Mavis Staples, Chevron Lighthouse - 1 March 2020

It was an unfortunate scheduling blunder by Perth Festival to clash the biggest name in the festival's music program with the crowd-pulling ACDC tribute 'Highway to Hell' was rolling down Canning Highway just a few kilometres away. Different audiences maybe, but I would love to have seen both. I figured however, this may be my last opportunity to see the 80 year old Chicago legend and she did not disappoint.

Helped onto stage by her band, Mavis cuts a tiny figure. At about four foot nothing, she is, however is a giant of her era. Unassuming, despite her long legacy, she smiled broadly beneath her bowl cut 'do as she opened her gospel service of joy, positivity and change.

As a freedom and civil rights singer since the 1950s, change and truth has been long been central to Mavis's music - firstly as a singer in the Staples Singers, and later at a solo performer. Similarly, these themes remain central to her new music.

Opening the sermon with the 1973 Staple Singers tune If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me), Take Us Back struck a celebratory note which immediately warmed the crowd on a windy night.

The unfolding set yielded further songs from The Staples Singers including Touch a Hand, Make a Friend and Respect Yourself, as well as covers from Funkadelic and Buffalo Springfield. Throughout, Mavis sidled up to her bandmate guitarist and vocalist Rick Holmstrom and enthusiastically slapped him on the back to the beat as he played .Even when she wasn't singing, the music was still spilling out of her.

Closing her set with No Time for Crying, and declaring her contempt for her President, she threatened to go up "to that White House and pull that guy by his red tie" before declaring I might run for president myself!”

Despite declaring she was tired, her rousing encore closed out with the influential folk song Keep Your Eyes on the Prize and to rapturous applause for the joy, the humour, the history and the talent, she shuffled offstage just as she had come on, on the arms of her band,

It was a highlight of Perth Festival. Vote 1 for Mavis!

★★★★★