Glenn Bennie's GB3 had a warm up gig at Readings 2 weeks ago, but this was the real thing to launch Emptiness Is Our Business - most of the guest vocalists were here - Steve Kilbey, Philippa Nihill, Stephen Cummings and Sarah Blasko. Meanwhile Graham Lee was on pedal steel duty, Maurice Argiro and Robert Tickner did bass and guitar work, with Andrew Nunns up the back on drums. As expected from a combination like that, something real good came out of it all - the crowd was begging for more (we got about 4 encores), plenty of Underground Lovers songs were spread amongst the new songs and Richard Andrew (who'd been doing drumming for support act Princess One Point Five) even got up and drummed for the last 2 encores. Steve Kilbey held court, taking care of Grant McLennan's contribution to the new album (a track called Actress on a Mattress) and following up with Providence (y'know, from the first Jack Frost album, which happens to have been re-released). Later on, he gave us some old Undies favourites like I Was Right and Eastside Stories - I'd have loved to see him (or somebody) do Cold Feeling, but with no keyboards in sight I figured there wasn't much chance. Stephen Cummings was in "rock" mode, giving a fairly spirited performance of his track All for love, and Sarah Blasko covered Losin' It (yay!) while Philippa Nihill looked on and smiled. There seemed to be a few hardcore Church fans up the front, one of them desperately rifling through the paper at the front of the stage (looking for anything written by Steve, maybe? he took the set list then put it back...). Anyway, it was good to see so much love for the Underground Lovers in one room.

[ see all the photos from GB3's launch gig for Emptiness is our business. ]