Halestorm Live in Adelaide – Dec 9, 2019

Steven Perdikis

Adelaide, South Australia. American rockstars Halestorm grace the stage of The Gov, a venerable local venue for live music.

Fronted by an true rock goddess, Lizzy Hale, Halestorm is a barrage of attitude, sound, and pure madness. Backed by her spastic, charismatic, brother Arejay Hale on drums, a Rob Flynn lookalike (Joe Hottinger) on guitar and energetic bassist Josh Smith, the complete band delivers a live show that is powerful, exhausting, frenetic, and fast paced.

There’s an unacceptable level of energy thrown from the stage into the audience at a show like this.

An excellent mix of new, old, and live specials, the performance was that of a studio quality album. With a dramatic build up, the band ceased just before the real, hard riff was about to hit – “Gotcha”, before dropping into a shredding cacophony of sound, louder than everything that led up to that moment of the show.

I was in the second row, and managed to capture the following images. I used my phone, as I was not able to get a photo-pass for the gig.

I didn’t know the concert was happening until the night before – thanks to Google Play Music for notifying me that the concert was even happening. An awesome night out. My ears are still not back to one hundred percent.

Everyone got a solo part – and as usual, Arejay managed to engage and enchant the audience just as much as front woman and rock goddess Lizzy did. Hottinger was … well, hot on the guitar, shredding the fretboard of his instrument like no tomorrow. The audience, I felt, did not truly appreciate his skill.

From my position, I did not see much of the bassist, as he was mostly isolated on the opposite side of the tiny stage, but for the $90 I paid as admission, every single moment was great.

I was a little disappointed that the “moshpit” never really got going, but for a Monday night rockshow – there was no better place to be.

Regarding my photographic imagery from the night: shutter speeds could’ve been a tiny bit faster to better freeze the motion, but I’m pretty happy with what I managed to capture considering the entire workflow for these three images was completely done on a mobile phone – Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ , and Mobile Lightroom.

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