The one-off show will feature a double bill, the Indigenous music legend with My Friend The Chocolate Cake - performing separately and together for the first time in 20 years.
The night will also include old favourites from Roach plus new tracks from his new edition of Charcoal Lane.
Festival Records and Warner Music Australia released the new edition of the classic 1990 Aurora/Mushroom Records debut Charcoal Lane in November.
The ‘new but old’ album includes the remastered version of the Charcoal Lane, together with a second disc including five acoustic tracks recorded live for Triple j’s Live at the Wireless in 1990.
It also comes with new recordings of Charcoal Lane material by other artists, including Paul Kelly and Dan Sultan, and recently released tracks by Briggs & Gurrumul & Dewayne Everettsmith and Emma Donovan & The Putbacks with Archie himself.
New recordings include:
- Paul Kelly & Courtney Barnett ‘Charcoal Lane’
- Dan Sultan & Emma Donovan ‘ Munjuna’
- Marlon Williams & Leah Flanagan ‘I’ve Lied’
- Ellie Lovegrove & Nancy Bates ‘Beautiful Child’
- Emma Donovan & The PutBacks (Featuring Archie Roach) ‘Down City Streets’
- Radical Son & Urthboy Produced by Trials ‘No No No’
- Briggs & Gurrumul & Dewayne Everettsmith ‘The Children Came Back’
Charcoal Lane was co-produced by Steve Connolly and Paul Kelly and rocketed Roach into the national consciousness in the 1990s.
The album won Roach two ARIA awards, achieved gold sales, and, unprecedentedly, an international ‘Human Rights Achievement Award’ for the song ‘Took The Children Away’.
The song was written by Roach about his own experience as a member of the Stolen Generations: he was forcibly removed from his own family and community at a young age.
The new edition of Charcoal Lane also includes a thick booklet featuring previously unseen images from the era and lengthy and insightful liner notes.
Included in the notes are new pieces by long-time US Rolling Stone writer David Fricke and NITV’s The Marngrook Footy Show’s Grant Hansen, who documented Archie’s first US tour in ’92.
Archie will undertake some Back to Charcoal Lane shows over the coming months and will be available for interviews by request.
The booklet also includes reprints of significant early features on Archie by Clinton Walker from RollingStone and by former ABC Speaking Out producer/presenter Wayne Coolwell that provide, from a unique vantage, an in-depth look at what inspired Archie to create Charcoal Lane and what impact its release had on his and Ruby’s lives.
Most recently, Roach was awarded an Order of Australia Medal (earlier this year), and ‘Took The Children Away’ was entered into the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA)’s prestigious ‘Sounds of Australia’ register.
However, the succession of albums that begun with Charcoal Lane was momentarily halted in 2010 with the death of his wife and singer-songwriter Ruby Hunter, and his subsequent stroke and battle with lung cancer.
Roach ‘came back’ with the much-acclaimed album Into The Bloodstream in 2012, which was followed by the 4CD collection Creation in 2013.
