A few days ago the tour of New Zealand and Australia ended. The tour has taken its toll on our hero, and he’s tweeted he’s not sure if he’ll be back again. These things are usually something you should take with a grain of salt, and if you look at his history, he’s been to Australia in 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2017. I’m sure the flight is dreadful, and to make matters worse, this time around he had to do a ton of press to try and sell the remaining tickets for Melbourne and Sydney. The subject of not coming back hasn’t been raised in the interviews he’s done on the tour, and I’m sure when he’s done with this tour, has rested, and has a new album he’d like to tour and promote, he’ll figure out how to squeeze Australian and New Zealand dates into his itinerary again.
He arrived in New Zealand first to do a single sold out show and a couple of in-depth interviews. First an interview on ABC’s The Music Show and later a 40 minute segment on Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning show with Kim Hill. I wonder why he didn’t do more shows in New Zealand or even Auckland, since the show had sold out and it can’t be financially sound to fly in band, crew and equipment for that one gig. The biggest surprise in the Auckland show was the cover of Black Hole Sun by the late Chris Cornell’s band Soundgarden. Ryan did the vocal in his own style and range and wisely didn’t try to mimic Cornell. The band played the song very well, and I would’ve liked to have seen it on the setlist for the following shows, for them to really flesh out the arrangement (and for more people to hear it). Sadly, it remains a one-off.
Before arriving in Australia Ryan tweeted his fans asking for requests. Plenty of deep cuts were requested as well as regulars on the setlist (which he gladly accepted), and in the end he did a string of rare songs in Byron Bay, of all places. The crowd there was especially rowdy, as the venue is essentially a large pub in a hotel, and as such the rarities seemed to fall on deaf ears, mostly. The few fans who followed Ryan and the band around to all the gigs got treated to Hard Way To Fall (first performance in 11 years!), Friends, Desire, A Kiss Before I Go and The End. Sydney on the other hand got Tightrope, making its first appearance of the proper Prisoner Tour (he’d played it on the promo tour earlier in the year), while the giant Melbourne show got nada in terms of surprises. Every report agreed it was a great show though, with the only objection being to the giant arena itself.
But before we got so far, a happy Ryan arriving in Australia a day early for his gigs put together a secret gig in Brisbane with proceeds going to a local cat charity, Little Paws Kitten Rescue. The venue was a large bar, The Woolly Mammoth, holding upwards of 450 people. The tickets were just $5 and only available at the door. The show surprised people by being a full band show, and then an even bigger surprise was that it went on for nearly 3 hours. The band played on borrowed equipment, and seemed to wrestle with it a bit in the beginning with amp noise throwing a shade on the early part of the concert. But once they got going they went into full jam mode, with extensive jam parts and thus wound up with a 3 hour set on a 26 song setlist.
The jamming was obviously fun for the band and they seemed to struggle with curfews for the rest of the tour. Having booked the up and coming The Middle Kids for the remainder of the tour, they had no choice but to come on after nine and be met with an eleven o’clock curfew in most places. The result was an unusually quiet Ryan who threw his all into performing and eschewed his usual banter and the discipline of improvised songs. The latter is becoming a thing on this tour, with Ryan appearing increasingly professional.
The Prisoner show is now broken into segments by acoustic segments where Ryan will perform unplugged in front of two microphones. This is how he started out when he went solo after Whiskeytown, and he’s confident that he will be able to pull it off even in front of an audience of 7.000 as was the case in Melbourne. This gives the show a maximum dynamic between tight band songs, explosive jams, slower almost droning numbers like his current take on When The Stars Go Blue and the solo spots where you can hear a pin drop in the audience. His current take on Prisoner, where he starts off solo and the band comes in towards the end with him switching to electric guitar for raving solo seems to be a highlight of the show with most audiences.
With Ryan saying his goodbyes on Twitter and Instagram and returning for his Californian dates I noticed a string of lovely responses from Australian fans. Most of them along the lines of Thank you so much for coming all this way out here, we know how hard it is and Please don’t risk your health – come back when you can. The travelling, performing, flying, planning is clearly doing his head in, provoking one Meniere’s attack after the other. I bet most of us would be tired just following him around, and add to that that he takes time to do interviews and tv appearances, sign his merch, rehearse covers and new arrangements of his songs, promote the upcoming shows, as well as his main task of sounchecking, rehearsing and performing one stellar show after the other.
[The stellar artwork for this post is by Matt Garnier who put this together in photoshop.]