History Hit Parade

ONE SHOW REMAINING: Mercury Cinema, Adelaide Sunday 17 May at 4pm.

Keith Conlon and Steve Davis are bringing South Australian history to the Mercury Cinema this May, and the format is a little different to anything you have likely tried before.

It goes like this. Steve has written the lyrics for ten original songs about South Australian people, places, and moments. Before each song plays, Keith and Steve sit down and talk through the story behind it. The anecdotes, the human detail, the connections you did not know existed. Then the music video plays on the big screen and you hear the song properly, already knowing what went into it.

That is it. Conversation, then song. Story, then music. Ninety minutes of it.

There is a song about a couple who met in the John Martin's lifts during a store refurbishment in the late 1930s. She was in kitchenware on the Lower Ground Floor. He was installing the lifts. The lift ladies would call "up please, going up" and somehow, eventually, those two people ended up together. Steve has a particular reason for knowing this story well.

There is a song about the Floating Palais de Danse, a white-domed barge moored near Elder Park in the 1920s, where Adelaideans danced under dimmed electric lights and sent postcards home with the stamp placed upside down, which meant something specific if you knew the code.

There is a song about a pizza bar in Rostrevor, thirty-plus years of the same face behind the counter, and what it means for a suburb to have a place like that.

There is a song about growing up in Marion when the vineyards were still there, and a Don Dunstan tribute, and a river shanty about Murray paddle steamers, and a love story from Port Lincoln that begins at a tuna tossing tent.

Ten songs. Ten stories. All of them South Australian, all of them worth a morning or an afternoon.

He has been telling SA stories for fifty years. He trained under Alec McCaskill who ran 5AD's original Hit Parade. Walking into this show with Keith as your guide feels like settling in next to someone who genuinely knows where all the good stories are buried, and is happy to share them.

This is a good show to attend with a companion. Someone who grew up here. Someone who remembers John Martin's, or the West End chimney, or the river. Someone who will lean over mid-show and say "I did not know that."

Two seats is the right ticket to buy.

Every person who attends walks out with a free download of the full album.