Jason Webley, Adam Hadley,Drew Walky @ The Front,Canberra (17/3/2011)

Sat 19th Mar, 2011 in Gig Reviews

The destruction of a coffee table, a packed, sweaty Canberra cafe and a talented madman with an accordion; what a winning combination for a Thursday night in autumn. The fact that it also happened to be St Patrick’s Day also added something to the atmosphere for Jason Webley, Adam Hadley and Drew Walky. Or maybe people just look friendly in green.

To open the night, local artist Drew Walky took to the stage… well corner of the room with a lamp, with his beautifully crude, yet romantic songs which reminded one of modern Irish ballads played with a Stratocaster.

After Walky finished his last song Lullaby, well-known local entertainer Adam Hadley enlightened the audience with a set of poems including a new piece performed as a female Irish alter-ego – the name of which escapes me. It did, however, conjure thoughts of Colin Farrell in drag. But it could’ve been that I was distracted by the fact that Hadley for the first time in living memory was clean-shaven.

I do suspect that this superficial change to his face was to enhance the adorable scruffiness of the star of the night Jason Webley a man who is clearly the greatest accordion-playing-alternative-cabaret act that anyone will see… ever.

From the moment he set up and began to sing, the atmosphere in The Front changed. From just the smile on his face, the room seemed to warm up (even beyond the sweltering humidity from the sheer number of bodies in the room), and as he stepped away from the microphone, engaging with the audience directly, forming sing-a-longs and telling stories, you could almost see the intimacy in the air.

What ensued can only be described as two-and-a-half hours of pure entertainment. From unplugged renditions of Dance While the Sky Crashes Down, through the Ig Nobel Prize-inspired version of the Evelyn Evelyn classic Elephant Elephant, followed by jumping on a coffee table and stamping out his own drum beats while belting out his songs mic-free, to a great battle between each side of The Front, which almost had even yours truly believing we were warring violins and trombones, each side battling it out to sound better than the other, and all of us – at Webley’s bidding – battling against the rest of the country for the right to be called his best audience on the tour.

Being his first performance in Canberra, I think it is fair to say that we left a positive impression on Webley. Around half-way through the show, he had managed to squeeze almost everyone into sitting in the small space in front of the amp in the corner. He then managed to get us all up and dance and sing with him (as the angelic female and the “weird deep-voiced European guy from those 90s techno songs”) the lines, ‘My hair is a very very long hair. It’s short and long. Long long short and long’. After that, things slowed down. He took out his whiskey bottle filled with pennies for the beautiful Last Song, encouraging much swaying and just a touch of love in some people’s eyes.

To finish up, in the spirit of St Patrick’s Day, we all came together and sang a drinking song. But Jason Webley noticed something was missing. A certain “drunken craziness.” So, he came up with an ingenious way to get us all really wasted, very quickly. We all held up one finger. Looked at it and kept looking at it as we span around on the spot… around 16 times. The effect was immediate. Everyone in the room began to sway and laugh, and eventually we all grabbed the persons next to us and began to sway. Finally, we sang again, “When the glass is full drink up, drink up! This may the last time we see this cup! If God wanted us sober, he’d knock the glass over. So, while it is full we drink up!”
 As the song went on, the swaying got a bit out of control with the artificially drunk choir of an audience singing/yelling “Yah-da-deeeee! Ya-da-daaaaaaah!” Then as quickly as it had begun, the show was over and we were all invited to hang around after the show, to chill out, have a chat, buy some merch, etc.

While we may have made an impression on him, Jason Webley left Canberra and all of us at his show at The Front with something special indeed. A show so big for one man and a memory of a special little gig so intimate in its veracity that it’ll stay with us for many months to come at least.