Here’s the thing: whenever you set out to talk about Bill Callahan, you only ever really end up talking about yourself. Sure, that might sound a little bit academic, particularly given this is a man whose artistic highs are textural, encapsulated in lines about strung-out men doing push-ups while blasting a bootleg copy of Highway To Hell. But it’s hard to otherwise explain what a dud exercise it is writing about this artist.
Take, for example, his get-up at his Sydney Opera House show. Rather than the white suit he donned last time he took to the famous venue’s boards back in 2015, Callahan was dressed down, giving the whole night an intimate vibe only strengthened by his uncharacteristic onstage banter. “I don’t eat sugar,” he said after a punter offered to bring him a cake to celebrate his birthday the following day, breaking a perfectly timed comedic straight face with a slow smile.
But the show wasn’t some warts-and-all, searingly honest look at the man behind the music. Mostly because, A) he was lying about that sugar thing (“I do eat it,” he said after finishing the next song, eyes twinkling); and B) it would be a stretch to describe his songs as confessional. The setting might have been low-key, but Callahan was still in mythic storyteller mode, cycling through maximal tales like ‘Drover’ and ‘Too Many Birds’.
The show didn’t even happen as advertised. Despite press in the lead-up to the gig describing it as a chance to hear songs “from Smog to Bill Callahan”, only two tunes released under Callahan’s old moniker made an appearance – the powerful ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ and the semi-spoken word stinger ‘I’m New Here’.
And nothing made more sense towards the set’s tail end either. Nothing suddenly slipped into focus – it was just as impossible to say what kind of show was unfolding, or to explain why none of the punters could look away, not even for a second. Was the beautiful strangeness of the songs to blame; the magic of those tunes that hold the audience to a feeling and then nail them there? Or was it just the slow-motion spectacle of it all; the weird dance of a performer flirting with an audience he never once revealed himself to?
Who knows. Certainly not Bill Callahan, the stranger at the centre of it all, who ended the night with a song, a nod, a vote of thanks, and then went to go, the premature house lights groggily flicking on and throwing his long shadow across the audience like a tossed bouquet.
Bill Callahan played the Sydney Opera House on Friday June 2. Photos by Prudence Upton
