Fresh images from TISM’s Sydney Opera House run were shared by DRW Entertainment on Sunday. Photo: High Voltage Photography.

Australian music icons TISM will honour roadie Andy Sutherland at tonight’s Sydney Opera House show.

In a Facebook post shared on Sunday, April 12, the band said Sutherland would be honoured during tonight’s performance. Earlier that afternoon, TISM had announced the death of their longtime roadie.

In a post shared at 1pm on April 12, TISM said the “TISM family” had lost Sutherland at 9:30 the previous night. The band said he died after a brief but devastating battle with cancer.

TISM asked fans at tonight’s show to pay tribute during “Greg! The Stop Sign!!”. The band urged them to bellow the chorus so loudly that, if there is an afterlife, Sutherland would hear it at the gates.

TISM described him as a “roadie extraordinaire” and a “staunch warrior” who had been with the band since the early 1990s. They remembered him as a fearless presence at shows. He would head into the mosh with a fistful of balaclavas to retrieve Ron, Les and, at times, Humphrey, while trying not to hurt fans in the chaos.

TISM’s Sydney Opera House run

Tonight’s show is part of TISM’s special Sydney Opera House Concert Hall run of their ARIA-winning 1995 album Machiavelli and the Four Seasons.

Performances are scheduled from April 10 to 12. A second date was added after the first sold out.

The run underlines the appetite for one of Australian music’s strangest and most enduring live acts.

Whatever possessed TISM to stage Machiavelli and the Four Seasons inside the Opera House, the setting makes a weird kind of sense. The band’s mix of satire, theatre, chaos and precision has long pushed beyond the shape of an ordinary rock show. One review described it as “a strange mashup of rock opera and punk anarchy”.

TISM said Sutherland died peacefully in the arms of his wife, surrounded by love, and would be greatly missed.

Fans quickly began sharing memories beneath the announcement. One fan recalled Sutherland giving her son a balaclava and one of the band’s props after TISM’s Mona Foma performance in 2024. She said it became the boy’s favourite night ever. Others remembered him as a decent and generous presence around the band’s live world.

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