When I saw that Western Australian artists Tanya Ransom and Adele Oliver were planning to tour the east coast of Australia together, I immediately bought a ticket for their Sydney show at Gasoline Pony in Marrickville on Wednesday 8 October. Having interviewed them both – Oliver several times – and knowing I loved their music, seeing them live was, as the phrase goes, a no-brainer. When Sydney country-folk artist Abigail Wighton was announced as their support for the gig, it became an even more compelling proposition. I’ve seen Wighton play support for Fanny Lumsden at Leichhardt Town Hall, and interviewed her too. (The context of having had conversations with all three artists wasn’t necessary, of course, for me to enjoy the music but it did add a dimension to the show.)
Abigail Wighton’s set was charming – and I am one of those people who thinks there should be more charm in the world – and she knows just the right amount of detail to give about a song before she plays it, which means we found out that she wrote the song ‘Church Boys’ at the DAG Sheep Station Songwriting Retreat with Mitchell Steele, and ‘Stage Fright’ at the same place with Ashleigh Dallas. The thing with Wighton’s songs is that they don’t usually go where you expect them to, lyrically, which means she keeps your attention as she relates the stories in her strong, mellifluous voice.
Keeping our attention would, as it turned out, be a theme for the night. Adele Oliver as a presence on stage which means you’re drawn in before she even starts singing. There’s a calm confidence about her – perhaps formed by playing to crowds of tourists and locals in Broome, her home town, and up and down the west coast – that makes an audience relax. It’s an understated and underrated quality in an artist. She performed her first single, ‘Wiley Blue’, as part of the set, and gave us the backstory for it. It turned out she’d also been to the DAG and performed two songs she wrote with emerging talent Jacob Vincent. The second of them, and the second last song of the set, was devastating – vast in emotional scope and specific in detail. Trying to describe it further won’t do it justice, but I hope she records it soon.
Tanya Ransom too has presence. She is energetically grounded in the way of artists who have performed in so many different sorts of venues that they know they can play a great show no matter the circumstances. And from that solid basis there is a lightness to the way she plays her guitar and sings, and an ease in her interaction with the audience. Her songs have long been impressive, and one impetus for the tour is the release of her latest album, The Significance of Time. The set included several songs from it, and ‘Armour’ from her 2021 EP Breakdown to Breakthrough.
