The curtain pulls aside to unveil first act of tonight, Kimbra, who stands alone on stage with her guitar. The Melbourne-based songstress wastes no time, launching into an eclectic jazz-fusion inspired set that features heavy use of a looping pedal. She looks stunning, sounds great, and sets the mood for this evening. The complexity of looped harmonies and rhythms that she pulls off is impressive and her take on Gotye’s Heart’s A Mess is truly sublime.

Brisbane’s favourite purveyors of pop, Hungry Kids of Hungary are greeted warmly by the hometown crowd. Recent touring as well as their recent QSong award wins may be partly responsible for a marked rise in the level of performance and engagement the band are now wielding. Playing several new songs, a couple of which had a very tasty seventies-come-10CC flavour, meant that long time listeners are able to savour new morsels that we haven’t been treated to before. Triple J rotation helps Set It Right and Scattered Diamonds take their place as the crowd favourites of tonight, although new single Old Money hints at much greater things for these boys.

After an aggravating experience finding the bathroom (through a congested bottlenecked walkway and up a narrow flight of stairs as the venue doesn’t have any on the ground level) and acquiring a beverage (you’d expect more bar staff for a sold out show to serve the waiting crowd of six or seven people deep!) Bertie Blackman takes to the stage, now decorated with cardboard animal cutouts, with her band. Dressed in a large man’s white business shirt, stockings and sans pants, Bertie looks a little like she has come from a late wakeup one-night-stand, which is an appropriate look for her aptly named Secrets And Lies tour.

Bertie launches straight into second single Thump from her Secrets and Lies release, its pulsing and heart-thumping electro-rock making it an agreeable start to a set that holds the excitement at an upper level for most of the evening. Television, Come To Bed and White Owl follow in quick succession.

Triple J flogged Heart like crazy, so it was no surprise that the audience respond most enthusiastically to its performance tonight. The pre-recorded backing tracks that are used for most of the set are made glaringly obvious with this song, as the featured - œOh lalala’ backing vocals come seemingly out of nowhere. Band mates Neal Sutherland, Manny Bourakis and Sam Lawrence provide a solid, if somewhat static underlay for Bertie to croon, crackle and shout out her spleen.

Rounding off the main set are Clocks, Lust And Found, Black Cats, Byrds Of Prey and Baby Teeth. After a quick break Bertie returns to the stage for a solo acoustic version of Shout Out that is eerie and haunting in its delivery. The others return for an extended cover of Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight before finishing up the night with Sky Is Falling. We then begin the awkward slow shuffle through the bottleneck out into the cool of the evening, quietly satisfied that this has been a night well worth having.