INTERVIEW: David Campbell

Published Apr 16, 2025, 12:26 PM

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So Adelaide's own David Campbell, former Cabaret Festival artistic Director, is returning to Adelaide to help celebrate the twenty fifth birthday of the festival that he helped transform. A phenomenal news show. It's called Good Lovin and More. It's at the Beautiful Her Majesty's on Friday, the twentieth of June. He joins me, David, welcome home.

Think it's going to be great to be home.

I tell you so nice to have you back. And what an amazing achievement. Twenty five years at the Cabaret Festival, Isn't it amazing?

And it kind of blows my mind that I get.

To be at the festival this year, but also been such a part of its time, you know, as a festival director with my wife for three years.

You know, I talk about it a lot.

But my son Leo was born and the second year at the festival, my wife was in hospital while I was doing the red carpet and walking Natalie Cole down and that was the first gig he'd ever been to, was.

Natalie Cole, when he was like four days old. So it has such an important part of my personal life.

But just the fat of Adelaide and how it comes alive in the winter at this festival and Virginia Guy has done a remarkable job these.

Last few years.

Isn't it great that all the icons want to be a part of it too. It's not one of those things, well, where you do the festival, when we leave, we never see you again. It's it just draws you back.

No, And that was the key.

So when we started doing the festival in twenty ten, I want to say, the amount of people that wanted to be a part of it that had been there before. That's when we knew this was something special. And that tradition keeps going because everyone just keeps going to.

Come back and come back and come back, and you don't always get that at festivals.

So your show, you're doing your favorite tunes from the sixties. We're talking soul and swing, dream lover, swing sessions, good, all of that. So what if you've done twelve albums thirteen out? You got so much to choose, So how do you narrow it down or are you just going to play forever, play until you pass out?

Well we could do that too.

This is a show that sort of brought me back to doing live music again post COVID, and thought maybe there was not much of us a call for it for my audience anymore, but maybe they'd moved on. And we did it one show out in Western Sydney, and so my drummer and m d Joe Acaria, who's been with me for twenty two years, we took this show out in two thousand and eight and it was really successful.

It was really good, and we loved a lot of the songs we were doing with it.

So let's take that skeleton and add you know, as you were saying, dream lover songs I've done from an album a couple of years ago, tell different stories.

And it just had a different life and a different energy.

So yeah, we've been doing it for the last year and a bit and this will probably be the last time we do this one for a while, until we park it and reinvent the show again and put another.

You know, bits of meat on the old skeleton. Well, the music is a really graphic thing. To describe it a little bit, That's what I'm going for.

I know you where you're going though, but I like the I'm trying to work out the origin of this. So you're a north Field High boy now Ross Smith's Secondary, and I've seen the phone on you in your big school mullet. Where did this music come into your life? I'm assuming it wasn't at school, or was it at school?

It was at school, so some of it was through my grandmother who I was brought up with in Engle Farm and around law Field. But you got to remember, like kids nowadays, when they listened to TikTok, they're listening to nineties music because that was thirtis prior and that's what was fashionable.

So in the eighties we were listening to fifties and sixties.

Remember that that was when La Bumba came out and Grey Bulls of Fire and all those movies. So we got into you know, Eddie Copper, and we got into Richie Allen's and then the Big Chill soundtrack dropped, and so all those songs were really really prevalent. Reap Petite was number one again in the eighties by Jackie Wilson, So I'd already had that sort of in the background of pop music, all those songs playing anyway, because it was on all tracks and all those shows we used to watch growing up and then of course my dad soon after that did the soul deeper.

So when I was coming out of.

Doing wing music with the Swing sessions, you know, back in two thousand and six, two thousand and five, I'd done Swing Sessions one, Swing Sessions two, I don't want to repeat myself, and I wanted.

To find what the evolution of that music was. Where did swing music happen?

What happened swing music after the Beatles arrived, you know, the Rascals and Tom Jones and so brass music was being interplated with rock and good pop and Burt Bachara, and so there was this incredible new genre that was alive for a couple of years that is really great to do. Righteous Brothers and the Wall of Sound and things like that.

So you would have been with your grandmother like I am with my fourteen year old who comes to me and says, oh, listen to this song. How cool is this song? And that was around when I was a kid. That's a forty year song that now TikTok's just embraced again. But yeah, just the eighties version of.

That, yeah, pretty much, I mean that was I guess our version of the eighties was.

Just you know, movies and TVs regurgitating this music from the sixties.

I mean, the Wonder Years was happening at our time, you know what I mean.

So we're really getting into all the Vietnam movies were coming out, So we're getting all of those incredible Gallipoli.

And you know, good Morning Vietnam.

All those songs were just push through popular culture back at us again as young kids.

It was a remarkable education. When I think back on it, it's really great.

So good on those TikTok kids.

Patrick Swayzey to me more too, and a pottery dish. You know, got a lot to answer for the Righteous Brothers being beloved by people of your age, my age, well for everyone. Hey, so you do so much as we know television radio. You're on our network in smooth which is great for the Nova Network. You do, the writing, you do, the books. This is your true love though, Right getting on a stage, people's eyes are looking at you building out a tune. That's got to be For all the greatness of everything else you do, this has got to be the most fun, right.

I mean, the people's eyes looking at me makes me feel very nervous when you say it like that. But it's probably where I feel most comfortable in all of my work. I mean, I guess now on vision I've done for so long, I feel that way.

On TV.

I know the live TV and what I can do, and I don't stress it as much, and if something goes wrong or something news breaks, I quite enjoy it, not if it's terrible news, but the adrenaline gigs in and you know where are going. And that's the only thing I can equate to being like being a live performer. Like when I was starting out, I mean, it was all those years singing in small clubs here in Australia, you know, doing geets in New York, or traveling around and try and make my name in America and really trying to sort of gather who I was. I mean, that's how I found out who I was as a personality on stage.

Was later seven people.

In Chicago one night and turning it like it was a bedroom here and I was just performing for them. So then doing Carnegie Hall or doing you know, Her Majesty Theater or the Festival Theater, you sort of I learned more about myself on stage.

I learned how to be I guess what the kids nowadays fork about being authentic.

That's how I learned how to be authentic was being on stage in front of an audience and realizing I've got nowhere to hide, and my music wasn't as loud as and so I couldn't just do his another rock song and get through it. I had these gaps where I had to talk about things, and so that's how I let my style.

I guess.

And now you're going from entertaining seven people in the studio cameramen and sound guys and stuff, to for her Majesty's Hey, while I've got you, we also get to hang out you and I while you're back here in Adelaide, because I know it's a stack cabaret festival. But on the twenty first of June you will be here for the Little Heroes Foundation Gala ball and not in Vegas.

Yeah, and it's gonna be really great.

We're gonna do a little trio thing like a little side room in Vegas. But I was really honored to be asked to be a part of this. I know you've had great singers in the past before me. I've had Leo Sayer and Paul Lennie, and people like that, and I just love you know you and I were talking beforehand about what they're reaching for this year.

They're targets and their goals, especially childhood dementia. That we spoke to.

It's Renee Right who is in Adelaide, who has the three kids there, and we spoke to her a couple of years ago when she first came back to her story on Today Extra and just you know how she moves through that and tells this and tells us a story about what she's going through with her kids and what she's having to live with. And so it's important that we raise money for research. It's important to have nights like this and so I'm I'm very opant to be there. We're gonna have a good time.

Leif, Oh, such a good time, Cake Colins. You will have to drag her off the dance floor once you starts. She's meant to be working, she's meant to be hosting, but she can't help herself.

Is she is?

Little Heroes Foundation dot com dot u of people want to book their tickets for that. So great to have you coming home and again twenty five years and extraordinary when you look back at those twenty five years, the festivals before you, the festivals you're a part of the ones now we are so blessed in say, aren't we to have this on our doorstep, to have something of this ilk.

What's interesting about the festival like this is that like no other festival in the world outside of Her Majesty's and the satellite shows that happened there, it's all contained. You go from it's a winter festival. You go from room to room to room. You can get food, you see people that you haven't seen.

For a while.

You can go way into the night into the piano bar or you know, to bake up room and see a great gig. There is something for everybody at all times. For that two weeks of the festival is on. There is no other festival in the country and probably the world that has caught up and worked out the secret source that is happening at the Festival Theater in June.

And Adelaide, Adelaie Pebreu festival dot com dot u for tickets. There's so many great shows to see. One you have to put into your diary, folks, is on Friday, the twentieth of June at the Beautiful her Majesty's Theater. David Campbell, good, loving and more. Great to see it, look forward to seeing here in Adelaide.

Hey, thanks for talking to me.

The Great David Campbell my guest