Live Review: Queensland Music Festival: 16 Lovers Lane

One of Katie Noonan's first gambits in her inaugural year as Artistic Director of Queensland Music Festival was to pull together tonight's tribute to The Go-Betweens' seminal 1988 sixth album 16 Lovers Lane, a career high-water mark from one of Queensland's finest ever outfits. Fittingly, the crowd assembled for the performance seem largely comprised of people who were there the first time around, a sartorially elegant crew now longer in the tooth but no less keen to revisit their youth in this traipse down memory lane. 

Queensland-bred singer-songwriter Ben Salter opens proceedings with an all-too-brief set of powerful originals, abetted by Bridget Lewis - one of his partners-in-crime from The Gin Club - on cello. He makes a strong impression with just four songs, a soaring, impassioned take on West End Girls entirely appropriate in both tone and content and a new tune also hitting home hard.

There's no intermission, just a brief darkness while the stage is changed over, and after a vibrant didgeridoo-fuelled Welcome To Country we get to the main proceedings. The band tonight includes three past members of The Go-Betweens who played on the original 16 Lovers Lane sessions - Amanda Brown, Lindy Morrison and John Willsteed - augmented by guitarists Dan Kelly and Danny Widdicombe and multi-instrumentalist Luke Daniel Peacock. For the duration this ensemble provides the musical backbone of tonight's homage, offering versions of the songs that remain largely faithful to the recorded arrangements but nonetheless sound wonderful in the live setting.

In the absence of The Go-Betweens' two singer-songwriters - Grant McLennan, who sadly passed away in 2006, and Robert Forster, who declined to be involved while giving his full blessings for the tribute to go ahead without him - an array of top-notch vocalists from all around the country have been reined in to sing these classic songs, Died Pretty frontman Ron S Peno tasked with opening proceedings and doing a strong job on McLennan's gorgeous Love Goes On. Next up Katie Noonan and her brother Tyrone - the principals from much-loved '90s/'00s Brisbane band george - offer a lovely reading of Quiet Heart, Tyrone taking the lead with his sister offering powerful familial harmonies, their voices meshing perfectly. There's a slight shuffling of positions as Kelly moves forward to offer vocals on Love Is A Sign - Zoe Davis from local indie-popsters Cub Sport briefly taking over on bass duties - before Sydney singer-songwriter Montaigne steps up to the plate for You Can't Say No Forever, the song sounding vastly different but no less wonderful rendered in a female voice. Next up, Brown takes a break from violin duties to offer a beautiful rendition of The Devil's Eye, preceding it with an anecdote about when her then-partner McLennan penned the song in (and presumably about) her absence, a delightfully intimate touch.

Side two of the album kicks off with hit single Streets Of Your Town, The Go-Betweens' contemporary Steve Kilbey from The Church also offering a nice tribute to the band before diving into the cherished tune, starting briefly in the wrong key before recovering nicely. Local songstress Sahara Beck does a great job on Clouds - despite Forster's songs seeming slightly more difficult to replicate vocally, perhaps less traditional in structure than his cohort's - before Sam Cromack and Jen Boyce completely own McLennan's up-tempo standard Was There Anything I Could Do? in perhaps the performance of the night. Another contemporary of the band, Mark Callaghan - who was fronting The Riptides when The Go-Betweens were first making their mark in Brisbane - takes vocals for I'm All Right, and the album proper concludes when Davis returns alongside her Cub Sport bandmate Tim Nelson for a lovely reading of Forster's brilliant Dive For Your Memory.

The band joke about the night now being over, but it's clear from their demeanour that there's more to come, and we're treated to some B-sides from the era in the form of You Won't Find It Again (sung by the Noonans), Rock And Roll Friend (Kilbey again), Twin Layers Of Lightning (marked by tonight's first appearance from Sydney's Kirin J Callinan, clad in resplendent cowboy attire), before Nelson and Cromack team up to trade verses on older The Go-Betweens classic Cattle And Cane to (ostensibly) bring proceedings to a close.

But of course there's still more to unfurl, and a strong audience response drags the band back for another older McLennan track Apology Accepted - delivered wonderfully by Peno and featuring some excellent steel guitar work from Widdicombe - before the entire cast reconvenes to reprise Streets Of Your Town, complete with mass audience singalong. When Willsteed busts out the song's trademark acoustic solo the crowd goes wild, in the process hammering home the validity of this tribute to the Brisbane musical landmark: people still love these timeless songs and fully appreciate their importance to our cultural fabric, and if that's not worth celebrating then it's hard to imagine what is.