The “sold out” signs and had already been pasted up (*Niche Productions* are starting to make a habit out of selling out their gigs, you will have noticed) as I shimmied past the metal-detector-wand-wielding security guard and into the Gaelic Theatre to find a very healthy crowd had got there before me. This I was a little surprised about, for it was only half-time in the Australia v New Zealand Rugby League Test Match, and when you are coming to see an act as proud of his Maori heritage as former Salmonella Dub front man Tiki Taane is, its only reasonable to expect that more that a few other proud Maori coming to the gig might delay their arrival until after the game.

Still, New Zealand were ten points down at half time, and there might have been more than a few of the crowd who decided that if they weren’t going to be watching poetry in motion on the field, they would be better off listening to some poetry in the mix from the Dub Soldiers’ Reno and Sambora. As matters transpired, that would have been a pretty good choice; as the Rugby League Test went steadily downhill, the music got better. Reno and Sambora are better known as members of Shapeshifter, and they were certainly adept at shifting their DJing shapes through some deep and funky sounds to some throbbing drum n’ bass. Looking around the crowd I couldn’t help but be struck by the diversity of the crowd; no obvious common denominator of age, dress, or gender, instead only the highest common denominators; broad smiles and appreciation for the music.

Reno and Sambora were briefly off stage, and then back on as part of Tiki Taane’s band, which also featured Shapeshifter’s P Diggs, and also, for a couple of numbers (including the opening number) Taane’s father, who came on “clear a good space for us to work in”, as Taane explained. Taane opened playing the conch, but was wielding the guitar, and singing, for most of the show. The material from Taane’s debut album, Past, Present, Future is rather heavier live than it is on the record (as, indeed, was often the case for Salmonella Dub) and Taane has us all doing the horned goat’s head symbol at one point as he tells us that both he and P Diggs were both once in heavy metal bands. That’s not to say that we’ve rocked out completely; dub, in its various forms, provides the palette from which Taane’s colours are selected. You would, however, have to say that the colours of thunderstorms are used more liberally than the colours of sunsets, and this choice is typified by the storming finale of Tangaroa, all cascading, pounding percussion and frantic MPC stabs.

But soft, what light through yonder encore breaks? Taane is back out on with just his acoustic guitar, and after kicking things off with Salmonella Dub’s For The Love Of It, he launches into Always On My Mind, a beautifully simple track from the album which was #1 in New Zealand for about 78 weeks last year. The crowd, who had been enthusiastically moshing away not long before are now all singing along, and although it could so easily have gone terribly cheesy at any moment, didn’t (which is good, because your humble reviewer is only a little bloke, and telling a lot of big tattooed guys that they are a part of something cheesy is not what my life insurer has in mind for me).

If you’d left before the encore you would have judged it a good show, but the encore made it a great show, not least because it showed that the sunset colours were there as well. More correctly, though, I should have been looking for sunrise colours; although this was a first solo Sydney show for Tiki Taane, there’s no doubting that we were privileged to see the dawning of what is sure to be an impressive solo career.