When he told you to “Turn up your radio” you listened, as did every subsequent generation that stumbled upon that great Masters Apprentices anthem. But even though Jim Keays and the Masters had their moment in the sun in the late 60′s and early 70′s, Keay’s has always refused to go gently into the dying of the light; hanging around and recording and playing in many guises over the decades, including Cotton, Keays and Morris (with Darryl and Russell). Now half way through his seventh decade Jim Keays is choosing to make a racket again, literally. Going back to his own roots, rock’n'roll’n'garage punk. Eleven remarkably well chosen covers from the Crazy Horse tune that gives the album its title, through The Flamin’ Groovies Whiskey Woman, Betty McQuade’s Midnight Bus, and Them’s Mystic Eyes. Highlights include the lesser know Save My Soul by Wimple Winch (once covered by The Lime Spiders) and The Move’s Do Ya as Keays has gathered a band that are as raw and dirty as he wants them to be. These are great covers, done with heart and soul by a dude who was there in the first place. When Keays takes a run at The Dream Syndicate’s glorious Tell Me When It’s Over, the answer is a resounding “Not yet!”.

*** 1/2

There are, as they say, two sure things in life: death and taxes.

Part of me is disappointed that the Australian Theatre for Young people did not, in its new production, present a series of monologues about teenagers grappling with taxation.

What they have given us instead in The One Sure Thing is an exploration of what death means for people who are coming to it for the first time. These are budding actors, some as young as 16, working with material penned by writers as young as 18. As you might expect, there are a handful of false starts: the grieving flit too quickly from chatter to howls of guilt, or their reminisces of the dead try too hard.

But there is ample compensation for the moments that misfire. Lucy Coleman’s eight-year-old social climber is perfection, all bated breath and childish self-importance in the face of desperate tragedy. Emma Campbell’s account of the cruel and unusual disease that is slowly killing her schoolgirl character is, by turns, crushing and laugh-out-loud funny.

And canny direction from Tanya Goldberg transforms some pieces from soliloquy to a drama that consumes the stage – and the audience.

A touching production that reminds us what is at stake for us all.

Until Feb 18, atyp Studio 1, The Wharf, Pier 4/5, Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay, $15-25, 9270 2400, atyp.com.au

What’s in a name? Very little these days it must be said, as everybody stands out from the crowd, forming a fairly big crowd themselves. The amusingly titled Phenomenal Handclap Band release their second album and immediately it is 1984 again. Not in an Orwellian sense, in an OMD, Depeche Mode Human League sense. Deliberately dated synths abound, along with heavily treated vocals, the ice cool but trying to be sexy kind. What does hang things together for the Handclappers is the use of real drums, bass and guitar over this mix, adding an organic element that propels the songs along out of the occasional disco mire. Throw in a little art rock, such as opens Winter Falls, and there is enough, just, to keep this album from disappearing up its own influences (there is a fine line between tongue in cheek and tongue elsewhere). The Unknown Father James Park stands out on the back of a strong melody and chorus, and the most personal of performances from the dual female vocal leads. New, neu, nu-romantics?

** 1/2

It could be said that Suzy Connolly is merely another pleasant-but-plain singer-songwriter of which there seems to be an inexhaustible supply. However, what separates this Sydney artist from the pack is her revival of the sounds of mid-century rock and pop with the aid of producer/musician Josh Schuberth. From the whammy-bar guitar wavering on Gold to the slick surf-rock of Skydive, Night Larks seems determined to present Connolly as a sort of Australian Nancy Sinatra or, with Schuberth in tow, another She & Him-type outfit. It isn’t all just retro production at play, though – Connolly clearly has a clever way with words. Aside from name-dropping references to Ray Davies and the Kinks in Best In Life, the line “I’m a casualty of you / from a casual tea for two” from Casualty Of You is an example of Connolly’s bittersweet take on relationship strife, a theme which permeates much of the album. This all reaches a sweary climax with the powerful final track Sea Dog, an album highlight. Tales of love and emotional woes set to music are obviously nothing new, but Connolly has utilised deft lyricism and  quirky production to lift her debut offering above a lot of the other plain pleasantries.

***

Otherwise known as reborner or deciduous teeth, babyteeth are those that precede your adult set and are kind of like the training wheels for your mouth. Often wished upon or traded in for gold, they are both valuable and impermanent. In the freshly-penned Rita Kalnejais play of the same name, there is a bittersweet edge to this concept of childhood chrysalis – as 14-year-old Milla (Sara West) is very, very sick, and like her one remaining baby tooth, may not make it to adulthood. For this inaugural staging, we speak to director Eamon Flack (As You Like It) about how he pulled out this challenging little tale …

What compelled you to direct Babyteeth? There are very few reasons NOT to do a play like this. It’s wildly alive, it’s difficult to direct (which I like), it’s funny, it’s full of wonderful ways of seeing the world, and most brilliantly of all it’s a love story. Theatre has so few of these nowadays. Theatre yielded the love story to opera and film a century ago, and modern love stories on stage are rare. This is one of them, and a glorious one at that.

Tell us about Milla, the dying teenager? She has cancer but she’s also 14 and it’s this gap between illness and the ordinary teenage urge to live and experience that gives the play its force. The fact that she’s dying makes her living all the more important – she’s trying to find a way to leap into the thick of life while she can, and in a stroke of madness or sheer sanity, depending which way you look at it, she falls instantly in love with a junkie [Eamon Farren] ten years her senior and invites him home. The situation is part screwball and part tragedy. It’s quite brilliant.

And how about the other characters. How do they fit into the story? There’s a family of three – Milla and her parents – and each of them, in the course of dealing with Milla’s illness, find themselves forging an unlikely bond with a random stranger. As Milla’s illness takes over the life of the family, these people from the world at large become their most important anchors to a wider sense of life and living. It’s beautifully simple storytelling, really, but unexpected, idiosyncratic and alive.

How have you prepared the cast for their performances? To be honest it’s not really something I talk about. Characters are just people with intense complexes of obstacles and desires, so you spend most of your time talking about obstacles and desires. Having said that, the marvellous Russell Dykstra is playing a Latvian violin teacher, so Russell has heroically learnt both a Latvian accent and the violin. He’s also had to learn to be a lot ruder than he himself is. Other than that – no characterisation, just six weeks worth of painstaking accumulation of details of human behaviour!

Babyteeth is described as dark, a whimsical comedy, bittersweet and a love story where, ‘love undoes you and makes you honest’. How do all these differing themes connect to one another? I think LIFE has multidimensional themes – it’s pretty normal for it to be funny and awful at the same moment – and life rarely ties its themes up neatly. Babyteeth is adamantly life-like in that sense. It refuses to package the themes into a single pill. But at the centre of the living mess of it all is a moment-by-moment interest in what it means to love another person when you know that, somewhere along the way, one of you will end up losing the other person to oblivion. Love is not a feeling, it’s a constant activity you engage in, especially when someone is dying.

How has the play been staged? What visual or sensory tools have been utilised to enhance the story-telling, the mood or emotional landscapes of the characters and their interactions? Bob Cousins is the set designer – he really is one of the best – and we spent long hours trying to find some very practical solutions to staging a very eventful play. It has lots of locations – it’s very filmic in that sense – so we needed to find something that could do a lot of work with great ease. But the play also has this unusual and very beautiful kind of poetry of space going on – this remarkable way of constantly unfolding and opening up and just when you think it can’t open up any more it does. So we’ve found ourselves putting three rooms on a revolve, when the interior of each room is the exterior of the room next door – a kind of Escher-esque world of interiors becoming exteriors. But the moods and rhythms and emotional landscapes of the staging really come from the dialogue, which is intricately musical in a very special way. We’ll be using very gentle music and lighting to support those rhythms, rather than invest too heavily in a theatricality.

What do you hope the audience will take away with them? Oh – that great and classic feeling of having had a good laugh and a good cry in the same few hours – you feel like your lungs and your stomach and your heart have had a good physical workout just by sitting in the dark – and when you walk away with those feelings you also end up somehow more open-minded and more compassionate, which is always a good thing! I also hope lots of people fall in love after watching the show.

Feb 11-Mar 18, Upstairs, Belvoir St Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills, $42-62, 9699 3444, belvoir.com.au

Claiming their new stuff is about, “feeling, not feelings,” The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are not afraid of coming across as painfully earnest. But the floss-spinning foursome (the band name comes from a children’s book, no less) hailing from the Big Apple somehow manage to avoid tumbling too far into twee, with some fierce melodies and competitive stats (Pitchfork handed out an 8.2 for their 2011 release Belong) to back them up. Here for the Laneway Festival you can catch their sideshow at the Manning Bar with a similarly cute-but-canny Rainbow Chan (co-winner of the FBi Radio Northern Lights competition) and Geoffrey O’Connor. (AB)

Feb 9, Manning Bar, Manning Rd, University of Sydney, $45+BF, 1300 762 545, manningbar.com

It’s not every day you hear the words red carpet, live entertainment, short movies and free in the same sentence, however Tropfest goes out of its way to offer just that. The most prestigious short film festival in Australia (next stop: the world) takes over the Sydney Domain for one special night in February – the films are also broadcast to various other locations. Considering last year’s finalists include a pink spin on the Y2K bug (yep, Y2GAY), a feathery therapy session, and a watery journey to an unusual animal kingdom (the winning entry directed by actor Damon Gameau), 2012 could have its work cut out for it in the field of  ’raising the stakes.’ We wish them well. Go witness the action from the arvo onwards, Sunday February 19th.

Feb 19, the Domain, Sydney, get there early with a picnic blanket, tropfest.com

Viewers are confronted with a fearless and frank depiction of sex addiction in Shame, the breathtaking sophomore film of British director Steve McQueen (Hunger). Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a New York yuppie whose insatiable sexual appetite is fuelled by an endless regime of one-night stands and moral depravity. When his wayward sister (Carey Mulligan) arrives for an unannounced visit, Brandon becomes increasingly volatile, spurning her efforts to reconnect and hurtling further into the city’s dark underbelly. In his best performance to date, Fassbender (also Hunger) chips away at Brandon’s veneer of cool-charm and casual cynicism to expose raw despair, and in doing so conjures sympathy for an otherwise deplorable person. Mulligan (An Education), who’s equally impressive, strikes a careful balance between impertinence and vulnerability, whilst demonstrating her talent as a singer with a tender rendition of the theme from New York, New York. Shame is steeped in explicit sexual imagery, but McQueen deliberately avoids titillation. Instead, he deglamorises sex to reveal sobering, often unsettling truths about human dysfunction. Ultimately, Shame is a challenging yet immensely rewarding exploration of self-destruction and possible salvation. (JH) ****1/2

A Bundjalung artist of the Djanbun clan, Bronwyn Bancroft has been making her distinctive mark on the Australian arts for over 30 years. A practising artist, she works across a wide range of mediums, from painting and collage to literature and textile and fashion designs. After establishing her fashion outlet Designer Aboriginals in 1985, Bancroft became the first Australian designer to be invited to show her work in Paris. Not content with success in the fashion and art worlds (her paintings are held by the National Gallery, AGNSW and Art Gallery of WA), Bancroft went on to become a founding member of the Boomali’s Aboriginal Artist Co-Op, a watershed organisation in the contemporary urban Indigenous art movement.

Throughout her career, she has continued to produce a well-regarded body of artworks and fashion, as well as remained passionate and active in community activism (particularly about the rights of Aboriginal artists) and as an arts administrator, sitting on and directing countless Indigenous and non-Indigenous art boards over the last three decades. Power, Passion, Politics, currently showing at CarriageWorks, is a retrospective of Bancroft’s work, and the first in-depth examination of this extraordinary artist. Mainly featuring her paintings, the collection also has examples of her designs, and archival footage and photographs.

Until Mar 17, CarriageWorks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh, free, 8571 9099, carriageworks.com.au

This Thursday February 9th Indie rock band Yuck will be here from the UK promoting their self-titled debut album which is trashy, melodic and harks back to the days of early Smashing Pumkins and Dinosaur Jr. They’re supported by Californian noise rocker EMA whose album Past Life Martyred Saints was a revelation last year and local Sydney garage rockers Step Panther. Singer-songwriter Paris Wells will be showing off some of the energetic soul music which has won her much admiration from other distinguished musicians both within Australia and around the world (including one Justin Timberlake). The sultry Melbournian singer can not only carry a note, she’s crafted two albums worth of unique pop music that is raw, bluesy and impossible to ignore. That’s on at the Vanguard. Canadian electronic band Austra are bringing their synth laden pop to The Basement. Though their sounds are produced electronically their music doesn’t suffer dynamically for it and it perfectly suits singer Katie Stelmanis soaring vocal stylings that’s reminiscent of Kate Bush or fellow Canadian Feist.

It’ll be a big night of blues this Friday February 10th as there’s a couple of great shows featuring greats of the genre. Spend a night at the crossroads when two Aussie blues greats Dom Turner and Ian Collard play a show of Mississippi-inspired blues from their latest release Mama Says We’re Crazy Too at The Vanguard. Slide guitar hero Dom Turner (The Backsliders) and vocalist/harmonica player Ian Collard (Collard Greens & Gravy) have a ton of experience behind them as they join forces to reproduce the sound of Son House, Robert Johnson and Leadbelly. At 505 Pugsley Buzzard will be playing his Harlem stride, New Orleans jazz inspired blues. Not only does he add a vaudevillian spin to the sound, his stride piano style is spot on for the genre and his whiskey-tinged growl is never less endearing whenever you hear it. Alternatively, 90s alternative rock band Urge Overkill are making a pleasant return to Australia. After 16 years they’ve released a new album called Rock n Roll Submarine and they’ll be playing these tracks alongside a host of classics at the Gaelic Theatre. Over at Candy’s Apartment, local hard rockers Paper Champion will be pushing their melodic rock sound along side Queensland’s Greenthief and Minus House.

On Saturday February 11th you can see Tex Perkins’ new band called The Band of Gold. As usual he’s teamed up with some of the hottest musicians to record material for a debut album which covers a whole host of country classics. They’ll be previewing these songs at The Basement. Venturing up from the south of Sydney, Caravana Sun will be playing their uplifting ska reggae-rock fusion at the Beach Rd Hotel. They’ve been making a name for themselves as a great live act and they adored themselves to audiences back in October when they launched their debut album Rising Falling at the same venue so the night is sure to be a belter. They’re supported by Andy Kelly and The Shipwrecks.