While the Melbourne International Comedy Festival fills the city streets with punters hungry for laughs, one of the funniest and most enjoyable shows in town this evening has nothing to do with the festival at all.
But before the Chris Isaak show can begin, an almost-full theatre is treated to the hushed folk rock of Ohioan singer-songwriter Bobbie Lee Stamper.
Stamper’s finger-picking style is easy on the ear, and his voice brings to mind Mark Knopfler or Bruce Springsteen. To hold a sold-out Palais to attention requires charisma, and thankfully, Stamper has plenty.
His songs Too Much Light, Another Human Heart, and Burn So Bright sound as though they could have been released anytime in the last 50 years, and they hush the audience in a way that is surprising for someone relatively unknown. Playing much of his 2023 album Bad Rhythm Of A Good Heart, Stamper’s songs are deceptively straightforward, balancing simple structures, unshowy playing and sharp, observational lyrics.
He closes his set with Black Eye, a “drinking song for people who don’t drink”, its lyrics full of Americana references like county lines, tanks of gas, and shotgun shacks, imagery the audience eats up. But of course, we’re leaving plenty of room for the main course.
As Isaak arrives, the stage is bathed in warm lights and red drapes that can’t help recalling the world of Twin Peaks. The crowd, mostly aged as if they caught Isaak on his first Australian tour in 1995, thrill with excitement. More than anywhere else in the world, Australia has had a lasting love for Isaak, sending his albums high in the charts during his heyday and warmly welcoming him to X-Factor and the 2015 AFL Grand Final decades later.
It’s a curious obsession but one that comes to a full-throated denouement this evening. Within moments of beginning American Boy (“I’m the original American boy / Love you, baby, with all my heart / Ten times better than those movie stars”), there is no flicker of a doubt that we are in good hands.
Isaak’s magnificent voice, good-natured Hanks-ian charm, and musical proficiency are all here, and no screaming, impassioned sexagenarian fan will sway him. Isaak’s band—most of whom we are later reminded have been with him for over 39 years—is equally at ease in the songs, on the stage, and with the crowd.
Sometimes, such as in the case of some recent tours from long-running bands, familiarity can result in lazy concerts in which the audience is taken for granted. Not so with Isaak.
After a version of Somebody’s Crying that sees the band dancing energetically while holding their guitars aloft, Isaak pauses to talk to the crowd. “I mean, we might not be Taylor Swift quality,” he says in mock seriousness, snapping a friendship bracelet on his wrist. “But we are union quality, and tonight you’re going to see this band give at least 60 per cent. Maybe even higher.”
Isaak spends the next two songs testing the range of his wireless microphone as he ventures throughout the crowd, up the stairs and to the very back of the higher balcony, posing for selfies, doling out high fives and ensuring no face is left glum. Skills that led to him being given the short-lived sitcom The Chris Isaak Show television series are being exercised to their fullest.
“You’re not a crowd; you’re a mob,” he says, smiling and breathless from the exertion. Once back on stage, the band reel through the high-energy rock of I Want Your Love and the spellbinding tenderness of Wicked Game, a delicate atmosphere of close mic’ed vocals that swoop to a peerless falsetto and resonant guitar lines, broken only by the incessant screams of an inebriated fan.
Tonight’s crowd contains more boomer energy than a Kmart Boxing Day sale, but again, nothing phases Isaak. Not even when a story about visiting Sun Studios is interrupted by a fan in the crowd who insists he sign her tee shirt. “Man, I feel like I’m in a bar again,” he says, smiling and taking her pen.
Speak Of The Devil, Summer Holiday, and a cover of Pretty Woman bring the crowd to its feet, much to Isaak’s delight, “Come on, stand up!” he tells us. “Pants are overrated.” Much of the second half of the concert is given over to cover versions of fifties and sixties classics, and it is a thrill to hear not only Isaak’s magnificent voice curl its way around melodies that he almost makes his own but also the personal connections to that era of music.
Returning to the Sun Studios story, Isaak shares how he met Elvis Presley‘s guitarist Scotty Moore there and later sang with proto-rock legends Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison, “a man who was friends with everyone in this band.” It is this connection that is clearly a huge part of his appeal, yet it is one that never overshadows Isaak’s talents.
For the concert’s acoustic session, the audience returns to their seats, and the band draws themselves to the front of the stage, Isaak taking an acoustic guitar to lead them through Forever Blue, Two Hearts and another Orbison cover, Only The Lonely.
It is here that the musicianship on stage really shines. Drummer and backing vocalist Kenney Dale Johnson, bassist Roly Salley, guitarist Hershel Yatovitz and keyboard player Timothy Drury feel like a band who have played together for nearly four decades. Occasionally moving into synchronised dance moves, as in Livin’ For Your Lover (used in the film Blue Velvet), pitching in with perfect backing vocals and looking like exactly what you would expect someone who has made a living as a session musician to look, they are exactly the right crew for the job.
The band and Isaak move with joyous ease and freedom when goofing around or nailing the chorus of a pop classic like Blue Hotel. Tonight, we get two Elvis covers, I Forgot To Remember To Forget, and I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You, and gags about long-term relationships and the value of being passionate over being good at something before we get the set closer, Big Wide Wonderful World.
Disappearing off stage just long enough to change into a suit made of small rectangular mirrors, Isaak and the band return to the ominous chug of his evergreen hit Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing, which sees him bring some of the few women in the crowd under 40 to the stage to dance alongside him. Like him and us, they can barely keep the smiles from their faces.
