Liner Notes Live debuted in 2006, with a tribute to David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, as a special event from producers Babble, which presented regular spoken word nights at Bar Open, in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. The line-up was local poets and spoken-word performers, each assigned a song to use as a springboard for an original work, with host Michael Nolan offering some background stories about the album in between and singing a few songs accompanied by Chris Chapple on guitar. Having hit on a great formula, the format has remained largely unchanged since then, other than expanding the musical segments to include a full band.

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Liner Notes Live soon became one of Melbourne’s best-loved spoken word events, and has featured many of the city’s poets, authors, musicians and comedians. In 2009, LNL was included in the Melbourne Writers Festival, as the festival began to include an entertainment program in addition to the usual talks and panels. The classic album chosen was Thriller – news broke of Michael Jackson’s death just weeks before the show. Concerns about how an event that includes as much irreverence as reverence might be received were allayed in the night, when audience and performers experienced a night of memorably ecstatic catharsis.

 

It was the beginning of a new phase of LNL shows, programmed in writers festivals and featuring line-ups that included national and international guests of the festivals. We have since sold out shows at the MWF in previous years, including 400-seat salutes to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and The Doors’ LA Woman, as well as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and INXS’s Kick. We presented a special edition of the Ziggy Stardust show for the internationally touring David Bowie Is… exhibition, at ACMI in Melbourne in 2015, and toured to Brisbane’s and Byron Bay’s writers festivals. In 2019, we were invited to present two shows at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival for the first of new artistic director Julia Zemiro’s programs.