Co-written by Lee Crawford
Cameron Winter sold out Melbourne’s Forum on Monday night for his first ever Australian show.
It’s a pretty packed schedule for the Geese frontman over the next couple of weeks as he bounces around the country between solo shows, Laneway dates and band side shows, and I’m pretty sure there might even be a DJ set crammed in there somewhere too.
Listed on the bill as the support act is Jing Tao. A quick Google search throws up results for a Year 7 student from Caulfield Grammar – very curious! So I get my hustle on (because obviously I only thought to Google this an hour or so before the support is due to start and I’m already (unsurprisingly) running late) and get myself down to Forum just in time to catch whoever this act may be. Is it some kind of mysterious special guest? Or will I actually be watching a Year 7 student play to a packed Forum crowd? Either way, I’m ready to be entertained.
Amazingly, Jing Tao does in fact turn out to be a school child, and though it’s still unclear if it’s the same Jing Tao from Caulfield that I Googled (ETA: apparently it is…) or a different kid altogether, either way he is an incredible pianist. It is great to see this audience get behind him too – this kind of thing could genuinely have gone either way, but it turns out to be a truly wholesome start to the evening. Jing Tao handled the whole thing phenomenally well and certainly set us all up perfectly for the main event.
A quick confession. If I’m being totally honest, I came to Cameron Winter fully prepared to be severely underwhelmed. Quite a few of our friends back home are utterly obsessed with him, they’ve seen him perform multiple times and are constantly raving about him. They effectively pressured me into buying the ticket with reassurances that I will ‘witness something incredible!’ I have to admit, I truly think I did.
There is something wonderfully moving about the performance. You feel it in the sparseness of the stage design – just Cameron and the piano – which forces you to really focus on the music; in the rapt attention of the crowd; in the stillness of the air around us. The evening sits somewhere between a classical music rendition and an indie show, and the audience are captivated. There is a palpable sense of us all slowly drifting away into the music that takes hold early on in the night and never really leaves.
The audience hang off his every word, which is probably a good thing because there aren’t many! As with everything else tonight, the audience engagement is stripped back, sparse. This is probably my one main criticism of the evening. The stage is obviously set up so that Cameron is facing away from the crowd, and for much of the night he is lost in his piano. It’s a shame, because when he does talk he was genuinely funny, and I think a bit more interaction with the crowd could have added further depth to the performance.
However, much as this lack of audience interaction is one of my pet peeves, it (frustratingly) doesn’t really detract from the evening. Leaning towards a more classic style of performance certainly helps with these expectations. The connection instead comes through the performance itself. We are pulled in by the way he emotes through the lyrics, through the piano; through the silly little moments of playfulness where he tinkers with the keys and the odd notes of frustration. You feel his passion in ways that possibly can’t be communicated with words alone.
Highlights of the evening are his rendition of album single $0, If You Turn Back Now – which he performed as the encore (though he did begin with another song which he quickly abandoned for this) – and The Rolling Stones. The confidence he exudes in the performance of these tracks is captivating. Some of the unreleased tracks are also pretty special and the blending of these less familiar songs with his most well known pieces works incredibly well and makes for a truly incredible night of music.
A final thought. There’s a lot of chatter online from people throwing around comparisons between Geese and The Strokes, and by extension, between this man and Julian Casablancas. After witnessing the performance Cameron gave tonight these comparisons feel more than a little unfair*. Cameron is an incredible and prodigious talent. He has the kind of restlessness in his creativity you don’t see too often and a clear desire to explore that creativity along whatever twisting pathways it leads him, and it is this aspect that has the potential to set both him and his band up for the kind of career some musicians could only dream of.
*For anyone not already aware of this. The Strokes rank highly in my ‘most overrated bands of all time’.
Find out more about Cameron Winter here.