Deep into his epic, blistering, exhilarating set at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on 1 August, Brad Cox asked the audience if we could do him a favour.
‘I want you to dance with me,’ he said, then his band – this band shouted out in his hit song ‘Acres’, which would be the finale of the set and have the whole crowd belting out ‘I love the boys in my band’ at top volume – launched into ‘Vertigo’ from Cox’s most recent album, Endemic Intelligence in Multiple Dimensions. ‘Vertigo’ is a mid-tempo song that facilitates relaxed dancing for those who aren’t sure whether dancing is something they should be doing, especially in public. It was a good choice for this exhortation to dance with Cox, who moves unself-consciously and joyfully throughout any set he plays, when he’s not playing guitar.
When I interviewed him recently, I asked him about the fact that he moves when he’s performing. It’s so rare to see on stage in Australia, the way he does it: fluid and free, shoulders back, heart open, smiling, as if he’s offering tribute to Dionysus.
‘I’m a big guy,’ he told me, ‘and when people see me dancing freely, which feels great – I don’t know if you’ve ever done it, I dance all day. Dancing freely. And when people look at someone like me doing that and really not caring what I look like or what people think of me, I think that’s infectious.’
So when he asked us to dance, pretty much everyone danced. It had taken careful set management to get everyone to that point, though; in fact, careful show management.
The evening started with a short set from the always-impressive Max Jackson, who was joined by her husband and collaborator Jeremy Minett on guitar. Jackson had about twenty minutes to perform and in that time she brought the crowd to quite a pitch. I’ve noted this about Jackson before, but what she does looks easy – because she is always smiling, always seeming relaxed – and therefore it is likely to have taken a lot of work and thought and intention, because that’s the only way you arrive at ease. It is one of the least-easy things in live performance to come out to a crowd that is not necessarily your own and energise them to the point that they’re buzzing after twenty minutes. Jackson does this not only through song choice but through judicious engagement of and interaction with the audience.
And I said ‘not necessarily’ her audience because I looked around and saw all sorts of people singing along to her songs. So while they bought a ticket for Brad Cox, they knew Max Jackson.
They also knew The Vanns, who were the second band on stage, and their brand of rock music had traces of great grunge rockers and a tinge of lead-singer allure of Michael Hutchence. There were plenty of Vanns fans in the crowd as well, and when Cox joined them onstage for a song the place erupted. By the time the Vanns’ set was over, everyone was high on the energy of what had come before.
Brad Cox opened his set with ‘Sunset Psalm’, which is the first song on Endemic Intelligence. It’s a paean to Queensland, to fishing, to the ocean, to mindfulness, to the peace that comes from taking time to observe and be in the world. If he’d started with something immediately high energy and up-tempo, he could have tipped the audience over too soon. We were on the high wire and he knew to not make it sway.
What followed was a set that peaked and rolled like a set of waves, taking us into the fist-pumping energy of ‘Everything I’ve Got’; to the evergreen love song that is ‘Lake House’; bringing his wife, Sammy White, on stage for ‘The High Cost of Living’, and introducing newest band member Piper Butcher to the audience to sing lead on a song.
While Butcher was at the microphone, Cox was moving position. I may have had a tip-off during the interview that he would be playing some songs from the sound-desk area, so that’s where I was planted, and that’s where he appeared with an acoustic guitar, sitting on a chair, performing his latest single, ‘What Are the Odds’, which he has said was the wedding song he should have written for White two years ago.
After that he said he was going to play a song he’d never stop singing. It was ‘Water on the Ground’, from his 2018 self-titled debut album. That song was my introduction to Cox’s music; when it was released I remember playing it over and over, drawn in by his voice and storytelling. It remains a favourite, and clearly so for the rest of the audience there that night, for we were all singing along in full voice, singing back to Cox his indelible story of rural hardship and resilience.
As I was standing close by, I could see what it meant to him. ‘I love you all to death,’ he said, not for the only time that night. He said it again after he’d gone back to the stage – through the crowd – and rejoined his band, ultimately ending the set with ‘Acres’, with Max Jackson and The Vanns on stage with him, turning it into a mini-carnival of artists who were clearly relishing the experience of playing what Cox had called ‘a special room’ earlier in the night.
The thing is, though, that when you put on a show like that, every room is special. To create such an experience for hundreds of humans is to weave magic. There is no exact spell for it, of course; the magic is in the moment and in the hands of someone who knows how to wield it. Having seen Cox play live three times in the past hear, I’d say he’s a master at that – a wizard, perhaps.
The secret may be in the way he moves – yes, I’m coming back to that, because free-form dance is an ancient practice that has dropped out of certain cultures over the past few centuries, but it’s there in us. We are encoded with it. Cox knows the codes. In doing so, he opens the channels – or a portal, if you prefer – to a certain kind of energy which can then be worked with throughout the set. To go to the title of his own album: he’s working with endemic intelligence. It made for a brilliant album; it makes for an unforgettable show.
That has been his intention from the start of his career, though. As he told me in that interview: ‘I literally went into our first band rehearsal saying, right-o, lads, no matter what, we’re going to have fun with this project. If we’re having fun, our audience will have fun. And that was the first kind of mission statement of this band. And … we really got hold of my core audience in the early days because we were having the time of our lives doing what we love.’
That love of what he’s doing, that ability to share it with his audience, to create and offer joy, is what made us all feel like we were levitating. And gave us the energy to keep our feet off the ground for quite a while longer.
