Great news for Sydney Film Festival

After more than a decade of deep-rooted financial problems and organisational instability, the Sydney Film Festival faces a potentially bright new future after yesterday's announcement of a $2.25 million funding boost spread over three years.

The announcement follows the festival's adaptation of a new board structure at an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) a few weeks ago. (This paragraph and the one below have been edited pending further research)

The funding boost not only wipes out the festival's debts but shores up the organisation's shaky financial foundation (corporate sponsorship being understandably hard to find since the global financial crash) and allows it to pursue a new venue/ audience strategy.
Today's SMH has news of a possible expansion to Parramatta in Western Sydney. Extract: "Yesterday's funding increase, from $220,000 to $970,000 a year for the next three years, would revitalise the festival and boost Sydney's efforts to entice more big movies to be made in NSW, said the Minister for State and Regional Development, Ian Macdonald.

"The increase will help cover the shortfall left by the festival's likely lack of a principal sponsor this year.

"The festival would also stick to the shorter format introduced last year, which was reduced from 19 days to 12 in response to a tough economic climate."

"The Arts Minister, Virginia Judge, said the festival was looking to renew its focus on western Sydney and enhance its travelling festival in rural areas, broadening its audience." (SMH extract ends)

In exchange for extra funding the state governemnt had wanted a seat on the board and a revamp of the constitution to bring the organisation more in line with the Sydney Writers Festival or the Sydney Festival.

The EGM, which I was unable to attend, voted yes to the proposed new constitution by the required minimum margin of 75%.

Former board member member Tina Kaufman, who was at the meeting,
reported that "a small but very vocal group were very concerned about what they saw as the disenfranchisement of members.

"They argued for an amendment or rider offering an alternate board structure or ways of electing/ appointing the board that they felt would lessen this disenfranchisement.

"The amendment was not possible legally, so the meeting finally made a formal request that the board look at ways of strengthening the artistic independence clause and the possibility of an additional member-elected person on the (new)selection panel. This is up to the new board
after the Annual General Meeting."

Extract from SFF media release, 23/02/10:
“The Independent Review commissioned by the NSW Government and the SFF, undertaken by Booz and Co, provided a blueprint for a sustainable and long-term future and has assisted the company to look to the future.

"The funding package announced today enables the Booz recommendations to be confidently realised by the SFF, whilst firmly retaining the artistic independence of the company.

"Overall the Booz Review recommended a two to three-year development strategy for the Festival that focuses on operational and governance reform, exploration of new markets and further consideration of the Sydney Film Festival’s future position in the local, national and international events calendar and film festival environment...

"Today’s announcement confirmed the appointment by the Minister of G+T lawyer Chris Freeland as Chair-elect...

"The SFF will hold its AGM this Sunday.

"The full program for the 57th Sydney Film Festival, 2–14 June 2010, will be announced on 5th May."

(Image, Kawai piano at State Theatre: www.kawai.net.au)
Other images: filmfestivalworld.com)

Beauty in the cinema - Romy Schneider, cigarettes, swoon

Judging by these extraordinary images Henri-Georges Clouzot's L'Enfer had the potential to be a startling cinema masterpiece. Sadly it was not to be. The French director best known for his thrillers The Wages of Fear and Les Diabolioques abandoned the project in 1964.

The story is told in a documentary directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno, that appeared last year and screened at MIFF (unfortunately I missed it - if anyone has any details of an Australian DVD release, please let me know).

If the film's title sounds familiar, it's because in 1994 Claude Chabrol directed a rather earnest and forgettable version of the story based on Clouzot's script, with Emanuelle Beart in the Schneider role as a woman suffering due to the paranoid fantasies of her insanely jealous husband.

The Guardian picked up the trail one week ahead of its London release early last November. Extract:

"Clouzot is being brought to new audiences with a documentary about his doomed 1964 project concerning a jealous husband's mental collapse into paranoid fantasy. Called L'Enfer (Hell), the film became a real hell for the director and everyone on set...

"The test shots for Clouzot's L'Enfer that appear in the new documentary show that he envisaged using kinetic art in a way that parallels how Hitchcock had used Salvador Dalí's surrealist dream sequences almost 20 years earlier on Spellbound.

"Maybe, though, it was in making these test shots that Clouzot's ambition went beyond his capacity to realise a film. Film-maker Bernard Stora, then an intern on the film, worked on the tests. "I walked into something totally insane," he recalls. 'Clouzot had the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians. It seemed clear from the beginning they didn't know what they were doing'.. "

Postscript (thanks to reader David for the link to this clip below)

Reviews - Crazy Heart & The Hurt Locker

My reviews of country music romantic drama Crazy Heart and Iraqi war film The Hurt Locker are now up at SBS Films - the latter published as part of a pair of dissenting views.

Crazy Heart extract:

"Unlike Robert Altman’s Nashville, which satirised country music mercilessly (or at least its more commercial variant), Jeff Bridges' Cooper clearly loves and understands the form and the milieu it thrives in. Whether performed in smoky bars or sprawling outdoor concerts, the music is presented at its best – soulful and melodic, with lyrics that tolerate no nonsense...If you’re going to make a movie set in a specific musical sub-culture, you’d better get its details right. Crazy Heart does that and more. "


The Hurt Locker extract:

"We gain a vivid feel for what life is like on the streets for the ordinary soldier, but get no sense of why some Iraqis are trying to kill them. The Iraqi people are treated almost contemptibly by the filmmakers. With the sole exception of a young boy befriended by one of the soldiers, they don’t exist as rounded human beings with their own thoughts, desires and fears. They’re simply the 'other'."

NINE -the review

Finally I get around to posting my review of the musical Nine, which ran in The Weekend Australian's print edition a few ago but not online.

Have to say I was surprised and somewhat baffled by the level of vitriol levelled at this film by some US and Australian critics. I can accept people finding flaws in the film (I found some myself). I can't accept the idea that it's abject rubbish - a judgement that only makes sense to me if you accept that many critics dislike the musical genre. Here, for what it's worth, is what I thought:

Nine is the follow-up musical to director Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning Chicago and again it’s based on a stage show, this time one dating based on a classic film, Federico Fellini’s 8 ½.

That 1963 film starred Marcello Mastroianni as a movie director named Guido undergoing a creative crisis as he prepared to direct his latest production, assailed by the expectations of his mistress, his wife, his fans and his collaborators.

The film made a huge impact on critics, filmmakers and lovers of European cinema for two principal reasons, the first being its daringly self-referential nature (Fellini clearly based Guido upon himself and was undergoing his own creative crisis ).

The second reason was the bold way it folded together Guido’s present tense life with enactments of his memories, dreams and fantasies without ever clearly marking the boundaries. This was not quite unprecedented - Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Wild Strawberries was an obvious precursor – but Fellini took the technique somewhere new, intensely personal and stylish.

Nine is not the first to have been been inspired (either directly or indirectly) by 8 ½ - witness Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories and a year earlier, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. The latter used Fellini’s template for a musical based on Fosse’s own life (again the material was first made as a stage musical), resulting in a masterpiece.

Marshall has, then, a lot to live up too. His major advantage is an all-star cast centering on Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido. The melancholic director is surrounded by the significant women in his life, played mostly by Oscar-winners: Sophia Loren (his mother), Penelope Cruz (lover), Marion Cotillard (wife), Nicole Kidman (leading lady), Judi Dench (costume designer). Oscar nominee Kate Hudson appears as a journalist and would-be seducer, and singer Fergie plays a whore from Guido’s childhood.
Unlike the Fellini and Fosse films, Nine has a fairly simple, almost predictable structure: Guido’s present tense story (wanders off from media conference, runs off to coastal resort with his mistress, etc) is punctuated by song-and-dance numbers at regular intervals, each featuring one of the aforementioned women.

The songs are not especially memorable, which you can also say about most contemporary musicals, though they’re performed and staged with a verve that I found mostly entertaining. The female star power varies in its dazzle, though. The roles of Loren and Kidman are brief and under-written. Cotillard is moving, Cruz is fine except that her song and dance routine seems to have been conceived for a woman with much longer legs. Marshall has not flattered her.

What holds the film together is Day-Lewis. After his get-me-an-Oscar performance in There Will be Blood, he again plays a larger than life character but here his performance is all the more compelling for being contained. The film is not in the same class as All That Jazz, but as a flashy musical entertainment it delivers a charge.

1969: Arthur C. Clarke invents the iPad, Skype, etc

Not only did Arthur C. Clarke invent the communications satellite, he also dreamt up the internet, the iPad and e-newspapers.

Oh, and Skype - see the image above , taken from 2001: a Space Odyssey (for which I guess we should give Stanley Kubrick a smidgeon of credit for co-writing with Clarke and directing)

The extract below is from Clarke's novel version of 2001 (Thanks to Cinema Fist, which has a longer extract.)

"Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites."

Eyeswired interviews Berlinale chief Kosslick for SBS

I couldn't get to this year's Berlinale (Berlin film festival), which is now in full swing, but I did at least get to interview the festival's head, Dieter Kosslick, when he and his New Zealand-born selector of Australian films, Marianne Redpath, visited Australia for the first time in September.

The interview is up at the SBS film website.

Extract:
'...if Kosslick is known for anything, it’s his unapologetic enthusiasm for stars. “When I came in there was the criticism that there aren’t enough celebrities on the red carpet,” he says, adding that after teething problems in the first three years, he had 100 percent success in the turn-up rate. “Then we had people saying ‘Dieter is focusing on the celebrities and not the films’ – and this is a stupid point. Because on the red carpet are the people who make these films.

' “We have 4200 journalists in Berlin," he continues. “Can you tell me what these journalists would do without the red carpet? The red carpet is very important.” When Kosslick invites a film into a competition or gala screening spot, there’s an explicit understanding the stars and director will appear in person..."

Photo above right: Kosslick rubbing shoulders on the red carpet with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley.

Meanwhile the festival has premiered the restored, director's cut of Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis - described by the Independent as " better than anyone could ever have expected".

Seven ages of rock hackwork

My somewhat stinging critique of the BBC music documentary series Seven Ages of Rock, currently screening on ABC1 on Thursday nights, is up at ABC Unleashed.

Have to hand it to ABC Online for being prepared to publish a critique of one of its own programs on the apparent principle that it's good to encourage debate and discussion.

Extract:

"How could a program purporting to examine the birth of rock and the guitar hero completely omit the name of Jimi Hendrix and still stake a claim to credibility? The US-born Hendrix blew away the sixties British rock aristocracy when he launched his career in the UK in 1966-7 and revolutionised electric guitar playing. But it seems he wasn't British enough for the program makers.

"Or was he? Strangely when you go to the BBC website you find the first episode described as actually revolving around Hendrix. This means that in Australia we've ended up with a different version of the series - one so flawed that its value has to be seriously queried..."

The Hendrix poster above is by Australian artist Martin Sharp, who has an exhibition of his work currently at the Museum of Sydney.

A century of visual effects

It's easy to get so caught up in discussions about CGI that we forget that visual effects have a long history in cinema. It's also easy to assume quite erroneously that digital imagery automatically outclasses anything done in earlier eras of cinema.

Those images from Thief of Baghdad (1940) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) still look mighty impressive. Meanwhile the dinosaurs in the first two clips from Jurassic Park now look scarcely more realistic than the clip from the original King Kong.

If the Tyrannosaurus rex in the third clip looks more real, it's probably because this part of the film used a combination of digital imagery and older-style animatronic technology, giving the dinosaur a more solid, physical appearance.

Digital FX technicians will tell that it's easier to come up with seamless effects when you're working from something physical, as opposed to building an image from scratch - especially when you're trying to create something with the kinetic complexity of a living creature.

Effects are usually at their most artfully achieved when they're totally invisible to the viewer - note the effectiveness of the streetscape painted in behind Naomi Watts in the clip from the Peter Jackson King Kong.

Not shown here, but a good example of this use of the technology, are the scenes depicting Gary Sinise's character minus legs in Forrest Gump (no, Sinise, did not undergo a double amputation before taking the role) .

For that reason I tend to distrust awards given for special effects. The only people who really understand the exact role of FX are often the people who worked on the movie.

The same goes for editing - you don't see the parts of an actor's performance that the editor has decided to reject. Those of us outside the editing suite can't possibly judge this crucial part of the editing process.

Video tip: ABC website

Torn between two lovers

Overlooked by the Oscar voters, James Gray's Two Lovers is one of my favourite films of last year.

On SBS's film website I review the film - now in DVD release - and list some of its outstanding qualities, especially the extraordinary lead performance of Joaquin Phoenix as Leonard, a bipolar Jewish-American caught between two lovers.

Extract:

"In Phoenix’s hands Leonard is frequently nervous, restless, uncomfortable in his own skin, while being apparently confident during his illness’s manic phases. We never know which way he’s going to turn, what he’s going to do next, so even when he’s behaving in an unremarkable manner we’re on the edge of our seats."

Beauty in the cinema - Claudia Cardinale

My Claudia Cardinale interview and career profile, published in yesterday's arts section of The Australian, makes an appropriate companion piece to my thoughts on beauty in cinema a couple of posts below.

Extract:

"GAZING on the young Claudia Cardinale, with that gracefully swan-like neck, hypnotisingly dark eyes and curvaceous figure, it's not hard to see why she was dubbed Italy's brunette answer to Brigitte Bardot's blonde bombshell in the early 1960s. Bardot herself was once quoted as saying Cardinale was destined to take her place ("After BB comes CC, no?").

"I hesitate to bring this up when talking to the Tunisian-born Cardinale ahead of an upcoming Melbourne retrospective devoted to her work, thinking she may be long over it.

"I needn't have worried. Not only does she not mind but Cardinale, who at 71 is still making films and appearing in theatre, finds the comparison "fantastic". For her, Bardot "was the most beautiful actress", the male equivalent, she adds, being Marlon Brando..."

The feature is hooked on an upcoming retrospective screening season devoted to Cardinale at Melbourne's ACMI. Hmm. Yet again I think I may be living in the wrong city...

On innocence and blood

My curator's notes on Paul Cox's film Innocence (2000) are now up at the National Film & Sound Archive website, australianscreen.

The film, for those who haven't seen it, is a drama examing an adulterous affair between two senior citizens, resurrecting the brief but intense love affair of their youth.

On a different note, if you're interested in Australian genre film-making I recommend you check out my colleague Richard Kuipers's recently posted notes on several Oz horror films including Wolf Creek and Long Weekend.

Brief extract: Innocence:

The principal themes of Innocence – love, mortality, spirituality – are found throughout the work of veteran auteur filmmaker Paul Cox (Cactus, 1986; A Woman’s Tale, 1991), but find a particularly intense and satisfying expression here. The film became one of the Dutch-born Australian filmmaker’s most widely admired and internationally successful features...

"...Perhaps the strangest thing about Innocence is the title, the meaning of which is not immediately obvious but provides a moral and philosophical framework in which to discuss its events.

"On a literal level it appears Cox is proclaiming that the spirituality of love goes hand in hand with moral innocence. Yet by highlighting the genuine trauma caused to Claire’s (Julia Blake) husband John (Terry Norris) by her affair with Andreas (Bud Tingwell), this notion is complicated in a deeply interesting way..."

Beauty in the cinema matters

Beauty has been a central element of the cinema since shortly after it began yet it's a subject that film writers tend to tiptoe around today, for fear of seeming either sexist or low-brow. Beauty after all is the subject of countless populist celebrity magazines, pleastered all over their covers. We don't often stop to ask why.

An appreciation of the power of human beauty is the one thing that unites every type of feature filmmaking, every film making culture, whether Chinese or Indian, American, French or Spanish. This is regardless of whether the director is male or female, straight or gay.

That iconoclast Luis Bunuel boasted of deliberately turning his camera away from picturesque landscapes, as if to demonstrate the purity of his filmmaking, yet when it came to beautiful women he wasn't so quick to turn away, building films around Catherine Deneuve and Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina (both pictured right). Jean-Luc Godard may have loved to tear up film-making convention but when it came to the power of a beautiful woman like Anna Karina he seemed powerless to resist.

Most directors are hetereosexual males and female beauty is naturally high on their list of fascinations, yet note the way the perfectly gay-credentialled Pedro Almodovar fixates on Penelope Cruz.

Feminist theoretician Laura Mulvey's once influential formulation of "the male gaze", in which cinema was said to be created essentially from a voyeuristic male point of view for a male viewer's pleasure, now seems naively ideological and wrong-headed

The power and uniquity of the female gaze has always been something that even the most chauvinistic Hollywood males have had to build into their calculations. It's not that Hollywood and other film industries aren't guilty of sexism, but good-looking males are just as common in mainstream cinema as are attractive women - think Johnny Depp and George Clooney. Or Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Paul Newman.

I started thinking about this subject after watching the upcoming French film Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, which is released in Australian cinemas in April. Anna Mouglalis (pictured right), the French actress and model who plays Chanel, makes an extraordinary impression on screen, not so much for her acting (though it is flawless) , as for the striking beauty of her face, her remarkably feline body, and the elegant perfection with which these two go together.

The film shows Stravinsky (played by the himself rather beautiful Mads Mikkelsen) becoming obsessed with Chanel the moment she steps into the same room for the first time. Mouglalis makes this instant sexual obsession seem utterly logical - who could resist it?

Below are some of my favourite female screen beauties of recent years - the women who always glue me to the screen. All are good actresses - their looks are never something they rely on but part of an irresistible package that we call screen presence. Why women, and not men? Because I'm male and heterosexual and not the best judge of what makes a male iresisitibly good-looking. (Pictured top: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi; Anna Mouglasis with Mads Mikkelsen in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. Below: Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Day-Lewis with Marion Cotillard, Eva Green, Julie Delpy and Maggie Gyllenhaal)

A complete Tucker

So what does Tony Blair's notorious former spin-doctor Alastair Campbell make of Malcolm Tucker, the gobsmackingly vicious spinmeister based on him in the current satire In The Loop?

Well we know the answer to that because the BBC's The Culture Show screened the film for him then asked him for his views immediately after. No major mea culpas from Alastair, but what did you expect? Interesting viewing nonetheless, especially if you've seen - or plan to see - the film.

My review of Loop was published in The Australian, and since it hasn't been posted online I'm reproducing it here (in my submitted version rather than slightly edited version that appeared in print).

IN THE LOOP (MA15+) National release (four stars)

"In the history of colourfully obscene dialogue I never thought it would be possible to surpass the efforts of Lee Ermey, the ex-parade ground instructor who played a fictionalised version of his former self and contributed many of his own lines to Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket.

'You are so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece' is the only line repeatable here, and while it gives an idea of his humour, it lacks its ear-tingling crudity.

"Ermey however has had his day. A new King of Potty Mouth has ascended the throne in the shape of In The Loop’s spectacularly foul-tempered British spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.

"Tucker doesn’t so much dominate this sharp-fanged satire about the lead up to an unnamed war in the Middle East (obviously the Iraq invasion) as crash his way in before charging around like a badly injured bull.

"When he’s not physically on screen, the thought is never far away that he might burst in at any second (as indeed he sometimes does), behaving in borderline-certifiable manner and red-facedly browbeating his colleagues.

"The latter include a hopelessly waffling minister (Tom Hollander) whose ambiguous statements on the possibility of war trigger a dire political crisis – at least in the mind of Tucker and the media. The crisis leads to an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington for the MP - part of the spin maestro’s political manoeuvering – where much of the action unfolds.

"British political satire has come a long way since the classic understatement of the TV series Yes Minister, in which ministerial bullying came wrapped in a velvet glove. The film, essentially a feature spin-off of the same production team’s British TV satire The Thick of It, is more about open, bare-faced monstering. When accused of bullying, Tucker responds furiously with 'Don’t. Ever. Call me. A bully.”' Pause. 'I’m so much more than that.'

"Anyone even casually familiar with the last decade’s British political scene will quickly recognize Tucker as a fictionalised version of the Tony Blair’s director of communications Alistair Campbell – indeed In the Loop’s director, Armando Iannucci, admits to basing the character on him.

"As Tucker, Peter Capaldi relishes every moment of the almost surrealistically crass dialogue he’s been provided by the five-man screenwriting team - it’s a tour-de-force performance. Hardly ever has scenery chewing seemed more appropriate and perversely enjoyable. But this is by no means a one man show.

"Hollander is on great form as the none–too-bright Secretary of State for International Development – a man who only ever seems to get excited when his own personal interests are threatened. Also good value is James Gandolfini as – oh the irony – a peace-loving US general, and Chris Addison as a wimpy British government aide who can’t keep his mouth closed in front of a US journalist.

"A production of BBC Films, In The Loop has only one major flaw in that visually its TV origins are only too obvious at times. In other respects however it reflects the very finest values of contemporary television, which is where most of the best screenwriting for adult audiences tends to be found.

"As Hollywood focuses ever more obsessively on spectacle and comic book stories aimed at younger viewers, television has stepped forward to plug the gap. Witness US series like The Wire and The Sopranos, and UK comedies such as I’m Alan Partridge (on which Iannucci worked as producer, writer and director) and The Office.

If In The Loop is a version of something originally produced for television, its plotting is as complex, and its sensibility as adult, as anything you’re likely to see in an art-house cinema.

"Will it lose much by being viewed at home in a few months’ time on DVD? Visually, perhaps not, but then comedy always works so much better with an audience, and if I haven’t mentioned it already, the film is often screamingly funny."

"Alistair Campbell has dismissed In The Loop as “cartoon-like” – but then great satire so often is. It’s not hard to imagine that the back-room politicking in the lead up to the Iraq invasion was at heart not so very different – just more boring and with swearing far less inventive."

Image: Peter Capaldi (L), James Gandolfini (R)

Sydney Festival's Gallery of Rogues

Over the past few days the Sydney Festival website has been flooded with complaints from concertgoers (scroll down), angry about the shambolic nature of Hal Willner's Rogue's Gallery concert last Thursday.

Festival artistic director Lindy Hume has posted no less than two statements in reply on the festival website, the latest one opening thus:

"Over the last few days the Sydney Festival team and I have been coming to terms with the harsh reality that so many of you have expressed your disappointment in Rogue's Gallery. We all feel terrible that an evening we had planned as a joyful, raucous musical celebration on the steps of the Sydney Opera House has alienated so many people. This is definitely not the way we wanted the 2010 Festival to end..."

My review ran in The Australian yesterday, and since isn't online, and the Monday edition is no longer for sale, I'm posting it here:

Sydney Festival
Rogue’s Gallery, Sydney Opera House forecourt, January 28

US producer Hal Willner got away with this one by the skin of his teeth. The high spots will live in the memory, blotting out the low ones, of which there were too many for an event at this price ($145+ per ticket).

A program of traditional sea shanties sung by a sprawling and an eccentric combination of major, minor (and non) talents was always going to be hit or miss. But who could have predicted how big the misses would be; that drawcard Marianne Faithfull would embarrassingly struggle with her words and miss the notes, for instance?

I certainly didn’t guess the clear standouts would be a batch of under-celebrated female singers - Ireland’s Camille O’Sullivan, Britain’s Marry Waterson (from the Waterson-Carthy folk clan) and Australia’s Sarah Blasko (pictured above right). On this showing all deserve to be showered with fortune and global fame. Blasko’s sublime acapella tribute to the late Kate McGarrigle was a shivers down the spine moment. O’Sullivan (with Todd Rundgren and without) demonstrated superb stagecraft and vocal prowess.

Planting hands confidently on hips, as if to say “now THIS is how you sing a folk song”), Waterson commanded attention with a deep understanding of the traditional form. So where were the Australian folkies, and why were we subjected to the “singing“ of Tim Robbins, a man whose gifts are manifestly not of the musical kind?

Opening in steady rain that at least echoed the sea-lashed maritime theme, the first hour was an under-rehearsed curio verging on a shambles. First act Baby Gramps, an old-timer whose main gimmick is to sing like a didgeridoo, went on and on. Peter Garrett and the great Rundgren put their hearts and souls into their songs, ex-Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas growled to no good effect and raunch-mistress Peaches was accompanied by a queer pantomime act who would have looked pathetic in a pub open-mic night.

At the roughly one hour mark, just as the concert was looking a giant fizzer, Liam Finn (son of Neil) and Augie March’s Glenn Richards came to the rescue with Blood Red Roses accompanied by a chorus that actually seemed to have rehearsed. Stirring stuff, beautifully sung. The rain miraculously stopped and the music turned magnificent for the next half hour before an uneven race to a Pogues-like knees-up of a finale led by Garrett.