‘I’m sorry for all of my insecurities, but they’re just a part of me’, sings Courtney Barnett in her song ‘Debbie Downer’. Those insecurities are not just part of her, but key to the heady spike in her global profile over the past two years. Since her mid-2013 single ‘Avant Gardener’, which detailed the twenty-seven-year-old songwriter’s panic attack and anaphylaxis while gardening one day, Barnett has become renowned for off-the-cuff songs about her private worries and perceived failings.

She is now one of the most talked-about artists. Playing the first of a three-night stand at a roomy theatre in her base of Melbourne, Barnett was able to bring the diary-esque entries from her début album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, back to the city of their birth. After much touring and promotion overseas, including a March performance of the Melbourne-set ‘Depreston’ on Ellen DeGeneres’s hit US talk show Ellen, Barnett sang about a series of locations all too familiar to the audience, from the Hume Highway on the current single, ‘Dead Fox’, and the Great Barrier Reef on the dirge ‘Kim’s Caravan’ to nearby Swanston Street and a great many others on ‘Elevator Operator’.