Canadian rock icon Matthew Good made Campbell River’s Tidemark Theatre the second stop on his latest cross-Canada tour Sunday night and treated those in attendance to a show unlike any other.
Good’s current trip across the nation, dubbed the I Miss New Wave Tour, celebrates the band’s 1999 double-platinum selling album, Beautiful Midnight, which Good recently went back into studio to revisit.
The always engaging – if somewhat enigmatic – frontman led the audience through that entire album from front to back, opening with Giant, Hello Time Bomb, Strange Days, a new version of I Miss New Wave and Load Me Up, five of the most memorable songs of his lengthy music career.
Good and the band moved through the rest of the album with the skill and grace expected of musicians with more than two decades of experience doing this, joking with the crowd and keeping things light and memorable.
The sold-out show was opened by Craig Stickland, a little-known (but that’s about to change, I’d say) solo musician out of Toronto who demonstrated exactly why he landed the spot opening for one of Canada’s greats.
Stickland’s rocky, folky, hard-driving blues sound, his ability to loop his own current performance into itself by live-recording various parts of his songs and playing them back while accompanying them, along with his down-to-Earth charisma and charm certainly put the crowd in the mood for a night of fun.
The tour now heads down Island for a show in Nanaimo before heading on a month-and-a-half long trip across Canada, ending in Halifax March 25.