It has been almost forty years since Robyn Archer first performed A Star is Torn, her one-woman cabaret honouring the too-short lives of female singers from Bessie Smith to Janis Joplin. Playing for a year on the West End, and spawning both an album (in 1980) and a book (1986), the show substantially made Archer’s reputation overseas, touring widely for four years. Now she has written and directed The Sound of Falling Stars, a sort of male companion piece starring fellow Adelaidean Cameron Goodall, who was born the same year A Star is Torn premièred at the Universal Theatre in Fitzroy.

Backed by George Butrumlis on accordion and Enio Pozzebon on keyboard, Goodall – who also accompanies himself on various acoustic and electric guitars – embodies thirty-one singers in the course of the show’s seventy minutes. It is a much more generous selection of subjects than Archer’s – about three times as many – but then, four decades have passed since, the death toll has risen, and men are supposedly bigger risk takers than women. In any case, the emphasis is the same – those who died young, and mostly troubled souls who exemplify that signature paradigm of rock and roll, here making its way into the mouth of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain by way of his 1994 suicide note: ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away.’