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Keith Urban review: shiny, shallow and deadening

Bernard Zuel

Keith Urban
ICC Theatre, December 14
★★

How does Keith Urban look himself in the mirror? How does he sleep at night?

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Pretty bloody well I would guess. It's a good life he has and he's worked hard for it. And still works hard, even when opening a new – rather impressive – space in a town which had been slow to fall for him but now is solid Urban country.

This second Sydney show, having played the much bigger but less attractive arena at Homebush two nights earlier, is as energised and pulsing with effort as any show he's done in the past two decades.

While there may be (a lot) more electronics, the guitar playing is still first class and the rock'n'roll is undiminished. While it may be a standard part of his show, the elevation of someone from the audience bit – in this case first a 16-year-old who had flown from Adelaide to celebrate her birthday – still was nicer than shtick should be with first her mother and then the rest of the family and friends called up on stage for chat and selfies, and her father given a go on Urban's vintage Les Paul guitar.

On the old footy caller's Frank Hyde Meter, this show is long enough (more than 20 songs), it's straight enough (no fancy effects, costume changes or commentary on pesky subjects such as refugees, presidents or lock out laws) and, in terms of audience reaction, it's right between the posts (they were up, they were dancing, they were fist pumping).

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Mate, how good was that? Top bloke. Top show. Mate, you couldn't ask for more could you?

Actually, yes mate, you could. By every account, Urban is a really nice human being, but in his songs there is not a sliver of him to be found anywhere. Not a skerrick of soul, not a smidgin of heart, not even the faintest shadow of something that is uniquely Keith Lionel Urban, son of Marienne and Bob, husband of Nicole, father of Sunday and Faith.

Slip Urban out of any musical moment here, replace him with another good looking bloke strapped to a guitar, and the bland everyman-ness, the thrice reheated sentiments, the clichés – Oh. My. God! such clichés - would mean as much or as little.

These songs are not badly written; the opposite in fact given their intensely focused construction that hits every mark like a precision machine. But strung together on record or on stage they, and in effect the public Urban, are as shallow, as infuriatingly empty and as spirit-deadening as could possibly be managed in 90 minutes.

How does he face that every night?

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