What stayed with the audience at #1 Dads’ concert at Sydney’s Lansdowne Hotel on Thursday 5 November was not a perfectly delivered chorus. It was not a set that went exactly to plan. It was watching Tom Iansek lose his place because the audience already knew theirs. What began with a joke about punctuality became an evening of gratitude: funny, occasionally faltering and beautifully human.
Ruby Gill opened with the warmth of someone telling you a story across a kitchen table. Charming, humorous and earnest, she made the room feel smaller without making the songs feel slight. Material from her newly released album, Fishing Is Not About Fishing, found an attentive audience, while Touch Me There built towards an emotional crescendo that made her gentler moments land harder.
Gill’s storytelling suited the room’s close quarters. There was nowhere for the feeling to disappear, and little reason to want it to. Her promised return next April already felt less like another booking than an invitation to pick up the conversation.
Iansek arrived precisely on time and made sure we noticed. The man behind #1 Dads had brought a friendly poke and a smile, establishing an easy rapport before the evening revealed how much that friendliness would matter. This is his first Australian tour under the name in six years; the welcome was anything but tentative.
Across the first three songs, the crowd’s singing repeatedly seemed to undo him. Verses slipped away. Choruses went missing. He was visibly moved, sometimes his hands physically shaking, as a packed Thursday night audience returned his songs to him.
Elsewhere, those early stumbles might have tightened the room. Here, they opened it up. Iansek would revisit a missed passage after the song, and the audience would jump straight back in, less a forgiving crowd than a well-rehearsed band waiting for its cue. There was no embarrassment to overcome. The affection had already done the work.
The set moved between older favourites and new material, with Another Day, My Rush and Hard Questions opening proceedings. Songs separated by years shared the same immediate recognition. Hearing the newer words sung back seemed particularly startling to the artist.
There were surprises, too: a saxophonist appearing in the crowd, a late duet with Tom Snowdon, a bag of balloons. And holding most of the wonderfully warm show together was a trusty, miked-up CD player supplying drums and other backing parts. Its unglamorous practicality was entirely at home in a show that never confused elaborate presentation with emotional reach.
The pleasure was not that everything went to plan. It was that nobody needed it to. Between Gill’s candid storytelling and Iansek’s overwhelmed delight, the evening celebrated songwriting as something enjoyed with company.
Sydney has extraordinary talent playing rooms close enough for an adoring fan to effortlessly lean over and peel the setlist from the stage floor. At the Lansdowne, that proximity was not simply a feature of the venue. It was the point.
