have to adjust and it’s a fascinating process.

We’ve played with the Melbourne Symphony, the Sydney Symphony, the Tasmanian Symphony, the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, and they’re wonderful musicians. There is a lot of pressure on the day, because we rehearse a two-and-a-quarter-hour show in three hours. So, as you can imagine, their sight reading is mind‑bogglingly good. We’ve learned which sections of which songs we need to run twice, because they’re the bits that sometimes get wobbly, so half of the job is running the rehearsals efficiently, and handling your energy levels. We have a one‑hour sound check, a three‑hour rehearsal, then we do a two‑hour show, so… I need to be in pretty good nick to still be bushy‑tailed by 10pm.

So there’s not, like, a week of rehearsals, it’s literally on the day?
Yep! Well, you see, as you can imagine, if you want to do a rehearsal with an orchestra, each call is many, many thousands of dollars, so we’ve made sure that our charts are extremely cohesive and extremely well put together, so that they can just read them, and it’s generally right the first time.

Wow, that’s impressive.
I just need to get together with the conductor, and say: this one starts at around 66, but we like to slow it down in the second chorus, and the conductor’s the one that I need to communicate with, because he or she then communicates with the thirty five musicians with their body. So it’s a beautiful, fluid, organic, breathing thing that happens and when it works, it’s a joy. We had all the charts completely re-orchestrated by Sean O’Boyle, so we’ve got this lovely box of cohesive charts for the symphony because it’s such an ambitious tour, we’ve really had to raise our professionalism to make it work. It’s been working, so it’s been very, very satisfying, and the audiences are loving it.

With all that in mind, do you feel the stress leading up to the show? When you’ve got that many moving parts, that must heighten the anxiety levels quite a bit.
No, I don’t get anxious in showbiz anymore. I get excited and I enjoy every minute of those days, because it’s hard work, but very, very rewarding. I do notice if I’ve gone up to Brisbane and rehearsed all day Friday, performed Friday night, done the Saturday matinee, done the Saturday night… I’m on high alert for a couple of days, and I must admit, I get home on Sunday night and I pull the blinds and put on the Premier League. I’m pretty drained on the Sunday and then I’ll bounce back by Tuesday, ready for another round.

Is it hard for people who don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes hard to narrow down that list of songs you’re going to go with?
Well, we’ve had about thirty orchestrated over the years and that was a job I did four months ago. I went to the Sydney Opera House concert hall and watched Sigur Rós with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. I love the way that they held my attention with extremely atmospheric and slow‑moving music. That inspired me to be a little bit ambitious with this show, and so the first half is extremely laid back and emotional. It’s all the Charlie songs. It’s a lot of songs without any rhythm section. A lot of sections in these songs where it’s just piano and orchestra. It’s a real emotional journey, the first fifty minutes.

Then it’s the classic case of a concert in two halves. The second half really opens up. The lights start moving, we play more of the hits, more of the upbeat stuff. And so it’s a real gentle arc, the two‑hour show. I’m pleased that this concert develops as a story and as a mood. So I’m glad I went and saw Sigur Rós five months ago. It inspired me to be more artful and ambitious in the first half. What I find is people are sitting down for the first time, they’re in a beautiful theatre. A lot of them are listening to a symphony orchestra for the first time. I don’t need to bash them over the head. We just need to let them hear the textures and have lots of moments where they can hear the orchestra on its own. Because it’s a new and unique experience for a lot of them. Then we just start adding flavours as the night wears on.

I saw that Sigur Rós show here in Adelaide, and it was incredible.
The first song of this show was inspired by my sitting in the concert hall that night. I had a song called Beauty In Me re-orchestrated. I actually used a Sigur Rós song as a template, as some of the reference points for the orchestration. So the first song, I’m just standing up with the orchestra. There’s no band at all, no piano. That was inspired by the mood of that first twenty five minutes of the Sigur Rós concert.

How do you top a tour like this? Once the last of the shows are finished, what do you do next?
We do a pub run.

Back at the Gov?
Well, we’re going to do an East Coast pub run. I’m afraid we’re not coming to The Gov in October, but we love sweating for two hours to a standing audience just as much, so we’ll do something completely different, and we’ll wash the orchestras out of our hair. And you’re right, this is really probably the tour I’m proudest of in my whole career, this symphony tour. The arrangements are working beautifully. We have people like Peter Scullthorpe and Benjamin Northey, and your local Adelaide boy Jamie Messenger, who’s provided three or four arrangements, and it’s a lovely, varied composer list. So there’s a lot of different styles that happen as well. So it is the height of our touring career, and to improve it, because we seem to do it once every seven years, I’ll have to write some new songs and some new arrangements, come up with a different concept. But I’m proud of this concept.

Do you think you’ll do a live recording, or some way to commemorate the tour by grabbing bits from each of the shows on this run?
Yes, I’ve recorded all the shows, and when the dust settles, I would like, ideally, to release a little snapshot of the tour, maybe seven or eight songs that just provide a memento of the event. But I don’t want to put the whole concert out, because I think the whole concert needs to be experienced live. I think sometimes you can give things away for free, and then people don’t want to come to the live show.

Beyond the tour are there plans for new music?
Very early days. I’ve been working so hard live in four different configurations that I’ve been concentrating on my live activity. I’ll take my foot off the pedal in June, and I’d like to write some songs for The Whitlams Black Stump, the Americana outfit, which has had one album and needs to have a second one next year.

Interview By Rob Lyon

General Public tickets via: https://linktr.ee/WhitlamsOrchestral_2026

FRI 10 APR – Festival Theatre SA
with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

SAT 11 APR – Festival Theatre SA (Sold Out)
with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

SAT 6 JUN – Empire Theatre QLD
with Toowoomba Concert Orchestra

SAT 13 JUN – Riverside Theatre WA
with West Australian Symphony Orchestra