Project Description
. . John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew, The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 24 Oct 2025 . . John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew, The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 24 Oct 2025 . . John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew, The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 24 Oct 2025 . . John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew, The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 24 Oct 2025 . . John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew, The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 24 Oct 2025 . . John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew, The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 24 Oct 2025 . . John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew, The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 24 Oct 2025 . . John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew, The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 24 Oct 2025 . . CLICK THE PIC TO VIEW THE NEWS
.JOHN SCHUMANN
& THE VAGABOND CREW
+ Shane Nicholson
The Redgum Years
@ The Tivoli,
Fortitude Valley, Brisbane,
24th October 2025
(Live Review)Review and photos by Alec Smart (@alecsmart_fotos)
Former Redgum singer-songwriter John Schumann and his six-piece band, The Vagabond Crew, performed an evening of Redgum songs at The Tivoli Theatre in Brisbane, on their Corrugated Highway Tour. They were supported by award-winning folk-country artist Shane Nicholson, who later joined them onstage for the finale.
The concert at the majestic Tivoli Theatre in Fortitude Valley was a seated show. The Heritage-listed Tivoli, unusually for a theatre, began life in 1927 as an industrial unit – a bakery owned by Adams Cake Factory. The new factory in Costin Street was claimed to be “the most up-to-date and hygienic factory of its kind in Queensland”, producing around 13 tonnes of cake and bread a week.
After its closure in 1968, the warehouse was used by the State Library of Queensland as a storage facility for rare books for many years.
In 1988 it was rebuilt by restaurateur and former Director of the National Trust, Ann Garms, a visionary who restored some of Brisbane’s most iconic buildings that were facing demolition by over-zealous developers.
She oversaw the remodelling of The Tivoli interior, inspired by the Parisian cabaret Paradis Latin, the oldest cabaret in Paris, which was originally built in the early 19th century by Napoleon and upgraded in 1889 by Gustave Eiffel (designer of the magnificent Eiffel Tower).
Shane Nicholson, who last performed at The Tivoli in 2017 during his Hell & Half of It tour, quietly strolled onstage with his acoustic guitar and strummed a selection of material from his varied and successful career.
These included songs from his multi-award-winning latest album, Living In Colour (2022).
Nicholson, in his third decade of an outstanding career as a singer-songwriter, and latterly a music producer, has 3 ARIA Awards and two APRA Awards, plus 15 Golden Guitar Awards to his name, the latter the prestigious accolade given by the Country Music Association of Australia.
Between 2002-2022 he released seven solo studio albums, plus an additional two with singer-songwriter Kasey Chambers (to whom he was married from 2005-13). The latter were the chart-topping Rattlin’ Bones (2008) and Wreck and Ruin (2012) – he played the title song from Rattlin’ Bones at The Tivoli, which segued into the Redgum song ASIO.
Nicholson stated that he and Chambers are still friends. “It was a successful marriage. Now it’s a successful divorce – she babysits my three-year-old!”
Nicholson, who grew up in Redcliffe in Brisbane’s north, told an amusing anecdote that he first performed live at Redcliffe Dolphins Club, coming third among three competitors in a local talent contest. The winner was a girl who waved a ribbon on a stick.
He revealed he shared that memory with singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, who replied, “Where’s that stupid girl now?”
Nicholson also produced the John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew live album that accompanied this tour, Corrugated Highway – The Redgum Years Live.
John Schumann and his touring band, The Vagabond Crew, with whom he’s recorded and released three studio albums, Lawson (2005), Behind the Lines (2008), and Ghosts and Memories (2018), is currently revisiting his pre-Vagabond musical career.
This was his successful tenure as lead vocalist and one of the principal songwriters in agit-pop folk band Redgum, which he co-founded with Michael Atkinson and Verity Truman in 1975, while they were all students at Adelaide Flinders University.
The band, known for their left-leaning politics and satirical lyrics, remained active until 1990, releasing five studio albums and a celebrated live album, Caught in the Act (1983), although Schumann left in 1985 to pursue a solo career.
At The Tivoli, Schumann was his characteristic best – performing a varied set of songs (including a few Redgum compositions that he didn’t write), accompanied by enlightened commentary between the music, with droll jokes, topical discussions and historical recollections. He’s a gifted raconteur.
The set tended to follow a loose chronology of when they were originally written – from Redgum’s debut album If You Don’t Fight You Lose (1978) through to Schumann’s last collaboration with the band, Frontline (1984) – although more poignant or memorable songs were performed later in the evening.
The latter included the chart-topping I Was Only 19 (A Walk in the Light Green), the band’s best-known composition that has been covered (as well as parodied) by numerous artists and is frequently included among lists of the all-time greatest Australian songs.
It’s a sad first-person account of an Australian soldier returned from the Vietnam War with PTSD and a persistent chemical rash from the harmful effects of the defoliant Agent Orange – which was sprayed on the forests where the opposing Viet Cong forces operated.
The story was inspired by real-life recollections of combat veteran Mick Storen, Schumann’s brother-in-law, and the song recalls the horrific death of fellow soldier Frank Hume, who stepped on a landmine, coincidentally the same day that humankind stepped on the Moon.
Royalties from the performance of the song go to the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia.
Although I Was Only 19 is evocative and deals with a sorrowful issue, most of the Redgum set consisted of material that underscored Schumann and his former bandmate’s incisive humour. Several numbers featured updated lyrics to reflect contemporary issues – such as One More Boring Night In Adelaide and the anti-consumerist Fabulon (the spoof rewrite of The Melodians’ song Rivers of Babylon, which Boney M popularised in 1978).
Schumann’s between-song banter with the Vagabond Crew reveals they also share an ironic humour, and they have nicknames for each other (Schumann goes by ‘Mother Superior’!).
Among the night’s final triptych, during which Shane Nicholson joined them on guitar and backing vocals, was a new composition, Fishing Net in the Rain (which appears on the Corrugated Highway tour’s accompanying live album).
Written by Schumann and his friend and manager Ivan Tanner, the lyrics deal with suicide by Australian military veterans. It was inspired by David Finney, a Royal Australian Navy officer with PTSD who took his own life in 2019 after years of dealing with tides of desperate human ‘boat people’ refugees fleeing war zones across the ocean. Finney wrote in a Facebook post, “Sometimes I feel like I’m catching all the answers, sometimes it’s like holding a fishing net in the rain.”
The night’s closure, which included Vagabond Crew band members performing solos, was an extended reworking of the Australian classic Waltzing Matilda.
Incidentally, the band’s name – Vagabond Crew – is taken from a line in the poem Knocking Around by the gifted-but-troubled writer Henry Lawson, which was written in 1898 and published in a collection of verse in 1930, eight years after the author’s death.
In 2005, John Schumann reunited with former Redgum bandmates Hugh MacDonald and Michael Atkinson and recorded an album of Henry Lawson poems set to music, titled Lawson. Previously, in 1993, MacDonald recorded a similar project titled The Lawson Album, which contained two of the same songs.
MacDonald, who was a touring and recording member of Vagabond Crew, sadly passed away from prostate cancer in November 2016.
Set List
One More Boring Night In Adelaide
Beaumont Rag
Stewie
Poor Ned
Peter the Cabby
Virgin Ground
It Doesn’t Matter to Me
Killing Floor
100 Years On
Fabulon
The Last Frontier
Where Ya Gonna Run to
Bomb Bomb Iran (parody of Beach Boys’ Barbara-Ann)
The Diamantina Drover
Working Girls
I’ve Been to Bali Too
Gladstone Pier
I Was Only 19 (A Walk in the Light Green)Encore
Fishing Net in the Rain
Long Run
Waltzing Matilda
Check out Alec Smart’s (@alecsmart_fotos) full gallery of this event HERE
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