Music: Jimmy Webb

Heath Ledger Theatre
July 1, 2017

The last time the American songwriter Jimmy Webb played Perth, a paltry 100 or so people were sprinkled around the little Fly By Night Club in Fremantle.
Six years later, the swanky, and much larger, Heath Ledger Theatre was full to over-capacity.
This was partly due to much better promotion of this visit, but something else, I suspect, was afoot – call it nostalgia if you like, but that doesn’t adequately explain the resurgence in the careers of the septuagenarian Webb and his veteran peers.
Webb, though, is a unique case; he’s never had a hit single of his own, his own albums sell modestly, and yet he’s been a major star since the 1960s on the strength of his songwriting alone.