Melbourne Town Hall is packed on a Tuesday night for the Australian live debut of Palestinian pop star Saint Levant.
His stage name is a spin on the luxury brand Yves Saint Laurent and he arrives on stage – the first night of two on a sold-out Australian tour – in an opulent, double-breasted white suit. Cries of longing send his birth name echoing through the hall: “Marwaaaann!”
Born Marwan Abdelhamid in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Serbian father and an Algerian French mother, he sings and rhymes in Arabic, English and French over smooth pop R&B that mixes vintage synth aesthetics with Levantine percussion and modern north African Raï music influences.
Much of his music is concerned with R&B’s favoured subjects – love, longing, aspiration – and on an alternate timeline his music could remain apolitical in content. But in 2026, Gaza is still occupied by Israel, which continues to lay waste to his homeland – so while his music embodies pop music’s escape, it reflects these darker realities too. As Nesrine Malik wrote of him in a recent profile in the Guardian: “A singer who was of Palestine, but broke with the sobriety of expression about it, was a shock to the system in a way that was invigorating and scandalising.”
Zaghrouta calls ring out from the crowd as the first beats usher his arrival. Lebanese flags are waved in one section of the crowd and keffiyehs in another. Melbourne’s Arab diaspora has turned up ready to party.
Saint Levant takes the stage and opens with 2024’s On This Land, which mixes dabke rhythms with Abdelhamid’s bittersweet croon. The track was inspired by a clip filmed in the wake of 7 October, of journalists in Gaza singing Sawfa Nabqa Hawa by the Libyan singer Adel el-Mshiti, who was imprisoned for five years by the Gaddafi regime, and whose track became an anthem of the Libyan Arab spring. Its title and Arabic section is inspired by a poem of the same name by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish; other lyrics describe Abdelhamid’s discomfort with the code switching he needs to do, while recognising why he needs to do it: to spread the message and the music beyond the Arabic-speaking world.
Reading the preceding paragraph, one might assume a sombreness to the performance – but Abdelhamid delivers even his most political songs with the casual poise of a heart-throb who knows it. Even slight hand gestures elicit screams from the crowd, who wave desperately to attract his attention.
His band leans into the groove of laid-back funk takes on his national pride anthem Daloona, and the unrequited love of Wazira. Fans send hand love hearts during a slow jam of his early career hit, Very Few Friends. He slips a saxophone over his shoulder, channelling George Michael’s Careless Whisper – and by the time he gets to 2025’s Exile, Abdelhamid is fully embodying the drama, letting his voice rip with light vocoder-esque adornments. The crowd’s raised wrists flick hands in the air as they sing the chorus of Deira back to the stage.
Throughout, Abdelhamid makes subtle and overt calls for solidarity between Arab nations, and to oppressed peoples elsewhere, too. He acknowledges the people suffering in conflicts in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Congo and Sudan. In this context, even choosing to cover Law Hobna Ghalta by Lebanese singer Wael Kfoury feels like a nod of solidarity as Israel continues its bombing of Lebanon.
During a break, he alludes in both English and Arabic to feeling unable to speak his mind. “I can’t speak because I want to be with you,” he says, perhaps referring to the backlash that faces artists who use their platform to admonish Israel and the US. The crowd responds for him with a chant: “Free! Free! Palestine!”
The set list zags back to pop with his new single Sabah El Ward. Released at the end of last month, the crowd already knows all the words. When a fan in the front row faints, he stops the music and hands his own bottle of water down.
Towards the end, a set of CDJs are mystifyingly wheeled on to the stage. The DJ is very excited and groups of friends dancing are losing it to a Shakira remix. It turns out the DJ is Abdelhamid’s dad, the architect and former owner of Gaza’s Al Deira hotel, which was bombed and destroyed by Israeli forces. He is clearly ecstatic to be joining his son on stage.
Abdelhamid returns for an encore in the true sense of the word, with an uninterrupted rerun of Sabah El Ward. The crowd eats it up even more rapturously than the first time, and leave with their hearts full, back out into the cold Melbourne night.
• Saint Levant is playing Melbourne Town Hall on 4 June as part of Rising festival; at City Recital Hall in Sydney on 6 and 7 June as part of Vivid festival; and at Princess theatre in Brisbane on 8 June
