★★★★★
Before Postmodern Jukebox’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival set, a voice from the crowd yelled out: “Willie!” It was not a random heckle. It was a greeting. Willie Jay Moore Jr had not yet been handed his big solo moment. He was behind the kit, holding down the show with the casual authority of someone who could probably make a malfunctioning washing machine swing. Yet the shout revealed what makes Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox more than a slick covers act.
For more than a decade, audiences have watched these performers appear in weekly YouTube videos. They have seen singers arrive, disappear, return in new guises, and turn familiar pop songs into old-world curiosities. The relationship is strangely intimate. You may not know Willie personally. But you feel like you have been dropping by his living room for years.
Postmodern Jukebox began in 2011, when New York pianist and arranger Scott Bradlee started filming vintage-styled reworks of contemporary songs with friends in Queens. Before that, Bradlee had spent years struggling as a jazz musician. An ’80s ragtime medley went viral after author Neil Gaiman shared it on Twitter. The snowball started rolling.
The project’s first major viral hit came soon after. Its 1920s-flavoured version of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ Thrift Shop turned the collective into a global internet phenomenon. Since then, PMJ has built a vast rotating family of singers, a PMJ family of players and specialist performers, with billions of YouTube views and a touring empire that can travel several continents at once.
That history sat underneath the Adelaide show like a bassline.
MC Rogello Douglas Jr opened with Hotel California, making The Eagles cool again through sheer force of charm. He then took the room on a rapid-fire, Hot Dub Time Machine-style history of music. The gramophone era arrived via La donna è mobile. Tap dancer Demi Remi burst into a Charleston. Tatum Langley emerged in a white-and-red cheerleader costume to evoke the polished optimism of the ’50s and ’60s. The decades kept coming.
Demi Remi returned in an ’80s hoodie, beatboxing and breakdancing. Langley reappeared in a Christina Aguilera-inspired noughties look, complete with an iPod to mark the streaming age. Then Douglas took the audience forward to a bleak imagined 2084, where AI creates all the music.
The music industry is currently staring down a flood of machine-made songs, fake streams and an increasingly murky relationship between artists, platforms and audiences. Streaming killed the old certainty of record sales. It also created pathways that did not previously exist. Bradlee is proof of that. A pianist with no obvious mainstream route found a global audience because a strange mash-up, a good tweet and the right moment collided.
Luck helped. Timing helped. But Postmodern Jukebox’s real secret is that every person on that stage can do something absurdly well.
Willie Jay Moore Jr got his moment with Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun. He sang it like Stevie Wonder had wandered into a Seattle grunge rehearsal, all while still playing drums.
The band’s Star Wars interludes drew some of the night’s biggest cheers, especially the Cantina sequence. Demi Remi folded Super Mario, sci-fi and tap into a series of mini set-pieces. Coins chimed from the piano as she jumped for them. Shots were downed. Costumes came and went at a pace that suggested her backstage cardio load may have rivalled the actual choreography. She must have changed outfits more than a dozen times.
That restless motion was part of the show’s charm. Two hours passed without an interval. Every arrangement felt engineered to produce a moment that could later become a clip, a reel, a fan video or a new algorithmic rabbit hole. It was like falling into a scrolling feed and forgetting you needed to eat, drink or find a toilet.
Yet the human element kept breaking through. Tatum Langley showed remarkable range. Early on, she channelled a peroxide-blonde vintage glamour, complete with narrow fringe, for Copacabana. Demi Remi played Lola for the gags, flirting with the brass section and turning the number into a tiny nightclub farce.
Later, Langley appeared in a dazzling blue gown for a sweeping James Bond-styled treatment of The Weeknd’s Die For You. She climbed and climbed, then ended in a whisper.
Fresh from Las Vegas and Cirque du Soleil’s Mad Apple, Jackie Mac delivered The Police’s Every Breath You Take with a level of control that was almost unnerving. She altered the colour and character of her voice within single phrases. Her statuesque presence made the number feel like a private séance.
Then there was Katerina Lomis.
At 24, the Miami artist has already built a substantial independent online following after moving from cancer research into music full-time. Her voice has a theatrical elasticity that makes sense of that unusual journey. She arrived with curls suggesting early-’90s Mariah Carey and a stage presence that smacked the audience straight across the face.
Her version of ABBA’s Thank You For The Music was bright, silly and full of scat-singing joy. Her Red Right Hand was another animal entirely. Smoky, sly and full of bite, it carried enough attitude to make Nick Cave blush. Lomis felt like an early glimpse of a future headliner.
Douglas, meanwhile, held the evening together. He sang, MC’d and beatboxed through Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive, then later confessed that the seated, well-behaved Adelaide audience was giving him social anxiety. He got everyone on their feet for U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, turning the Festival Theatre into a church with brass.
The finale, naturally, was the song that helped define the PMJ phenomenon: Meghan Trainor’s All About That Bass, reborn in the group’s now-famous retro style. No computer can replicate a night like this.
Algorithms may have helped bring Postmodern Jukebox into people’s bedrooms, phones and YouTube recommendations. They may have made a weekly upload feel like a standing appointment with a global cast of musical overachievers. But the screen cannot replace the room.
It cannot reproduce the shout of “Willie!” from the stalls. It cannot replicate the heat of a tap break, the split-second silence before a singer drops into a whisper, or the strange collective thrill of hearing a song you have known for years suddenly reveal a different century inside it.
Postmodern Jukebox has always been built on technology. At Adelaide Cabaret Festival, it reminded us why the technology only matters if it eventually gets us back together.
Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox: The Future is Vintage ran for one show only on 21 June at the Festival Theatre as part of the 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
The Future Is Vintage is part of a major Australia and New Zealand tour. See their website for future tour dates.
Website: https://cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/whats-on/scott-bradlees-postmodern-jukebox
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/adelaidecabaret/ and https://www.instagram.com/pmjofficial/
Images supplied.
