Angel of Desire

Tell me what you want, what you really, really want. Oh, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. – Spice Girls

Desire can mean any number of things and changes from person to person, minute by minute. At their essence, a desire is a personal want that is communicated to the wider world in a variety of different ways, be it through actions, body language, emotions or by someone straight up saying what they want (known as the Spice Girl approach).

You can have multiple simultaneous desires, and desires of different levels. Such as today, I wanted the Bruce to not be fucked (unfulfilled), for Parramatta to win in an upset over the Rabbits (unfulfilled), have a winning Powerball ticket (unfulfilled), have fun whilst listening to some enjoyable music (somewhat filled) and provide some appreciated content (definitely will be unfulfilled). It’s always fun to look at your desires and sort them according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Most of the above would be considered within the Safety or Love & Belonging tiers of the Maslow’s Hierarchy except for the last one, its pretty close to the peak in the Esteem tier.

The basic principle expressed by Maslow, is that people have specific needs and don’t really give a shit about higher tier needs unless they have secured the lower tier ones. For example, a homeless person generally isn’t going to care over much about their appearance when they are still worrying about where they are going to sleep that night or whether they are going to be going to sleep hungry. After a lower tier is satisfied, then a person will continue going up the hierarchy until they reach self-actualization and have transcended their needs, leaving, I guess, only desires behind.

My desires when it comes to live music are also generally reflected within Maslow’s Hierarchy; I want the venue to be good, appropriate for the crowd size and demographics attending. Good security, comfortable  seating or general admission standing area, good sound and acoustics and a seamless, professional show from the performers. Some of these are easier and more simple than others to achieve.

Tonight’s gig was at Season Three, a modestly sized community space located above a bar and café in Woollongabba. You go through the bar and café and then up the back (exterior stairs) to reach the concert area. Where an eclectic space containing a selection of rugs that operated as the sole floor covering, a random couch, peeling paint and at least one instance of duct tape restraining something (hopefully not a crack) on the walls and the sound mixing equipment situated on a flimsy random pine wood styled set of boxes.

I’ve talked previously about Junk Bar and how it is what a designer would create when a venue with a significant investment in it desires to be cosplaying as a dive bar. Season Three is not cosplaying. Or if they are, they’ve gone a little too far in the Tropic Thunder style, to the point that they don’t seem to be acting, rather people just think they are.

That’s not to say that Season Three is a bad venue. Far from it, it definitely has character and seems to cater to its target audience of university students, who just desire a place to hang out, well. To be honest, walking into it gave me some nostalgic feelings of the old Clare, that classic student pub opposite UTS in Sydney before it was renovated, except this place only had one dingy couch.

Continuing in the vein of honesty, expecting a crowd of notionally adults to sit on the floor, whilst fulfilling that hipster-ish vibe, is a somewhat questionable, if forgivable, strategy. What is less desirous, is the lack of sound proofing. Numerous times during the event, sirens and general traffic noise could easily be heard over the performers. In any event, the room didn’t have a stupid heritage listed column in the middle of it, so the jury is still out on where it sits in the hierarchy of Brisbane live music venues.

The concert itself, consisted of Asha Jefferies performing a solo tour whilst being supported by Charlotte Meade. Whilst I hadn’t seen Asha perform previously, I had had the opportunity to see Charlotte when she supported Rowena Wise at Junk Bar on 29 May 2026. I wasn’t a massive fan at that time for reasons I couldn’t really pinpoint in my mind, however the second time was the charm, as they say, and it crystalized my thoughts to an extent.

Before I go into my critique and general review of Charlotte’s performance, I want to be clear that while my review would charitably be considered neutral, leaning towards negative, I’m still going to include it. If only because solely writing positive reviews where I am constantly seeking new superlatives to describe the performances gets both monotonous and after a point, doesn’t add anything of value.

I would also like to be abundantly clear that there were some great positives in Charlotte’s performance and I genuinely like some of her songs, for example her opening number about swimming pools, lakes and oceans and how they don’t look quite the same after growing up is solid and something that I would go out of my way to listen to again, even if I dislike or disagree with the underlying metaphor of the song.  

Further to this, the vast majority of the crowd responded extremely positively to Charlotte’s performance and I do admit that she was a reasonably good fit in terms of style with Asha’s headlining. The whole point of this blog is to get me to go to concerts I wouldn’t normally attend and discover artists I might never discover if I just stuck with my Spotify algorithm.

My biggest issue with Charlotte is that there seems to be the lack of a certain level of authenticity. The emotions are definitely present, with songs about self-esteem, body positivity and acceptance and a song which is close to Natalie Imbruglia’s version of Torn in terms of lyrics explicitly depicting sexual assault. However, these emotions feel stilted, like Charlotte has chosen to portray the emotions in a “safe” fashion that minimizes them to a certain extent.

For instance, Charlotte’s song about who she would run through an airport for is about her brother. Putting aside the very clearly unintentional Sweet Home Alabama vibes of that, it begs the question of whether Charlotte focuses repeatedly on family emotions and touchpoints because she does not have the life experience yet and as such hasn’t experienced those big emotions of love and loss outside of the family relationship or is she just playing it safe and refusing to show her true underlying feelings.

Whilst there’s evidence to support both hypotheses, I personally opine that it’s the latter.

A second, albeit vastly different, example of refusing to truly bare her soul is Charlotte’s song about what is clearly describing a predatory workplace sexual harassment and assault scenario where the lyrics make it clear that non-consensual touching occurred, at work, on potentially numerous occasions, and in circumstances where management didn’t do anything. The guy in the song is clearly a creep, a predator and a criminal.

However the focus of Charlotte’s introduction to it (one which remained consistent across both times I’ve heard her perform) is the implication that the guy is predatory because he is 35 and preying on 18 year olds. Sure, that’s an element of it, and is a continued hot button issue for feminist rage to be directed at in terms of power imbalances that come with significant age and life experience gaps, however the bigger element, in my opinion, is the blatant sexual assault included within the lyrics, with a secondary one being that management refused to do anything about it.

Focusing the introduction on the age gap, seems to diminish the message that the situation is simply not right with the implication that if the guy was also young and or hot then the correctness of the situation may be different (spoiler, it isn’t).

Whilst the song is emotionally heavy, and has been skilfully composed, the way its been presented seems to highlight the surface level societal issues rather than risking unearthing the deeper ones.

IN nay event, what and how Charlotte wants to expose in terms of her feelings on stage is a matter for her as an artist. The above really shouldn’t be read as a criticism of Charlotte, her choices or her ability, rather they are my attempts to elucidate the lack of depth to the authenticity that I feel is preventing her from fully capturing the crowd. But, hey, what do I know, I’m not the one up on the stage singing about personal experiences. The fact that she has the courage to pursue her dream and perform Infront of people she doesn’t know should be celebrated.

In any event, we have strayed a bit far from the theme of this article, that being desires. To that end, Asha provided a deep dive into the operations of personal desires and how they manifest.

Her upcoming album, Angel of Desire, takes the listener through their own wants and destigmatizes those feelings. In doing so, Asha shows the paths that various desires can take, be it through the development of a crush (a topic I have no doubt thoroughly bored people on in another article) or how acting on a desire can lead to negative consequences or unhealthy behaviours, as beautifully shown in her song Golden Hour where she sings about going for a walk through the neighbourhood each evening at sunset because she knows her ex lives close by and she hopes to run into them.

Her song about why her ex’s new girlfriend looks just like her is a great contrast between realizing that your ex clearly has a type and the dangers of essentially asking a question that you already (subconsciously) know the answer to.

Asha also showed the potential for acting on your desires, with the clever, and somewhat random, weaving of a cover of a Jason Derulo chorus acoustically into one of her songs, definitely leading to a moment of both levity at the juxtaposing of Asha’s general music style with that of Jason’s whilst simultaneously showcasing Asha’s musical talent to be able to do this in such a flawless and natural style.

Overall it was a consummate performance with those little touches that show the thought that went into developing it. I quite liked the small shrine that was present that allowed attendees to light a candle and write down their desires.

I think the key lesson learnt from Asha’s performance, is that desires have a lot of potential (much like a Friday night) and whilst some caution should be applied to acting on them, there is a certain level of whimsy and feelings of forbidden fruit from acting on some of them, even if you already know that they are a bad idea or even downright delusional.

As such, I’ll take these lessons to heart and continue to bet on Parramatta when they are the underdog (that’s most games, they really are shit), buy more lottery tickets and pretend that these articles are insightful, informative and brighten people’s day (super delusional, I know).