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27 Club

4 stars

 

A photograph of blues legend Robert Johnson is projected onto the back wall at the start of this epic homage to some of rock and roll’s more precocious talents, who all breathed their last aged just 27. As Johnson’s Crossroad Blues is reinvented by the band on stage as a barroom rocker, it sets the tone for a seventy-minute power through as many greatest hits by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse as time will allow. 

 

Zac Tyler’s production for Australia’s Amplified House company bring together what amounts to an Aussie supergroup, with vocalists Dusty Lee Stephensen (Wanderers), Kevin Mitchell (Jebediah, Bob Evans), Carla Lippis (Mondo Psycho) and Sarah McLeod (The Superjesus), leading the charge. 

 

With line drawings of the dead icons projected behind them, rather than attempt some Stars in Their Eyes type impressions, each singer stamps their own personality on the classics to make them their own. Like the words of Neil Young – 79-years-old and still rockin’ in the free world –  that appear at one point declaring how ‘It’s Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away’, 27 Club understands rock and roll mythology enough to make its heroes immortal in an exhilarating resurrection. 

 

Assembly Rooms until 24 August, 8.35pm.


The List, August 2025

 

Ends

 

 

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