Alex Cameron Dazzles Chicago at The Hideout
A historic show as the Australian indie singer proves ready for larger rooms; plus, looking back at the origins of my Al Cam fandom
Words, photos & videos by Katie Ingegneri
The Hideout is one of Chicago’s greatest indie music venues. And that’s saying a lot for a city obsessed with music, home to many excellent spots from dive bars to stadiums. I’ve only been there a handful of times in the four years I’ve lived in Chicago, but each show I’ve been to there has been amazing, from The Lemon Twigs’ pre-debut album release tour last summer where they rocked out like it was their high school’s Battle of the Bands, to iconic DIY artist Juan Wauters bringing hardened garage rockers to tears on a cold winter night. It’s the perfect place for indie artists to make a serious impression in Chicago. So I had a feeling that Australian indie singer Alex Cameron’s show there, which sold out the intimate room, would be one for the books. And boy, was I right.
Part of why I love The Hideout is because it is probably the most established “house show” in Chicago, just a standalone house in an industrial area near North Ave that has technically been a bar for over a hundred years. It’s a true music fan’s venue, complete with twinkly white Christmas lights and a bar like your uncle’s living room, and whenever I’m there I see people I know, like Chicago’s own indie luminaries if they’re not on tour at the moment. The Al Cam show was no exception, with a crowd full of various members of Twin Peaks, Whitney (right before shipping off on their own tour) and serious appreciators of the music and art world. As I’ve learned, if you want to know where the best new music is coming from, look at what musicians themselves are listening to.
I’ve been aware of Al Cam for a few years now, since he and his saxophonist and business partner Roy Molloy opened for Foxygen here at the Metro in April 2015. A drunken Chicago night that involved me spotting a still-underground Angel Olsen in the audience and awkwardly fangirling at her at the bar while strains of the excellently cheesy 1970s pop hit “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree” caught my consciousness from the stage. My concert companion with excellent music taste commented on how much he was digging it, and I couldn’t shake that melody or vague impressions of this tall man swiveling across the stage. That was Al.
So I later paid more attention when Alex’s debut album “Jumping the Shark” was (re-)released by Secretly Canadian after it had come out in his native Australia a few years prior. I listened to the elegantly sparse, synth-based album and was hypnotized by Al’s voice and one-of-a kind lyrics. I donated last November after Roy’s sax was stolen to help get these scrappy Australians back on their tour, as they traversed the globe looking for receptive ears. I put “Real Bad Lookin’” on my list of top 10 songs of 2016. But Al didn’t seem to be on many people’s radars yet beyond the tuned-in indie scene.
That changed this year with the announcement of his second album “Forced Witness,” which would include cameos from Angel Olsen. It’s funny how things come full circle. Angel Olsen is my Jesus (despite us being the exact same age!) and anything she sings on is great by me, and I was excited to see how Al was going to take his act to the next level, with help from the likes of Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, Richard Swift, Brandon Flowers of The Killers and more on production and songwriting. I was blown away by the first single “Candy May,” keeping it on repeat all day, and had a great feeling about the album, which features an expanded backing band and fuller treatments of his unique songs than on the first album.
There’s no one like Alex Cameron out there today. A somewhat androgynous Millennial offspring of early Bruce Springsteen and Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry in style and substance, tall and angular with long blondish-brown hair, he’s evolved from his earlier act that featured false wrinkles and sleazy suits to a more honest and direct approach in his style — while continuing with his lyrical themes of outsiders, hustlers, and broken-down humanity just looking for a quick fix or a slightly better day, set to earworm-worthy, 80s-influenced pop-rock. He’s maybe the only man in the world who can get away with using words like “pussy” and “faggot” to great effect in his songs that are like literary short stories, telling first-person narratives of toxic masculinity, failed machismo, barely legal girlfriends on the Internet who might actually just be a “Nigerian guy,” porn and booze and gambling addictions, and trying to find the meaning in all of it. Feeling bad but feeling good. And once you get a hit of what Al himself is selling, you’re hooked.
The show was everything I had been hoping for after waiting to see Alex, Roy and company for over a year. I made sure to get right up front to take pictures for this review after my photographer couldn’t make it, and it was amazing to experience from the front lines. My only lament is that I could not also simultaneously experience it from further back in the venue, to get the magical starry night effect from the “nice lights in the sky,” as Alex referred to them. Alex’s smooth voice, long limbs and now-iconic hip swiveling dance moves, thanks to the “Stranger’s Kiss” video being directed by Girls’ Jemima Kirke as she dresses up to emulate the singer in all his movements, took over the small stage and indeed the entire room.
It was a tight set of five songs from “Jumping the Shark” and six from “Forced Witness.” Frankly, I would’ve been ecstatic to hear the entirety of both albums. Cheers would go up when sax man Roy stepped up off his stool to play (check out his stool reviews on his Instagram stories), and the show ended with a triumphant “Marlon Brando.” “I feel like Marlon Brando circa 1999” is maybe one of his best lyrics to sum up Alex’s work, as he weaves tales of faded glory and fading looks — but it’s funny when you also remember Alex is a young person, who kicked off his career singing about defeats and comebacks. It’s a funny juxtaposition, but Al and Roy are deadly serious — at least about the business of touring and making music.
Alex referenced the previous 2015 show with Foxygen, saying “something about Chicago makes you feel like something important is about to happen.” And y’know what, I think it did.
Angel Olsen’s album vocals were sung at the show by a young woman charmingly named Holiday Sidewinder (an Australian musician in her own right), whose platinum-bobbed hair and white denim ensemble fit well with the aesthetic of Al’s themes. I had initially been a little concerned to see how they would handle Angel not being in the room for their duet “Stranger’s Kiss” and backing vocals on “Candy May,” but Holiday was a more than capable replacement. Actually, for all I know, she might have been the other female vocals on the album. Holiday and opening act Jack Ladder joined Al & Roy, drummer Henri Lindstrom, and guitarist/bassist Justin Nijssen for the “Forced Witness” portion of the evening.
By the end of the night, one of the Hideout’s owners was so into the show that she started bringing down cans of beer for the band and then a 30-rack of PBR for the front rows of the audience.
Opening act Jack Ladder, another Australian who is a solo artist in addition to touring with the likes of Weyes Blood and now Alex as a member of his band, set the tone for the night with sparse synth and guitar tracks as backing to his captivatingly rich voice. Coming in at what seemed like seven feet tall, Jack’s whole aesthetic was that of a rock star in a film and I thought that was pretty cool.
I was a little sad after the fact to realize that Alex hadn’t played “Studmuffin96,” one of my top favorites from “Forced Witness,” but I really cannot complain after such a fantastic set. I hung around for a while trying to figure out what to say to Alex and company as I already owned the records, and not wanting to just leave after a few years of waiting for this opportunity and following them closely on social media. I spoke to a music scene friend and we speculated about the capacity of The Hideout and how we figure Alex will be able to fill some of Chicago’s much larger venues next time around (I vote Lincoln Hall or Thalia Hall for bigger rooms, but also Empty Bottle for another intimate show).
Hanging around outside on the porch area, proper house show-style, turned into a conversation with the sweetly low-key Jack Ladder about the 1994 Australian film “Muriel’s Wedding,” which seemed fitting as it’s a pretty dark but hopeful movie with a lot of excellent 70s pop music like ABBA and Peter Allen, a sort of fitting connection to the Al Cam show (I grew up on that soundtrack and look at me now)— and after a while Jack let me trail him back inside to say hi to the boys as they packed up. I even got to chat with Alex privately for a minute or two in the big venue room as he packed up the last of the cables from the comfort of a post-show grey sweatshirt, and who couldn’t have been sweeter or more down-to-earth, which was a really lovely end to this first chapter of my Al Cam fandom. I can’t wait to see what comes next, and they best not wait 2 more years to come back to Chicago, because we will be ready and waiting.
Don’t miss Alex’s act when they come through your town, because down the road you’ll be wanting to tell your kids, or the other solo drunks at the bar, that on that night, you were there.
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