A NIGHT WITH IAN RILEN
The Excelsior Hotel, Surry Hills
July 11, 2005Words and Pictures: THE BARMAN
Apologies to the support bands (Bunt and another whose name I missed) but fellow I-94 Barfly Richard Sharman and myself were too busy shooting the shit with a heap of people in the front bar to catch 'em. Not the least of our drinking companions were two-thirds of Tex, Don & Charlie, soon to embark on European shows.
As it was, the impressions that Charlie Owen was only going to guest on a couple of songs, and Tex Perkins was going to guest on none, were ill-founded. That made for this show all the more memorable, and no-one was complaining.
It was a quick visit to Sydney from recent new home Melbourne for Ian Rilen, this time with his beloved Buick but without his band the Love Addicts. There's celebrating to be done with a bevy of people as the 57-year-old has just become a father for the fourth time. With a bottle of red to toast young Romeo, there's no shortage of well-wishers.
The one thing you can expect from Ian in solo mode is the unexpected, so anticipation hung in the air when he took the stage about 10.30-ish.
What followed was one set interrupted by a technical hitch (or two sets, if you like) of Rilen-penned songs, many of them from his current album "Passion, Boots and Bruises", and the balance from a long career in too many bands to mention. A shortage of X material is in the set tonight, but it's a strong back catalogue regardless.
Seeing Charlie Owen play guitar would have been worth the price of admission, and it's made more amazing by the fact that his accompaniment was entirely improvised. OK, the Rilen songbook is based on a handful of chords and pretty straightforward structures, but there's some superb stuff played extremely well.
Even on an acoustic, Rilen plays guitar as hard as shit. The usual pattern was for Ian to lay down the basic chords with his star sideman working out how his own flow should go for the first verse or so, and then he'd often go spiralling off into appropriate directions over the bridge.
Tex Perkins is obviously even less familiar with most of these songs than Charlie, and is reluctantly drafted to climb up and add backing vocals to "Happy" anyway. "Inside Out" is chopped up and spat out nicely, while "Mobile Phone" has some Owen embellishments that lift it out of the ranks of a standard blues lament. The rarely-played "Grey Street" is given an outing and the whole affair ends all too soon.
"Booze to Blame" is something of a Rilen signature tune and is played out to sparse accompaniment tonight that works well. It's also the reason that neither Richard or I can retrospectively piece together much more of the set list.
Ian Rilen really started finding his voice as a solo artist with his debut album ("Love is Murder") and the newie has made him more of a mark. Live, his weatherbeaten vocals go down a treat . Tonight makes you think that the concept of him touring with a rotating cast of collaborators is a direction that could throw up no shortage of interesting possibilities.
