Kevin Devine
Lively in Adelaide
Event Description
Kevin Devine Australian Tour | Adelaide
For the first time since 2014, New York singer songwriter Kevin Devine will make his long awaited return to Australia for a special and intimate acoustic headline tour in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide proudly presented by Destroy All Lines
Devine’s 20-year career includes 10 full-length records, 11 EPs, 12 Devinyl Splits, three albums with his band Bad Books, and now a wildly-successful Patreon called “Social Club,” which delivers fans new original music, cover songs, livestream concerts, archival recordings, and more, every month.
“It’s like on my headstone it could say, ‘Not famous, but beloved by those who knew,’” he laughs. “I authentically feel like I won the lottery that that’s the truth.” But that feeling doesn’t halt what Devine describes as “the Russian nesting dolls of distorted, warping influence” that encourage insecurity and competition in working musicians. “That’s late-stage casino capitalism,” he says.
Devine cites Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith as formative aesthetic and ideological influences, but mourns how capitalist music industries chewed up both artists. “I kinda wish neither of those people were any more famous than playing 500-capacity clubs, cause I think it was bad for them,” he says. He cites Smith’s tattoo of Ferdinand the Bull, the titular character of the childhood story of a bull who refuses his role in bullfighting and instead longs to sit among the flowers. Devine reads the story now to his daughter. Neither Cobain nor Smith could change the bullfight, despite their best efforts to disorder and unsettle it. Ferdinand’s greatest and most instructional success, says Devine, was to simply leave the arena. “I wanna figure out a way to just get as far away from the bullfight as possible,” says Devine.
Joining Kevin Devine on all dates is indigenous singer songwriter Jimmy Kyle from the band Chasing Ghosts playing songs from latest EP ‘Homelands Unplugged’ and fan favorites from his career discography.
Tickets available from Thursday 15th February 10am local time
