Review: Paul Kelly at RAC Arena

Paul Kelly at RAC Arena
w/ Lucinda Williams, Fanny Lumsden
Tuesday, August 26, 2025

There are only a handful of moments in life when you can say you were truly in the presence of greatness. And never would you expect to say it twice in the same evening. But when a pair of musical stalwarts from opposite hemispheres toured RAC Arena’s near-capacity audience through their respective musical worlds on Tuesday night, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to apply that statement to both Paul Kelly and Lucinda Williams.

Fanny Lumsden opened the evening with an effervescent serving of contemporary country from Australia’s heartland. Based on the western slopes of the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales, despite this being the singer-songwriter’s first arena appearance, Lumsden commanded the cavernous setting as though she’d played it a thousand times before. Lumsden’s bubbly personality and boundless charm helped her connect with the already sizable audience, with the ensuing half-dozen songs cementing the accord. 

Backed by a spritely five-piece band, Lumsden opened the set with Fierce before joining the orchestration on acoustic guitar for Land of Gold and Great Divide. Relinquishing her guitar once more, Look at Me Now gave Lumsden the opportunity to command the spotlight as she bent, bowed, swirled, and kicked her way around the stage. The mandolin-driven Dig provided a jaunty closure to Lumsden’s buoyant set before the band took a well-earned bow and handed the stage over to Lucinda Williams.

If you want a barometer for the esteem in which the American singer-songwriter is held, you only need to look at Lucinda Williams’s most recent album, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart. Featured artists joining the Louisianan on the album include everyone from icons such as Bruce Springsteen and Buddy Miller to rising talents like Angel Olsen and Margo Price. Backed by an equally impressive ensemble of touring musicians, Williams fittingly chose to commence proceedings with the album’s opening track, Let’s Get the Band Back Together. The growling dual electric guitars carved out a hearty dose of barroom blues and emphatically laid the foundations for what was to come.

Across her 45-year career, Williams has received countless awards and honours. Having won Grammy Awards in the Country, Rock, and Folk categories, it was the title song from an album curiously categorised as folk that she turned to next. As guitarist Doug Pettibone peeled off the opening lines to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, the audience quickly voiced its approval. Cataloguing a series of childhood recollections from growing up in the South, the song provided an atmospheric portrait of Williams’ transient upbringing.

Staying with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, the band next launched into Drunken Angel, a song about Austin-based singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, who was senselessly shot to death in 1989. With Foley’s considerable musical talent muted by his self-sabotaging nature, the song cut through the mythology to deliver a poignant portrait of an artist whose demons engulfed their art. As Texas gave way to Louisiana, Williams delivered the audience to New Orleans, which provided a soulful canvas for a new composition titled Low Life. Set in a neighbourhood bar, the song furthered Williams’ empathetic embrace of those struggling with life’s burdens, albeit with a Hurricane cocktail in hand.

A gorgeous rendition of Fruits of My Labor was followed by a pristine reworking of Memphis Minnie’s You Can’t Rule Me. The scorching guitar interplay between Pettibone and former Black Crowes member Marc Ford sublimely echoed Williams’ defiant delivery of Minnie’s stirring lyrics. Having recently released a series of themed cover albums under the banner of Lu’s Jukebox, Williams then took on George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps from 2024’s Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles from Abbey Road, with Ford’s rapturous solo taking the guitar antics to yet another level.

After Pettibone and drummer Brady Blade seductively ground out the introduction to Joy, Ford and bassist David Sutton gently eased their way into the mix. The song built into a blaze of sound before the instrumentation was masterfully pulled back to reveal the song’s sultry essence. Across their far too brief set, Williams’ musical accomplices were impeccable and fittingly brought their evening to a striking end with an inspired rendition of Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World. Rousing and raw, the ensemble blazed away as Williams inched her way to the side of the stage, clapping and fisting the air in gratitude for the reception the capacity audience graciously bestowed upon her and the band.

As the post-changeover house lights dimmed, backed by Dan Kelly on electric guitar and the longtime rhythm section of Bill McDonald on bass and Pete Luscombe on drums, Paul Kelly eased the audience into his set. Seated at an electric piano, Kelly et al. delivered a beautiful rendition of Houndstooth Dress from his 2024 album, Fever Longing Still. As Kelly swapped piano for acoustic guitar, Firewood and Candles then brought Ash Naylor’s tempered electric guitar work and Jess Hitchcock’s majestic vocal backing into the fray.

As far as openings go, few songs are as instantly captivating as Before Too Long. Kelly explained how it was a Perth radio station that first gave the composition airplay, before the six-piece launched into the song, and Kelly proceeded to bound around the stage perpetuating its exuberant execution. The transition into Rising Moon highlighted the depths of Kelly’s songwriting prowess, delivering a song as intimate and contemplative as its predecessor was spritely and gregarious.

Expanding his instrumental armoury, Kelly accentuated the remorseful overtones of Careless with perfectly tempered blasts of harmonica before heading back to the future for a rendition of his latest single, Rita Wrote A Letter, a sequel to his 1996 song How to Make Gravy. Always the consummate storyteller, Kelly is at his insightful best when tackling family dynamics, which When I First Met Your Ma poignantly displayed. A love story told by a father to a son about how he met the boy’s mother, the song was as rich in emotion as it was in imagery. 

With McDonald turning to upright bass, Harpoon to the Heart, a song inspired by the 1950s husband-and-wife musical duo of Les Paul and Mary Ford, was imparted with a classic Californian country feel. The stripped-back Sonnet 18, presented with just acoustic guitar, mandolin, and vocal, then slowed the tempo. The air of introspection was maintained by If I Could Start Today Again before the band cleared the stage, leaving Kelly to deliver a poignant solo rendition of They Thought I Was Asleep under a glowing spotlight.

From St. Kilda to Kings Cross had the entire stadium singing along, as did a subtly reworked version of To Her Door. The pulsing rhythms and swirling keyboards of the raucous Dumb Things were delivered in a blaze of pulsing and sweeping stage lights before How To Make Gravy was illuminated by the audience with a sea of swaying cell phone lights. Kelly and his band rounded out their set with the Kev Carmody co-write, From Little Things Big Things Grow. As the song neared its conclusion, its instrumentation peeled away and left the vocals from both the stage and audience echoing through the arena.

Going To The River With Dad kickstarted the encore with a wash of piano and chiming mandolin, before Leaps and Bounds once again had the audience singing along. The unified vocalising continued with the night’s final contribution, Meet Me In The Middle Of The Air, but this time it was solely centred on the stage. As the ensemble gathered round a single microphone, they provided a lush chorus over which Kelly weaved his distinctive vocals. In a stadium that holds 15,000 people, it was a remarkable moment of intimacy that concluded a near-perfect set by Australia’s most masterful storyteller and performer.

BRETT LEIGH DICKS

Photos by Adrian Thomson