The top 10 music tours coming to Melbourne in 2025

We may not have another T-Swift phenomenon this year – that we know of yet – but 2025 still has a great line-up of local and international music tours to look forward to. Here’s our pick of the bunch so you can start booking tickets now.

GILLIAN WELCH & DAVE RAWLINGS

Fans expect a decade of tumbleweeds between anything from Americana torchbearers Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, so this limited Sydney-Melbourne run quickly blew out to eight shows on the back of their typically brilliant Woodland album, released in September. The Nashville duo’s unhurried reputation is unfair when you add their projects together, which is what they’re doing in the USA as we speak: songs from her albums and his are weaving in and out of set lists cut with a trickle of new new tunes that didn’t fit the album. Those surprises aside, expect two acoustic guitars, two voices and a room full of suspended breath. Hamer Hall, Melbourne, January 28-31, February 2

BILLIE EILISH

Beatles covers, Christmas carols, one surprise visit from Charli XCX … pouting pop poster-girl Billie Eilish has been mixing up her Hit Me Hard and Soft tour since launching in Quebec in September. Two more Grammys and another Oscar for that Barbie song, What Was I Made For? preceded her third album, which topped the charts in 20 countries last May to escalate an ongoing Millennial pop storm. In the throes of all that, her shared gift with brother Finneas for muted textures and sleepy-time restraint feels more and more like genius. Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, March 4, 5, 7 and 8

DUA LIPA

Radical Optimism was a brilliant title for an album bent on the impossible: topping Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa’s dance-pop smash of 2020. It came close enough to complete a perfect arena set-list of whip-smart “not if I dump you first” bangers, spiced with some of the copious collaborations (Calvin Harris, Elton John, Silk City) that have bent the world to her will so assuredly. It might be Lipa’s dual upbringing in London and Kosovo that gives her the worldly style and class that eludes so many of her peers. Being eulogised by Patti Smith as “the master of her ever-evolving kingdom” in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024 doesn’t hurt either. Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, March 17, 19, 20, 22 and 23

CAT POWER

Understated soul singer Chan Marshall’s game this year is simple to the point of cliche: reconstruct a Bob Dylan album in its entirety. The fact that it’s his endlessly mythologised half acoustic/half electric bootleg of 1966 adds historical intrigue and extra texture, but it’s the way she sings these extraordinary songs – utterly present and focused on every torturous phrase to the point of possession – that makes her 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert such a transporting experience. Cat Power fans would pay to hear her sing the phonebook, of course. This is just superior material. Festival Hall, Melbourne, March 6; Port Fairy Folk Festival, March 7

ZZ TOP

“I guess we’re talking about consistency and longevity,” Keith Richards surmised when he inducted ZZ Top into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame 20 years ago. It’s nearly as long since the Texas boogie trio’s last original material, so it’s more of what Keef said on this trip, with fellow electric blues grunts George Thorogood & the Destroyers warming the amps. It’s also more than three years since the sudden passing of bassist Dusty Hill, but his anointed successor, Elwood Francis, has grown a fulsome enough beard to make us believe it’s still 1983, when Eliminator made its squillion-selling bridge from roots rock into a world of synthesisers. Expect it all to sound exactly how you remembered. Margaret Court Arena, Mebourne, May 7

SIGUR ROS WITH THE MSO

Gloo. Blooberg. Skel. Kletter. With or without those mystifying Viking squiggles, titles like these can only mean Sigur Ros is back, after a decade in hell presaged by their abrasive 2013 album, Kveikur. Last year’s Atta relaunched the fractured Icelandic band as a trio with the return of keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson and a recommitment to the “sparse, floaty and beautiful” principle (says singer Jonsi) that makes their best work levitate into the sun. The 41-piece Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is unlikely to weigh them down. Hamer Hall, Melbourne, May 19, 20

SUPERGRASS

I Should Coco was the greatest gift any band could bring to the ’90s Britpop bubble: a good laugh. Punk-infused Oxford trio Supergrass seemed to exist in their own Goodies-style sitcom while the rest of the country was navigating Coronation Street, their hit-packed debut escaping the grown-ups’ melodrama to have a smoke behind the bike sheds. Always a hair-parting live act, it’s a safe bet that’s how we’ll find them when they replay their finest 40 minutes on the album’s 30th-anniversary tour, with plenty from their subsequent catalogue for a killer second act. The Forum, Melbourne, June 7-8

TYLER, THE CREATOR

Californian hip-hop maverick Tyler Okonma dropped his surprise eighth album in October, but he’s since been less coy about the kaleidoscopic Chromakopia. It’s “me taking a bunch of shit my mum told me as a kid”, he told fans, filtered through the wisdom and experience of his 33-year-old self. Thematic parallels with Kanye’s Donda and Kendrick’s Mr. Morale extend to a shredded panorama of soul, gospel and a ton of everything else, laced with the almost-persuasive conviction that he’s the greatest (after Kendrick). The world tour begins in February, so let’s see how his masked alter-ego St. Chroma handles the trip. Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, August 20, 22, 23 and 24

OASIS

The wheels were all but off when Oasis finally reached Australia in 1998: a tour mostly about smoking on aeroplanes, headbutting fans, and not their lame third album, Be Here Now. It’s a miracle the seething Gallagher brothers staggered on for four more ‘meh’ albums but even more surprising that ticket-buyers of 2025 have so ecstatically embraced their reunion. Destined to go heavy on their two good ones, Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory, it’s likely to thrill diehards but sensible brother Noel must be feeling the ominous weight of a phenomenon that’s become about anything but his songs. Pressure makes diamonds, so here goes. Marvel Stadium Melbourne, October 31, November 1 and 4.

CLIFF RICHARD

It would be crass to bring Sir Cliff Richard’s age into this, but it’s worth contemplating the fact that this was the guy the young Beatles were rebelling against. Move It! was cool, but Living Doll, Summer Holiday and Bachelor Boy banished the man formerly known as Harry Webb, of British India, to the sidelines of the rock’n’roll revolution for a career in royal-variety-style entertainment. Expect all that wholesome goodness plus his stunning video-era resurgence with Devil Woman, Wired For Sound, We Don’t Talk Anymore and the rest, with his often underestimated vocal prowess unlikely to have suffered from hard living. The Palais Theatre, Melbourne, November 6-7

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