In a city that knows how to do riverfront living properly, it’s surprising Brisbane hasn’t claimed more of its skyline for large-scale outdoor music. That changes this autumn with On the Banks, a new live concert series transforming the Cultural Forecourt at South Bank into a standing-room-only stage framed by the Brisbane River, the Wheel of Brisbane and the glowing BRISBANE sign.
Presented by QPAC and South Bank Corporation, the inaugural run stretches across February and March 2026, bringing a genuinely eclectic mix of international heavyweights and Australian favourites into the heart of Meanjin. Alternative, pop, garage, R&B and hip-hop will all echo across the water, with headline moments from Grace Jones, The Streets, and Peach PRC anchoring the series.
This isn’t a polite, picnic-rug affair. All events are standing general admission, bars and catering on site, cashless transactions only. It’s designed to feel less like a seated arts precinct show and more like a festival distilled into a stunning, skyline-backed stage.
If you’re going to launch a brand-new riverfront series, you may as well open with someone who has spent four decades redefining what a live performance can be.
On March 5th, Grace Jones takes over the Cultural Forecourt, joined by New York’s The Illustrious Blacks. It’s hard to overstate what Jones represents: a singer, model, actor, and provocateur whose influence stretches from the disco underground of 1970s New York to contemporary pop’s most daring visual thinkers.
Emerging from New York and Paris in the early ’70s, Jones became synonymous with Studio 54-era glamour and artistic liberation, collaborating with cultural visionaries like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Paul Goude. But her legend isn’t locked in a single decade. The ’80s saw her pivot into the hybrid sound of the Compass Point trilogy — Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing, and Living My Life — records that fused reggae, new wave, house and electronica long before genre fluidity became pop’s default setting.
Songs like “Pull Up to the Bumper” and “My Jamaican Guy” still land with thrilling immediacy, but it’s the totality of a Grace Jones show — the sculptural silhouettes, the commanding stillness, the sudden detonations of rhythm — that makes her appearance here feel significant. Against Brisbane’s skyline, Jones won’t just be another touring act; she’ll be a cultural moment.
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The Illustrious Blacks, self-described as Afro-Electro-Disco-Space-Punks, are a fitting opener. Expect a dancefloor primed for spectacle before Jones even steps into the light.
The following night, March 6th, belongs to The Streets, and, more specifically, to A Grand Don’t Come for Free.
Led by Mike Skinner, The Streets will perform the 2004 record in full in Brisbane for the first time ever. For anyone who came of age in the early 2000s, that album wasn’t just a collection of singles; it was a narrative. A messy, painfully relatable story of a lost thousand pounds, a fracturing relationship and the slow, chaotic unravelling of young adulthood.
“Dry Your Eyes”, “Fit But You Know It”, and “Blinded By The Lights” still hit with the same bruised honesty they did two decades ago, but hearing the album front to back restores its cinematic sweep. Skinner’s conversational flow — half-confession, half-observation — reshaped UK music when Original Pirate Material landed in 2002. Since then, he’s picked up BRIT nominations, an Ivor Novello Award and collaborations spanning Kano to Fred again, never losing that sharp-edged, hyper-specific storytelling voice.
On the live front, Skinner thrives on tension and release. He can command a Glastonbury-sized field or make a large space feel like a basement rave. At On the Banks, with the river behind him and Shady Nasty warming the stage, expect nostalgia tempered by something more urgent: a reminder of how radical it was to hear everyday vulnerability reframed as anthemic.
By March 19th, the energy shifts again, this time into glitter-slicked catharsis courtesy of Peach PRC.
Fresh from a rapid ascent that saw her debut EP Manic Dream Pixie hit the top spot on the ARIA Album Charts, Peach PRC has become one of Australia’s most distinctive modern pop voices. Her songwriting is diaristic and disarmingly open, exploring heartbreak, queerness, and self-worth with humour and bite. The internet-first fandom that rallied around her early singles has since followed her onto major festival stages — Splendour in the Grass, Falls Festival, Spilt Milk — and into tens of millions of global streams.
At On the Banks, she’ll be joined by Maude Latour and Salty, turning the forecourt into a pop-infused singalong. Peach PRC’s live shows walk a fine line between camp spectacle and emotional group therapy. One minute she’s cracking jokes; the next she’s leading a crowd through a chorus that feels ripped from a shared journal entry.
If Grace Jones represents the avant-garde lineage of pop iconography, Peach PRC embodies its current, hyper-connected evolution — fan-driven, emotionally literate and unapologetically maximalist. The latter’s debut album, Porcelain, will drop just after her On the Banks appearance.
Beyond those three tentpoles, the series continues with Disco Club (March 7th), Bernard Fanning (March 15th), Maoli (March 20th), and Marlon Williams (March 22th), underscoring the breadth of the programming.
But the throughline is clear: On the Banks isn’t chasing a single demographic. It’s positioning Brisbane as a city capable of hosting everything from disco royalty to UK garage storytelling to glitter-pop confessionals, all within a few steps of the river.
