Tagged By brisbane

LISTEN: No Sister and Bitumen – Split Cassette

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No Sister

You know when someone is talking to you with extreme passion about something you’ve not previously been that interested in, and you can’t help but get sucked in to their argument, even though you’ve got no idea what it is? That’s how I often feel about No Sister. Everything they do is so intentional, so serious that I forget to roll my eyes at their use of the kind of art-rock, playing-guitar-with-a-screwdriver business that would usually be Not My Vibe.

So No Sister make kind of pretentious music, but at least they’re not pretending to be on the dole or like they didn’t go to uni. They don’t pretend to be approachable, #relateable fuckups – they’ve talk to you from a place of knowledge and foresight. Like lookout motherfuckers cuz it’s time to get mad. And there’s nothing wrong with being a bit pretentious if it’s for a good cause – like for some of the most vicious, vital music you’ll hear this hear. Its pretentious music that rules, seethes and gnashes its teeth, scowling in righteous anger. The were like this even before they moved from Bris to Melbourne.

‘Perpetrate’ is absolutely ferocious. I want that bassline isolated in its own track, so I can discover the secret to its absolute genius. Don’t listen to this at work if you don’t wanna be making wild-eyes at your co-workers for the next half hour, Siahn Davis and Tiarney Miekus’s vocals dueling like a devil on each shoulder. The lyrics are snippets of violent imagery ‘Like a hot fist thrown first!’ / ‘blazing through the noise’

Bitumen’s side starts with drum machine, and immediately it’s more obviously influenced by Melbourne goth post punk, um, coldwave, with Kate Binning’s drawling vocals swirling out of your speakers like black smoke. Their stuff is mushier, and noisier, using repetition and emotion rather than appealing to any kind of rationality

The lyrics seem lean on more personal stuff – there’s more yous and mes and hims and hers in these songs, less burning cities and shards of glass. ‘Honey Hunter’ sounds like someone very sinister, the snippets of ominous detail repeated; ‘indefensible, heavy breathing’ ‘in a pure world, he found her’.

The No Sister side stays restrained – held in by the tightness of the sound, the dry brittleness, There’s a calculated feeling even when the guitar devolves into noise, but Bitumen are absolutely balls to the wall, especially on ‘Winter Swimmer’, with that crunchy metal rhythm guitar under all the shredding, deep and dark with rumbling bitterness, a kind of fucked-up desperate devotion ‘I’ll do what needs to be done / I’ll do what needs to be done/ for you’.

It’s kind of a head/heart divide, except both are working together in violent revolt against outside forces. And, if making a good as tape counts as any kind of victory, absolutely kicking their arse.

Get this tape via always rock solid Vacant Valley.

See Bitumen and No Sister in Brisbane tonight at The Bearded lady with formidable support from Pleasure Symbols and Clever and on Sunday at The Time Machine in Nambour supported by the nice guys of hard rock Sewers, or next Saturday April 22nd in Melbourne at the Tote with Stationary Suns and Synthetics (who I hear are very good).

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WATCH: Ultra Material – ‘Borderline’ Video

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ultra material

Yes, pure is the most overused word of all time, but there’s something just solidly, reliably, pure about Ultra Material. They’re terrific musicians and good people. They also have lots of other shit going on, so they can make consistently interesting and beautiful music and play the occasional great show around Brisbane without burning out or getting bored.

‘Borderline’, off their latest EP II, is about the poppiest song they’ve released to date. It’s less meandering and abstract, with more catchy vocal melodies and forward motion. They’ve embraced that ‘dream pop’ label bands have to take on so they can lose the ‘shoegaze’ baggage and made something that’s … dreamy and poppy. Vocalist / bassist Sarah Deasy is letting her vocals come through, without being drowned in effects. It’s a great move; while having a classically ‘good’ voice can sometimes be seen as a detriment to this kind of music, her singing is darkly lovely and resonant, elevating the whole song.

Almost everyone in this band is some kind of accomplished artist or designer in their real life, so you know they’re not going to slack off on a walking down Brunswick street eating a pie music video. Enter the queen of green screen Helena Papageorgiou, the Brisbane director who made, among others, this delightful video for Dag late last year (go watch it if you haven’t already, I’ll wait).

While the look for that clip was weird and ramshackle, this one is all moody cool, moving fast to keep up with Matt Deasy’s impeccable drumming. Patterns and silhouettes, neon colours and constellations fly by the surface of the moon and anime-style waves. Though Papageorgiou knows where to linger – like on the X-Files-y ending and the coolest use of dogs in space since 1986.

Ultra Material – Borderline from Helena Papageorgiou on Vimeo.

You can find this song and lots of other winners on II. If you buy a physical copy of the cassette if comes in a beautiful case with a fold-out poster design by keyboard player Zuzana Kovar, printed by Matt Deasy at his screenprinting company no. 7 Print House (I told you they were arty). People come and go, but objects are forever.

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LOOK: Bent & Sydney 2000 Tour Photos

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Tristan, Steve, Skye, Heidi

Last month two of Brisbane’s best bands recently stretched their legs and bank accounts on a national tour – taking in Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart (The Entire Nation) and playing with local top dogs like Primo, Parsnip, Treehouse, Sex Tourists, LA Suffocated and Dolphin.

Both bands are DIY as hell – from Sydney 2000‘s bananas stage attire to Bent‘s playful, haphazard film clips to the fact that Steve Rose from Sydney 2000 drove from city to city the entire way cuz none of the others have licenses. Glen Schenau from Bent (also Per Purpose, Deck in the Pit, Kitchens Floor) takes photos of gigs around town on disposable, capturing and documenting blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments of scrappy, sweaty beauty.

We asked Glen for some photos of the tour – which was also a kind of farewell for Heidi Cutlack, who plays bass and sings in Bent and drums in Sydney 2000, and has since moved to Japan.

(Couple of iPhone ones in here too, don’t comment)

Thanks Glen, and thanks Heidi for making your wild, cool, and uniquely lovely music in Brisbane for so long.

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Sex Tourists – Sydney

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Bent

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LA Suffocated – Sydney

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Sydney 2000

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Place Holder – Sydney

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Kitchen’s Floor (Brisbane in Melbourne)

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Dolphin – Hobart

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Treehouse – Hobart

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Sydney 2000

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Bent

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Sydney 2000

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Primo – Melbourne

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Parsnip – Melbourne

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Bent’s ecstatically sick new record Snakes and Shapes is out on Moontown now

Sydney 2000 have tape out and floating around that should be online sometime in the future. Until then, see if you can hunt it down, nestled in the fur of the meanest cat on your street, sown into the pocket of the camo shorts you haven’t worn since 2009.

Bent Facebook / Sydney 2000 Facebook 

Bent Bandcamp

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LISTEN: Dag – Benefits of Solitude LP

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Dag

It’s interesting to me the way this record has been promoted as being Australian rock and roll, in the vein of The Go-Betweens and The Triffids – not cuz that’s inaccurate, but because of how those bands often seemed uncomfortable in their Australian-ness. They lived in England, they wanted to be English art-college post-punk, but the frustration of being outsiders on a far-off island prompted the melancholy isolation that became so much a part of what we think of the Australian sound.

And a couple of decades later middle-class uni dropouts broaden their accents and keep year ten English extension prizes hidden. Well, that’s the story for a lot of us. But not Dusty Mc-Cord Anastassiou, Dag‘s front man and songwriter. His takes in growing up amidst the struggle of cattle farming, moving to Brisbane and finding a new way to be lonely.

The kind of Australian young adulthood this record captures has the same isolation as those private school boys longing for fashionable Manchester squats. But in a way that seems to understand that it’s not always about the place – you can be alone and misunderstood anywhere. (Though Anastassiou has moved to Melbourne since recording this record – does that make that whole preamble moot? We’ll see).

Something I’ve noticed about when I write about records: I love moments. I love to quote poignant lines like, ‘Hey, isn’t this REAL’ or draw attention to the way a little drum fill or riff grabs your attention and makes a song special.

And there’s plenty of those in this record – like the off-kilter heartbreak of ‘Not Fine Mind’ perfectly signaled by its opening discordant brass, leading into the casual cruelty of lines like ‘I know at times I can be unkind / it doesn’t help hearing you move at the back of the house in a close friend’s room’.

Or the beautiful classical guitar bits in ‘Exercise’. I wonder why they didn’t make this a single – the mix of sinister imagery, hopelessness and relentless, jaunty beauty in the swing of the guitars and the ooooh oooohs seems like the perfect teaser to hook people in. I guess they kept it to start the record how they intended to go on – sadly lovely, full of surprises.

Or, the catches in the throat and the fingers moving on strings that bring such and intimate human physicality to ‘Company’. Maudlin violin and unsettling sounds mixed in to tighten the vice on your heart.

Then, the naivete of ‘Guards Down’; sweet and easy like love should be, sung with a smile – just the thing to break up ‘Age of Anxiety’s furious fear and the grim, classic country death storytelling of ‘JB’. ‘Endless, Aching Dance’ is a stark picture of a drought-stricken cattle farm, the demons that breed in an atmosphere as leaden with death as that one. Death is all over this record. And not in that ‘I’m a nihilist so I don’t have to care about anyone’ way, but like it’s something real, something you have to fight off tooth and nail at any moment.

But it feels like a disservice to just pull apart this record without talking about how, for all these beautiful pieces, it works even better as a whole. It’s less of a story more of a picture, when you listen to the whole thing you get a nuanced understanding of time and place where there was boredom and anxiety and depression and love and fun and a fuck load of nothing. It’s an album of beautifully written songs about strangeness and ugliness, an album about isolation that draws the listener in close. It exists, it struggles on, it says you can too.

Benefits of Solitude is out on Bedroom Suck right now

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WATCH: Forevr – ‘Petrichor’ Video

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forevr

Making a video for Petrichor’, Brisbane band Forevr’s first single as a four-piece, must have been a bit intimidating. The song itself has all the unpredictably energy of an electrical storm – how do you match those drums pulsing up from a thousand miles under the earth, then attacking skittishly from all sides? How do you make images that stand up to the precision and detail of the sound, the weirdness and the deep grounding emotion?

Using moody wafts of slow-moving smoke, deeply unsettling Claymation, and 3D diamonds shattering across the matrix,video director/editor/clay enthusiast Josh Watson (responsible for Blank Realm’s ‘Reach You On The Phone’ video, among others) has gone with vibe over plot. Though there’s still an overriding theme – a sense of being out of place, of trying to get back to the familiar, but every way you turn there’s something more strange and frightening. With fleshy molded flower petals opening and closing like mouths in silent desperation as Sam George-Allen coos ‘make your bed / where you call home’, the animation turns the natural into the perverse, but in a way that draws you in.

The 3D adds a more lighthearted future-from-the-90s tone – shit, there’s a lot going on here. Impeccably timed fast cuts fusing together the sound and image, and making sure there’s always something new to see.

Forevr are currently working on two releases, which will be out later in the year.

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Pious Faults – ‘Pious Faults’ EP

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pious-faults

Pic by Glen Schenau

There was a while there when it seemed like every time you went out to a rock show in Brisbane you knew everyone in the room. And that’s sick for a while. But slowly whispers crept in: where are the kids. Where are the young punk bands starting out? Did everyone just wanna be a DJ or a singer-songwriter? There were the Goon Sax yeah but they seemed so mature, so Chapter Music ready after just like, 6 months, that it almost didn’t really count.

Pious Faults aren’t the first in the movement of younger aggressive bands pushing their way onto lineups again, but they’ve turned heads the quickest. Exciting enough to convince Tenth Court to release this tape after just a couple of shows, they make fast, grim, serious music. At just a bit over 5 minutes, it’s an intense, pressurised experience. Though ‘Our Comfort’, an opus at 1:34 minutes, shows they can make, you know ‘songs’. This is confident, self-assured stuff – sure, sing a song in French why the fuck not. These guys, by virtue of being relatively new to the scene as I know it (though at least a couple have been in other bands), are free from the ubiquitous forced irony of Brisbane rock and roll. From the underlying unspoken rule that sure, you can make punk music, but it’s got to be funny. You can’t really mean it.

Still, it makes me slightly uneasy that one of the most exciting bands I’ve seen in Brisbane recently is four dudes playing music reminiscent of ‘80s East Coast American punk. A scene of almost entirely self-serious dudes that set the blueprint of how we think of punk music until too recently- as a bunch of skinny white men singing vicious, purposefully unfeminine music. All under a guise of progressiveness because hey, it’s not ACTUALY masculine or aggressive, because they’re not big enough to ACTUALLY beat anyone up. Probably. This isn’t the bands fault. It should just be about the music. If only I could stop noticing this shit.

I got off track here. I like this record a lot – I wanna see a Brisbane punk band not shoot themselves in the foot with a lack of self-confidence and ambition. And from lines like ‘we no longer adapt to our surrounds / we now adapt our surrounds to us’  and the general manifesto-like feel of the record, this doesn’t seem like an issue for these guys just yet. I also wanna see young kids getting angry about the right shit, I wanna hear fuck-off tough riffs and someone do something interesting with fast guitar music – and that’s all right here on this tape.

But I also wanna believe that it’s not just young dudes who are allowed to do it. And that this is the beginning for punk kids in Brisbane, with more diverse bands hot on their heels with even more ferocity. I want to believe that a smart label like Tenth Court – one of my favourites – doesn’t have almost exclusively mostly-male bands on their roster on purpose, that they’re just as desperate for some different voices as me. I don’t wanna give up on guitar music because the real innovators moved on to pop and dance a long time ago. And I’m gonna keep writing about this stuff because I can’t play guitar and I don’t know what else to do. This is a good record.

Pious Faults is available via Tenth Court here

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Naked Tour Diary (Part 1)

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naked-tour-2

Hobart three-piece Naked turn grim irony about the general hopelessness of everything into short, strangled shouts of songs, dredging up all the bad feelings with jagged driving guitar and smartly pointed lyrics.

They’re also extremely funny. There’s something about the crisp air/high unemployment in Tasmania that makes that kind of acidic self-depreciation come as second nature maybe, cuz Hobart tends to bat way above average in likeable ratbag population. So you know a tour diary by the band’s good mate Alex Romano is gonna be worth reading. Alex tagged along for most of the shows on their album tour earlier in the year (following the release of the scathingly wonderful Pink Quartz), to sample the rockdog lifestyle and small-town vegan food.

Naked’s recently released video for the catchy but uncomfortable ‘Blepharitis’, showcases some of the beauty of Australia’s landscape – deep brown earth and rocky bushland, soft winter sun hitting dew-sprinkled leaves. This tour diary does the same – Juicy vans, Grinspoon on the radio, crystal shops, vita wheats.

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Alex reckons Naked deserve a Pitchfork review. I’m sorry this isn’t that site, but here goes!

[Long opening paragraph of mostly irrelevant biographical details] [speculation about the band member’s mental state while writing the song/record] [made up genre] [word no one knows, possibly accurate possibly not, who cares?] [backhanded compliment] [7.7 stars].

Naked is a band from Hobart and they deserve a review on Pitchfork

By Alex Romano

On 12 February 2016, Kanye West released his 7th studio album, the Life of Pablo. This will be just a minor footnote in history compared to the fact that the Hobart band, Naked landed in Brisbane to begin a series of dates that rocked the east coast of Australia. Naked is Kieran, Rob and Jordy and I was lucky enough to see most of their shows on tour so I prepared a record of what is probably the greatest Aussie victory since Shane ‘Warnie’ Warne won took a world record breaking 709 Test wickets.

I will be rating each important tour event according to the Rockdog-o-meter. 5 Rockdogs is roughly the equivalent of snorting cocaine off Phil Jamieson’s tummy while Mick Jagger claps gently underneath a blue light, 0 rockdogs is giving a 6 second handshake to Andrew Bolt at a Polo match.

Day 1 – Feb 13 – Brisbane – we met a Go-Between (almost)!!!

4ZZZ Car Park Show

Wandering down the street on an overcast Brisbane day, the whirring of a PA pushed to the limits in the 4ZZZ carpark brings visions of a humid and beer soaked Brisbane that more people should be familiar with. It’s my home and I’m fully stoked there’s a real top notch brizzy welcome for the Naked boys on arrival. When I rock in to the carpark the kings of the Hobart experimental punk scene are already here having a great time, throwing a few fists in the air and crushing some XXXX (beersies) like they were reared up on the banks of the mighty Brisbane River. I hi-five Rob and give a solid embrace to Jordy and Kieran. The band on before them is expressly punk, and called Clever. They live up to their name by starting one of their songs to the tune of the Black Eyed Peas ‘Don’t Funk with My Heart’ but they replaced funk with fuck and heart with shard. Very clever boys. I think what they were saying is that when smoking meth it’s not great to fuck with one’s crystal so it was pretty funny coz also it’s like the crystal is my heart and don’t funk with my heart. They exhibit a force like Cadel Evans on his maiden Tour de France victory and whirlwind their way through a set that basically sends everyone’s jaws to the concrete carpark floor.

Kieran’s pretty visibly shaken. I’m trying to calm him down and soothe his worries that Naked will not be appreciated.

“You’ll be right champion!”

The other guys get in on the act and pretty soon we are all pumping his tyres up. Jordy takes a quick break from pumping Kieran’s tyres to be a self-appointed sound engineer and starts inspecting some wires and shifting the location of the monitors. Kieran’s still a bundle of nerves but before I can blink he’s burned down an interview (at 4:20pm!) and then come out and obliterated the eardrums of all before him. The set was relatively light on jokes, but the crowd was still treated to a stirring rendition of Violent Soho’s Bernard Fanning Stole my Girlfriend. It was a real highlight and almost certainly better than the Violent Soho’s original, everyone around me seems to enjoy it, maybe these Hobart kids have got a future in the alternative mainstream of Australian music!

At the end of the set, someone lets it out of the bag that Robert Forster’s son has been milling about with a goon sack and it sends the band frantically searching for the DNA of a Go-Between. The boys begin to ask around, gradually descending into uncontainable rage when it looks as though Forster disappeared into the spring rain of the streets of our town. Please stay safe young Forster, do not lose yourself in a Darlinghurst night. Steal a few bachelor kisses with Lee Remick and Karen but just make sure you don’t end up on your arse in the cattle and the cane but I guess love goes on anyway. [ML: guys I see Louis Forster on the bus every day you gotta relax]

The promise of people and alcohol at 116 (pretty trendy little house in the Brizness) drew The Nakeds away for a quick bevy before the night show. At the 116 the boys took the best photo of the tour, unfortunately for Kieran he didn’t actually feature in the photo. Rob and Jordy are now secretly plotting to have Kieran removed from the band and replaced with Matt Kennedy of Kitchen’s Floor. I will try not to tell Kieran, it will be my cross to bear for the rest of the tour.

naked-tour-1

[Best photo of the tour – Naked on the Kitchen Floor – not Metallica]

4ZZZ carpark gig rating: 4 out of 5 Rockdogs (the only thing stopping it from 5 rockdogs was the PA not quite coping with the iphone beats and the sound not quite being the best. Maybe the band should think about employing a drummer like the guy writing their tour diary – Kieran’s banter was also limited.)

While the guys were having a few more long island ice teas, I had a delicious burger and made my way to the scene of the next Naked gig, Trainspotters. It was mc’d by renowned food and life critic, Aaron Gocs! He made a really good joke about his daughter not loving him and generally hosted a really bonza night, the only thing it was missing was some vegan sangas and it really would have been the best night of our lives.

Also, Aaron (or Mr Gocs) if you are reading this could you please send me the text of the joke that you told on tour about your daughter, I laughed really hard and I’d like to retell it to mates as if it were my own. My favourite Aaron moment was when he leaned over and whispered in my ear that Kieran was reading out Grinspoon lyrics during Run At Me, it sent us both giddy and I had to steady myself on the bar. Phil Jamieson is a serious idol of all Australians and was robbed on season three of the X Factor even though he had serious X Factor as he is basically the face of Generation X.

I got a hi-five and a photo with Aaron after we’d calmed down and I’m really glad that he was who I thought he was and that he also liked Grinspoon, he must really have a (Chemical) heart after all.

I should probably also mention the other bands that played tonight. Pillow Pro played early on in the night but I missed them, I heard they sounded really in tune for most of the set [ML: Is this a diss? Pillow Pro are great [Confirmed: Not a diss. Alex also thinks Pillow Pro are great]]. Cannon played before Naked and I reckon they are gonna be a hard act to follow.

Woah! Hang on! Naked lost control! The show was a really big thrill! Rob banged the cymbal with enthusiasm, Kieran also sung in tune and Jordy rocked out with a beaming smile. Jordy always looks pretty happy during the sets so far which is awesome to see, good onya Jordy. Everyone had an absolute blast and I even got a compliment from a real big chiller with taking photos of the gig who was very impressed by the fact that I knew the band. His exact words were, “that’s sick!”

It sure was sick mate!

Trainspotters ratings: 5 out of 5 rockdogs – the only way this one could have been better is if Robert Forster’s son had turned up. Or if Bernard Fanning and Kieran’s ex-girlfriend had turned up.

Day 2 – Feb 14 – Leaving Home by Grinspoon (Fuck Jebediah) – personal joke fyi

I lost track of times in Brisbane sorry Mum but I’ve kept them from now on. Sorry, just be aware that now each event will have a little time stamp but it doesn’t mean that Brisbane was in some kind of time vacuum.

9:00 am [sorry I was too rocked out in Brisbane to keep track of the time and I didn’t wanna just lie and make up times for my thoughts]

The boys pick me up in a Juicy van. I am begging for the abyss to take me, what is there worth living for anymore? A little voice kicks me in the back of the head and says the Naked tour so I’m back on top. There is some significant discussion about an ABN and whether it is worthwhile for the band to acquire one. I could not want to listen to this any fucking less and neither could Kez. We politely begin to nod off as Rob insists that he is –

“not having a go Jordy”

-he just wants to get to the bottom of it. Fair enough but the bottom of what exactly Rob?

“The pros and cons, that sort of stuff of course!”

I don’t know much about business so I don’t interject, I’m also technically not in the band. Jordy raises his voice slightly, not to a level of anger, but there is clearly something I would maybe classify as “irk.” He basically stares through Rob’s soul and tells him,

“No you are wrong Robert, I am right.”

Kieran is asleep solidifying his role as the most important member of the band but also the most useless. We’re all a little bit tired I think but this glam rock lifestyle will do it to you.

11:30 am

Someone has now whacked on Grinspoon. I have a feeling this tour is going to be full of grinners…Even though I’m really hungry, I hope we stop at Dreamworld and take a photo because I haven’t been there in a long while.

11:45 am

We did not stop at Dreamworld. Or Hollywood on the Gold Coast. Instead we are now driving around looking for a carpark in Tweed Heads.

12:10pm

We’ve found a park. We all just got to piss and swim and eat a bit of a single mushroom panini with some very rustic potatoes. If you didn’t know we were on tour you do now.

2:30 pm

Lismore is pretty much how I remember it! Absolutely chocka block of Grinspoon tribute signs, tempeh burgers and people selling crystals. There were also a lot of funny looking people giving funny looks and sideways glances to Rob. I think they were surprised that a man can still wear a dress and look “sexy.” For the tour record, Rob’s floral number is very cute and I think he has definitely left an imprint on Lismore and definitely left an imprint on the bottle shop attendant who couldn’t stop having a look.

The space where the band is playing is a bit smelly and relatively empty, we all nod in approval at the suggestion that we crash anywhere else but in this room tonight. The exterior of the building reminds me of a youth detention centre cell block like the one sung about in Sprinters of the World Unite, or also a school building (woah!). There are some good vibes and a lot of brick, a real sense that not everything is lost, despite the rugged exterior. I’m sure the guys want to just play the show and move on but they will give a good one for the fans.

5:00 pm

They gave a good one. An angry guy in a Bunnings hat and T-shirt has other ideas though so I asked him for his thoughts.

An interview with “name withheld” regarding the band Naked at See Space in Lismore

Q: What do you think of See space?

I’m pretty much a regular down at See Space, it’s one of the few joints in Lismore that you can really let your hair down.

Q: Cool! What brought you to the gig?

I was a bit sweaty after having gone to Bunnings earlier in the day [points to shirt and hat with toothy grin]. I just think they have a very well curated selection of useful equipment, much more so than Masters, it’s probably why Masters went broke. Fuck Woolworths! Or Coles. I mean fuck em both but yeah especially fuck whichever one of them does Masters.

Q: What did you think about the song Massive Cock?

Yeah sure they have a song called Massive Cock but that sure as hell isn’t about a dick. It’s about some kind of male guilt. I wasn’t particularly interested.

Q: Was there any part of the gig you enjoyed?

Yeah, when I went outside about halfway through the set to finish my glass of Pinot Grigio.

Q: Anything else you’d like to add?

I think the last song they played was called Critical Arseholes. That one was ok. And so was one at the start that had a pretty punchy rhythm. It had some stupid long jokey kind of title that those guys think must be funny or ironic probably. The youth of today are lost, that’s what just kept going round in my head over and over and it was driving me mental so I had to step outside. The vocals were too out of key as well and I think the singer was trying on some kind of Smith Street Band type of thing. I don’t really know how I feel about them.

5:30 pm

As we drive out of the town there are endless signs essentially saying the same thing “coal seam gas, 96% of people in X town don’t want you.” A wave of disappointment floods over me, why didn’t Kieran make a joke about the previous Naked ep being titled Coal Seam Jazz? Should I have mentioned this connection earlier? Maybe then old mate would have liked the band more. You can’t pander to everyone though. Sorry.

Thanks for having us Lismore. We are going to Bunnings now because Jordy wants coffee in the morning. Apprently Bunnings sells gas for coffee but not sleeping bags? Go figure. I am excited for the coffee though.

6:05 pm

We need a wind down after Bunnings so it’s off to a little slice of heaven known as “Minion Falls.” The only Minions we saw were stuck to the back of a Toyota Tarago though which was a bit of a bum out! The water in the falls was very chill and we got some great piccies courtesy of a couple of lovers who were getting ready to make their own little army of minion loving monsters heh. Anyway, cheers for the photos guys, here is one of them. Strong recommend. Happy Valentines Day.

naked-tour-2

8:30 pm

We’re on the road to Lennox Heads now to camp under the stars. One Love.

Lismore: 2 out of 5 rockdogs – smelly, not enough Grinspoon and too much Bunnings not enough Masters.

Alex Romano graduated from the University of Queensland with a Bachelor of Arts/Law. He lives in Sydney and works as a solicitor. He never wears a suit to work.

Part 2 Tomorrow

Pink Quartz is available now through Tenth Court

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