A countdown ticks across the enormous screen at Afterpay Arena as insects crawl through the visuals and roadies get busy building a house onstage. It has a porch and front door and looks as though a piece of rural Vermont has somehow landed in the middle of Sydney. A circular catwalk reaches halfway into the arena, wrapping around a pocket of very lucky fans who are going to have Kahan and his band playing almost on top of them for much of the night.
Noah Kahan arrives and launches into American Cars, followed by Doors and All My Love, and the singing starts immediately. Thousands of voices know every word and we are barely three songs into the night. Everyone has been given an LED wristband on the way in, and when they start lighting up across the arena the effect is quite something.
After All My Love, Kahan stops for a chat and remembers playing the Oxford Art Factory eight years ago, where he reckons he sold about 30 tickets. The contrast with tonight is immense. He also speaks openly about his OCD and tells us that he is here to make us cry, before explaining that his management reminded him that he had an opportunity to spread positivity. Kahan has other ideas: shut the fuck up, he says, he’s here to spread negativity.
The dry humour runs through the night, even as the songs deal with considerably heavier things. Kahan heads down the catwalk into the crowd and I keep looking around at people singing not just the choruses but entire songs back at him. There is very little casual familiarity with this audience. They know the lot.
There is also a surprise coming. At previous shows Kahan has been taking phone calls from Katniss Everdeen, teasing his involvement with The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. He has already confirmed that he has written the lead single, Draw You Out, for the forthcoming film, but he hasn’t been able to perform it live because the song wasn’t out yet. That changes now, because it was released today and Sydney becomes the first audience to hear Kahan play it live. Once everyone realises what is happening, the reaction is huge.
Dashboard loosens everything up again, with the band breaking into a spontaneous dance around the stage while people in the crowd turn towards each other and sing the lyrics. Dial Drunk is spectacular, the wristbands flashing red and blue across Afterpay Arena while the audience threatens to drown Kahan out.
By now the house that was built at the beginning of the show has morphed into Kahan’s General Store. It remains a constant presence as the night moves along, with Kahan using every bit of it. During Willing and Able he is up on the roof singing, while Porch Light sees the entire arena glow yellow from thousands of wristbands as moths circle the porch light in the visuals behind him, as Nina de Vitry tears into a rip-roaring fiddle solo before Kahan leaves the main stage and heads into the audience. He eventually appears at the back of the arena on a much smaller stage, surrounded by several microphones so he can keep turning to face the people gathered around him. Before Orbiter he tells us he isn’t very good at accepting praise, then a huge moon appears behind him and somebody in the crowd lets out a wolf howl. You couldn’t really time it better.
Kahan stays at the back for Pain Is Cold Water and Maine before the band joins him there for Paid Time Off and Dan. The smaller stage suddenly turns into a hoedown in the middle of Afterpay Arena.
The band eventually heads back to the main stage, but Kahan stays behind for The View Between Villages. Images of countryside and empty roads roll across the screen while the roadies quietly start rebuilding the house in the distance. It is one of the recurring pleasures of the show, watching this set constantly being pulled apart and put back together without interrupting what is happening around it.
Northern Attitude brings another huge response, with people hugging each other and singing along all around me. The Great Divide is accompanied by more images of open countryside and roads, and when Kahan leaves part of the song to the crowd they finish it for him without hesitation. New Perspective follows, introduced by Kahan as a song about rooting for your friends to fail, and he tells us it will be the last song of the night.
Of course it isn’t. Kahan returns for End of August, sitting at the keys on the stage in the middle of the venue. A local Sydney horn section comes along for the ride and adds some serious power as the song builds.
Homesick has everyone singing again, although by now the crowd looks emotionally wrung out in the best possible way. There has been a lot of laughing, crying, hugging and yelling lyrics at friends over the course of the night, and Kahan seems to understand exactly how much these songs mean to the people standing in front of him.
Stick Season is saved for the final release. Kahan is high-kicking alongside his guitarist while the huge screen behind him fills with faces from the crowd singing back at him, and the entire arena joins in. He introduces his band and the Sydney horn section as whatever energy is left in the room gets thrown into one last enormous singalong.
What I like most about the show is how earthy it feels despite the size of the production. The screens are enormous and the wristbands are clever, but the world Kahan creates is full of houses, porches, general stores, villages, country roads and open landscapes. There are fiddles, horns and musicians crowded together on a small stage in the middle of an arena having a hoedown.
Perhaps that is part of why Kahan is connecting on this scale right now. The music is obviously doing the heavy lifting, but there is also something appealing about a show that reaches for things that feel simple and real at a time when so much of life happens online. Nobody in Afterpay Arena has escaped technology tonight, there are thousands of phones in the air, but people are also singing directly to each other, hugging and occasionally crying together.
At times it feels almost like a religious experience, without anyone needing to preach. Eight years after around 30 people apparently turned up to see him at the Oxford Art Factory, Noah Kahan now has thousands filling Afterpay Arena and singing every word back to him. It is hard not to be swept up in it.
Kahan will perform 3 more times in Sydney, before heading to New Zealand, tickets HERE.
Images Deb Pelser
