Georgia Maq & Ben Lee | Review | Melbourne Recital Centre | 24th September

We crossed over Princes Bridge, through the throng posing for photos in front of the illuminated facade of Hamer Hall, past the NGV and its ponds, and past the VCA campus to The Melbourne Recital Centre, a far cry from the beer-sticky carpet of The Old Bar where I last saw Georgia Maq in June. We collected our tickets from the box office as the lobby chimes tolled and a voice directed us to assume our seats as the show would start in five minutes. '

The wooden sound panelling of the hall is carved in curves and cut into squares. The entire venue maintains the softwood aesthetic, the lights above us are geometric spiraling polygons of smooth wood, and behind the electric guitars and banjos that sit on the empty stage is a mirrored maze of termite tunnelled wood chutes behind two red curtains tied at the middle. The lights dim and conversations hush, and Ben Lee and Georgia Maq took the stage dressed in black. They talked over each other, “this is basically just two friends playing songs together” Ben got out, and they opened with ‘Love Me Like The World Is Ending’, a song of Ben’s. 

Ben, in his black sports coat over striped t-shirt played a fluro orange acoustic guitar covered in stickers. Georgia wore a black dress, her acoustic guitar bare except for a tortoiseshell pick guard. They played Georgia’s song ‘Citronella’, Georgia saying as she tuned her banjo that “The aim was for [the banjo] to sound like the stars in the sky”. A beautiful song me and Faith fell in love with when she played it at her Old Bar gig. Her songs have such a complex dynamic over very simple, often repeating chords, punctuated only by her voice which is never out of place in any of the many genres she has dipped her toes in over her career. 

Next they played Ben’s ‘Arsehole’, followed by Georgia’s ‘LA River’, for which Ben played guitar and Georgia sang, her hands fidgeting with her harmonica behind the mic. She blew on the harmonica after each chorus, her diaphragm rising and falling underneath her long black gown with the blue notes of her solo. The semi-full room felt far more intimate than it otherwise would have for a lesser pair, the ‘unplugged’ nature of the performance giving the evening a feeling of timelessness. Before the intermission “I know we’re so grown up”, Georgia sang Ben’s song ‘Hard Drive’, which was recorded by Evan Dando and later covered by Phoebe Bridgers. Georgia sang and strummed while Ben played pseudo slide, swelling his volume up and down on his sticker clad electric. 

We smoked camel yellows outside during the intermission and drank expensive Asahis. We profiled the other patrons as either ‘Ben fans’ or ‘Georgia fans’ by the blackness of their outfits and their choice vape. We, Georgia fans, were relatively young and more darkly clad than the older, perhaps cheerier Ben fans who drank wine and ate ice cream in the foyer. 

We resumed our seats, taking up a slightly better position for the second half, and the show resumed with Georgia’s ‘Slightly Below The Middle’. Next Ben played his big hit ‘Catch My Disease’, and Georgia told a story of mixing beer and coke together at a wedding when she was 10 because she “heard it in a Ben Lee song”. Ben replaced the names of the bands “Good Charlotte” etc that he shouts out in the song with the topical, Melbourne-specific “Amyl and the Sniffers” and “Spikefuck”, to which the crowd gave a cheer. Next they covered The Replacements’ ‘Androgynous’, a song I first heard when Georgia covered it on her YouTube almost a decade ago. Their voices singing in duet are starkly different, but both absolute and exact in their pitch, and the song's jaunty chorus when they sang together in harmony was incredibly powerful. 

“It’s one of the great honours of my creative life to be able to stand on the stage with you Georgia”, said Ben before they played their final song of the evening ‘Rearranging The Chairs On The Titanic’. The emotionally taut room was twisted to breaking point when Georgia sang the lines “I could spend my money on a flight back home” in the last chorus of the song about missing Melbourne from LA, and she broke away from the mic, too emotional to finish the chorus. Ben Lee walked over next to her and they smiled at each other, looping the final chorus which Georgia attempted again, and again cracked up singing about missing her family, who sat behind us and yelled “we’re here!” as the crowd cheered in support of the prodigal daughter of Melbourne’s alternative music scene, returning from LA a hometown hero. She finished the song with Ben next to her at her mic, and they both walked off stage proudly to the cheering recital centre crowd, Georgia strutting and Ben waddling, laughing with one another. Georgia’s family behind us were all teary and hugging, and a great sense of catharsis hung over the entire exiting crowd as we piled away and onto the street.