Review: C.W. Stoneking at The Embassy
C.W. Stoneking at The Embassy
Saturday, February 21, 2026
C.W. Stoneking’s appearance at this year’s Perth Festival wasn’t so much a gig but more an intimate creep through the tunes of a bygone era.
Recent conservation works on the heritage-listed Perth Town Hall, with its colonial bones and high ceilings lavishly adorned with silken ribbons and drapery, all bathed in a deeply intimate, purple-violet hue, turned out to be the perfect accomplice for a setlist of classic Stoneking tunes that smell like sweat, saltwater, cheap tobacco and trouble.
Stoneking arrived on the stage like he’d just stepped off a freight train carrying nothing but a guitar and a suitcase full of mysteries, looking temporarily displaced, like a riverboat gambler from a sepia photograph brought to life. He embraced the sold-out room with a simple “howdy” and modestly backed with a two-piece ensemble of Stephen Grant on accordion and Phil Stack (Phillbilly J) pounding out the low end for the hour-long set on an imposingly large tuba.
With the first notes of the evening being delivered low and metallic through Stoneking’s vintage-inspired Gilchrist guitar (model #772) and a brand-new thumb pick, he quipped to the audience that he needed to take a quick moment to “get into the right headspace” for his opening tune, Dodo Bird, taken from 2008’s King Hokum, laying down a more slow-paced, echoed and swoon-driven ride for the evening as tune after tune indulged the cabaret-laden setting of the hall as the audience gathered intimately around small dimly lit tables, as suited waiters quietly ushered bottle-serviced wine through the set.
Stoneking’s mastery and performance arrived to the listener via a resonated, slightly muted musical silhouette, with his setlist for the evening carefully crafted for the aesthetic of the performance space. Intimately grounded and hauntingly resonant, the gaps between his songs were peppered with dry, crooked little remarks, half tall tales, half under-the-breath mischief. It was the kind of stage banter that didn’t so much try to charm the audience but rather leave them guessing if he was being sincere or just playing a character. Moving into The Marching of the Drums, with the rhythm ironically and hypnotically performed on tuba, then at the song’s end regaling with a tale of how he has been searching for a brand of beef jerky that he has only been able to locate at the Esperance IGA.
Stoneking rolled through a series of setlist staples, lightly reimagined from the recorded catalogue with his Primitive Horn Orchestra, with his stripped-down backing duo. Tunes like Love Me or Die wafted romantically over the air as the acoustics of the heritage hall generously welcomed the carnivalesque output of the backing accordion, sounding like a love letter that was being written and torn apart at the same time. The low-end bass and percussion were delivered deep, gentle and at times enormous, backing the song like a warm hug as Stoneking’s vocals were delivered through the mic as though being projected through a gramophone you’d find in a local antique store, the acoustics giving his voice an old-theatre bloom, drawling out notes that hung nostalgically in the air.
Stoneking then announced we were into the Caribbean segment of the show; his right hand strummed the opening chord of The Thing I Done, a rollicking toe-tapper that would feel at home in a ragtime speakeasy, before wafting straight into other rum-drenched ballads off his Gon’ Boogaloo record, Mumma Got the Blues and On a Desert Isle. The stage and performance set the scene of a leisurely steamboat drift down a jungle river on the African Queen, with Stoneking playing the role of Humphrey Bogart.
Briefly stopping to warn any kids in the crowd who may scare too easily, we were treated to the guitar plucks’ eerie swing of The Zombie, the audience filling the chorus lines with shrieks and gasps and providing the backing vocals “to the left, to the right” of the chorus as the tune grooved playfully and macabrely across the darkened hall, with hints of smoke wafting in over a backlit ghoulishly green stage.
As he wound down with delta-inspired blues numbers taken from 2007’s Jungle Blues, notably with the songs Jungle Blues, Brave Son of America and Jailhouse Blues, before closing the evening out with Jungle Lullaby. The arrangements hung tempered as the audience seemed under a slight spell, tuned into the gorgeous world of mud-on-yer-boots storytelling, populated with jailbirds, heroes, and shipwrecked souls.
Stoneking oozes the ability of committing to the world of songs so completely that the modern world can begin to feel like the fake one. The evening was a showcase mix-up of genres ranging from Congo blues, swamp shuffle, island sway, and jungle swing, making the walk back out into the busy Saturday streets which filled the Perth night afterwards feel quite jarring. Traffic lights too bright. Phones lighting up faces. The contemporary world snapping back into place like a bad fluorescent bulb. A billing that fit snugly into what the 2026 Perth Festival is about, for 60 minutes Stoneking and his two-piece ensemble didn’t take the audience back in time; they made time feel disposable.
ZAC NICHOLS
Photos by Linda Dunjey
