The Whitlams Love This City 25 Years Tour goes on sale this Thursday 20 June at 10am.
Visiting their favourite theatres and pubs around Australia over 12 dates, the band will tour with one of the country’s best brass sections to punch out the interwoven melodies that so defined the lushly orchestrated long player.
Love This City (1999) was The Whitlams fourth album, a much anticipated big-budget follow-up to the award-winning Eternal Nightcap which had led them to Best Group and Best Song at the ARIA Awards the previous year.
Since 2022, a reinvigorated Tim Freedman has led The Whitlams in a resurgence, touring heavily and releasing two new albums – Sancho (2022) and Kookaburra (2024), the latter an Americana-shaded album which still sits at #3 on the ARIA Australian Country Albums chart three months after its release.
With one eye thus firmly in the present, Freedman will take the time in October and November to look back fondly to an album that, at the time, seemed like it would make or break him. The initial critical reception was rapturous (see below), but the surprising choice of first single ‘Chunky Chunky Air Guitar’ proved to be a stumble, considered as a puzzling novelty song unrepresentative of the band.
The second and third singles corrected the ship, when ‘Blow Up the Pokies’ and ‘Thank You (for loving me at my worst)’ were successful at radio and drove the album to double platinum status. Love This City has retained its solid reputation and was placed along with its predecessor in the Rolling Stone’s 200 Greatest Albums of All-time, with Eternal Nightcap at #36, and Love This City at #101.
Tim Freedman will be joined by long term cohort’s guitarist Jak Housden and drummer Terepai Richmond, who were both part of the sessions back in 1999, with new member multi-instrumentalist Ian Peres.
It will be an evening of memories, melody and humour as the band delivers its usual rambunctious performance, complete with the power of brass.
‘LOVE THIS CITY’ 25TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR DATES:
Friday 4th October – Corner Hotel – Richmond, VIC
Saturday 5th October – Corner Hotel – Richmond, VIC
Friday 11th October – City Recital Hall – Sydney, NSW
Thursday 17th October – Canberra Theatre Centre – Canberra, ACT
Friday 18th October – Odeon Theatre – Hobart, TAS
Saturday 19th October – Craigie Knowe Vineyard – Cranbrook, TAS
Saturday 2nd November – Princess Theatre – Woolloongabba, QLD
Friday 8th November – Anita’s Theatre – Thirroul, NSW
Saturday 9th November – Newcastle Civic Theatre – Newcastle, NSW
Thursday 14th November – Astor Theatre – Perth, WA
Friday 15th November – Shelter Brewing Co – Busselton, WA
Saturday 7th December – The Gov – Hindmarsh, SA
Tickets on sale Thursday 20th June and available via https://thewhitlams.com/tour/:
DAILY TELEGRAPH – Dino Scatena
An extraordinary couple of years in the life of Tim Freedman has seen the Sydney-based musician come out the other side with an extraordinary new album.
His Whitlams’ latest Love This City can stake a serious claim on being the biggest album ever produced by a local act, in sound at least.
With the help of some 50 musicians both here and in Memphis (including such local luminaries as Garry Gary Beers, Chris Abrahams, Marcia Hines and Jackie Orszaczky, Love This City constantly strolls from Freedman’s solo trademark piano tinkerings to monumental string and brass arrangements, often within the confines of the same song.
THE COURIER MAIL – Noel Mengel
The Whitlams are no longer just another promising band from the inner-Sydney indie scene and Freedman has the freedom and the budget to create the album that has been spinning around in his head for years.
And he succeeds beyond all expectations with Love This City (East West/Warner), a record destined to provide the soundtrack for the summer and, in years to come, be regarded as a high watermark for Ozpop in the ’90s, using pop, rock and soul ingredients for its distinctive Australian flavour.
At the core of the album is a trio of songs inspired by events around the local pub at the end of his street in Sydney’s Newtown.
You Gotta Love This City is a lightly funky soul tune (with marimbas, flute and Marcia Hines, no less, on backing vocals) that tells the tale of a young man who loses his job and wanders drunkenly by the harbour on the night that Syd-er-ny won the Olympics; God Drinks At The Sando is a late-night piano-bar ballad; Blow Up The Pokies is an anti-gambling song written after poker machines took over the stage where this band played its first shows.
I’ve been listening to Love This City for a month and each time I go back it reveals new layers to me, the surest indication of an album with a long shelf life.
GOLD COAST BULLETIN – Paul Weston
The latest offering from Tim Freedman and The Whitlams is already being touted as the soundtrack of the summer.
After a few listens, the 15-track Love This City lives up to the hype with the combination of Freedman’s clever lyrics and pop/soul melodies.
There are three standout tracks, starting with You Gotta Love This City which apart from opening with some soulful back-up vocals from Marcia Hines is possibly the best song written about Sydney and how it prostitutes its beauty to earn a dollar.
The track should become pre-Games special, but the real political drama here is provided by 400 Miles From Darwin, a deep, brooding piece about Australia’s shameful failure to stop the carnage in East Timor which carries the line ‘We would have all been Schindler there’.
The best is the working-class anthem Blow Up The Pokies, with Freedman as always leading on piano and backed by soaring string arrangements.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD – Matt Buchanan
For a start, it’s an album of many songs, various in style, theme and expression and many, many musicians – try five drummers, including d.i.g. engine Terepai Richmond. It has big orchestral flourishes, but strings are not dominant. It’s an album of R&B flavours, monster choruses and touching piano-man ballads – some very strong, some that slip through the cracks. It is an album of exotic instruments: saron, Kapaci zither, the rebana from Timor, along with flute, congas, tabla and marimba. And, for the first time, there’s even politics, as Freedman chews on the big questions of East Timor in 400 Miles From Darwin and state-assisted gambling in Blow Up The Pokies.
ROLLING STONE – TYLER JENKE
200 Greatest Australian Albums of All Time
The Whitlams, ‘Love This City’
For newcomers to The Whitlams, Love This City could easily be mistaken for a mislabelled greatest hits compilation. For diehard fans, it remains a brief moment of hope amidst an era defined by personal tragedy.
Following on from the commercial breakthrough of 1997’s Eternal Nightcap, their fourth album earned the Sydney outfit a bronze medal on the ARIA charts, and widespread acclaim for its singles.
Guided by Tim Freedman’s smooth, magnetic voice, and his stellar piano work, Love This City showcased an eclectic selection of styles (most notably seen on the somewhat divisive “Chunky Chunky Air Guitar”), whilst maintaining their trademark sentiment and emotion with some of their most heartfelt work to date.
While its title track remains a classic ironic look at the city of Sydney, singles such as “Thankyou (For Loving Me at My Worst)” and “Made Me Hard” remain perfect examples of the group’s accomplished songwriting. Of course, the hard-hitting “Blow Up The Pokies” (their equal-highest charting single) serves as both an ever-relevant plea and a grim foreshadowing, with bassist Andy Lewis passing away just three months after the record’s release due to a gambling addiction.
Yet, despite the tragedies that both preceded and succeeded Love This City, it stands tall as an almost euphoric example of what one of the country’s finest bands can do when they’re firing on all cylinders, unafraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD – Matt Buchanan
Chunky Chunky Air Guitar
With so much riding on the album, the choice of first single is necessarily a delicate, even precarious choice. Now, on Love This City, there are, if not an abundance, then certainly two or three obvious contenders for first single that would easily satisfy a market still dizzy from No Aphrodisiac, truth, beauty and a picture of Tim.
There’s the anthemic Blow Up The Pokies, for example. Or, left of centre, with its irresistible key change, there’s the cover of Made Me Hard, by Bernie Hayes. Both songs are catchy, both certain hits.
So, with all the achievements of his entire past leading up to this point, with the very prow of his career nosing nervously into waters reserved for “hit-meisters only”, Freedman frisbees Chunky Chunky Air Guitar to the gasping hordes. An eccentrically phrased funk rap featuring a girl from the Cocos Islands, it has received, it must be said, an astonished response. So, mad or what?
“Brave?” offers Freedman, before deciding he had better explain. “I wish I’d put the clip out before the single because then people would have realised we were having fun.”
Undeniably, it wins several points for (apparently) being the first single ever to use the words “air guitar” in its title. But surely it risks several million as a single so unrepresentative of the album, and broadly speaking, so un-Whitlamsy. On the other hand, it is very catchy.
“I hope so, but gee, the critics are giving it a f—ing pasting,” Freedman admits. “A typical review is Chunky Air Guitar shouldn’t have even been on the album, let alone the first single.”
Whether or not one likes or loathes Chunky Chunky Air Guitar, it’s undeniably different from anything else on Love This City. But then this album is different from any other recording from the Whitlams. Tim Freedman could, for the first time, do whatever he wanted. And the album, to a large degree, reflects that fact.
THE COURIER MAIL – Noel Mengel
Thank You (for loving me at my worst)
“It is a much happier record,” Freedman says. “Even when I’m having a bit of a whinge, I’m doing it from a positive point of view.”
Thank You reflects the sunny vibrations of success: “I had a great December, money in the bank for the first time in years, a few weeks off and I hit the silly season with aplomb. “I thought, you can’t go through these happy months and not record them.”
The song has a joyful bounce that recalls John Sebastian’s Welcome Back Kotter, although Freedman reckons he was just trying to speed up Randy Newman.
