Live Review + Photos: SAMANTHA FISH at Manning Bar, Sydney – 18th February 2023 (with Blake O’Connor)

Review and photos by Peter Coates – www.facebook.com/InsideEdgePhotography

SAMANTHA FISH
Support – BLAKE O’CONNOR
Manning Bar, Sydney   18th Feb 2023

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This tour is an example of what can be achieved with a desire to bring the best musicians to Australia, and put them on a real tour that covers every major centre, including Canberra, Newcastle and Perth, and picks the right size venues, has excellent sound and lighting all round, and uses local support acts in the different areas.  Massive congratulations to Gerard Allmann and Annie Johnsson for pulling this one off!

BLAKE O’CONNOR hails from Port Macquarie and is a solo singer and guitarist with a bunch of effects pedals, a beat box and looping gear, but in reality he is a really good songwriter with a wonderful voice, and some dextrous guitar skills. We got Time To Kill featuring a nice bottleneck slide guitar sound, and a punchy Kicking A Rock with the beat-box pedal in use.  Blake has a warm blues/country voice, and this was prominent in the ballad, Worth, with some excellent guitar harmonics and loops thrown in for good measure.  Really excellent playing in Keep Rolling confirms a real talent here, and the new album is available to order right now.  We got a cracker of a finale in If You Wanna Get to Heaven, with harmonica, beats, some staccato guitar chords and a powerful lead vocal.  While not the obvious support act for this show, Blake did a fine job, and no doubt made some new friends on the night.

SAMANTHA FISH was out in Australia for Bluesfest in 2019, so this was her first time in Sydney, and she brought her A-game to the show, backed by her really excellent band, Sarah Tomek on Drums, Ron Johnson on Bass and Matt Wade on the Keyboards.  Samantha Fish is something of a force of nature live, combining an amazing voice with a superb range, with her extraordinary talent on the guitar – how she does both at the same time is quite startling!   She opens the set with Bulletproof featuring the Cigar Box guitar, before the White Gibson SG come out for Better Be Lonely and Twisted Ambition, both from the most recent album Faster.  Hello Stranger and Highway’s Holding Me Now rolled through, with extended mid-song jams between guitar and keyboards, and the solid as a rock rhythm section of Tomek and Johnson holding it all together.  The massive epic of Hypnotic was next, and this got wild through the soloing.   

No Angels had a gentle intro with electric piano and harmony vocals, with Samantha’s lead vocal being the hero of the song – well until the stripped-back middle-eight, punctuated by the thump of toms, and some initially restrained soling, that builds and builds until she lets rip, and the band joins in, with some truly excellent drumming.  Somebody opens up with a wailing howl to die for, that fades into an RnB boogie standard featuring an crushingly powerful segment and a great duel between Samantha’s guitar and Matt Wade on keyboards.

Samantha straps on an acoustic guitar, and says she is not sure what happens next – but we got a rollicking blues standard and a haunting ballad, with that soulful almost Motown feel that Samantha brings to her vocal delivery – which I believe was If I was Your Woman from Alicia Keys.  The piano intro belies to powerful blues-rock of Loud, which brings on the Bad Company vibe, with some terrific vocal / guitar interplay through the solo.  The set is coming to a tasty crescendo with the up-beat Bitch On The Run, with yet another gem of a solo while the band absolutely blitzes the backing, with a glorious organ solo before some crowd singalong action that leads us to a climactic finale.  Then it was an adrenaline-fuelled So Called Lover, with Samantha’s insane vocal range on full display in this 3-minute stormer.  Sarah gives us a percussion intro to the medley of Dream Girl and Either Way I Lose, with some ethereal vocals leading the way into some more clever guitar work.

The set list closed with Black Wind Howlin’, the title track of her 2013 album which has a suitably grandiose vocal and guitar intro, which is another corker of a blues rock masterpiece, powered along by the bass and drums, and some tasty keyboards before Samantha takes over with a drop in pace and volume, to allow the power and intensity to ratchet up even more, with Sarah laying to her kit like John Bonham or Keith Moon, while Samantha continues to wring some amazing sounds from the SG.  In traditional form we got a bow, and a stage exit……….and only when the band was ready, did they come back with the cigar box guitar and special guest Mitch Grainger appearing on harmonica for what may have been a stomping version of Shake ‘Em On Down by Mississippi Fred McDowell.

We got the best part of two hours of high-intensity blues guitar playing from a virtuoso guitarist in Samantha Fish, with a band of the highest quality, with the various arrangements all allowing the rest of the band to shine at various moments in the set.  If you have any chance of catching any of the remaining dates on the tour, with a few tickets left for the extra show in Melbourne this week being your best chance.  Please bring Samantha Fish back to Australia before too long.

upcoming 2023 Australian Tour Dates

Feb 21st – Freo Social, Perth
Feb 23rd – Memo Music Hall, Melbourne (new show)
Feb 24th  – Memo Music Hall, Melbourne
Feb 25th – The Gov, Adelaide

Blake O’Connor