When Troy Cassar-Daley steps onto the stage at the 2025 Adelaide Guitar Festival with his band, the spotlight won’t just be on his voice or his multi-award-winning songwriting. It will be firmly trained on the instrument that started it all.

“A lot of people know me as a singer and a songwriter,” he tells Limelight. “But for me, it all began with the guitar. It wasn’t singing. It wasn’t writing. It was sitting down with this instrument and working out what it could do.”

That early passion will be front and centre at the festival, where Cassar-Daley plans to show his stuff – stretch out on extended solos, explore textures and dust off numbers he seldom performs live. 

“It’ll give people a totally different concept of what I do on guitar,” he says. “It’s like putting a magnifying glass on that passion. Even now, I still can’t walk past a guitar without picking it up.”

Troy Cassar-Daley

Despite decades of experience and countless gigs over the past 35 years, Cassar-Daley is still reluctant to claim the mantle of ‘guitarist’. “That’s for people like Slava [Grigoryan]! I’d describe myself as more of a...