05/11/2025

Cowboy Junkies – Auckland Town Hall, November 4, 2025 (13th Floor Concert Review)

Its two-and-a half years since their Covid-delayed show amid the monsoon-like storm of January 2023 and the Cowboy Junkies never expected to be back so soon.

But here we are. Still trying to sell records, put on a good show then hitting the next town.

This time its early summer teasing its way into a spring evening. Billed as 40 Years of the Cowboy Junkies. And it’s certainly a good show from a band that – in true Canadian manner- is too modest.

Walking into the imperial baroque design of the Auckland Town Hall, I am awash with gratitude. This time we have the Cowboy Junkies in a venue befitting their stately nature as purveyors of hard-to-categorise music.

And I’m niggled by the memory of walking into a record store on a cold and white Toronto night and hearing one of the truly great covers for the first time: the Junkies doing the Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane. The art rock and proto-punk of Lou Reed and co becoming tragi-country, to use a term coined by my friend the late Tim Higham of Aotea FM.

Indie, country and folk-rock can be such constraining terms. Rolling Stone once described them as “hypnotic and introspective”. They’ve been around in a stable four-strong combo for so long, they almost deserve their own genre.

Formed in Toronto in 1985 they comprise Alan Anton (bass), Michael Timmins (songwriting and guitars), Peter Timmins (drums) and Margo Timmins(vocals). Three siblings and a childhood friend. How many bands have achieved stability of personnel for four decades?

Their backstory is full of fun facts. Debut album recorded in the family garage (due to noise complaints, we learned to play with less volume). Necessity the mother of invention as the saying goes.

The second, and breakthrough, album (The Trinity Sessions 1988) recorded in Toronto’s exquisite stone Church of the Holy Trinity. Their producer persuaded clerical gatekeepers saying The Timmins Family Singers were recording a Christmas special.

Tonight it’s straight into familiar territory with Misguided Angel. Margo Timmins’ voice is in top form, aided by mugs of herbal tea. She jiggles the string between verses. All in black – as with the rest of the band – adjusting a bouquet of red roses beside her. She joins Lucinda William as among the truly distinctive female voices in the wide church of country music.

Margo sings alongside the soaring twang of elder brother Michael on guitar, the expressive drumming of younger brother Peter and the glue that carries it all: Alan Anton’s bass playing. And then the fifth unofficial Junkie, multi-instrumentalist Jeff Bird. More than merely a touring band-member, he’s contributed to their sound since the Trinity Sessions.

Margo is not only singer, but spokesperson. The others stay silent, heads often down, intent on extracting the perfect sound, master craftsmen. Forty years, I can’t believe it. That must mean I was about 12 when we started says Margo.

The first set is mostly a taste of their 2023 album Such Ferocious Beauty. What I Lost is tough stuff, reflecting on their father dementia and the long journey of farewell. The beat is dirge-like. I looked at the room/didn’t know what to do. To those of us who have travelled that road, we know. Tough stuff.

The rockier Hard to Build offers a counter to this melancholy with the band at full throttle before the Greek myth of Penelope and Circe is given new life as a tale of ghosting. Bird’s yearning harmonica speaks to the pain of callous abandonment. A Common Disaster offers us more Bird magic, this time with tambourine. Then it’s the bluesy Forgive Me off their debut album all those years back with Bird playing harmonica as hauntingly as Paul Butterfield.

Early in the second set they offer an extended intro of teasing notes as if engaging in freeform jazz while Margo sits back sipping tea until the familiar baseline of Sweet Jane kicks in. An excited roar of the crowd. Margo as much speaks as sings. The breathy account of New York grittiness is transformed once again. They’ve turned it into an anthem says the person next to me.

Where Are You Tonight is one of the pleasures from 1990’s Caution Horses. Margo introduces it saying she has flashbacks to looking out on a sea of baseball caps – a reference to both their Canadian beginnings and youthful audience. She’d single one out and gaze longingly at him. Tonight, the demographic largely matches the 60s age bracket of the band. But mercifully there’s one cap-wearing male in the audience she can croon to.

So many highlights. In a second and longer set the Junkies roam through their catalogue offering both signature songs and lesser-known gems. Their covers are highlights. In addition to Sweet Jane, there’s a plaintive version of Bruce Springsteen’s State Trooper and Neil Young’s Powderfinger (We’re a Canadian band – and these days that’s very important to us [big audience cheer] and every show it’s our duty to play at least one Neil Young song). Perhaps there’s an irony that this Canadian song is about an America torn asunder by civil war?

A band playing with the precision of being in the studio and every bit as tight as one might expect after 40 years on stage together. So many highlights to ponder as Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis) signals closure.

First, the ‘acoustic’ set during which, in the absence of drums and bass, highlights the spareness of Margo’s voice and the other voices: brother Michael’s guitar and Jeff Bird’s sparkling mandolin.

Second, the new songs: a reminder that this is no greatest hits tour, but a band still adding to their own legacy – charting the contours of feelings and often fraught relationships in textured soundscapes.

And third, the location. Another reminder: that when a band performs at its peak, there is no better place in Auckland that the Town Hall: near-perfect acoustics, grand design and a feeling that the past – in my case Sweet Jane first heard in that record store in Toronto – is alive again in the present.

Robin Kearns

Click on any image to view a photo gallery by Chris Zwaagdyk: