{"id":6540,"date":"2026-04-30T15:08:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T04:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=6540"},"modified":"2026-04-30T15:38:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T05:08:34","slug":"guest-post-steve-davis-on-history-hit-parade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2026\/04\/guest-post-steve-davis-on-history-hit-parade\/","title":{"rendered":"GUEST POST: Steve Davis on History Hit Parade"},"content":{"rendered":"
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South Australia’s History Festival, held annually in May, features a wide variety of events \u2013 author talks, workshops, guided tours \u2013 shining a light on the state’s rich history. History Hit Parade<\/a> is one of these upcoming events, featuring Keith Conlon and Steve Davis (of the Adelaide Show<\/em> Podcast<\/em><\/a>) discussing ten original songs written by Steve about South Australian life.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Wakefield Press will make an appearance at both sessions, selling a selection of our favourite South Australian history titles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this special guest post, Steve tell us the story behind History Hit Parade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Why Keith Conlon and I Are Doing This<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Wakefield Press authors have been coming onto the Adelaide Show Podcast<\/em> for years. Every one of those conversations left me with the same feeling: South Australian stories are genuinely worth celebrating, and most people only need a small invitation to start talking about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The invitation for me came from the 2025 Variety Bash. Driving north of Coober Pedy, looking at roads barely visible in the scrub, I wrote a song about it and called it ‘A Lot of Nothing’. That song changed something. I went back to my Saturday afternoon segments on FIVEaa with Richard Pascoe and stopped doing marketing tips (my day job). I started sharing songs I had written about South Australia instead, its history, its peculiarities, and the people who shaped it (my passion project). The audience responded warmly and we kept going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been writing poetry, journalism, and theatre reviews for decades. What technology has given me is a virtual session band, Steve Davis and the Virtualosos, which can bring those lyrics to life. These recordings are meant as starting points, an invitation for a human performer to hear the idea of a song and decide whether to make it their own. You can hear a few dozen songs on stevedavis.com.au<\/a> and on all streaming networks.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Keith Conlon was the right person to build a show around these songs because he holds South Australian anecdotes the way other people hold photographs. Working with him over the years, I could see that his stories and my songs were already pointing at the same history from different angles. This May at the Mercury Cinema, we find out what happens when you put them together in one room. I’ll share my inspirations for a song and Keith will add extra context with his anecdotes, before we play them on the big screen with captions. Then we’ll move on to the next one. We want the sessions to be light and full of surprises, and if people want to sing along, we will welcome that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One song in particular sits very close to the reason I started writing any of this. ‘Jack and Lil’ is about my maternal grandparents meeting at John Martin’s in the late 1930s. My grandfather was there to install the lifts. My grandmother was behind the kitchenware counter on the lower ground floor. Every floor referenced in the song is historically accurate, a detail I was able to nail down through a chance meeting with former Johnnies planning department veteran, Robert Tedstone, while being interviewed for The Big Store <\/em>documentary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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‘Goodnight Don’ <\/em>has been a long time coming. We have ended all 420-plus episodes of the Adelaide Show Podcast<\/em> by saying goodnight to Don Dunstan. About ten years ago, a double episode with author Dino Hodge about his Wakefield Press book, Don Dunstan, Intimacy and Liberty<\/a>, <\/em>gave me a much deeper understanding of who Dunstan was. Because Don was friends with Robin Archer and had a genuine love of Brechtian music, I wrote the song in that style.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One of these songs is now being worked on by Adelaide jazz cabaret performer Alexandra Frost. When it gets its first public performance, something that started in the back of a car north of Coober Pedy will have completed a full circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keith and Steve will present History Hit Parade on Monday 11 May and Sunday 17 May at the Mercury in Hindley Street. Tickets start at $15.<\/strong>
Find more information and book your tickets here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South Australia’s History Festival, held annually in May, features a wide variety of events \u2013 author talks, workshops, guided tours \u2013 shining a light on the state’s rich history. History Hit Parade is one of these upcoming events, featuring Keith … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-fun"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-1Hu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6540"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6546,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6540\/revisions\/6546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}