Brag#710 by The Brag Magazine

MADE IN SYDNEY APRIL 26, 2017

FREE Now picked up at over 1,600 places across Sydney and surrounds. thebrag.com

MUSIC, FILM, COMEDY + MORE

ÁSGEIR

HOW RETURNING TO HIS ROOTS LED TO A CHANGE IN MUSICAL DIRECTION

Inside

AT T HE DR I V E IN V IN Y L G I V E AWAY UR Z IL A C A R L S ON P HIL L J U P I T U S

SAM SPARRO

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

BAD//DREEMS

Sharing his cherished memories of the late George Michael.

How White Australia tarnished a sacred Aboriginal site.

Living out their Recovery dreams with an old-school film clip.

THE 50 BEST COFFEES IN SYDNEY: PART FOUR Where to find the best cups of joe.

T HE MU SIC OF CREAM A ND MUCH MOR E

AT THE DRIV

New album in • ter a • li • a is out Friday May 5 through Rise/Cooking Vinyl. Playing the Hordern Pavilion on Friday September 29.

From your ﬁrst day at SAE, you’ll start creating in world-class facilities, on the latest software and equipment, all under the guidance of our expert lecturers – discover how you could bring your creative career to life at our Info Night.

INFO NIGHT. SYDNEY CAMPUS. THUR 04 MAY 6PM – 8PM.

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in this issue

free stuff

what you’ll find inside…

head to: thebrag.com/freeshit

The Frontline

6-7

Back To Business

8-9

Ásgeir explains how returning to his roots inspired a new direction for his music

(10)

Sam Sparro looks back on the storied career of George Michael

18-21 How White Australia And Picnic At Hanging Rock Tarnished The Legacy Of A Sacred Aboriginal Site

8-9

22-23

“We need songwriters. We need people to challenge all the fuckery that’s going on.”

Bad//Dreems

The Music Of Cream

16-17 Out & About, arts reviews, The Bedroom Philosopher

13-14 Eight Bands Who Combine Male And Female Vocals Perfectly

22-23 The 50 Best Coffees In Sydney: Part Four, Mjølner, The Seven Best Places For A Late-Night Dinner

Urzila Carlson, Phill Jupitus

Album reviews, First Drafts

“Hanging Rock is a key part in one big white vanishing myth Caucasian Australians have obsessively told themselves for decades.” (18-21)

Off The Record, Nikki Hill

26-29 Live reviews, Name The Classic Song 30

Gig guide

AT THE DRIVE IN One of the defining rock bands of the last 25 years is back in business. On Friday May 5, At The Drive In will release in • ter a • li • a, their first record since 2000’s Relationship Of Command and their 2001 breakup. ‘Highly anticipated’ doesn’t go anywhere near doing it justice. But on the evidence of ‘Governed By Contagions’ and ‘Incurably Innocent’ – the first two previews of the new album – this could be something special indeed. We’ve got three vinyl copies of in • ter a • li • a to give away. To be in the running to win, visit thebrag.com/ freeshit.

the frontline with Chris Martin, Tyler Jenke and Nathan Jolly ISSUE 710: Wednesday April 26, 2017 PRINT & DIGITAL EDITOR: Chris Martin chris.martin@seventhstreet.media SUB-EDITOR: David Molloy STAFF WRITERS: Joseph Earp, Nathan Jolly, Adam Norris NEWS: Nathan Jolly, Tyler Jenke, Brandon John

Screamfeeder

WE ALL SCREAM FOR SCREAMFEEDER How’s this for a blast from the past? ’90s indie heroes Screamfeeder have come roaring back with a new album, Pop Guilt, released last week. It’s been 12 years since the Brisbane band stepped backed from touring and releasing regularly, but the music listening public’s appetite for Screamfeeder never waned, with their first five albums re-released on vinyl in 2015 and 2016. Now that their new music is here, you can see them live at Frankie’s Pizza this Saturday April 29.

ART DIRECTOR: Sarah Bryant PHOTOGRAPHER: Ashley Mar ADVERTISING: Josh Burrows - 0411 025 674 josh.burrows@seventhstreet.media PUBLISHER: Seventh Street Media CEO, SEVENTH STREET MEDIA: Luke Girgis - luke.girgis@seventhstreet.media MANAGING EDITOR: Poppy Reid poppy.reid@seventhstreet.media THE GODFATHER: BnJ GIG GUIDE: gigguide@thebrag.com AWESOME INTERNS: Harriet Flitcroft, Abbey Lenton REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Nat Amat, Arca Bayburt, Lars Brandle, Chelsea Deeley, Matthew Galea, Emily Gibb, Jennifer Hoddinett, Emily Meller, David Molloy, Annie Murney, Adam Norris, George Nott, Daniel Prior, Natalie Rogers, Erin Rooney, Anna Rose, Spencer Scott, Natalie Salvo, Leonardo Silvestrini, Jade Smith, Aaron Streatfeild, Augustus Welby, Jessica Westcott, Zanda Wilson, Stephanie Yip, David James Young Please send mail NOT ACCOUNTS direct to this NEW address Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046

SOCIETY OF BEGGARS HIT SYDNEY Following a grand reception for their 2016 single ‘An Angel Called Night’, Melbourne rock’n’rollers Society Of Beggars capitalised on the theme with A Tour Called Night, playing venues around Australia. Now they’re back to celebrate An EP Called Bob Evans

EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of the BRAG. ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Carrie Huang - accounts@seventhstreet.vc (02) 9713 9269 Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046

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BOB EVANS IS ON THE ROAD The ARIA Award winning alter ego of Jebediah’s Kevin Mitchell, Bob Evans, is back on the highway. More specifically, that’s the Lonesome Highways, as per the name of his latest national tour, which kicked off last week in Canberra. The shows follow the release of Evans’ new LP Car Boot Sale in 2016, and he’s promising an intimate experience for his fans across the country. Evans will be at Camelot Lounge on Friday May 5 and The Brass Monkey on Saturday May 6.

A HOT TUB CINEMA NEAR YOU With winter making its way towards us, you’ll be forgiven for rugging up on those increasingly cold nights. But what if you want to head out for a night on the town, regardless of the chilly weather outside? It’s OK, there’s now an answer to your prayers. Hot Tub Cinema is set to hit Sydney between Thursday July 6 – Thursday July 13, with four sessions taking place on a rooftop in the heart of the city. Registrations have begun for presale tickets, but at the current time, further details – including dates and locations – are being kept under wraps. The fully licensed events began in London about five years back, and have expanded worldwide since then. The events include “about 30 hot tubs, two screens and a bespoke surround sound system”, so it’s got everything you’ll need for a great night out. Be sure to check out hottubcinemasydney. com for more details, which will be unveiled closer to the dates.

AUSTRALIAN MUSIC WEEK RETURNS Australian Music Week is back for a third year, returning to Cronulla Beach from Wednesday November 1 – Sunday November 5. “The connections made at last year’s event, particularly with overseas delegates, have inspired us to continue to

ALL ABOUT ALCEST France’s masters of post-black metal, Alcest, are making their Sydney return this week. Alcest have always been a fluid outfit, starting out as a solo project for Neige (Stéphane Paut) before adding drummer Winterhalter of Peste Noire fame. Alcest’s latest visit to our shores coincides with their fifth album, Kodama, a behemoth of a thing released last September. See Alcest at Manning Bar on Thursday April 27.

grow the event in 2017,” said conference manager Jon Howell. “We’re starting to see results for artists as a direct result of their involvement in the conference, and have received feedback from artists and industry that they find AMW a great place to meet new people and get business done.” Australian Music Week “brings together industry professionals, artists and music lovers from all over Australia and the world to network, learn, and celebrate the latest in music of all genres in a relaxed and friendly environment”. Showcase applications are already open, and close on Monday July 17. AMW conference tickets will be on sale from Tuesday May 2. Visit australianmusicweek. com for more.

SKUNKHOUR SMELL A RAT Skunkhour reformed last year to perform their debut album in its entirety, and that show went down a storm. Now they are doing the same thing for their 1995 album Feed, playing one show on Saturday May 27 at the Metro Theatre in Sydney. “We are absolutely amped to be playing the Feed album in its entirety,” says the band’s drummer Michael Sutherland. “We haven’t played some tracks on the album for many years. It will bring an exciting edge to another epic show in one of our all-time favourite venues.” thebrag.com

Screamfeeder photo by Stephen Booth

DEADLINES: Editorial: Friday 12pm (no extensions) Ad bookings: Friday 5pm (no extensions) Fishished art: No later than 2pm Monday Ad cancellations: Friday 4pm Deadlines are strictly adhered to. Published by Seventh Street Media Pty Ltd All content copyrighted to Seventh Street Media 2017

Night – geddit? – and have lined up not one, but two Sydney dates to share it. With new single ‘Old Haunts’ available now, Society Of Beggars play Frankie’s Pizza on Thursday May 11 and the Vic On The Park on Friday May 12.

Alcest

ES T. 2 010

happyendingscomedyclub.com.au

FRIDAY & SATURDAY

NIGHT SHOWS WINNER OF THE LAST TWO TIME OUT COMEDY AWARDS –

Sydney’s Best Comedy Club.

INTIMATE, SMOULDERING AND EVERYTHING A COMEDY CLUB SHOULD BE.

½¾ 154 Brougham St, Cnr William St, Potts Point 1 Minute From Kings Cross Station, 30 Meters From Coca Cola Sign.

(02) 9130 5150 thebrag.com

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Back To Business Music Industry News with Lars Brandle

breaking biz Gema has joined the billionaires’ club. The German performance rights organisation collected an all-time high €1.02 billion ($1.46 billion) in royalty payments in 2016, up 15 per cent from the previous year. A big chunk of those gains stem from “intensive growth” from streaming sources, or more precisely, a settlement the society hammered out with YouTube last November that saw an end to those frustrating content

Jessie Lloyd

blocks Gema authorised for major label content streaming on the video platform. Online music usage more than doubled to nearly €82 million ($116 million) during the reporting period and those royalties were retroactively incorporated into Gema’s annual accounts for the period 2009-16. Gema represents 70,000 members and rights owners and has been operating for 80 years.

Nick Cave

ENDING AN EPIDEMIC Nick Cave has thrown his support behind a suicide prevention app for indigenous people in Australia. The Warlpiri community of Lajamanu in the Australian Tanami Desert is hosting a crowdfunding campaign for the app, which could provide hope for communities in need. Aboriginal suicide rates are at epidemic levels with three people taking their own lives each week. Young Aboriginal people are said to be four times more likely to take their own life than their non-indigenous peers, a rate that is sadly among the highest in the world. Since 2005, however, there hasn’t been a single suicide in Lajamanu. The community itself may have the answers, and it’s hoped the app can get this important message out. “With Aboriginal people committing suicide on an unprecedented scale, a group of elders are creating an app based on ceremony, story and law,” says Cave. “Join them in fighting for the lives of young Aboriginal people and let’s show Aboriginal Australia we believe in them.” The community-led and community empowering project is the subject of a GoFundMe campaign, with indigenous elders providing all content for the so-called Kurdiji 1.0 app. Read more here at gofundme.com/kurdiji.

FU FOR THOUGHT

YOUNG AND XSTREAM

Former Lucasfi lm art director and music video boss Warren Fu is the first international guest speaker at this year’s Clipped Music Video Festival, the country’s main pow-wow for the music clip space. Fu, who has worked on clips for Daft Punk, The Strokes, Snoop Dogg and The Weeknd’s latest (‘I Feel It Coming’), will also take on judging duties at Clipped. The festival takes place Saturday June 3 at Sydney’s Sunstudios and will run in conjunction with Vivid Ideas. Filmmakers and bands are invited to submit their clips, which will be judged across a string of categories including animation, cinematography, directing and editing. Attendees at the daylong summit gain entry to interactive music video exhibition, screenings, awards, workshops, industry keynotes and discussion panels. For more, visit clippedfestival.com.

OK, so Neil Young’s PonoMusic turned out to be a polished turd (but, alas, still a turd). That hasn’t dulled the Canadian rocker’s entrepreneurial spirit. It appears Young’s high-fidelity Pono service will live on, in some shape. Young has partnered with Singapore firm Orastream to create “an adaptive streaming service that changes with available bandwidth” for “complete highresolution playback”, according to a Pono post. And they’re calling it Xstream. It all sounds like an empire-building statement, which unfortunately builds on Empire; there’s already a fictional service of that name in the popular US hip hop drama Empire. PonoMusic has had a troubled time of late. Last July, the company announced it would enter “offline” mode, but hasn’t switched back ‘on’. There hasn’t been a message from the official PonoMusic Twitter account since January 24.

NO CRYING OVER SPILT MILK Samsung’s Milk Music venue went sour last year, but the electronics giant is attempting a bigger splash in digital music through a partnership with Google. The South Korean conglomerate has joined forces with Google to bring streaming music to its new Galaxy S8 and S8+ phones – where Google Play music will be the default music player – and on new Samsung devices. Customers who buy one of these handsets will get a three-month free trial of Google Play Music’s premium tier (which boasts 40 million licensed songs), and be able to upload up to 100,000 of their own MP3s to its cloud locker for unlimited streaming. Samsung launched its own web radio service Milk Music back in 2014, but, after failing to get any meaningful traction, started retiring the venture some two years ago.

Kendrick Lamar

departures

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DAMN THAT DIVIDE Damn, that Kendrick Lamar is doing the business. The Compton hip hop giant’s latest, Damn., arrives at the summit of the Billboard 200 albums chart after shifting 603,000 equivalent album units, according to Nielsen Music. That’s the biggest opening week for any album Stateside this year. Damn. rings up a hat-trick of number ones for Lamar: To Pimp A Butterfly hit the top in 2015 and Untitled Unmastered. reached the summit last year. Lamar, however, couldn’t get over the line in the UK, where Ed Sheeran’s Divide powers ahead for a seventh week in the lead of the Official Albums Chart. Sheeran’s ‘Shape Of You’ is back at the peak of the Official Singles Chart for a 14th non-consecutive week, while Lamar lands five Damn. tracks inside the top 40.

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Nick Cave photo by Kerry Brown

Sylvia Moy, the Motown songwriter who collaborated on several hits including Stevie Wonder’s 1969 soul classics ‘My Cherie Amour’ and ‘I Was Made To Love Her’, and Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston’s ‘It Takes Two’, died on April 15 at Beaumont (Oakwood) Hospital in Dearborn, Michigan. She was 78. Moy, one of Motown’s first female songwriter/producers, was a six-time Grammy Award nominee and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006.

movers and shakers

THE BIG STAGE It’s official: the 2017 National Folk Festival was a resounding success. An aggregate crowd of up to 48,000 soaked up the good vibes and cracking weather at the 51st annual fest, which took place over Easter at Canberra’s Exhibition Park. Among the big highlights: Jessie Lloyd’s packed-out Mission Songs Project, which, with a lineup of top indigenous artists, presented a rare collection of early Australian indigenous songs that were performed on missions and settlements. It was the young women of the festival who led the way when the National Folk Festival awards were handed out at its prestigious Finale Concert, with the likes of Loren Kate (Lis Johnston Award for Vocal Excellence), Charm Of Finches (Gill Rees Award), The Drowsy Maggies (Peter J Daly Memorial Award) and Monique Clare (The Folk Alliance of Australia Youth Folk Award) among the big winners. Organisers have confirmed the 52nd National Folk Festival will be held from Thursday March 29 – Monday April 2 in 2018: mark it in the diary.

FINAL WORD The music business has always been a boys’ club, and never has it been more obvious than on the latest US singles chart. No women appeared in the top ten of Billboard’s Hot 100’s chart dated April 29. You’ll have to travel back to 1984 for the last time the top tier of the chart was such a blokey place.

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Chris Harrison becomes CEO of the Digital Media Association (DiMA), a US-based peak body that represents online distributors of digital music, film and books, from Amazon to Apple, Pandora and Spotify and others. Until recently, Harrison was vice president of music business affairs for Sirius XM Radio, and before that served as vice president of business affairs and assistant general counsel at Pandora Media. His legal smarts were recognised with his inclusion in Billboard’s Most Powerful Attorneys list published in 2015. Another top legal going places is Universal Music Group’s general counsel Richard

Constant, who is reportedly set to retire. Constant, one of the key players in his position in the international music biz, will step down this summer, according to MBW. An official announcement is expected in due course. In the same week The Industry Observer broke the big news of triple j’s music director reshuffle (Nick Findlay replacing the promoted Richard Kingsmill), another key staffer has waved goodbye to Aunty. Unearthed executive producer Stephanie Carrick has resigned from the network. Prior to taking the reins at Unearthed in 2008, Carrick produced crossplatform content for ABC

Kids, Rage, ABC Arts, ABC Documentaries and Q&A in various roles dating back to the late 1990s. We look forward to hearing what she does next. The HR department has been kept particularly busy at Warner/Chappell, where the music giant’s production music operations are scouting for a new boss. Warner/Chappell production music CEO Randy Wachtler is leaving the company, according to MBW, with Warner/Chappell CEO and chairman Jon Platt taking his duties until the new hire is in place. In other news, Platt has been promoted, while elsewhere, Ben Vaughn has risen to the role of president

the dotted line Warner/Chappell Music is bringing some steel to its roster. The music publishing giant has signed in-demand UK songwriter, DJ and producer Steel Banglez to a worldwide publishing agreement. Born and raised in East London of Sikh heritage, Steel Banglez has worked with some of the bigger names in grime and rap from Wiley

to Birdman, Krept & Konan, Mist and D Double E. His debut single ‘Money’ recently dropped on Polydor Records with guest spots from UK MCs MoStack, Mist, Haile and Abra Cadabra. Mike Smith, managing director of Warner/Chappell UK, describes his new signing as “one of the central songwriter/producers to have emerged from the scene”.

for Warner/Chappell Nashville, and Katie Vinten and Ryan Press are to act as co-heads of US A&R. Sony/ATV Music Publishing has promoted Guy Henderson from executive VP of international to president, international, reporting to Sony/ATV chairman and CEO Martin Bandier. Henderson, who joined Sony/ATV in 2001 as VP of Europe, is based in London and will oversee all of the company’s operations and sub-publishers outside the Americas and UK. The exec was part of the leadership team that earned regulatory approval for Sony/ ATV’s 2012 acquisition of EMI Music Publishing.

In other news, Guv, CEO of Catalyst Management (which manages Steel Banglez), has teamed up with Zues, founding partner of Soho club Tape London, to create a new “entertainment venture”. Steel Banglez will be one songwriter invited to the new creative facility in Battersea, South London, which hopes to be a centre of excellence for new and existing artists with global potential.

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COVER STORY

Ásgeir

Electronica On Ice BY NATALIE ROGERS

8 :: BRAG :: 710 :: 26:04:17

augarbakki is a hamlet located in the sparse northern areas of Iceland. Home to around 80 residents, this peaceful village is on the eastern banks of a renowned salmon river, Miðfjarðará, and is the backdrop to the Saga of Grettir the Strong, an Icelandic outlaw who is believed to have lived during the late tenth and early 11th centuries. This friendly fishing village is also the birthplace of Ásgeir Trausti Einarsson – known to fans simply as Ásgeir – and his second solo album Afterglow. “I was only going to go back [to Laugarbakki] for just a few days, but I

ended up staying for weeks,” he says. “It was a time of self-discovery.” The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist says he has found peace after being thrust onto the international spotlight in 2014 with In The Silence, a re-recording of 2012’s Dýrð Í Dauðaþögn, his critically acclaimed album originally recorded in his native tongue. It still holds the record for the fastest-selling debut in Icelandic history, toppling his countrymen Sigur Rós and national icon Björk. “After [In The Silence] I began questioning things I’d never thought of before,” Ásgeir says. “I kind

of forgot why I wanted to make music in the first place. I got so involved in the whole world of touring that I didn’t really have much time to think. I needed to take some time to fi gure things out.” The resultant Afterglow is an unabashed hop, step and leap into the world of electronica. Ásgeir says goodbye to his past and the acoustic guitardriven folk sensibilities heard on In The Silence, and embraces the future with glitchy, stopstart beats and soaring synths. Each track has extraordinary texture and scale, and showcases his unique ability for crafting melodies.

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family used to play on, so it’s good to work there. I wrote ‘Afterglow’ and ‘New Day’ there and my father still lives in that area, so we could work together.” His father, Einar Georg Einarsson – a former teacher and celebrated poet – retired to the small harbour community of Hvammstangi (just up the river from Miðfjarðará) a few years ago, but continues to write and collaborate with his son. “Those two songs, ‘Afterglow and ‘New Day’, are special because we were both in the same room working on them together,” Ásgeir says. “Usually we use just email and phone, so that was a bit different.” Ásgeir’s music is often a family affair, as his long-time collaborators – and biggest supporters – are his father and his brother, Thorsteinn Einarsson, alongside Júlíus Róbertsson, Högni Egilsson and producer and bandmate Guðmundur Kristinn Jónsson. “There have never been any arguments or conflicts because I’m usually always in control of what’s happening,” Ásgeir explains. “If my dad writes a lyric and I’m not happy with it, I just tell him and he makes another one, and he’s totally OK with that because he’s making music for me. It’s kind of like he’s working for me in a way [laughs]. He’s also getting a lot out of it himself – he enjoys the artistic freedom. I usually don’t tell him what the lyrics should be about or anything like that.” Afterglow’s lead single ‘Unbound’ was created around one inspiring line –“Nothing holds me back now” – and you can hear the conviction in Ásgeir’s voice as he sings the lyric. Other tracks like ‘Nothing’ and particularly ‘Hold’ showcase how fearless the young artist has become. “Sometimes after concerts, me and a few of the guys who can sing used to have choir practice and sing old Icelandic songs and harmonise them. So I made ‘Hold’ just like a choir piece and it became this really epic song. It was inspired by the choir group we had at the back of the bus, and also music that I’ve been listening to.” Despite a population of under 400,000, Iceland continues to produce world-class musicians and artists who can break down language and cultural barriers. Stalwarts like Björk and Sigur Rós have enjoyed decades of success, while more recent exports like Of Monsters And Men and Ásgeir have paved the way for up-and-coming acts including rock quintet Mammút, singer-songwriter Sóley and indie trip hop trio Samaris. But despite the fact Ásgeir first received global attention thanks to the English-language In The Silence, he says he will continue to write and record in Icelandic, and honour his Nordic heritage. “Most of the songs on Afterglow were written in Icelandic first, so it wouldn’t be too hard to release it in Icelandic. Actually, I was thinking about maybe releasing an alternative version with new songs later this year or when we have the time.”

“It’s been quite a long time since I was writing the songs for my first record. A lot of the things have changed, you know? I was changing personally and evolving musically too. “How I wanted to go about writing had changed, and I was kind of bored writing with an acoustic guitar, and I had a hard time enjoying that. I felt like I needed to do something new and different to get myself excited.” However, the unassuming rising star is the first to admit he was a little daunted by starting from scratch. “I don’t feel that I have to lie and say that it wasn’t difficult,” he says. “I just needed time. I spent one-

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and-a-half years working solely on this album with no touring, so was able to be my old self and not constantly moving around. That was a big part of it, and also having people around me that I can talk to. They helped a lot.” In recent years, the softly spoken 24-year-old has come to reside in the very green and very clean city of Reykjavík, Iceland’s largest urban centre – but he needed to reconnect with his roots to find his voice. “I like going back to my hometown because I like writing there. It’s a really quiet place, and I have my old piano there that I used to write on and that my

Time is the one thing Ásgeir and his band don’t have much of these days. To coincide with the release of Afterglow on Friday May 5, he will begin a 22-date tour of Europe and the UK, before heading back Down Under to play a few east coast dates, including Splendour In The Grass. “The last time I was in Australia it was a bit of a blur, but Splendour In The Grass and the Opera House shows stand out – they’re really special to me,” he says. “I’ve wanted to come to Australia since I was a kid, but I do like going home too.” What: Afterglow out Friday May 5 through Pod/Inertia With: Gordi Where: Enmore Theatre When: Friday July 21 And: Also appearing at Splendour In The Grass 2017, North Byron Parklands, Friday July 21 – Sunday July 23

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Sam Sparro

FEATURE

Never Lose Faith By David James Young

“George Michael was always someone that wrote from the heart. He always wrote so beautifully of the human experience and of the human condition.”

rom the days of “Choose Life” shirts and major hairdos to his turn-of-the-century comeback and all the way up to his majestic orchestral performances, there was no pop star quite like George Michael. For singer-songwriter Sam Sparro – best known for his 2008 smash pop hit ‘Black And Gold’ – it was love at first sight, ever since the MTV days of yore sparked the imagination of a prepubescent, wide-eyed child.

“The first thing I remember about George was seeing the video for [Wham! single] ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’,” Sparro begins. “I was a kid, and it just felt so iconic when I was watching it. I don’t know what it was – I just immediately felt a kinship with him. Maybe it was my gaydar going off at a young age. Whatever it was, I just felt that connection to his voice and his image. He had such an incredible tone to his voice – I just fell in love with it. From that moment on, I was obsessed. My mum bought me [1990 album] Listen Without Prejudice when I was about seven or eight, and I followed his career from there.” Sparro is among many in counting himself as a lifelong fan of Michael’s, expressing how the overwhelming

impact that a voice and a presence such as his inspired Sparro on his own path to stardom. “George was always someone that wrote from the heart. He always wrote so beautifully of the human experience and of the human condition. I think that’s why he mattered so much to so many people, and still does. The way he would bring in social commentary to these great-sounding pop songs was just amazing. He had a very broad approach to the kind of music that he would make – he could make a ballad using a bossanova beat that was classically influenced. He could write cheeky, fun pop songs and then turn around and write a heart-wrenching lyrical masterpiece. “George and I definitely had a lot of crossover in our tastes – he was a big listener of soul music, and took a lot from rhythm-based music. I like to think, whether it was subconscious or not, George ended up being quite an influence on the way I make music.” Of course, Michael was one of the final celebrities to succumb to the so-called ‘curse of 2016’, passing away from natural causes on Christmas Day. His death sent ripples

“We need songwriters. We need people to challenge all the fuckery that’s going on.” 10 :: BRAG :: 710 :: 26:04:17

through the extended LGBTQI+ community, with many tributes to the man and his music popping up around the world. “I remember I was in Boston when I got the message from my manager about it,” says Sparro. “It was really saddening, and so disappointing. It came at the end of a year that was really tough for a lot of people, for obvious reasons. I don’t want to trivialise anyone else’s experience, but I was quite affected by losing people like David Bowie and Prince. We need people like them, y’know – we need artists. We need songwriters. We need people to challenge all the fuckery that’s going on – this fascist, oppressive movement that’s going on in the world. It contradicts the arts, and anyone who stands for humanity.” A major tribute is planned for Michael’s life in music this coming July in conjunction with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Entitled George Michael: Praying For Time, the show is a symphonic ode to all of Michael’s biggest hits, taking over the Concert Hall at the illustrious Sydney Opera House for three consecutive nights. Sparro is one of the performers involved in the evening, which was a no-brainer for him to be involved with. “I was incredibly honoured and thrilled that they would think of me to do this,” he says. “I’m so blown away and so excited to be honouring him. The creative team behind the show really seemed to make the connection between myself and George, and

I’m so glad that they did. On top of that, being able to perform live with an orchestra – there really is nothing in the world like it. Any chance that I can get to do that, I absolutely will. It’s going to be a phenomenal experience.” Joining Sparro as part of the performance will be a wide array of artists. Among them are Aussie rock veteran Diesel, pop singer-songwriter Brendan Maclean, soul vocalist Jade MacRae and even Today Extra host and cabaret crooner David Campbell. Sparro, despite some connections with a few of the key singers on the bill, is excited for this to be the very first time he has sung with this exceptional collection of talent. “I used to mix in circles with Jade MacRae – we’d play around a lot of the same bars in Sydney when we were starting out around 12 or 13 years ago,” Sparro recalls. “I knew her briefly around that time, but weirdly we never actually performed together. I’m very familiar with Brendan’s work, and I obviously grew up seeing Diesel everywhere, but I think it’s the first time that I’ve done something with anyone on the bill. That’s always exciting – I love having a new experience.” What: George Michael: Praying For Time Where: Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House When: Thursday July 6 – Saturday July 8

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Bad//Dreems Going For The Gut By David James Young

FEATURE

lthough self-described “outsider rock” band Bad//Dreems still call Adelaide home, nearly all of their members have been distant from the city of churches in more recent times. Drummer Miles Wilson, for instance, packed up shop and relocated to Melbourne last year. Meanwhile, lead guitarist Alex Cameron – lovingly referred to by his bandmates as ‘Camo’ – and bassist/backing vocalist James ‘Bart’ Bartold found themselves working on the other side of the country. When you see the track names on Gutful, their second studio album – songs like ‘1000 Miles Away’ and ‘Million Times Alone’ – you know for a fact they’re coming from a very real place. “[Camo and I] were both working up in Darwin,” begins Bartold. “We were working at the same hospital – Camo was actually working in it, and I was doing the business side of things; helping people get in and out faster. He was living up there for about six months, while I was flying up for a few days each week to work there. It’s quite a way to travel, but I think it was good for us in its own way. “It was especially good for Camo, having the isolation that comes with going to a place like that. When we were sitting down to write stuff, we were definitely on the same page of being inspired by this place in the world that most people haven’t ever been to – even people in Australia. It definitely gave us a new sense of perspective and a new-found appreciation for the country.” Gutful arrives some two years after the band’s debut LP, Dogs At Bay. That record took Bad//Dreems to sold-out tours in their

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“I can remember Colin [Wynne], our engineer, and his joy when we’d walk into the studio. He’d slowly turn around in his chair, and I’d ask how many guitar tracks were on the song. He’d just say, ‘At least 55, James.’” own right alongside major support slots with At The Drive In, The Living End and DMA’s, and they could easily have ridden the momentum for a year longer. With the creative juices flowing again, however, the band opted to work towards album number two – and, in doing so, reflect just how much had changed along the way. “The way that we write and record has actually changed quite a bit since we first started,” says Bartold. “Our early days was just Camo firing off songs by himself in his bedroom. It evolved over time into us forming songs as a group and working on them together. Dogs At Bay was such a mismatch of pulling songs together from across that whole start-up period you have on a first album. With this one, we were testing a few songs out live, and then heading into the studio to see if they were able to work once we had them recorded. “From that point, the songs came together really quickly in the second half of last year. When we’re recording, we tend to split it up a bit – we’ll all be there for the first part, and then one half of us will piss off for a couple of days. If Ben [Marwe, vocals/guitar] and Camo are doing guitars, then Miles and I will give them some

space. It’s especially good if you’re in a band with someone like Camo, who can just put on guitar after guitar after guitar on a track.” Bartold laughs, before adding: “I can remember Colin [Wynne], our engineer, and his joy when we’d walk into the studio. He’d slowly turn around in his chair, and I’d ask how many guitar tracks were on the song. He’d just say, ‘At least 55, James.’” The first hint of Gutful came with the release of its lead single, ‘Mob Rule’, in October last year. It was followed up a matter of months later with ‘Feeling Remains’, which – while a fine song in its own right – was completely overshadowed by the hilarious music video. The clip imagines Bad//Dreems as an up-andcoming Aussie band in the ’90s, doing what most bands of the era were doing at that time – performing live on Recovery, the ABC Saturday morning music program hosted by the eccentric Dylan Lewis. Not only is the clip shot in a classic VHS style, it also features Lewis himself reprising the role of host and famously awkward interviewer. As far as Bartold is concerned, making the video for ‘Feeling Remains’ was a dream come true – even when it got a little too real at points.

“It was something that we all wanted to do for ages,” he says. “Anyone who’s met me drunk at night has heard me go on about recreating Recovery for a video – ‘We’re gonna do it,’ I kept saying. We ended up lucking out, because Ben’s brother actually works with Dylan. We pitched it to him, and his immediate response was, ‘Absolutely – you little bastards aren’t doing this thing without me.’ The next thing we know, he’s here and it’s all happening. “I remember Ben [Helweg], the director, asking Dylan if he wanted anything prepared for him before we started filming. Dylan just looked at him and said, ‘Mate, this is my fucking show!’ As soon as we were rolling, it was straight off the cuff with that classic Recovery weirdness. I was filming behind one of the cameras, and it actually made me feel a bit ill from how awkward it was. When you’ve got two guys that are that naturally awkward together... it was two very strange individuals having a very strange conversation.” What: Gutful out now through Ivy League With: The Creases Where: Metro Theatre When: Friday June 9

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FEATURE

The Music Of Cream Not Just A Tribute By Tom Parker

f you were to ask Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce or Ginger Baker what they thought of 21st century music-making, they’d likely give you either tongue-incheek ambiguity or a straight answer filled with regret. Enveloped by the busy era of the ’60s, Cream rose to prominence bound by not only unmatched charisma and stage malleability but instrumental precision – they were masters of their craft before becoming masters of the songbook, inventing conventions to last a lifetime, not a single generation. Subsequently, digesting modern-day methodology is a tough pill to swallow for Kofi Baker, son of legendary drummer Ginger. Driven by the pride and dignity of his father’s ingenuity, Baker believes educational impatience is overshadowing any push for technicality.

“Nowadays, they’re not really teaching musicians to be musicians,” Baker says. “They’re saying, ‘Let’s just play along with the song,’ and that’s not how musicians learnt to play in the old days – they didn’t play along with songs, they learnt how to read music and practise and learnt how to play their instrument. “Back in the jazz days, when drummers learnt to play, the left foot was very important. Nowadays, drummers get on the kit and they hear a rock song and their left foot sits still – they play bass drum, snare drum and right hand and just play along with the song. Once you’ve learnt how to play drums like that it’s hard to go back and learn everything from the start.” Bringing The Music Of Cream to Australia for the first time as part of the band’s 50th anniversary celebrations, Baker is

dogged in not only evading the devilish ‘tribute band’ status but conveying the spontaneity that rendered the original Cream unmatched. “We’re going to bring the experience of Cream back, which means we’re going to do a lot of jamming, a lot of improvisation and a lot of giving it everything we’ve got – that’s what Cream was all about. “We’re going to bring this jam rock music thing back to life, which no one’s doing. People have tried to do Cream but they’re not doing it with the fire that Cream had – they just try to copy Cream, which is not what Cream was about. Cream didn’t copy Cream, Cream played different every night and their live stuff was so much different to their studio stuff. You can’t play a tribute to Cream, because Cream didn’t copy themselves.

“So what you have to do is take the experience and take the attitudes of what these guys had, which me, Malcolm [Bruce, son of Jack] and Will [Johns, nephew of Clapton] really only know. There’s not a lot of people who have been as close to my dad, Jack and Eric than us, so we know what attitude to bring and we know what they were about.” Snobbishly titled so because Baker, Clapton and Bruce were the cream of the musical crop at the time, Cream enjoyed a helter skelter tenure between their formation in May 1966 and dissolution in November 1968. With their debut album Fresh Cream launching them to the top of the blues rock tree right from the get-go, every recording and live performance from there was a bonus. Indeed, despite their musical uniformity, Cream were never

“People have tried to do Cream but they’re not doing it with the fire that Cream had – they just try to copy Cream, which is not what Cream was about.” 12 :: BRAG :: 710 :: 26:04:17

able to completely escape the narcissism that embodied their building blocks. While Clapton was their ace of spades when it came to talent, acrimony never left Bruce and Baker behind, and their combustible relationship brought about the band’s ultimate demise. Cream’s farewell tour in October and November 1968 was known for its nascent supports, including Taste, Yes and Deep Purple – and the former bassist of the latter, Glenn Hughes, will be joining Baker, Bruce and Johns for The Music Of Cream showcase alongside Miles Davis collaborator Robben Ford. Not having played with Hughes or Ford before, Baker is unsure how the show will pan out. “We’re going to get together in LA a couple of days before the tour and see what happens,” Baker says. “I’m sure [Hughes] will step up to the plate, he’s a great player and a great singer. I’m hoping we can maybe put a few originals in the set and maybe come up with a few tunes, but we’ll see what time permits.” What: The Music Of Cream Where: State Theatre When: Thursday May 25

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FEATURE By Tyler Jenke

Bands Who Combine Male And Female Vocals Perfectly T

hroughout the history of music, there have been been some pretty amazing musical pairings – Simon and Garfunkel, Lennon and McCartney, Captain and Tennille; the list goes on. But some of the greatest pairings have come from the meeting of vocalists of different genders in a way that they complement each other brilliantly and maintain some gorgeous harmonies that would otherwise be unheard. There have been plenty of acts that have utilised this male/female dynamic, creating some fine tunes in the

process. Of course, Australia isn’t excluded from this category, with plenty of these groups coming from our fine country. Acts such as The Seekers, Angus & Julia Stone and San Cisco are all notable Aussie examples of the power ‘couple’ in music. Now, with San Cisco’s new record The Water set for release on Friday May 5, we’ve decided to take a look back at some of the greatest bands that have employed a healthy mix of female and male vocalists. San Cisco

San Cisco Fremantle’s San Cisco broke onto the Aussie music scene in 2011 thanks to their infectious hit ‘Awkward’. Fresh from capturing the hearts and minds of music fans around the country, they kept in the public eye by releasing their self-titled debut record in 2012, and their followup, Gracetown, in 2015. Featuring Scarlett Stevens and Jordi Davieson tackling vocal duties, San Cisco have managed to make a name for themselves not only in Australia, but internationally as well, after their famous cover of Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ went viral. With their third record, The Water, in the pipeline, the Western Australian quartet are set to dominate the airwaves yet again as they continue to do what we love to see them doing.

Sonic Youth

San Cisco photo by Ebony Talijancich

Undoubtedly one of the most famous alternative rock groups of all time, Sonic Youth formed in 1981, and throughout their 30-year career, managed to become one of the most influential and well-known groups in modern history. With a penchant for experimenting with odd time signatures, varied guitar tunings, and heavily experimental rhythmic structures, the group also pushed the boundaries of what was expected of a rock band by having two vocalists. Often seen as being fronted by Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth frequently had vocal duties fulfilled by Kim Gordon, who appeared as the lead vocalist on some of their biggest hits, such as ‘Kool Thing’ and ‘Bull In The Heather’. Sadly, the group split up in 2011 at the same time as Moore and Gordon’s marriage, but who knows if they’ll reconcile and if we’ll see another Sonic Youth tour?

The Dead Weather The Dead Weather are known to a casual music listener as “one of Jack White’s bands”, but to the discerning music fan, there’s

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“Some of the greatest pairings have come from the meeting of vocalists of different genders in a way that they complement each other brilliantly.” BRAG :: 710 :: 26:04:17 :: 13

FEATURE

Bands Who Combine Male And Female Vocals Perfectly The B-52’s

more to it than just that. The Dead Weather are a supergroup consisting of White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs), Alison Mosshart (The Kills), Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age) and Jack Lawrence (The Raconteurs, City And Colour). Formed in 2009 after White lost his voice before a Raconteurs show, the group is fronted equally by White and Mosshart, featuring vocal contributions from both artists. One of the most charismatic performers alive, Mosshart frequently overshadows White, adding an extra level of intensity to their live shows, and blowing away concert crowds in the process.

Angus & Julia Stone Angus & Julia Stone are a brother-and-sister duo from the Northern Beaches of Sydney, who started making music in 2006 – much to the Angus & Julia Stone

future delight of legions of fans around the world. The band found success almost immediately thanks to the intoxicating voice of Julia and the chilled-out contributions of Angus. The duo’s renown kept on growing, culminating in them reaching the top spot in the triple j Hottest 100 of 2010 with ‘Big Jet Plane’. Both Angus and Julia have embarked on solo journeys, with Angus’ solo career taking on three different names – once as Lady Of The Sunshine, once as Angus Stone, and most recently as Dope

Lemon. Meanwhile, Julia has also seen her fair share of success, and has been a featured vocalist on songs by artists such as Golden Features and Jarryd James.

McVie in 1970, and Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in 1974. With an established lineup, the Mac recorded a number of hits before they struck gold with Rumours.

that the band became as famous as it did, especially considering the lukewarm critical reception its earlier music garnered.

The vocal interplay between Buckingham and Nicks was one of the key factors in the album’s success, with the emotion and variety apparent between the two vocalists being especially apparent. Arguably, Fleetwood Mac’s status as a group that employs both female and male vocals appears to be one of main reasons

Chymes

Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac are one of the most successful rock groups of all time, with their magnum opus, 1977’s Rumours, having gone on to sell more than 45 million copies. Formed in 1967 by drummer Mick Fleetwood, the group added Christine

Indie-pop duo Chymes are the perfect example of a male and female vocal dynamic that works so perfectly, it almost seems like two halves of a single voice. Having met working on an earlier project, the Central Coast duo of lead vocalist Kiersten Nyman and vocalist/multiinstrumentalist Cameron Taylor discovered that their writing styles meshed, allowing them to develop dark and intimate lyrical themes, and deliver them as one. The pair have impressed with last year’s Grow EP, and their delicate new single ‘Bloom’ is evidence this songwriting partnership has plenty left in the tank.

The B-52’s The B-52’s have long been considered one of the finest new wave bands to emerge during the 1970s. Formed in Athens, Georgia in 1976, the group’s debut single ‘Rock Lobster’ was released the following year and took music fans by surprise due to its sheer kookiness. The song features a typically new wave approach to songwriting, but with Fred Schneider’s unconventional vocals backed by the equally adventurous vocals of Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson, music fans were

cautiously fanatical about the group. Sadly, Ricky Wilson – the original guitarist and older brother of Cindy – passed away in 1985, with the group continuing as a fourpiece. The infectious vocal styles of Schneider, Wilson and Pierson still remained, becoming one of the most well-known and beloved aspects of the group.

Arcade Fire Forming in Montreal, Canada in the early ’00s, Arcade Fire quickly rose to prominence among the most beloved indie rock collectives of recent years. With the success of debut record Funeral in 2004, the group toured internationally, receiving awards and acclaim along the way, before eventually settling down to work on a follow-up, Neon Bible, which landed in 2007. Arcade Fire’s 2010 record, The Suburbs, won the Grammy Award for album of the year, leading many music fans to seriously question, “Who the fuck are The Suburbs?” But the heart and soul of the band can be traced back to its membership, and most notably its dual lead vocalists, the husband-and-wife team of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne. The duo’s vocals complement each other in such a way that while one takes the lead, the other is able to perfectly accompany the other to the point their vocals sound almost like another instrument in the mix, rather than another singer. xxx

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URZILA CARLSON

UNACCEPTABLE

“It’s weird,” says Carlson. “Every time I walk out onstage and people are sitting there, I’m like, ‘For me?’”

From time to time in this business, an interview with an artist will derail entirely. Interviewees can sometimes be reticent or occasionally even hostile. In the case of Urzila Carlson, however, conversation comes to a grinding halt because she’s so goddamn hilarious.

Her profi le in Australia has certainly been helped by regular appearances on television shows such as Have You Been Paying Attention?, Spicks And Specks and spots on Comedy Up Late and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Gala. Which brings us back to her new Sydney Comedy Festival, Unacceptable.

By Joanne Brookfi eld

“Every time you ask someone that question you could emotionally scar them to a point where they’re going to snap and rip your head off one day and shit in your lung,” she says.

“Every time I walk out onstage and people are sitting there, I’m like, ‘For me?’”

It’s not one of my questions she’s referring to, just to be clear. We’ve been talking about the many things she finds unacceptable – which is what her latest Sydney Comedy Festival show is all about – and she’s delivered this punchline with her trademark timing and precision. Since accidentally starting stand-up almost ten years ago (her friend Leon Fisk basically tricked her into an open mic spot saying it was a work thing she had to do), Carlson has been on the up and up.

Born in South Africa and now calling Auckland home, where she lives with her wife and two kids, Carlson has sold out every solo show she’s performed in New Zealand since 2009. She’s also won Best Female Comedian at the 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 NZ Comedy Guild Awards, as well as the coveted TV3 People’s Choice Award two years in a row at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival. In Australia she’s equally as popular, selling out runs at festivals around the country.

“‘Unacceptable’ is such a powerful word,” she says. “You can stop arguments with it.” This time around, she’s tackling everything from the minutiae of everyday life through to bigger issues. “There are some big things that have happened in my life that I find unacceptable that I talk about, that affect everyone in the community and the world.”

FEATURE

THE BRAG’S GUIDE TO

PHILL JUPITUS

The show will revisit a few of the topics she also discusses in her recently released memoir Rolling With The Punchlines, such as having children. “In Unacceptable I talk about how we’ve got the two kids and we struggled to get to the point where we’ve got the two kids,” Carlson says. Social situations can often get out of hand on the topic of parenting, she suggests – especially when it comes to insensitive questions asked of childless couples. “It’s none of your damn business,” is Carlson’s default reply – and if you emerge from the conversation with your lungs intact, you should count yourself lucky.

WHERE: The Comedy Store WHEN: Tuesday May 16 – Friday May 19

JUPLICITY

By Jacob Colliver

Phill Jupitus is a master of many realms. As an actor, performance poet, cartoonist, musician, improvisational comedian and podcast host – as well as a regular guest on QI and team captain on Never Mind The Buzzcocks for 19 years – he’s gathered an incredible and eclectic skill set. Having just finished performing in the recent stage musical run of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Jupitus is ecstatic to get back into the wonderful world of stand-up. “The looseness of it – the freeform nature of it – is what appeals to me,” the UK comedian says. “That is always how the comedy evolves. It’s almost a sort of improvisational mess, that then starts to achieve density, and weight, and shape, and form. It’s just through doing it repeatedly. That’s what I’ve always liked, is that in these gigs, different thoughts will come to you because you’re a human being onstage and your mind is working. “I did a show years and years ago about Star Wars that started out as a five-minute routine,” Jupitus recalls. “Just five minutes of gags about Star Wars, that within a month was a 20-minute set just about Star Wars. Within six months, it was a one-hour show just about Star Wars. The last time I did it, after a UK tour, it was longer than the film Star Wars. I was doing a comedy routine that was longer than the film it was taking the piss out of. That, to my mind, defines how I work. You’ve got to be constantly squeezing every idea and notion. Find the new in what you do.”

Describing his latest show Juplicity as “low-energy chaos”, Jupitus will be heading to Sydney this Comedy Festival season with a multitude of incredible stories from his life. Comedy comes from truth, he says, and he loves the thrill and freedom of the stage. He explains that he feels his “performing brain” take over while weaving a tale, and often finds himself shocked at what he’s capable of when locked into the ethereal mindscape of improvisation – but he finds his own surprise to be half the fun, too. “I am personally willing to sacrifice myself for the entertainment of strangers,” Jupitus laughs. “There’s something I talk about in this bit that I’m going to be doing in Australia that I can’t believe I’m saying these words onstage in front of strangers. It’s a true story about my childhood, my mum, and something she told me that is so personal and harrowing, I find myself thinking, ‘Why are you saying this to these people? I’m sure they liked you.’ “The audience reaction is somewhere between open-mouthed silent horror and a whiplash, like when you get in a car shunt. I’m not going to spoil it by even telling you what it’s about. If you want to know my horrifying personal secret, then come and see me.”

“I did a show years and years ago about Star Wars that started out as a fiveminute routine … The last time I did it, after a UK tour, it was longer than the film Star Wars.”

WHERE: Factory Theatre WHEN: Friday April 28 – Saturday April 29

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THE BRAG’S GUIDE TO SYDNEY COMEDY FESTIVAL 2017

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out & about Queer(ish) matters with Arca Bayburt

arts reviews ■ Film

BERLIN SYNDROME

Where Do Sydney’s Lesbians Go At Night?

In cinemas now Style can be blessing or curse, and for acclaimed Aussie director Cate Shortland, it’s quickly becoming a crutch. While Berlin Syndrome fits neatly into her oeuvre of femalecentric, art-house-affected thrillers, it hamstrings itself with sluggish pacing and a derivative narrative core. Clare (Teresa Palmer) is as listless as backpackers come, drifting into Berlin on a whim, seeking “those life experiences” everyone talks about. She drifts straight into the arms – and bed – of local teacher Andi (Max Riemelt), and wishes she didn’t have to leave. But when Andi leaves for work the next day, he hasn’t left a key, and the door is conspicuously barred.

vidently hell froze over last night, and I ended up bar slumming on King Street.

I don’t do well in large groups of gay women. A handful of lesbians, no problem. 100 ethnocentric lesbians, wearing T-shirt dresses and trucker hats, staring each other down? Problem. I become incredibly cunty. I make inappropriate comments. Friend mentions she loves the ol’ dyke swagger; that John Wayne-esque cocky strut paired with a rageinducing perma-smirk. I say shit like, ‘Swagger? Swagger is indicative of brain damage.’ If someone hits on me, rather than being flattered or at all graceful in my reception, I insult them. “I WANT RUBY ROSE TO SIT ON MY FACE!”

of a lesbian haunt. I mean sure, it was full of lesbians last night, because it was a weeknight. That sad little Tuesday is all we’ve got left in this place. Straight immigration is a blight we’ve not been able to cure or outmanoeuvre, because lesbians don’t have the culture or the capital or the cultural capital to open and sustain a dedicated nightclub.

“GOOD RIDDANCE: I HATE FLANNEL. Y’ALL CAN HAVE IT.”

Where do lesbians go at night? It’s a question asked by many a well-meaning tourist wandering around Sydney, confused about where the party is. A new friend hailing from San Francisco asked me this. I reined in my bitter attitude long enough to stop myself from saying, “Honey, this is Sydney – the party’s over.”

The fragmentation of lesbian identity is happening fast. I walked past a Kmart display the other day and the mannequins were dressed in what the early ’00s would call ‘lesbian couture’. “That’s it,” I thought to myself, staring at this plaid-covered, gaydarscrambling mess. “It’s over. These awful stereotypical totems have finally been consumed by heterosexual culture’s unimaginative, gaping, greedy maw.” Good riddance: I hate flannel. Y’all can have it.

Madonna’s ‘This Used To Be My Playground’ started playing as soon as my friends and I remarked that this bar (which shall remain unnamed) used to be more

I suppose my shit attitude around massive groups of gay women comes from that tiny bit of internalised homophobia I haven’t managed to evict yet,

…is what the extremely drunk lesbian said as she slumped over the pool table, arse peeking out of her bike shorts.

this week… On Thursday April 27, head over to Lazybones Lounge in Marrickville for Queer As Fvck, a spectacularly queer night supporting community artists, performers and musicians. Featuring The Last Exposure, The Marrakesh Club and La Vif, the night will be hosted by Ms Kaala Moxy. Tickets are available on the door.

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On Friday April 28, The Shift Club is hosting The Hellfire Club’s Annual Uniform Party. Now, Hellfire’s idea of what constitutes a uniform is quite broad. Feel free to dress up however you want – the only thing that’s a requirement is effort. Hellfire encourages its party virgins to check out its Facebook page to get some outfit inspiration. The party starts early and goes well into the night. DJs to be announced.

and the fact that the homogenised lesbian monoculture we’ve got here just makes me want to push my face into a dog’s turd rather than participate in it. I can’t seem to help coming back, though – I go to gay parties as much as I can, always hoping for something different. I’ll still check out the Bank Hotel despite its current incarnation as party town for a legion of poppedcollar, boat-shoe-wearing Kings Cross refugees. So, where do lesbians go at night? I don’t know, but I wish there was some place that wasn’t full of caricatures. I sometimes don’t feel gay enough, which is ridiculous. An old friend of mine – an American who moved here some years ago – was always slightly bemused by the lesbian scene here. She said, “It’s like people are trying really hard to be read as gay. It’s very strange, I’ve never seen anything like it.” It might be that the absence of a physical place to gather where you don’t need to signal your gayness plays a part in that, because by being there, you are automatically assumed to be gay. Maybe because our spaces bleed into the spaces of other queers or are borrowed spaces, we feel the need to constantly telegraph that we’re gay, because we’re never really in a place where others can be sure of what we are.

Berlin Syndrome mines the classic fear of the other that fuelled the Taken franchise, but takes it in the opposite direction. Instead of a ruthless hitman, Clare is an anaemic innocent. How else could she fall for the charms of so immediately disconcerting a fella as Andi, who sets off alarm bells even without the looming threat of the film’s title? Shortland has a knack for depicting sex in frank and rousing fashion: Clare and Andi’s first tryst does a better job of misleading the audience than Andi’s unusual fl irtation. As his head dips between her thighs, she goes to muffle her own moans, until Andi brushes her hands aside. “No one can hear you,” he

breathes, and in his voice we hear both edges of that blade ringing through the abandoned apartment. But while Shortland and Snowtown/Jasper Jones screenwriter Shaun Grant draw on the thriller genre for some particularly knuckle-whitening sequences, Berlin Syndrome succumbs to its own art house aspirations, and we languish in Andi’s prison along with Clare to little dramatic effect. Bryony Marks’ legato strings only deepen the sense of exhaustion. In effect, Shortland is infl icting the same conditions on her audience that Andi creates, drawing the experience out as long as possible; hoping that the longer you’re

■ Film

THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS In cinemas now Eight films deep in this franchise, you best believe you know what you’re in for. Every insightful, reasoned criticism of this film can be easily brushed aside by yelling the word “CARS!” directly in the face of the critic saying it. Head honcho car boy Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) is enjoying his honeymoon in Cuba when he is made an offer he can’t refuse by the mysterious Cipher (Charlize Theron). Days later, on a high-stakes mission with the team, Dom goes rogue, presenting his makeshift ‘family’ with their greatest challenge yet – their own man turned against them. (Full disclosure: this critic’s only previous encounter with the Fast And The Furious saga is 2006’s Tokyo Drift – huge thanks to F&F historian Tom Hogan for his insight into the mythology of the franchise. Having said that, knowledge of callback gags is hardly a necessity for this kind of film.) F8 sees F. Gary Gray (of Straight Outta Compton fame) take the wheel from our boy James Wan, and Gray brings much of the polish of his last outing along with him. I could debate just how vital characterisation is for such a film, but… CARS! Diesel’s a big fan of the word ‘family’ when it comes to the crew, and it’s not hard to see why – the series regulars form a tight-knit team offered no introduction, and the audience instantly gets on board. It’s hard not to, considering they’re literally pursued by a wrecking ball within minutes of first appearing on screen. After seven films together, these people don’t need excessive development. Nor do the cameo roles need much dialogue, with Helen Mirren’s cheeky appearance being a particular gem. It must be said that the franchise’s great strength is in its unspoken diversity, true of both cast and crew. There are no Power Rangers-esque nods to how

progressive the filmmakers are; just a bunch of different people blowing shit up as a family. Subtlety is not in F&F’s wheelhouse, nor should it be. In fact, F8’s appeal is in its total lack of adherence to anything resembling nuance, or even the laws of physics. Cipher is your classic ’90s hacker depiction, whose touch-typing skills can give her total control over every car in New York City within seconds, leading to one of the film’s most exciting action set pieces. Unfortunately, despite Theron’s chilling, ice-eyed turn as Cipher, her villain lacks real motivation. The globetrotting hacktivist could have been so much more, but is instead a glorified hostage taker. What surprised this critic most is just how many on-screen deaths there are; these former illegal street racers commit so many murders, you’d second guess Man Of Steel’s record for collateral body count. The only real tragedy is the occasional wasted opportunity for a postmurder action movie quip. But this is a big, silly action movie not designed for asking tough questions, and the tough questions will surely provide hilarious conversation fuel for the more probing cinemagoer. Will Jason Statham’s late-game shootout have any long-term effects on the baby he’s carrying around? Is there any problem that can’t be resolved by Dwayne Johnson doing a punch on it? Can torpedoes truly be redirected by hand? And could this series possibly get any more ridiculous than the moment Tyrese Gibson takes out five Russian separatists with a Lamborghini car door? One can only hope – with the fate of the furious determined, the future remains endless possibility. David Molloy

That said, I still think we should abolish trucker hats.

Also on Friday April 28, Bhenji Ra takes over the Museum of Contemporary Art with MCA Artbar. It’s bringing together artistic collectives for a night of entertainment and education on the world of imitation, and be sure to get your tickets early as these events tend to sell out fast. There’ll be Ah Mer Ah Su, Bay Angels and The Pioneers with DJs to be announced.

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arts in focus

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trapped within her claustrophobic creation, the better you’ll come to appreciate her artistic vision. Worse is that Grant’s script admits to its own literary aspirations, citing examples more complex than what it can offer. We follow Andi throughout his day, teaching at high school before attending his father’s lectures on literature; in his lecture, Erich (Matthias Habich) cites classic narratives with dual protagonists and parallel narratives. Grant is too eager

here to champion those authors in whose shadows he dwells. With its relentless grey and interminable pacing, Berlin Syndrome offers some remarkably tense and disquieting sequences lost amid urban decay. Had she seen fi t to relinquish her ‘art house’ status, Shortland may have made a more effective captor, but our escape could not come soon enough. David Molloy

PORK PIE

Our friends across the ditch have struck gold again. Pork Pie is the latest film by director Matt Murphy, charting a road trip by out-of-luck novelist Jon and his new mates Luke (who’s secretly stolen the Mini Cooper they’re driving) and Keira (an undercover vegan activist). Keen cinemagoers will recognise this modern remake of the legendary 1981 Kiwi film Goodbye Pork Pie. Pork Pie opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday May 4, and we’ve got ten in-season double passes to give away. Enter the race at thebrag.com.

five minutes WITH

THE BEDROOM PHILOSOPHER

■ Theatre

BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO Playing at the Old Fitz Theatre until Saturday May 6 Playwright Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo takes an alternative approach to the Iraq War. Under the direction of Claudia Barrie, Mad March Hare Theatre Company and Red Line Productions give shape to this thought-provoking play at the Old Fitz. Stranded between life and death, this is a battlefield with no front and no back. There is a surprising amount of humour throughout Joseph’s play, concerned with the instabilities of Iraq as well as the stain of imperialism that won’t wipe away. Kev (Josh Anderson) and Tom (Stephen Multari) are two arrogant American marines tasked with guarding a tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. When things go awry and shots are fired, strange things start happening. The complexities of the conflict take their toll on the marines, along with an Iraqi gardener-turned-translator named Musa (Andrew Lindqvist) and, of course, a philosophising tiger (Maggie Dence). Dence plays the tiger with dry wit and a cat-like physicality. Her cynical musings come out as a throaty growl. It’s the existential angst of the tiger that touches the Iraq conflict like a hot knife – Dence asks: “Why am I here and why aren’t I gone?” And as the play unfolds, ghosts populate the streets of Baghdad, unable to be properly freed from the carnage of war. Bengal Tiger is powerfully acted, though Anderson is particularly strong – and hilarious – as the dopey, combat-affected Kev (think Jesse from Breaking Bad). Particularly interesting is the way his (and the tiger’s) afterlife enlightenment fails to bring any comprehension of the conflict – it remains opaque. In this sense, knowledge brings no relief and nowhere to go. Plaguing the imagination of Musa are the flamboyant and depraved Uday Hussein (Tyler De Nawi), summoned through the tyrant’s looted, gold-plated possessions, and his younger sister, Hadia (Megan Smart). Overall, the division between life and death is managed effectively, thanks in part to a visually striking design by Benjamin Brockman and Isabel Hudson. This is not a didactic play with neat metaphors, nor is a play that revels in its own philosophical commentary. The action is fierce, even gut-wrenching, and the humour is twisted. Ultimately, Bengal Tiger is a sketch of suggestive comparisons and thoughtful parallels that hover momentarily – mind they don’t dissipate when you leave the theatre.

he Bedroom Philosopher: Cat Show is coming to Sydney Comedy Festival. What can audiences expect? Spoiler alert: it’s me playing songs about cats while dressed as a cat. There are two PowerPoint presentations about lost cat posters and the ‘history of cats’ project I did in grade three. And a photo tour of cats I had growing up. Cat-specific songs include ‘I Think My Cat Has Got Depression’ where I run through all the mental illnesses and compare them to cat behaviour. There’s an eight-and-a-halfminute ballad about a heroic mattress protector, a song about dodgy share houses and a dance routine to Beyoncé. Go on Sydney, take a chance on an undercat, you money-worshipping weirdos.

Just how many cat puns are in the show? Hashtag ‘Feline Good’. There are not only five to ten cat puns (per minute) but there are even cat pans. I have my own little tray onstage with me. There’s nothing elegant about tripping over your own toilet. We’ve all been there, right? In 2014, you wrote the book Funemployed: Life As An Artist In Australia. Have your funemployment conditions changed since then? I recently held an annual general meeting in my mind and made a moving speech to myself. I vowed that all these years of self-employed work experience were paying off, and that it was more

important than ever to think of my bedroom as an office, and to adopt more stringent nine-to-five hours to my creativity. We decided that the company motto of “sorry” had to go, and that we needed to hold our heads high and ignite a bonfire of pride in our hearts for the ideas farm we’d built from the ground up. The next morning I slept in, fired myself and came home drunk to find my locks changed and an ad up for my position. I reapplied, was promoted to CEO and sold the company to pay back the Bank of Mum. Is there something lacking about ‘pure’ standup comedy that pushes you in more creative directions? It’s not a matter of being ‘better’ than, say, most other stand-ups. It’s just that I’m clearly more talented, so I have to branch out into other art forms the way, say, a river must burst its banks during a storm and ruin bogans’ carpets. The bogans may try and rub my nose in it, but it’s been so long since the initial ‘act’ that I am unlikely to remember why I’m being punished. The best approach for an artist like me is disciplining when I’m young, preferably at a nationally recognised training academy like NIDA. I am the original Cat Blanchett. What: The Bedroom Philosopher: Cat Show Where: Giant Dwarf When: Saturday April 29

Annie Murney

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FEATURE

HOW WHITE AUSTRALIA AND

PICNIC AT HANGING TARNISHED ROCK THE LEGACY OF A SACRED ABORIGINAL SITE BY JOSEPH E A R P

REMEMBERING THE ROCK: A History Obscured By Fiction “The myth of vanishing white schoolgirls is obsessively retold, while the removal and displacement of Aboriginal people and cultures is actively ignored.” – AMY SPIERS

he words ‘Hanging Rock’ have been drained of meaning in 21st century Australia. They are vague signifiers now, snipped off from their source like a budding plant pulled from the ground. What do we talk about when we talk about Hanging Rock? Certainly not the site itself, a six-millionyear-old, 105-metre-high behemoth located in Wurundjeri territory, near Victoria’s Macedon ranges. The ancient volcanic blister is almost the last thing those two words denote – and its history means even less, blemished and forgotten thanks to decades of counterfeit stories carefully laid over the top. Or perhaps that should read ‘story’. After all, it is almost wholly thanks to the prevailing power of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic At Hanging Rock – adapted into the classic Australian film by Peter Weir in 1975 – that fiction has obscured the cultural history of the site. The book’s invented heroines, chief among them the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Miranda, have

“The legacy of Picnic At Hanging Rock inspires cheap,

been implanted into the place, treated with all the reverence we afford to deeply ingrained cultural myths. For most white Australians, it is no longer of any matter that Hanging Rock itself was a dividing point for four Aboriginal territories, or that it sits at the very centre of historically and culturally valuable indigenous land. Nor is it recognised that the outcrop held such a degree of power to the local people – established tribes who had lived in the area for more than 26,000 years – that they refused to climb it. And, perhaps predictably, it is almost never acknowledged as a site of atrocities committed by white settlers, with introduced diseases such as smallpox ravaging the local population. No. Instead, Hanging Rock has slowly come to denote something entirely different. Its meaning has been hijacked by the film and book that bear its name, and the site now conjures up neither the indigenous history of our country, nor even the country itself. Hanging Rock is code, a stand-in for images of white virginal women, floating through the outback, lost to time and to their people. And it is a key part in one big white vanishing myth Caucasian Australians have obsessively told themselves for decades; an integral cog in the reshaping of this country’s history and a wide-scale repurposing of its landscape. That refitting continues to this day. The legacy of Picnic At Hanging Rock inspires cheap, hasty pilgrimages by

“Hanging Rock is a key part in one big white vanishing myth Caucasian Australians have obsessively told themselves for decades.” 18 :: BRAG :: 710 :: 26:04:17

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Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)

FEATURE

“I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water. I felt that story, if you call it a story – that the thing that happened on St. Valentine’s Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.” – JOAN LINDSAY

hasty pilgrimages by (predominantly white) tourists.”

(predominantly white) tourists, as travellers visit the site to bellow lines from the film off its uppermost point. Even the Lonely Planet guide to the area, not usually a text type to be dotted with even accidental irony, puts it thus: “Those fey young girls in virginal white dresses have been replaced by large robust groups of picnickers, hordes of car club members involved in sparkplugchanging competitions and, well, anyone who can pay the $5 admission price. The two most important calendar events are the annual Hanging Rock Picnic (usually sometime in late February) with its emphasis on regional grog, and the New Year’s Day Hanging Rock Horse Races.” This is the legacy of the novel and film. Though they were never calculated attacks on indigenous culture, both have contributed to a changing cultural landscape – one in which Aboriginal memory has been replaced first by virgins in white and then by “regional grog”. “I think there’s a national shame going on,” writer and academic Amy Spiers tells the BRAG. “It’s difficult to talk about the frontier past. That’s why a lot of people are so invested in denying and avoiding it.” There is a gasped line in Weir’s film that has become troublingly prescient now. Confronted by the sight of Hanging Rock for the first time, one of Picnic’s heroines dreamily mutters that the monolith has been “waiting a million years, just for us”. These days, the aside no longer reads like the tip of the hat towards youthful arrogance that it was meant to be – now, it has taken on the eerie ring of truth. After all, Hanging Rock does largely belong to Weir and Lindsay’s protagonists. It is no longer of the earth. Instead, it is an artificial marker, designed to highlight fictitious Caucasian pains at the expense of very real Aboriginal ones – a great, towering fiction, hastily assembled and reinforced by years of cultural worship. In 21st century Australia, Hanging Rock is not itself.

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AGAINST THE BUSH: Joan Lindsay And The Colonial Narrative

“Appleyard College was already, in the year nineteen hundred, an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a hopeless misfi t in time and place.” – PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, JOAN LINDSAY

oan Lindsay’s Picnic At Hanging Rock is almost as famous for what its pages don’t contain as for what they do. The legacy of the sparsely written, elegiac novel has been assured by its notable lack of an ending, and its central conundrum – the disappearance of three beautiful young schoolchildren and a teacher at Hanging Rock – never meets a satisfactory resolution. “The College Mystery, like that of the celebrated case of the Marie Celeste, seems likely to remain forever unsolved,” teases the book’s very last line. Instead, what Lindsay aims to explore is the effects of the disappearance, as a range of further evils befall the confused, enigma-obsessed residents of Appleyard College and its surrounding township. Those left behind – chief among them Sara, a strange and sexually ambiguous young girl infatuated with one of the missing characters, Miranda – find they can never fill the absence that has been gouged into their lives. Instead, they tear themselves apart, meeting a range of violent and unfortunate ends, as the bush that swallowed up their friends remains silent, inaccessible and evil.

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Anne-Louise Lambert as Miranda in Picnic At Hanging Rock

“Caucasian Australians obsessively share tales of white tragedies to blot out other crimes they were actively complicit in.” The novel has also earned a place in history thanks to its author’s considerable skills as a myth-maker. Aside from being a fine writer of prose, Lindsay knew how to sell her work. She long insisted that the novel was based on a true story, and worked hard to ensure that its narrative was regarded with all the hazily defined prestige and terror we afford to horror stories told around a campfire.

White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia’s LostIn-The-Bush Myth.

Some were so convinced that truth hid within the pages of Lindsay’s slim novel that they began to scour the State Library, desperately searching for some historical record to back up the myth. Lindsay remained coy about it all. “I can’t tell you whether the story is fact or fiction,” she told Melbourne’s The Herald at the time. “But a lot of very strange things have happened around the area of Hanging Rock.”

Indeed, the trope has become so recognisable that Tilley is able to recite its bare-bones structure without missing a beat. “A white person goes into the bush and becomes suddenly disoriented – they may have been able to see a track, and it’s as though the track suddenly disappeared. Or maybe they might have known what time of day it was and all of a sudden they become disoriented about what time it is.

Yet despite Lindsay’s vague prompting, amateur sleuths never found what they were looking for. They were being actively misled. As Terence O’Neill notes in Joan Lindsay: A Time For Everything, the origins of Picnic are mundane. The novel was not born of some great, ancient evil, or an obscured horror – instead, it was sparked off by “a brief article in [a] school magazine” that Lindsay read when she was young, written “by a Miss McCraw … describing a school photographic excursion she led to Hanging Rock”.

“Then they get very panicked and they either die and are never recovered or they are rescued by their gallant white community. But either way there tends to be a marker placed on the landscape recognising where they were and where they died … and then the story gets retold.”

“There are striking parallels in Lindsay’s novel to a number of the descriptions in the article,” O’Neill continues. “In both, the picnic party is accompanied by a teacher named Miss McCraw … in both they arrive at the foot of the Rock in the late afternoon. In the article they depart the school ‘freshly clad’ and return at night as ‘sorry objects’.” That explains why the host of Picnicobsessed private detectives returned to the novel empty-handed, lacking the sources they were so convinced must be hiding out there, somewhere. Despite all Lindsay’s carefully placed asides to the media – despite her attempts to slot her tale into reality itself – her work came about from vague generalisations and a rather unremarkable magazine article. Yet Lindsay was taking cues from her world. She might not have been assembling an eerie ghost story out of a mess of scattered facts like she thought, but she was subconsciously picking up on troubling biases that white Australia seems unwilling to address; pervasive lies that colonisation has left behind. That her heroines are not “sorry objects” but a heap of traumatised settlers is telling in itself, and helps lump Picnic in with a long and storied history of Australian white vanishing myths. “The white vanishing myth started right from colonisation,” Elspeth Tilley explains to the BRAG. Tilley would know: as the Associate Professor of English at Massey University in New Zealand, she is one of the chief experts on colonial narratives and the author of

“I studied it, and found hundreds of examples – I think the first one I found was about seven years after colonisation. And the basic structure is the same. These tales have a familiar kind of feel to them; familiar now because there have been so many hundreds of them in Australian culture.”

Tilley accepts that the structure has its roots in reality: white settlers did of course go missing, and some of the monuments set down in the landscape to honour them still remain. But she argues the sheer volume of the stories has drowned out the historical record, as Caucasian Australians obsessively share tales of white tragedies to blot out other crimes they were actively complicit in. “There were obviously real white vanishings, but they became overtold,” Tilley says. “They became retold and fictionalised intensively. So probably for every five real vanishings there were about a hundred to 200 retellings that were fictionalised exaggerations.” In that way, Picnic is the definitive white vanishing myth – an almost beat-by-beat recreation of the subgenre’s essential form. After all, the missing girls do become disoriented; one of them is recovered by their gallant white community; and, tellingly, a watch does stop just before they disappear. That last point is more telling than one might think. The old stopped watch trope is not just some idle way of creating tension, or creakily heightening the central characters’ disorientation – it is, Tilley explains, a fundamental signifier of colonial anxiety. “European people bring Cartesian ideas of time when they come and colonise,” Tilley says. “They just impose them on places as though that’s what time is. But our understanding of time is actually cultural – time is what we have chosen to describe it, it’s not a thing that exists as a material reality. Indigenous peoples have their own measuring of time. So when colonisers come and impose these things, there’s always an underlying anxiety or recognition that they have put something arbitrary in

“Picnic is the definitive white vanishing myth – an almost beat-by-beat recreation of the subgenre’s essential form.” 20 :: BRAG :: 710 :: 26:04:17

place and pretended that that’s the way that things are. “It’s almost like a repressed knowledge,” she continues. “Colonisers know that they’re colonising when they do it, but they kind of try and tell themselves that they are civilising and being very generous. But there’s always this repressed knowledge that, ‘Actually, we just marched in here and used a legal fiction to steal the land, committed massacres…’ That knowledge is there, and that knowledge seems to come out via anxieties about space and time. Anxiety erupts in that everything we think of as normal and rational might actually come undone if we stray off the path a little bit.” Of course, in order to tell that particular story, the landscape itself must be painted as inherently hostile – as fundamentally foreign, in a way that the settlers and colonialists themselves are never seen as being. To that end, in Lindsay’s novel, Hanging Rock is a kind of mythic, unfeeling threat. It is unreadable; its recesses are “teeming with unheard rustlings and twittering, scufflings, scratchings”. In many ways, it is the antagonist of the book: in lieu of a human threat, it swells up to become a hostile force, killing off up to three separate characters. And yet even still, the book misrepresents Hanging Rock. In her search to transform the outcrop into a vicious, alien force, Lindsay was obliged to obscure the reality she so endlessly claimed to be capturing. “Hanging Rock is explicitly rendered in the book as trackless,” Tilley explains. “But of course what [we] have found with all the research that has been [done] is that it was a heavily tracked space already. It was a meeting point and a training point for multiple tribes. It was never a wilderness. But the white mythology always goes in and creates a wilderness, erasing everything that there was before.” Hanging Rock is no villain, nor does it deserve to be described as one. Rather than some maw of ancient evil, swallowing up schoolgirls as they trot into its crevasses, the Rock is of profound cultural significance; rich with history and dotted with tracks. That it has been so desecrated by a book routinely described as one of Australia’s best isn’t some minor fib – it is one tragedy among many, all of them obscured by a weepy schoolgirl named Miranda and her waif-like, wearisome friends.

CEMENTING THE SELF: How Hanging Rock Ignited The Aussie Industry

“Whenever anyone starts to talk about Australian fi lm, Picnic is going to come up very quickly. Because it’s a memorable fi lm … It’s profound.” – DAVID THOMPSON

hough Peter Weir might now be considered one of Australia’s most important directors – a cultural icon responsible for work as varied as Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and yes, Picnic At Hanging Rock – the Sydneysider wasn’t always held in such high regard. In fact, once upon a time, he was considered a bit of a hack. Weir’s first five films were slightly sloppily assembled thrillers and dark comedies, and he built his reputation on such bizarre, fascinating fare as Homesdale and The Cars That Ate Paris. The latter might actually be his most interesting work; a 1974 horrorcomedy hybrid that remains a brilliantly effective take on small town ignorance and the intertwined evils of industrialisation and violence. But although such work might have been mould-breaking, it wasn’t exactly winning Weir a great deal of acclaim. Despite the accolade he picked up for Homesdale – an AACTA Award in directing – The Cars That Ate Paris failed to find an audience, instead coming into direct contact with a near landslide of critical derision. It was too ugly, they argued; too vicious, too lacking in cultural worth. It’s hard to say whether or not such a uniform critical cold shoulder influenced Weir’s work moving forward. After all, the

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FEATURE

“You cannot argue the value of fiction that has been built on years of colonial oppression while simultaneously claiming to honour the historical dead.”

The Miranda Must Go campaign

the rocks. So in telling the story about this trackless mountain, they went and put a track in it.” That’s not to mention the diminishing of the film’s lone indigenous actor. As much as Weir’s Picnic claims to be about the Australian landscape, it underplays the agency of this country’s real owners.

“Picnic drew from European cinema instead of local art, and had an air of respectability about it that industry and political figures could not help but love.” director is famously tight-lipped, giving only the rare interview and even then deigning to talk more about technical concerns than personal ones. But whatever his motivation, it’s certainly true that he changed after Cars. Gone were the broad, ocker voices he stuffed into his films. Gone was the humour and the stylised scenes of cruelty. Instead, he fully embraced the European masters – craftsmen like Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni – and headed off into the bush to shoot a film about schoolgirls disappearing into a mountainside. In the process, Weir solidified all that was troubling about Lindsay’s book. His version of Picnic is obsessed with ideas of repression and regression; one that can’t take its eyes off its virginal characters as they swoon around homoerotically in white and lace up each other in fetishised corsets. He emphasised lust, painting Hanging Rock as some great, phallic force of sexual freedom, one that tears apart the thin veneer of respectability draped over Appleyard College to reveal the teeming sexuality below. “While the novel plays it cool, more interested in social mores and their unravelling, the movie is all heat,” writes author and critic Megan Abbott. Of course, in order to make such a thematic case, Weir was forced to tap into all sorts of underlying biases and an undercurrent of colonial guilt. Using Australian nature as a kind of elemental force required Weir to paint it – and, by extension, Aboriginal culture – as inherently lesser. The rock is primitive; base. It is as removed from ideas like ‘culture’ as the Appleyard girls and their corsets are from nature. Yet even as he disparaged the locale, Weir still endlessly romanticised it, casting Hanging Rock as a savage, seductive beast; one that enraptures and fascinates its white victims. “It’s colonial nostalgia,” Tilley argues. “Colonising people think [their subjects have] lost something in the process of becoming civil. They sort of believe they are further along on this evolutionary hierarchy – that

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they’re further along and that they’re better evolved. But they also miss this deep, spiritual connection with the land. So they will try to reclaim that through motifs of white people merging with the landscape, as they do in Picnic At Hanging Rock.” Not that any Australian critics picked up on such subconscious biases at the time. Indeed, Picnic was widely hailed as a masterpiece upon its release, almost unequivocally loved by critics and the audiences that flocked to see it. A box office smash, it is often cited as beginning the Australian New Wave, inspiring filmmakers such as Bruce Beresford and George Miller and cementing Weir’s own reputation. It helped that the film depicted a vision of Australia that the nation’s government was keen to sell. Rather than the cruel, viciously imaginative horror films being produced at the time, Picnic drew from European cinema instead of local art, and had an air of respectability about it that industry and political figures could not help but love. Picnic touched a nerve for white Australia – touched a nerve and found a home, almost immediately finding itself assimilated into the Caucasian culture of the land. “It came at a time when Australians were trying to depict themselves on screen and trying to formulate a national character,” says Spiers. “So you can see why it’s captured the public imagination.” Yet the scars the film inflicted still remain. The damage has been done: Picnic remains the dominating myth of the area, the pervasive lie that cannot be dismissed. And that’s not just thematic, spiritual pain either – the film literally impacted the earth of Hanging Rock. “These stories just obliterate the way stories about Australian landscape could be told,” Tilley explains. “There’s actually a massive track up Hanging Rock from where they made the movie. When they were filming, they put in tarmac so that they could run the dollies for the cameras up and down

“There was an Aboriginal actor in Peter Weir’s film, but he didn’t get a speaking part,” explains Spiers. “And he didn’t get listed in the cast as well. This kind of structural racism goes even to the point where the Aboriginal actor doesn’t get named in the cast.” She laughs ruefully. “It’s so crazy.”

RETELLING THE STORY: Miranda Must Go

“The myth of a young white girl being lost at Hanging Rock: it’s not true. It’s a novel. And somehow it’s turned into some reality. [White] Australia’s got no real history: I suppose they’re grabbing at whatever they can get.” – ROBBIE THORPE

hen Amy Spiers launched Miranda Must Go, a campaign designed to emphasise the indigenous history of Hanging Rock, she expected to encounter a bit of a pushback from what she describes as the “usual places”. Australia is certainly full to the brim with white male mouthpieces who have a vested interest in upholding the work of Caucasian Australians as the country’s real cultural life. Yet what she wasn’t expecting was the opposition from a range of leftist academics and literary theorists. These academics criticised Spiers’ initiative, arguing that there was no need to underplay Weir’s film or Lindsay’s book in order to emphasise the local history of the Rock. “One of the responses a lot of people have had to the campaign, particularly literary theorists who have written about Picnic At Hanging Rock, is that it has a latent subtext which is all about our inability to talk about colonialism,” Spiers says. “So that’s one of the arguments: that Picnic deals with colonial aggression. And

I suppose my argument is that that subtext is lost on a lot of visitors to Hanging Rock. They don’t see that subtext. They just see Miranda and the white schoolgirls in a really literal sense. And I guess given that white Australians are so invested in denying our colonial past, it seems kind of inappropriate at this time to be dealing with colonial violence through subtext. I feel like we need to address it directly.” That, in unabashed terms, is the aim of Miranda Must Go. Through awarenessraising community drives, articles Spiers herself has written, social media campaigns and extensive media coverage, the academic and activist is attempting to make clear the indigenous history of Hanging Rock, and to reclaim a truth too long ignored in favour of a fiction. “The Miranda Must Go campaign is trying to point out that white Australians are very good at marking out their own sufferings in the landscape. And I guess that’s what the Miranda campaign is trying to point out: we are actually invested in denying this Aboriginal history, or minimising it. Because the minute you start talking about dispossession and illegal occupation of the land, then that leads to conversation about Aboriginal land rights, and that makes a lot of white Australians quite uncomfortable.” Ultimately, this is why Tilley and Spiers argue that paying homage both to the real-life history and Lindsay’s tale is a fundamental cop-out. You cannot hold in your mind two narratives that negate each other. You cannot argue the value of fiction that has been built on years of colonial oppression while simultaneously claiming to honour the historical dead. And you cannot argue that stories of white anxieties still hold a place in this, a society in which even Caucasian falsehoods are honoured over atrocities committed against Aboriginal Australians. Tilley puts it best. “Who cares if white people are anxious?” she laughs bitterly. “They bloody well should be. They should do something else about it instead of whingeing via the white vanishing novel endlessly, because that doesn’t help or fix anything. It’s kind of a BandAid solution that prevents our culture from coming to grips with the reality underneath. “It stops us from going, ‘Hang on, do we have a treaty?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do we need one?’ ‘Probably, yes.’ ‘How much are we making reparations?’ ‘What are the things embedded in our institutions that are dispossessing and disenfranchising indigenous Australians?’” This is the true crime of Hanging Rock. It’s not the fictional mystery Lindsay so endlessly documented and lied about to the press, or the sexual repression Weir drooled over. It is the atrocity of one culture being upheld at the expense of another: a crime with roots in a colonial history white Australians can still barely stand to acknowledge. ■

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FOOD + DRINK

FEATURE

Mamak

P L AC E S FO R A

Late-Night Dinner IN SYDNEY

BY HARRIET FLITCROFT

OK, so Sydney might be suffering under the government’s controversial lockout laws – but that doesn’t mean there’s absolutely nowhere to go after midnight on a Friday and Saturday. And to keep the party going, you’re going to need some fuel. Here are seven of the best places for late-night eating in Sydney.

earned a name for how tasty they are. There are also hot dogs and vego options, but it’s the thought of their pork crackling served in cups or whole sheets that makes our tummies rumble.

Mr Crackles is open until 1:30am on Thursdays and 4:30am on both Fridays and Saturdays.

Golden Century

6. Thirsty Bird

1. Mamak 15 Goulburn St, Sydney Mamak is a stalwart for those who enjoy Malaysian food, and the long queues prove it. The menu offers a number of different roti – filled with sweet onions, or enriched with butter – or if you prefer, served with bananas or coconut. The main menu is a list of heady meals: fried chicken, curries and rice dishes. Drinks vary from hot sweet tea to iced Milo. It’s BYO, so if you fancy a beer to wash down that nasi lemak you can pick up a few on the way there. Assuming it’s before 11pm of course.

2. Frankie’s Pizza

3. Golden Century 393-399 Sussex St, Sydney GCs is a go-to for after hours eats for industry types, and is famed for its salt-and-pepper squid and live seafood. It’s still one of the busiest Chinese restaurants in Sydney and offers an impressive drinks list: 39 pages, and wines by the bottle from $40 to $30,000. Golden Century is open until 4am seven nights a week.

4. Big Poppa’s 96 Oxford St, Darlinghurst Big Poppa’s holds a cosy and intimate dining space

at ground level, or you can head downstairs to the bar. The food can be ordered until 2:30am. A limited menu is available downstairs, while upstairs diners can truly stuff themselves. The lamb ragu is a firm favourite, served with hand-cut pappardelle. Big Poppa’s is open until 3am seven nights a week.

5. Mr. Crackles 155 Oxford St, Darlinghurst This famed little nook on Oxford Street serves slow-cooked pork belly and roast lamb shoulder in a variety of ways – stuffed into bread or with salad – and they’ve

3/2-14 Bayswater Rd, Potts Point Thirsty Bird’s brined, buttermilk fried chicken can come in original or hot and spicy flavours. Sides include mac and cheese, mash and gravy or mixed pickles. There are plenty of options for sauce and if chicken-bythe-piece doesn’t pluck your feathers, you can grab one of their chicken burgers. Thirsty Bird serves until 1:30am on Fridays and 3am on Saturdays.

7. Sydney Madang 371A Pitt St, Sydney If you feel like a laidback vibe with Korean BBQ and a decent bar list, this is the place to go. There is also a BYO option if you’d prefer. The at-table BBQ is a great idea if you are with a bunch of friends; everyone generally can be catered for. Sydney Madang is open till 2am seven nights a week.

THE 50 BEST COFFEES IN SYDNEY Part Four: Inner West BY JESSICA WESTCOTT

Any countdown of the best coffees in the Inner West is sure to provoke a lot of debate. It’s got more cafes per capita than almost anywhere else in Australia, so at least we can all agree on one thing: the Inner West has a latte to offer (sorry). Regardless of whether you’re after a quick espresso as you dart out of your Marrickville terrace, or you’d prefer a leisurely long black in Camperdown, you’re going to be satisfied wherever you end up. Bad coffees get shunned out of town in the Inner West – and so they should be. But in the spirit of our suburb-by-suburb countdown of the 50 best coffees in Sydney, here are our hot tips for the area. Follow the full list at thebrag.com.

NEWTOWN

Campos Coffee 193 Missenden Rd

It seems obvious, but after trialling every cup in Newtown, there’s still nothing that comes close to a nutty cup of Campos brewed by the expert (degreequalified!) Campos legends. This place deserves its success.

CAMPERDOWN

Store Espresso 17 Fowler St

This one will be controversial, but honestly, I’ve never had a bad cup here. Mecca beans are dark and chocolatey and heaven on a rainy day. It’s tough to get a seat, but grab a takeaway and sit on the grass across the road. A perfect Saturday morning.

STANMORE

Papercup Cafe 157-161 Cambridge St

A great little spot serving up Single Origin, so you know you can’t lose. Expect a more mild flavour that’s very drinkable and leaves a caramel/butterscotch taste on the tongue. Excellent brunch options, too.

ST PETERS

Aslan Coffee Roasters 1 Council St

With beans sourced from Indonesia and a roasting machine in-house, this place knows how to handle a cup. Enjoy dark, melty moments with an espresso, and an extremely chilled vibe in the room.

Papercup Cafe

50 Hunter St, Sydney Frankie’s is a riot of a dive bar/trattoria combo, serving thin and crispy pizzas until close. You can go for a whole, or grab a slice of one of the featured pizzas for $6. There’s a great beer list and live entertainment most nights. If you get bored you can always play on one of their pinball machines. Frankie’s is open until 3am seven nights a week.

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Frankie’s Pizza

thebrag.com

FOOD + DRINK

FEATURE

Store Espresso

Naked Brew

Mjølner: The Story Behind Sydney’s Viking Bar

BY SARAH MCMANUS

R ED FER N

iking-inspired restaurant and bar Mjølner (named after Thor’s famous hammer) recently opened its rustic wooden doors in Redfern, much to the delight of anyone with a Netflix subscription and a penchant for Nordic cuisine. The BRAG speaks to Sven Almenning, the owner of Mjølner’s parent company The Speakeasy Group, and the man who has everyone in Sydney speaking Norse.

ERSKINEVILLE

Naked Brew 110 Swanson St

With coffee by Five Senses, this place is seriously underrated and deserves more attention. Erskineville is saturated with great little spots but this one deserves the crown. Apart from an exceptional tasting pull, it also does a sticky chai latte which, dear God, I recommend.

MARRICKVILLE

Double Roasters 199 Victoria Rd

Despite Coffee Alchemy consistently taking the crown for the Marrickville folk, they’ve been outdone in 2017. Double Roasters is a great cafe, and the coffee is well made, with an earthy taste, and well balanced, possibly due to a lighter roast.

DULWICH HILL

Wolf And Stone 244 Wardell Rd

A new face in DH, this place is starting to earn its stripes. Honestly, there’s not a lot of competition for great coffee around here, so if W&S continues serving up a consistently tasty cup, it’ll keep the crown for a good long while. Great mochas, too – if you’re that way inclined.

PETERSHAM

The Tiny Giant 110 Audley St

This place honestly does better Campos than Campos. Although the baristas look like they don’t want to be there, they serve up a quality coffee.

Ragamuffin 157 Norton St

LEICHHARDT

Everyone seems to come here for the muffins, obviously, but no-one is talking about the seriously unbelievable coffee that is being made here. I’ll hasten to say that this place goes in my top five of the whole Inner West.

Garçon The Tramsheds

What made you want to open up a Vikinginspired bar? I’m from Norway and I’ve lived in Australia for 18 years; I’ve opened four venues already here. It felt nice to do something that reflects my heritage – plus, I’ve got two boys, Odin and Loki, so it just kind of fell into place for me. The backstory takes the assumption that the Avengers are real, that Hulk is real, that Thor is here. Because Thor is here, not back home in Valhalla – it’s his venue. The idea is it’s Thor’s bar, not my bar. I’m just facilitating for the great god. Where did you source all the decorations? We’ve been on this for a while – some of this stuff comes from my house because I’m a nerd. The big hammer we have was made by the Balvenie whiskey company; they thought it would be cool to make a whiskey decanter. The swords are all replicas of actual Viking swords. I have a real 1,000-year-old sword arriving soon, and we’ve been looking all over the world for various things. The helmets and the swords we have here came out of a store that sells museum replicas. It looks like you guys are cooking up whole animals for diners, too. The idea behind the menu is meant to be inspired by Scandinavian flavours in a way, but the menu created is more like what the Vikings would eat if they were here today. I definitely think the bone marrow for your entrée would be amazing. The mains change every day throughout the week, so we have a bird, a beast, a fish and a vegetarian dish. [During] our first weeks we are running with a fairly tight menu and we will start expanding as we go. But definitely, at the moment, if you’re in, try the short rib – it’s nuts! What are your top recommendations for the over 300 whiskies you have at the bar? My dog is called Talisker, so Talisker is probably my go-to whisky, if you don’t mind it a bit smoky. We have a whisky on the back bar called Flóki; if you watch the TV show Vikings you have to try that. Give Japanese a go if you don’t drink a lot of whisky – it’s light, sweet, easy to start off on, and then you can sign off your night with something big and smoky like an Octomore. I have one bottle on

the way which is quite special called Viking Soul, released by Highland Park. As the founder of The Speakeasy Group, how do you find the lockout laws have impacted your different venues? The lockout laws almost wiped us out in Sydney, that’s for sure. Turnover dropped immediately, probably by 30 to 40 per cent. There is no doubt it’s had a huge impact on business; we are lucky to still be here. The problem with licensing laws now is that there seems to be a real reluctance against granting bar licences. So, I might not get this 100 per cent right, but according to my solicitors there hasn’t been a new bar licence granted – like a general licence – in over three years in Sydney. So all you’re getting is restaurant licences or primary service licences. So whether it’s this one or any other venue, if you want to be a bar operator, you pretty much have to take over a failed business. Where: 267 Cleveland St, Redfern When: Tue – Sat 5pm-midnight; Sun noon-10pm More: mjolner.com.au

ANNANDALE

The Tramsheds are home to this wonderful place, boasting the chocolately, honey notes of Little Marionette coffee that we have come to know and love. The French/Australian-themed cafe serves up a consistently delightful cup, and the folks are just lovely.

thebrag.com

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Album Reviews What's been crossing our ears this week...

ALBUM OF THE WEEK AMY SHARK Night Thinker Wonderlick/Sony

The astronomic success of ‘Adore’, one of Amy Shark’s few singles so far, meant the Aussie songwriter was at high risk of becoming a one-hit wonder. But in her first EP, Night Thinker, Amy Billings proves she’s got so much more to offer. In similar style to ‘Adore’, Billings’ new single ‘Weekends’ has already earned her a place on the radio with its addictive, motif-driven melody. Both are natural indie rock hits, showing that Billings clearly has an instinct for crafting tunes with wide appeal.

Strangely, the most intriguing track on the EP is ‘Worst Girl’ featuring Adelaide rapper Allday. While perhaps an

xxx

‘Blood Brothers’ and ‘Drive You Mad’ follow the style of these tracks in Billings’ signature moody blend of acoustic guitar, percussion and electronic influences. But ‘Deleted’ offers a much more restrained take on her sound; it’s an emotive ballad about not wanting to be forgotten.

odd match, this collaboration allows us to hear something more challenging from Billings. Allday’s ambling beats and rhymes interact effortlessly with her vocals, and both artists’ styles seem to transform as they learn from each other in the process. Night Thinker is a solid collection of indie rock jams, and Billings demonstrates that she’s got plenty of room to grow, because she’s only just getting started. Erin Rooney

“In her first EP, Amy Billings proves she’s got so much more to offer.”

INDIE ALBUM OF THE WEEK MID AYR

On their new EP Elm Way, Brisbane indie rock duo Mid Ayr explore a darker side of society, disguised by a combination of poppy vocal lines, carefree guitar riffs, sorrow-filled synth bursts and laid-back drum grooves.

Elm Way Amplifire

“Opening the set is ‘All You Need’, which neatly introduces the band’s combination of gentle vocals and refined instrumentation.”

Opening the set is ‘All You Need’, which neatly introduces the band’s combination of gentle vocals and refined instrumentation while also revealing a frustration with society in lines such as “Greed and lust, does it ever stop / For a moment”. The EP’s title is a reference to A Nightmare On Elm Street and is taken from a line in the record’s lead single, ‘Pocket Her Eyes’. A minute-long intro sets a racing tempo and lulls the listener into a false sense of security before leading into the chorus. The vocals of Hugh Middleton seem to drift without urgency over the frantic indie rock groove. The pace slows tremendously in the last two songs: the cathartic ode ‘Looking For The Way Out’ and the remorseful ballad ‘Love Sick Child’. Elm Way showcases the continuing evolution of Mid Ayr’s melancholic indie sound through a meticulously balanced blend of the duo’s vocals and instruments. David Burley

FIRST DRAFTS Unearthed demos and unfinished hits, as heard by Nathan Jolly A-HA – ‘TAKE ON ME’ ake On Me’ sounds like an effortlessly perfect pop single, piped in from mid’80s Norway. In truth, it took many iterations before the song was anything resembling a success.

‘T

a title guaranteed to give kids all around the world an involuntary jolt of homework-related malaise, then it was renamed to the catchy ‘All’s Well That Starts Well And Moves With The Sun.’

This version may only be a demo, but the keyboard sounds like a terrible 1800-line Nintendo knockoff, and the lyrics are among the worst ever uttered into a microphone. “Come on, say after me / I’m happy, happy as can be / Hip, hip hooray”. It sounds like an esteem-building exercise at the worst after school am-dram theatre ever.

The first official release of ‘Take On Me’ quickly bombed, and the band scrambled to re-record it, still sensing a hit. The label agreed, and pumped money into studio time and a thencutting-edge video which used a groundbreaking technique called rotoscoping. With huge, dramatic vocals, futuristic visuals, and an ear worm of a synthline, the song was a smash. The song inspired a young Chris Martin to become a singer, and if you close your eyes you can hear the similarities between this song and Martin’s many leaps to falsetto.

It’s certainly not the type of wordplay that would set the world on fire. But even these lines would have passed muster with such a huge chorus on the way: that swooping gem with the insanely high note that everyone still fancies themselves a chance at hitting. Only, in the demo version of the song, this chorus is completely absent.

Instead we are treated to no lift, a lacklustre melody, and these lines: “So here’s a kid lesson, my number one / All’s good that starts well and moves with the sun”. Nonsense. Luckily, the listener is dragged out of this stage of shock by a truly confusing Tarzan yelp halfway through the second verse, an inclusion so baffling it actually made me spit-take – definitely not the intended response. It actually sounds like A-ha tried really hard to fail with this song. It was originally titled ‘Lesson One’,

“I have no doubt that the video made the song a hit,” keyboardist Magne Furuholmen told Rolling Stone in 2010. “I don’t think it would’ve been given the time of

day without the enormous impact of the video.” Maybe this is true, but as the video became laughably dated it was the song itself that held

up, and it still sounds amazing – unless, of course, someone is trying their luck at karaoke. Hear the original ‘Take On Me’ demo at thebrag.com.

“It actually sounds like A-ha really tried to fail with this song ... The first ofifical release quickly bombed.” 24 :: BRAG :: 710 :: 26:04:17

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live reviews

brag beats

What we’ve been out to see...

Off The Record Dance and Electronica with Alex Chetverikov

Newtown Social Club Monday April 17 If you step over the threshold of Newtown Social Club without feeling melancholy about its imminent closure, then frankly, your soul is broken. It’s a blessing that tonight’s main act offers such a pure blast of soulful, punching rock’n’roll. But before we get to North Carolina, Sydney bluesman Frank Sultana performs a stripped-back, bluesy set to ease us into the upcoming assault. He cuts a lonely figure onstage, and with contemplative and observant lyrical content, he tells intricate stories atop the brooding and often menacing instrumentation created by his single acoustic guitar and pedal. ‘Jesus Take The Bottle’ hits particularly hard against his audience, many of whom are sitting on the floor enveloped in his music.

Mika Vainio

ika Vainio, one of electronic music’s most interesting craftsmen of noise and sound, sadly passed away recently. Most of those familiar with the enigmatic Finn’s work tapped into the extraordinary Panasonic/Pan Sonic collaboration, though his dynamic body of pseudonyms spanned a diverse range (Ø’s ambient/minimal soundscapes are truly beautiful). The analogue architect was 53. In other news, I recommend DJ Rupture’s recent book Uproot: Travels In 21st-Century Music And Digital Culture. This is a specific, reflective illumination of digital cultures; of their relationship with the manifestation of the exotic in world music. His vignettes betray a refreshingly honest and critical approach to the effects of technology and its disruption of cultural constructs – in other words, well worth a read if you’re into music, ‘world music’ and questioning how we create and consume music. For

goading her husband and guitarist Matt Hill during his many solos. The whole band is completely alight, except for the drummer, who looks so incredibly bored that he may just keel over for a nap.

NIKKI HILL, FRANK SULTANA

one of the most interesting music history lessons you’ll ever listen to, check his Gold Teeth Thief mix for guaranteed beats.

That soon changes. As her four bandmates take the stage, Nikki Hill gets ready to crank this place up to 11. No part of Hill’s body is still as she launches into ‘(Let Me Tell You ’Bout) LUV’, followed by the title track from her latest record Heavy Hearts, Hard Fists. The music carries her everywhere, shimmying, clapping and

There are more tracks from her latest record, including ‘Struttin’ with a face-melting solo battle between Matt Hill and Laura Chavez. Elsewhere, the setlist includes covers of Barbara George and Chuck Berry tunes, as well Hill’s own high-voltage sounds from her debut record Here’s Nikki Hill up until her latest work. After hearing about the forthcoming closure of the very venue she stands in, all her efforts converge into one mission: “Let’s burn this place to the ground,” she says. “The proper way.” She ends with an encore of ‘Oh My’ and a blistering cover of the AC/DC anthem ‘Rocker’, leaving all in the room exhausted but screaming for more. Hill’s got boundless energy, growling yet soulful vocals and those face-melting guitars, all after a weekend-long stint at Bluesfest. Long live the Southern Fireball. Chelsea Deeley

If you’ve been craving a little bedroom boogie, Sadar Bahar is widely recognised as one of the diggers of quality tunes: his Boiler Room is testament to the amazing vibes he throws down on the regular. Aside from his excellent DJing ability, he’s also a hell of a selector, as compilation Soul In The Hole on the BBE label might attest. And we’re a little late on the uptake with these two projects, but better late than never... Corin’s shimmering sound designs evoke as much the video game synth stabs of Lone as they might channel the slamming bass thud of a grime banger. Meanwhile, Melbourne’s GL duo operates on a slightly more trodden path; ’80s revivalist synthpop matched to harder drums, and perfect cruising music.

PHOTOGRAPHER :: ASHLEY MAR

DJ Rupture

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST Kindness’ World, You Need A Change Of Mind – the dude’s videos are a little selfabsorbed, but if this ain’t the grooviest mode of electronic singer-songwriter, then I don’t know what is. It’s a little melancholy (his cover of The Replacements’ ‘Swingin Party’ is simply great), a little more dancefloor, but perfect for straddling the line between immense break-up sadness and the perma-grin of road trip anticipation. Plus, Danish synthpop-cum-reggae duo Laid Back’s …Keep Smiling is where dancey campreggae-pop white-boy sentiment hit its high point (featuring the huge hit ‘White Horse’).

RECOMMENDED THURSDAY APRIL 27

Women // Electronic Music: Heart People, Vetiver, P Twiggs Freda’s

thebrag.com

SATURDAY APRIL 29

Jayda G Harpoon Harry

FRIDAY MAY 12

Javi Bora, Andy Bird Jam Gallery

SATURDAY MAY 20

Sydney Feat. The Strides, Cumbiamuffin TBA

MCW012 – Mantra Collective Secret Inner West THURSDAY JUNE warehouse The Ladies SUNDAY MAY 28 Network Harpoon Harry Soul Of

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live reviews & snaps What we’ve been out to see... ENDORFF PHOTOGRAPHER :: LEAH HATT

BLUESFEST 2017 Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm Thursday April 13 – Monday April 17

Beware the Bluesfest rains, they told me. If there’s one constant in life, it’s that the Easter long weekend will see Byron descend into a maelstrom of music and mud, and your only chance of survival is to build an ark, or failing that, lash together a handful of Santana’s guitars into a makeshift raft and drift to drier ground. Or so they said. Though it was largely clear, open skies that stretched the length of Bluesfest’s 28th year, to be fair the region had certainly seen its share of rain in recent times. We found just one late-night sprinkle, whereas had we been camping out a week earlier the floodwaters may well have found us after all. As it is, the Bluesfest landscape is already a strange, sleek beast. Its celebration of music can hardly be disputed: from veterans still raging at a troubled world – Patti Smith, all eyes are on you – to younger musicians still staking their ground (Lucy Gallant, Little Georgia), the bill was a fine blend of sound and fury. Still, there existed a striking absence here: a lack of personality that can jar with the community that arises across multi-day events. Bluesfest sees you swing from stage to stage (the sound quality of which was generally gorgeous), perhaps stopping for food or booze between… and that’s really it. It’s about the music, above all else; there is little art or greenery in between. But the music, Jim! The music! You have to give Peter Noble and his team full points for an outstanding lineup, even despite the cancellation of Neil Young and Barry Gibb. The greatest struggle you’ll face at Bluesfest is which artist you have to reluctantly leave early in order to catch the next. Hence the need to slink away from The Strumbellas (who were, in retrospect, among the weaker performers) to find a good vantage point for Gallant, the California wunderkind who was quite simply phenomenal. Three songs in and I was convinced I was seeing the future of alt-R&B, and though the tone of his set could stand to see a touch more variety, this will surely come with time; the guy is still at the onset of his career. Speaking of the West Coast, The California Honeydrops will surely be recalled as festival favourite for a good many punters. Frontman Lech Wierzynski is the perfect blend of talent and comic extravagance.

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What’s more, they broke out a washboard, so what else could you ask for? The vitality of these guys onstage is a delight, and certainly guaranteed them a repeat audience. Ditto St. Paul and The Broken Bones. I’d caught these guys before and was afraid I’d over-hyped the soul six-piece, especially when St. Paul himself began his second set on uneven vocal footing. But man, there are few performers out there who can hit such charismatic performative peaks, and they walked away with perhaps the longest ovations this festival had to offer (though you can’t mention charisma without tipping your hat to Vintage Trouble; Ty Taylor’s vocals are one thing, but given the near-faceplant he encountered while crowdsurfing, the guy has earned his stripes). Patti Smith was, of course, a powderkeg. Her first set, a performance of her 1975 album debut, Horses, resulted in actual weeping from many of those gathered at front of stage. She has a presence up there that is as hard to define as it is to deny, and it is encouraging to see someone so political and passionate embraced by such a wide sweep of ages. Her second set, in addition to several spokenword pieces, saw Smith revisit Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize ceremony with a cover of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’. Oh, Irish Mythen. A performer so inspiring and raw, so endearing, with a voice that sighs and roars like a shifting tide. Her charm and her songs are just exquisite. Ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro achieved the impossible by leading an audience sing-along to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, while Santana were… well, Santana. Carlos and co. easily pulled the biggest crowd, and while they are all exceptional talents, Cindy Blackman Santana on drums was simply jawdropping. It’s hard to look past the strengths of The Mountain Goats (especially with a setlist that included ‘No Children’, ‘Up The Wolves’, ‘You Were Cool’ and ‘This Year’), but I’m a fanboy of old. Nahko and Medicine For The People were superbly atmospheric, Mary J. Blige brought the house down… In short, Bluesfest is a true event for all tastes and timbres. You only wish they could find some way of making the festival more than a spread of stages, to make it feel like an unlikely home, however briefly. Adam Norris

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VIEW FULL GALLERIES AT

zac brown band

14:04:17 :: Railway Pde :: Marrickville

PICS :: AM

bad friday

PICS :: AM

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21:04:17 :: ICC Sydney :: 14 Darling Dr Sydney 9215 7100

five things WITH Up 1. Growing It wasn’t until I discovered Back

In Black (AC/DC) in my Dad’s cassette collection that I truly wanted to unleash and destroy as a musician.

Inspirations My favorite drummers are Mitch Mitchell, Ginger Baker and Keith Moon. When I was introduced to Hendrix, I couldn’t believe music was allowed to be like that. It was loose, free, with no rules. It gave me permission to express myself. Around the same time I also discovered The Doors and Led Zeppelin. From then on I submerged myself into anything late ’60s/early ’70s.

Your Band Seedy Jeezus is Lex Waterreus on guitar and vocals, Paul Crick on bass and me on drums. We actually met when Lex posted an ad on Gumtree. Paul and Lex knew each other from a side project they were in together called Slocombes Pussy. We all share the same love of late ’60s/’70s psychedelic/heavy rock. The three of us also love Earthless.

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MARK SIBSON FROM SEEDY JEEZUS

The Music You Make Seedy Jeezus were once referred to as “The Bearded Shamen of Riffology” who take the beast that is ’60s psych and meld it to the throbbing corpse of ’70s rock. We have released five 12-inch records since 2015; our self-titled debut (recorded by Tony Reed from Mos Generator); an etched vinyl with the 20-minute song ‘Echoes In The Sky’ on one side and an etched motif on the other; a psychedelic swampout of Neil Young’s ‘Cortez The Killer’ with a Seedy space jam called ‘Into The Midnight Sun’; a live album, Live At Freak Valley, recorded at Freak Valley Festival in Netphen, Germany; and an album entitled Tranquonauts, which is a collaboration with Isaiah Mitchell (Earthless/Golden Void) that tied in with his solo tour of Australia in 2016, with Seedy Jeezus as his backing band. Our live shows are unrestrained, fervid, blazing and psychedelic.

Music, Right Here, Right Now The music scene is pretty healthy as it will never go away. Venues might disappear, but the bands and punters

will not. They will always find a way, regardless of any silly laws. I’ve had great nights at the Vic On The Park watching White Knuckle Fever and The Vee Bees, the Newtown Social Club watching Los Hombres Del Diablo, and even enjoyed an

eight-piece break beat and groove band at the Townie. Where: Marrickville Bowling Club When: Saturday April 29

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live reviews & snaps What we’ve been out to see...

THE LUMINEERS

GARETH LIDDIARD

Sydney Opera House Monday April 17

Newtown Social Club Sunday April 23

In the midst of an epic world tour supporting their second album Cleopatra, The Lumineers returned to Sydney for their Opera House debut. And what a reception they found.

In 1974, an unsuspecting world witnessed the release of Having Fun With Elvis On Stage. The 37-minutelong “album” – the brainchild of Presley’s controversial manager Colonel Tom Parker – consisted of nothing but The King’s cringey, halting onstage banter; track after track of boring stories and playful jabs at the audience. It was an Elvis record that didn’t actually feature any Elvis songs – a money-grabbing musical car wreck that was quickly derided as one of the worst records of all time.

The six-piece band delivered to one of the most euphoric audiences this town has ever seen, with everyone on their feet by the second song. The Concert Hall felt like a stadium, and in those rare moments you could tear your gaze away from the stage and admire the crowd, the sight was incredible: thousands of people singing along to every word, swaying to every strum and jumping out of their seats. When the band’s 2012 hit ‘Ho Hey’ arrived just three songs in, the crowd simply lost it. While many of The Lumineers’ songs have a certain anthemic quality, what was most astounding – on ‘Ho Hey’ in particular – was how big they can sound with the barest ingredients. The core band members took to the front of stage, and with nothing more than a kick drum for percussion, brought that song to soaring life. But the ball kept rolling. They played exactly what the audience wanted to hear, with hits plucked from their debut album (‘Big Parade’, ‘Dead Sea’ and ‘Submarines’) through to recent standouts like the album title track and singles ‘Ophelia’ and ‘Angela’. There was also a sublime rendition of Tom Petty’s ‘Walls’, a nice surprise. Throughout the show, the band showed incredible stamina, just days after a big Bluesfest set. Frontman Wesley Schultz could be found leaping off stage mid-song, running through the audience. Elsewhere, there was piano-diving, drum-mounting and confetti. PHOTOGRAPHER :: ASHLEY MAR

Schultz took an extremely personal approach to playing here, and really spoke to the audience, telling stories of his father (leading up to ‘Gun Song’), and giving insights into the beginnings of The Lumineers back when they would perform in people’s living rooms. It was clear the entire band was excited to be here, and you flatter yourself into thinking this was more than just a standard concert for the Colorado folksters. With inventive percussion, energised deliveries and a bubbling audience, The Lumineers put on a huge and dynamic show for their diehard fans that definitely won’t be forgotten.

Maia Jelavic

Over the years since, critics have assumed that the problem lay in the format – but maybe, just maybe, the issue was with the artist. After all, following his outstanding Newtown Social Club show, one can imagine that a Having Fun With Gareth Liddiard On Stage album would be nothing if not darkly entertaining.

BILLY BRAGG & JOE HENRY Sydney Opera House Wednesday April 19

Billy Bragg and Joe Henry’s Shine A Light is a resolutely low-key but completely fascinating project; a collection of songs about the American railroad recorded in pit stops on a cross-country train journey the pair made last year. These are simple, rough-hewn melodies, but on the likes of ‘Railroad Bill’ and a deeply felt ‘In The Pines’ they feel vibrant and fresh, with the pair’s obvious love of the source material shining through. If old standards, campfire folk and 12-bar blues seem somewhat unlikely inspiration for the politicised pair, they make clear that these are no mere nostalgia pieces, but songs of social mobility – quiet anthems for those seeking a better life. As such, they remain relevant even as they sketch out a slower-moving world. Bragg

CORINNE BAILEY RAE Metro Theatre Sunday April 16

It’s been more than ten years since the release of Corinne Bailey Rae’s debut single ‘Like A Star’ and massive hit ‘Put Your Records On’, both found on her selftitled debut album from 2006. Her charming singer-songwriter soul came after Amy Winehouse’s debut but perhaps paved the way for Adele, and she has often been compared to R&B icon Sade. Despite having released further two albums – 2010’s The Sea and The Heart Speaks In Whispers last year – Bailey Rae had never visited Australia before this year’s Bluesfest. And it was a radiant Bailey Rae who took the stage at the Metro Theatre on Easter Sunday.

Touching on everything from Xavier Rudd (“prick”) to his dream of playing a gig at Parliament House, mowing down some pollies with a machine gun and then taking himself out, Liddiard’s punky pontification was a work of art all in itself – a glimpse into the rage and wit that underpins his music. Of course, the songs were pretty bloody good too. A grotty, satisfyingly messy mix of covers, reworked Drones tunes and cuts from his excellent solo record Strange Tourist, Liddiard’s set was without fault – even when the singer-songwriter encountered a couple of, you know, faults. The terrifying historical epic ‘Sixteen Straws’ was held up when Liddiard briefly forgot the lyrics, while a drink spilt onstage resulted in a short musical break so an obliging punter could get a fresh one for the performer.

Liddiard’s words like carcasses on abattoir hooks. They joined in with his banter, helped him out when he needed prodding with the lyrics, and cheered and cawed when the first cluttered, cathartic notes of ‘I Don’t Ever Want To Change’ rang out. And isn’t that always the great, beautiful irony of any show Liddiard plays? Songs like ‘Oh My’ might speak of great spiritual loneliness – they might boast lines promoting Thomas Ligotti-esque ethical suicide and nuclear holocausts – but you don’t feel alone when you’re in a room full of people singing them. In fact, quite the opposite. Liddiard might be the only performer in Australia who can get a sold-out crowd of punters to bellow lines about skinny ice caps and dog food on a Sunday night – and have them feeling fucking great about it as they do.

Not that any of the crowd cared. The packed audience at this Newtown Social Club send-off show hung on

Joseph Earp

and Henry are both chatty, intelligent, funny performers, and their stories behind why they were drawn to these songs is often richly interesting – not least when they recount staying in San Antonio’s Gunter Hotel, where Robert Johnson famously made some of his most seminal recordings.

Bragg performance, which begins with a topical rewrite of Bob Dylan’s era-shaking ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ and includes Anais Mitchell’s simple yet powerful protest song ‘Why We Build The Wall’. There is also ‘The Warmest Room’ dedicated to all the “softies” in the audience and a version of ‘Between The Wars’.

The show is arranged in four parts, with the Shine A Light songs bookending short solo sets from Henry then Bragg. Henry’s solo section includes the poignant ‘God Only Knows’ and the piano-based lament of ‘After The War’, a mildmannered, wistful reflection on the lost ideals of the American dream that prompts one punter to complain loudly then storm out, angered by its “political messages”. It’s probably a good thing said punter doesn’t stick around after the intermission for a typically fiery

The duo reunite for ‘Rock Island Line’ and a lovely ‘Hobo’s Lullaby’. While Bragg has always been known as a lyricist more than a singer, his voice drips with warmth here and the pair’s harmonies fit together snugly. The set proper ends with a rousing ‘The Midnight Special’, and after Henry deals with an audience interjection in the classiest way possible, the night concludes with ‘Ramblin’ Round’ – a song from the man whose music initially brought Bragg and Henry together, Woody Guthrie. Daniel Herborn

nicely, and she also treated the audience to her cover of the epic Bob Marley tune ‘Is This Love’. There were a couple of ambling moments during particularly long renditions of ‘Horse Print Dress’ and ‘Do You Ever Think Of Me?’, but there was no doubt that the crowd was with the charismatic soul diva all the way. In addition to the obvious crowd-pleasers, a surprise highlight was ‘Stop Where You Are’. This relatively new track saw Bailey Rae’s delicate vocals and acoustic guitar stand almost completely alone during the verse before it exploded into a magnificently gripping pop chorus. Another pleasant surprise was ‘The Skies Will Break’, on which the annoyingly polished dance beat of the recorded version was not as protruding live, and the performance came off way more authentic.

She opened with ‘Been To The Moon’ from the latest record before venturing into ‘Closer’ from her second album and the oldie ‘Breathless’. “It’s still a trip to me when I go somewhere I’ve never been before and people know my songs,” she smiled, and then started another song from the debut record, ‘Till It Happens To You’.

Bailey Rae bid the crowd farewell with the enchanting soul lullaby ‘Like A Star’, which ended with her bursting into yet another contagious smile and triumphantly raising the acoustic guitar over her head. “I don’t know where and when,” she said, “but I hope we’ll get to see all of you again.”

The setlist balanced new and old material

Tanja Brinks Toubro

PHOTOGRAPHER :: ASHLEY MAR

28 :: BRAG :: 709 :: 26:04:17

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ST. PAUL AND THE BROKEN BONES, ALL OUR EXES LIVE IN TEXAS Metro Theatre Wednesday April 19

About a year ago, I was at the Metro Theatre watching All Our Exes Live In Texas support Nathaniel Rateliff. A week prior, in that same room I had witnessed St. Paul and The Broken Bones seduce an audience with more bombastic charm than a month of Billy Grahams, and thought that a St. Paul/Exes combo would make for one hell of a pairing. Turns out we didn’t need to wait very long for the prophecy to come true. Both acts are natural raconteurs, though while St. Paul brings the full fury of Southern Soul and gospel grandiloquence, the Exes are more at ease with music hall patter; they hook you in with selfdeprecating asides and endearing foibles as much as the music itself. That said, their set – mostly pulled from their debut LP – was strong, structured to allow each member to showcase their respective talents. Their harmonies are outrageously good, and one of the safest bets in the biz is that theirs is a band on an amazing trajectory. Hard to pull a highlight when there’s such variety, but at gunpoint I’d probably favour ‘Boundary Road’. I’d seen St. Paul at Bluesfest just a few nights before and was a touch uncertain what to anticipate. Following their last Metro gig, I’d talked up their festival appearance past all point of reason, and when they took to the Byron stage

this year, well, it was somewhat of a shaky start. However, it took little time for them to hit their stride and deliver a searing set, and you’d be hardpressed to think of a performer who can summon such theatricality, energy, and with such pipes as Paul – the man could damn near sing Otis Redding back from the dead. Suffice to say, when the band descended on Sydney again, it was after a run of loud, dance-dappled performances, and some of the weariness was beginning to show. Don’t get me wrong; I had a freakin’ blast. From St. Paul’s fire-engine-red lounge suit and single gold shoe abandoned onstage, to the sirens’ song of the horn section (really, some of those solos were just unbelievable), to the passion of the crowd, it was grand. In a nice touch, they even tipped their hat to the Exes by following the girls’ lead and covering Tame Impala’s ‘Eventually’ (and threw back to their first Sydney show with a revival of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’). But while the energy rarely wavered, the guys did look tired, and St. Paul’s still stunning vocals didn’t have quite the usual outrageous sustain. Nevertheless, they are one fiendishly fun band, and any time they pitch their tent on the outskirts of town, you’ll find me there among the acolytes. Adam Norris

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pick of the week

For our full gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gig-guide.

Hans Zimmer

TUESDAY MAY 2

Alcest

Alcest + Germ + The Veil Manning Bar, Camperdown. Thursday April 27. 8pm. $55.60. France’s leading post-black metal duo return to Australian shores on the back of their mammoth new creation Kodama.

Qudos Bank Arena

Hans Zimmer Revealed 7:30pm. $110.95.

WEDNESDAY APRIL 26 The Spooky Men’s Chorale City Recital Hall, Sydney. 7:30pm. $32. Tr eat Yo’Self presents Charity Show – feat: Brother Brad + Fox Holmes + World Champion Butterfl y Swimmers Valve Bar, Ultimo. 8pm. $10.

THURSDAY APRIL 27 City At Midnight + Ocean Street + Paravelle Valve Bar, Ultimo. 8pm. $10. Crackin’ Eggs – feat: Lord St Collective The Hideaway Bar, Enmore. 7:30pm. Free. Pez

Dave + E4444E + Over Under Captain Cook Hotel, Paddington. 9pm. Free.

Tanya Sparke & Friends Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $7.

Deep Space Supergroop + Slow Turismo + Vauxhall Outlaws Union Hotel, Newtown. 7:30pm. Free.

FRIDAY APRIL 28

Home Skillet – feat: Clive Of India + The Decimals Vic On The Park, Enmore. 8pm. Free. MMG + Glenn Lumanta + Levingstone The Record Crate, Glebe. 11pm. $11.25. Pez Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $28.70. Selaphonic Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $10.

Christopher Port Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 11pm. $5.70. Classy as F*ck Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $33.80.

Manning Bar, Camperdown. Saturday April 29. 8pm. $60.

Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. Friday April 28. 8pm. $23.10.

Legendary rockers Helmet are here to perform their classic 1994 album Betty in full, plus selections from their newbie Dead To The World. Heads up!

To celebrate their new single ‘Role Models’ from second album High Times For Low Lives, The Griswolds are back for a big hometown show.

Opiuo Metro Theatre, Sydney. 8pm. $45.

Oscar Joe Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $10.

Queen Porter Stomp Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $7.

Rare Finds Second Birthday – feat: Hey Geronimo + Bad Pony + Major Leagues + Mookhi + Mount Zamia + The Khanz + Moza + Crocodylus + Dappled Cities (DJs) + Schoolies ’08 DJs Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 7:30pm. $20.

SATURDAY APRIL 29 All Shook Up: ’50s/’60s Rock’N’Roll & Soul Party Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 11:30pm. $5.70.

Good Boy + Jarrow The Chippo Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $15.30.

Dylan Rass The Lair @ Metro Theatre, Sydney. 4:45pm. $20.

Hook N Sling Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 11:30pm. $13.60.

Hip Hop Hooray – feat: Ying Yang Twins + Twista + Bubba Sparks + Trina Big Top Luna Park, Sydney. 7:30pm. $90.

The Awesome Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 3pm. $16.

Los Monaros + Boo Boo Muck The Bearded Tit, Redfern. 4pm. Free. Matthew Druery & The Imperial Orchestra +

The Resignators + Los Kung Fu Monkeys + Chris Duke And The Royals + Ska’d 4 Life Valve Bar, Ultimo. 8pm. $18.40.

Toby Martin

Toby Martin Carriageworks, Eveleigh. 8pm. $15. Uptown Kings Cross Hotel, Kings Cross. 9pm. $10.

TUESDAY MAY 2 The Whitlams Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point. 8pm. $65.

the BRAG presents

SAN CISCO

DAPPLED CITIES

Enmore Theatre Friday June 2

City Recital Hall Sunday June 4

San Cisco photo by Ebony Talijancich

At The Dakota + The Zilzies + Lume Etiquette Captain Cook Hotel, Paddington. 9pm. $10.

Oka + Leonard Sumner + DJ Vuli The Lair @ Metro Theatre, Sydney. 7pm. $20.

The Griswolds + Lime Cordiale

Helmet

Freshly Pick’d Headz – feat: Benji PK + Big Gibo + Bigg Listic + DJ Myme + Dseeva + Dukes Of All + Kaoe + Scum City Valve Bar, Ultimo. 8pm. $10.

Ian Moss The Bunker, Coogee. 7:30pm. $43.30.

30 :: BRAG :: 710 :: 26:04:17

The Griswolds Helmet

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