Project Description
. . Crowded House, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . The Waifs, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Mark Seymour with Vika & Linda, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Mark Seymour with Vika & Linda, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . The Church, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . The Church, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Angus & Julia Stone, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Angus & Julia Stone, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Crowded House, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Crowded House, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Crowded House, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Crowded House, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Crowded House, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . Crowded House, Red Hot Summer Tour, Sandstone Point, Queensland. Photo: Alec Smart, 18 Oct 2025 . . CLICK THE PIC TO VIEW THE NEWS
.RED HOT SUMMER TOUR 2025
@ Sandstone Point Hotel,
Sandstone Point, Qld,
18th October 2025
(Live Review)Review and photos by Alec Smart (@alecsmart_fotos)
Crowded House headlined the 2025 Red-Hot Summer Tour when it rolled into Queensland on 18 October, supported by Angus & Julia Stone, The Church, Mark Seymour with Vika & Linda, and The Waifs.
The festival, which was extended to a second day due to high ticket demand (both days subsequently sold out), took place on the grassy seafront slope of the popular Sandstone Point Hotel on Moreton Bay’s northern peninsula (midway between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast).
Two short thunderstorms hit the oceanside venue late afternoon, causing minor delays to the program, and although many people were soaked (this reviewer included!) the showers failed to dampen the collective enthusiasm of the crowd.
The live music was paused while the torrential rain fell (although the sound system played ironic rain-themed songs!), however, due to jagged forks of lightning above, patrons were encouraged to seek shelter in the hotel or their vehicles, for safety’s sake.
Shortly before 3pm, the festival’s scheduled opener, The Waifs, arrived onstage. Josh Cunningham and sisters Vikki Thorn and Donna Simpson, the founding members of the West Australian band, appeared with long-term touring musicians Ben Franz and David Macdonald on bass guitar and drums, respectively.
Onstage, the main trio (Donna, Josh, Vikki) played a variety of instruments – mandolin, guitars, harmonica – and swapped lead vocals, performing songs from their repertoire of crowd favourites.
The Waifs formed over three decades ago in August 1992, the two sisters previously appearing together as Colours, then recruiting Josh, changing their name, and touring Australia in a VW Kombi van.
Eight studio albums and numerous awards later, the folk-roots band remain the darlings of the Australian folk and blues festival circuit – as evidenced by the enthusiastic response of the Red Hot Summer crowd.
Younger sister Vikki revealed the two siblings had been performing together for 35 years, to which her elder sister Donna quipped, “You serve less time for committing murder!”
Donna told an amusing anecdote about meeting a neighbour in her home town of Fremantle and hoping he might invite her to share his cool swimming pool on a hot summer’s day.
The neighbour was listening to the Triple J Hottest 100, the radio station’s annual round-up of the nation’s favourite songs. Donna revealed to him that The Waifs had a track in that esteemed list, London Still, which ranked number 74 in the year JJJ listeners voted it onto the chart. (Donna wrote the song while she was living in London but missing her home town of Albury, 440km south of Perth in Western Australia.)
The neighbour then asked Donna the song title and what year it featured. “London Still, 2002,” she revealed.
“Never heard of it,” the neighbour replied. “I was only eight years old! Now get in the pool!”
Mark Seymour appeared onstage with celebrated Tongan-Australian sisters Vika & Linda Bull plus two members of his regular band, The Undertow – guitarist Cameron McKenzie and drummer Pete Maslen – in addition to young talent Richard Bradbury on bass.
Vika and Linda, who have enjoyed a long and fruitful sister-act musical partnership, initially found fame as backing singers in successful blues-rock saxophonist Joe Camilleri’s band The Black Sorrows.
Their association with Mark Seymour dates back to their post-Black Sorrows’ debut album, Vika and Linda, in 1994, for which Seymour wrote the single, When will You Fall for Me?, which the trio performed at Sandstone Point.
Seymour and the Bull sisters’ set consisted of mainly Hunters & Collectors‘ songs – the band Seymour fronted from 1981-98 – including Still Hanging ‘Round, Do You See What I See, Holy Grail (which he often sings at the annual Australian Rules Football grand final in Melbourne during half-time break), the ever-popular Throw Your Arms Around Me (which inspired a huge crowd sing-along) and Say Goodbye.
For the latter, Linda Bull announced, “Mark wants me to sing this; I’m going to give it a red-hot go, but I’m going to sing it from a woman’s perspective!”
One of the highlights of the set was the duet between Seymour and Linda Bull singing Waiting on the Kid, a poignant, beautiful synergy.
The chosen single from Mark Seymour and the Undertow’s latest album The Boxer (2024), on which the pair both sang, was inspired by Linda waiting for her daughter Kiki.
In a March 2024 post on Facebook, Seymour explained, “‘Waiting on the Kid’ is Linda Bull’s line. I’ve heard her say it many times. On the phone: ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m waiting on the kid!’ The kid pick-up, outside school in the rain. ‘Waiting On The Kid’ is one of those lines you stumble on in common speech that conjures deep feelings of commitment and truth…”
A personal favourite at Sandstone Point was Westgate, from Seymour’s fifth solo album Westgate (2007).
The song is about the 15 Oct 1970 West Gate Bridge disaster, Australia’s worst industrial accident, in which 35 men were killed when a 112-metre section of the bridge collapsed into the Yarra River, Melbourne, during its construction. The song is written from the perspective of survivor Ed Halsall.
Vika & Linda also sang a new song, Where Do You Come From (due for release in Feb 2026), which referenced the soft drink Coca Cola. During their performance at the 2019 International Women’s Day, Vika explained the connection with the dark beverage, colloquially known as ‘Coke’.
“When our parents met and married, mixed marriages were not common… We are constantly being asked where we come from. Everyone used to always ask if I was Greek and if Linda was Chinese. My nickname at school was ‘Coke’.
“We’ve been referred to as ‘boong’ and ‘nigger’ in the playground. We’ve had to go in the back door at our own gigs because of the colour of our skin and we’ve been spat on and completely ignored in queues, but our fiercely independent Tongan mother and our gentle greenie father taught us from an early age how to stand up for ourselves and to not take a step back when you know you are being treated unfairly.”
The Church performed a full set of atmospheric songs after the first onslaught of tropical rain drove everyone not wrapped in disposable plastic anoraks under shelter. Singer-songwriter-bassist Steve Kilbey welcomed everyone to the “red hot, slightly cold and damp, summer!”
They started with Metropolis followed by Almost With You, however Kilbey’s vocal microphone kept cutting out through the onstage foldback speakers, undoubtedly due to rain penetrating the electrics, and he requested a substitute.
During one of their most well-known and loved songs, their 1981 breakthrough hit The Unguarded Moment, Kilbey repeated an (in)famous chant that fans at fellow Australian band The Angels sing during the latter’s most well-known (breakthrough) hit, Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again.
For those unfamiliar, the chant is “No way, get fucked, fuck off!”
The Church performed a selection of classics and more recent compositions, including The Hypnogogue from their 2023 concept album of the same name. The science-fiction narrative is about a device called ‘The Hypnogogue’ that harvests people’s dreams and turns them into music.
Prior to playing Under The Milky Way, from their 1998 Album Starfish, which was inspired by the famous Amsterdam nightclub venue Melkweg (Dutch for ‘Milky Way’), Kilbey asked the audience, “Would you like to hear the most-synced Australian song of all time?”
The 1989 ARIA award-winning Single of the Year, which Kilbey wrote with his then-girlfriend Karin Jansson of alt-rock band Curious (Yellow) while under the influence of marijuana, has appeared in numerous TV shows and movies.
These include films Tequila Sunrise (1988), Donnie Darko (2001), Walking On Water (2002), The Dry (2023) and TV episodes of Prison Break, Titans, Mrs Fletcher, Cold Case, Dead Boy Detectives, Here And Now, Miami Vice, Mix Tape and The O.C.
Kilbey also licensed it for use as an advertisement for the Lincoln MKT car in the USA (released 1989), sung by Australian-American pop superstar Sia.
According to Wikipedia, in 2006 Kilbey said of the recording, “It’s actually flat, lifeless and sterile. Great song, sure, but the performance, the sounds are ordinary…”
But the Sandgate Point crowd happily sang along, lifting it to a higher level.
Angus & Julia Stone, the multi award-winning brother-and-sister duo from Sydney’s Northern Beaches, opened their set with a cover of Streets of Your Town by classic Brisbane band The Go-Betweens.
(Incidentally, there’s a toll bridge across Brisbane River in the Brisbane CBD called The Go-Between Bridge, which was named after the result of a public vote. Former Go-Betweens’ guitarist Robert Forster quipped, “A bridge is a beautiful thing. It’s nicer than a Go-Between sewage works.”)
Accompanied onstage by bassist and drummer Ben Edgar and Lozz Benson, Angus & Julia alternated lead vocals for their respective self-penned compositions, each sibling providing harmonious backing vocals to the other.
Julia switched between electric and acoustic guitars and a trumpet, sometimes playing the trumpet while she held a guitar. Their songs tend to be folky-pop, hers lyrically more confessional, his more topical, but they stray into other realms, and at one stage segued into the Phil Collins’ hit In The Air Tonight.
They’ve been collaborating musically for 20 years, and you’d think as brother and sister they’d be sick of the sight of each other, having grown up in the same household (Angus was born in 1984, Julia 1986) and now regularly touring the world together. However, they maintain a strong creative connection that has yielded five studio albums and a soundtrack album, plus several solo albums, and collected a cluster of APRA and ARIA awards along the way.
And being billed as main support to Crowded House on a three-months national sold-out tour is an indicator of their winning formula.
Crowded House are one of Australia’s most-loved bands, having earned 13 ARIA and 8 APRA awards (plus the 1994 ‘International Group of the Year at the British BRIT Awards and numerous other overseas accolades).
Internationally, they’ve sold over 15 million records from a discography of eight studio albums.
Despite two hiatuses since their 1985 formation as a three-piece, original members Neil Finn (vocalist-guitarist and principal songwriter) and bassist Nick Seymour (younger brother of the aforementioned Mark Seymour) are still the creative centre.
Sadly, drummer Paul Hester is no longer with us (Paul and Neil were both previously in Neil’s older brother Tim Finn’s band Split Enz).
However, Neil’s sons Liam (guitar) and Elroy (drums) are now part of the line-up, along with American record producer Mitchell Froom (who’s worked with Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Missy Higgins, among others) on keyboards.
Crowded House performed a selection of their popular hits, such as Four Seasons In One Day, Private Universe, Distant Sun, Weather With You and probably their most famous song, Better Be Home Soon. For the latter two, the night’s closing numbers, they were joined onstage by Vika & Linda.
These were interspersed with more recent compositions – Teenage Summer, To The Island (lead vocals by Liam Finn), The Howl, and a new, unreleased track, Last Supper – which they were unable to complete due to the earlier thunderstorms pushing the concert behind schedule.
Neil, who played guitar with Fleetwood Mac for their 2018-22 final world tour, switched to piano for a spirited version of Chocolate Cake. He continued on piano for a cover of his 1983 Split Enz composition Message To My Girl.
There was a fair amount of good-natured banter between Neil Finn and Nick Seymour onstage, mainly jesting. Nick was wearing a bright orange suit, to which Neil declared, “Nick was going to wear a see-through plastic poncho, but I persuaded him to wear an orange suit instead!”
Neil also claimed Nick was a former catwalk model who had danced with Beyoncé (until her bouncer stepped in to separate them), and had once clumsily stood on the foot of pop diva Diana Ross at an awards ceremony.
Nick denied the latter, blaming their drummer, the late Paul Hester.
At one stage during the concert, after the sun had sunk on the horizon, a drone hovered overhead. Neil spotted it above and claimed it was a robot named Jasper.
Nick called out, “Fuck off Jasper!”
Neil announced, “Let’s give Jasper the finger from all of us!”
The crowd and the band duly responded and there was a mass sea of arms raised skyward toward the hovering quadcopter, with middle fingers firmly extended.
It was a lot of fun!
Crowded House
Set ListMean to Me
World Where You Live
Teenage Summer
Fall at Your Feet
To the Island
When You Come
Private Universe
Four Seasons in One Day
The Howl
Something So Strong
Distant Sun
Chocolate Cake
Message to My Girl (Split Enz cover)
Last Supper (new, unreleased song)
Weather With You
Better Be Home Soon
Check out Alec Smart’s (@alecsmart_fotos) full gallery of this event HERE
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Press Release 13th October 2025 (below) HERE
RED HOT SUMMER Tour
brings heat to
BATEMANS BAY
.AMNPLIFY – DB
