SOUNDS BY THE RIVER 2025 – ALL STAR AUSSIE LINE-UP…
Get ready for a rockin’ SOUNDS BY THE RIVER for 2025 which will bring together a stellar Aussie line-up. The celebrated ICEHOUSE will headline and be supported by other crowd favourites Noiseworks, Wolfmother, Eskimo Joe, Baby Animals, Killing Heidi & Bachelor Girl. This renowned outdoor show, that continues to sell out year after year, will take place at its traditional home of Mary Ann Reserve, on the banks of the River Murray. The much-loved festival will give South Australian music fans a dose of colossal songs that will ensure a huge day out.
With a career spanning over 45 years, ICEHOUSE is one of Australia’s most iconic bands, transcending age groups with their hit songs, well known and loved by audiences across generations, playing to sell-out, capacity audiences in Australia, New Zealand and throughout the world. Formed by Iva Davies, the band’s frontman and musical creative force, ICEHOUSE went on to have an amazing 28 Platinum albums, eight Top 10 albums, over thirty Top 40 singles and sell the equivalent to over 30 Platinum albums.
ICEHOUSE’s unofficial Australian anthem, Great Southern Land, has been a part of almost every Australian’s summer soundtrack for the past 40 years and in 2014, it was inducted into the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry. It’s also been remixed a number of times, most notably Bill Laswell’s The Great Southern Mix, clocking in at almost 16 minutes, and the Byrralku Dhangudha remix from 1994, which features Indigenous musicians playing and singing the chorus in their own language. Its message is as current and relevant today as it was when it first appeared.
In 2017, the band received another tribute when Qantas invited the public to vote for the names of the planes for their new fleet of Dreamliner 787-9s. Out of over 60,000 name suggestions submitted, Great Southern Land won the honour of the very first plane in the fleet being named after the iconic hit. In the same year, ICEHOUSE also celebrated 40 years of live performance with a national Australian tour and several outdoor performances in New Zealand and has continued to perform selected concerts for sell-out audiences in both countries since then.
Noiseworks provided the soundtrack to every big night in the 1980s, with rock anthems No Lies, Take Me Back, Hot Chilli Woman, Touch, and countless others. Original band members Jon Stevens, Steve Balbi, and Kevin Nicol will deliver all their legendary hits including those from their 2022 album ‘Evolution’ whose debut single ‘Heart & Soul’ became a national radio fan favourite and the Noiseworks Evolution National Tour in 2022/23 sold out from coast-to-coast. Get ready for their all killer, no filler, signature style Aussie rock!
Led by vocalist/guitarist Andrew Stockdale, Wolfmother has amassed a global fanbase, played to packed-house crowds around the world and delivered showstealing sets at star-studded festivals like Coachella, Isle of Wight, Lollapalooza, Splendour in the Grass, Rock en Seine and Fuji Rock to name a few. They have been invited to share stages with rock icons AC/DC, Guns’n’Roses and for Led Zeppelin’s induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame, Wolfmother was personally invited as their guest performers. After the colossal success of their debut record, Stockdale wrote and released another four records under the moniker of Wolfmother: Cosmic Egg, New Crown, Victorious and more recently Rock’n’Roll Baby, as well as two solo records Keep Moving and Slipstream. Stockdale has also collaborated on Slash’s first solo effort, ‘By The Sword’ and last year with Chris Cester of Jet on ‘Chase The Feeling’.
While successfully straddling the line between commercial success and managing to keep their Alternative Music roots secure, over their career, Eskimo Joe have racked up a long list of impressive accomplishments. With 6 studio albums under their belts and sales in excess of 750,000, in Australia alone, the band has seen 3 of those albums debut at number 1 on the ARIA charts, with juggernaut ‘Black Fingernails, Red Wine’ shining for a monster 62 weeks in the ARIA Chart Top 50 and “Foreign Land”, from their fourth album ‘Inshalla', bringing home 2 APRA Awards, for Most Played Rock Song on Australian radio and Best Rock Song of 2010. Eskimo Joe have enjoyed 35 ARIA nominations in their career thus far – a number only surpassed by Silverchair, Powderfinger, Kylie Minogue and John Farnham. They have brought home 3 International Song-writing Awards, 11 WAMi Awards and 8 ARIAs and 11 of their compositions have featured in Triple J’s Hottest 100 countdown, with ‘Black Fingernails, Red Wine’ landing 2nd place. The stage, however, is where Eskimo Joe shine, and they continue to captivate their large and devout fan base by pursuing new horizons and embarking on new challenges.
It has been 30 years since one of Australia’s most revered rock bands, Baby Animals, burst onto the scene with the release of their 8x Platinum, ARIA Award winning, self-titled debut album, featuring iconic hits ‘Rush You’, ‘Early Warning’, ‘Painless’ and ‘One Word’. The band was touring with Van Halen in the US when they heard the album had topped the charts, ‘Baby Animals’ spending six weeks at number one in Australia and keeping Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ out of top spot. The album went eight times platinum and won three ARIA Awards – Best Album, Best Debut Album and Best Debut Single. It was also declared one of the Top 25 albums of 1992 in UK rock bible Kerrang!, and Baby Animals performed ‘Painless’ on Late Night With David Letterman. They later appeared in The 100 Best Australian Albums, and Suze DeMarchi was also featured in the book Rock Chicks, The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now.
Killing Heidi celebrated an auspicious anniversary in 2020, two decades since the release of their rock-pop debut Reflector. The smash hit singles – including Weir and Mascara – embedded the album in Australian music history, took out four ARIA awards and reached four times platinum status. It also catapulted Killing Heidi and its teen musicians – Ella and Jesse Hooper – into international superstar status. The Hooper siblings were revered for their songwriting prowess and their subsequent albums earned them critical acclaim. 2025 sees them celebrate 25 years since Reflector’s debut.
In 1992, Tania Doko and James Roche formed BACHELOR GIRL, and the duo became one of the most loved Australian acts of the 90s & early 2000s, enjoying Australian and international success in Asia, Scandinavia and the US (including signing with the legendary Clive Davis at Arista Records). Standing out with their exceptional songwriting and Tania’s warm, powerful vocal, both PPCA and APRA have reported a massive achievement for the band - their hit single Buses and Trains was the most played Australian composition on Australian radio in its first year of release and during the last 25 years overall. In 1999, Buses and Trains also received the coveted APRA ‘Song of the Year’ award, while the critically acclaimed debut album ‘Waiting for the Day’ spawned five chart-topping, radio-friendly singles (including Treat Me Good and Permission To Shine), reached double platinum certification and an ARIA win to the duo for ‘Producer of the Year’.
After a brief hiatus to pursue their individual musical paths as writers and producers for outside artists in Sweden and the U.K, Tania and James reunited to release their socially conscious single Speak, in 2018. With their hit-studded and dynamic live set, Bachelor Girl have secured impressive support slots, including international heavyweights Eurythmics and The Goo Goo Dolls. More recently, the band has special guested on widely popular festival gigs such as Day on the Green (with John Farnham, Daryl Braithwaite et al.), the Red Hot Summer tour, and can also add Icehouse to the list of iconic acts they have toured with.