The Music (Sydney) Issue #11

# 11 • 2 3 . 1 0 . 1 3 • S Y D N E Y • F R E E • I N C O R P O R AT I N G

THE

DRINK ISSUE music

STONEFIELD ONEFIELD

travel

ICELAND ELAND

event

HALLOWEEN LOWEEN

the music | the lifestyle | the fashion | the art | the culture | you

OVER THE PAST 18 MONTHS WE'VE BEEN REACHiNG OUT TO (READ: BUGGiNG!) A WHOLE HEAP OF ARTiSTS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. THEY'VE JOiNED iN BY TURNiNG BLANK CONVERSE SNEAKERS iNTO ONE OFF PiECES OF ART BY PUTTiNG THEiR OWN PERSONALiTiES ON THE CANVAS, ADDiNG COLOUR, DESiGN, HUMOUR AND iMPRESSiVENESS.

24TH OCTOBER - 29TH OCTOBER 2013

WWW.iNTHEiRSHOES.COM.AU • WWW.EBAY.COM.AU/iNTHEiRSHOES

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themusic 23RD OCTOBER 2013

#011

WE’VE GOT THEM AS THEY’RE ANNOUNCED

INSIDE

ON THE MUSIC.COM.AU

FEATURES Dan Aykroyd The Breeders Yellowcard Television Fall Out Boy

festival sideshows

Cosmo Jarvis Limp Bizkit Eskimo Joe Love Field Lenka Fuck Buttons

I’LL TURN IT OFF IN A MINUTE, I NEED TO PRAY!

DAVID LIEBE HART’S TOUR DIARY ON THEMUSIC.COM.AU

Porter Robinson

REVIEWS Album: Future Of The Left Live: Lorde

WE’RE PUTTING INTO PLAY THE THOUGHT THAT ROCK’N’ROLL DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS TRADITIONALIST STYLE OF MUSIC. JOE TROHMAN OF FALL OUT BOY [P.36]

Arts: Prisoners Gear: BKE Beat Thang Drum Machine …and more

THE GUIDE Cover: Our Last Enemy Halloween Local News Gig Guide

BE KIND, UNWIND WILL QUENCH THE THIRST OF SOME DIEHARD PHILLY JAYS FANS. BEN PREECE REVIEWS FEELINGS [P.52]

review BETWEEN DRUNK PUBLICISTS AND DODGING BURRITOS, WE WRAP-UP THE AUSSIE EFFORTS AT NEW YORK’S CMJ FESTIVAL ON THEMUSIC.COM.AU

review 10 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

SONGS LIKE PERFECTION WOULD SOUND ABSOLUTELY AMAZING IF FOLKS QUIT FLAPPING THEIR GUMS AND SUPPED THEIR BEERS IN SILENCE FOR THREE LOUSY MINUTES. MATT MACMASTER REVIEWS ADALITA [P.55]

@ Agincourt 871 George street, Sydney City, valvebar@gmail.com www.valvebar.com.au WED 23RD 7PM THU 24TH 7PM BASEMENT FRI 25TH 7PM

FIRST LEVEL FRI 25TH 9PM

“MAROSI DI BURIANA”

JAZZ/FUSION SHOW WITH SUPPORT FROM: “TESSITURA” , “OLAJUWAN” , “THE CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRIES”

ELECTROSHOCK 3 “DEAD DIETIES”

METAL SHOW WITH SUPPORT FROM: “NA MAZA” , “TEMTRIS” , “VINTAGE VULVA” , “UNREST” , “TORCH THE VILLAGE”

HALLOWEEN 2013

A SKA PUNK PARTY

FEAT: “CHRIS DUKE ANT THE ROYALS” , “KUJO KINGS” , “EBOLAGOLDFISH” , “HANBALL DEATHMATCH” , “GENERAL PANTS & THE PRIVATES” , “LAURA PALMER”

LUSKIMZE DJ’S AND AF CLOTHING PRESENTS SAT 26TH 3PM

SPOOKS HALLOWEEN PARTY

FEAT: DELI, MANJAZZ, LSD5, ALBERT HUNT, C MONEY, EPIQUE, LUSKIMZE, CARCOLA, DEY LA FUNK, KILD-G, CORY BLAKE, SODDY AND MANY MORE

ROCKCHICK ENT PRESENTS SUN 27TH 12PM

SUN 27TH 5PM

METAL SHOW

FEAT: “OAKSEER” , “TOMORROW NEVER COMES” , “ HARMONY OF HATE” , “FACING ZERO” , “KUNVUK” , “A VENGEANCE”

“PSYCHIC SUN” PSYCHEDELIC ROCK SHOW WITH SUPPORT FROM: “THE PLASMON RESONANCE BAND” , “LESLIE SPEAKER”

COMING UP:

Wed 30 Oct: City Slickers Band Competition ; Thu 31 Oct: Hipster Halloween Party feat: Nightbug” , “Woodland” , “Collision Kings” , “Paper Crane” and special guests ; Fri 1 Nov: Basement: Street R’n’R Show with “Slick 46” , “RUST” , “Standard Union” , “Eager 13”; First Level: Str8 From Da Hood Hip Hop Show feat: Nter, DJ Neri, Cloud 8, Pity Lane, Jaytwo, Korza, Herbavore, 316, HFM, Promisques, Fortay At Large and many more; Sat 2nd Nov: Basement: 7pm Halloween Special with “Amodus” , “Domino” , “Acid Nymph” , “Coredea” and guests; First Level: 8pm Glitch Hop Halloween Party feat: Skope (UK), Goosebumps and many more; Sun 3 Nov: 12pm: RockChick Ent presents: Metal Show feat: “Vendetta Of The Fallen” , “Nekrology” , “Sylvain” , “Atlantis Of The Sky” , “Carbon Black” , “Amber Trace” , “Our Past Days”; 6pm: Rock Show with “Moonfield” , “Anchors Of Tortugas” , “Gypsy” , “John Edwards Trio” , “Mangrove Jack”

For band bookings please email valvebar@gmail.com

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CREDITS PUBLISHER

Street Press Australia Pty Ltd

GROUP MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Mast

EDITOR Mark Neilsen

ASSISTANT EDITOR Hannah Story

ARTS AND CULTURE EDITOR Cassandra Fumi

MUSO EDITOR Michael Smith

GIG GUIDE EDITOR Justine Lynch nsw.gigs@themusic.com.au

CONTRIBUTORS Adam Wilding, Andrew McDonald, Anthony Carew, Ben Meyer, Ben Doyle, Ben Preece, Bethany Cannan, Brendan Crabb, Brendan Telford, Callum Twigger, Cam Findlay, Cameron Warner, Cate Summers, Chris Familton, Chris Maric, Chris Yates, Christopher H James, Cyclone, Dan Condon, Daniel Cribb, Dave Drayton, Dominique Wall, Dylan Stewart, Glenn Waller, Guido Farnell, Guy Davis, Helen Lear, Jamelle Wells, James d’Apice, James Dawson, Justine Keating, Kris Swales, Liz Giuff re, Lorin Reid, Lukas Murphy, Mark Hebblewhite, Mat Lee, Matt MacMaster, Paul Ransom, Paul Smith, Rip Nicholson, Robbie Lowe, Ross Clelland, Sam Hilton, Sam Murphy, Sarah Braybrooke, Sarah Petchell, Scott Fitzsimons, Sebastian Skeet, Sevana Ohandjanian, Simon Eales, Steve Bell, Stuart Evans, Tim Finney, Tom Hersey, Tyler McLoughlan

PHOTOGRAPHERS Angela Padovan, Carine Thevenau, Clare Hawley, Cybele Malinowski, Josh Groom, Justin Malinowski, Kane Hibberd, Peter Sharp, Sara Wills, Thomas Graham, Tony Mott

NATIONAL SALES MANAGER Brett Dayman

ADVERTISING DEPT Brett Dayman, James Seeney, Andrew Lilley sales@themusic.com.au

ART DIRECTOR Nicholas Hopkins

ART DEPT

THIS WEEK THINGS TO DO THIS WEEK • 23 OCTOBER - 29 OCTOBER 2013

tour

winner

The Mexican Elvis, El Vez, takes down the Factory Theatre Saturday as part of Black Cherry’s Halloween Fiesta. It’s a seventh-birthday Day Of The Dead-themed party, also featuring The Barons Of Tang, Victor Valdes Mariachi Band, The Art, Mesa Cosa, Our Last Enemy, The Drey Rollan Band and Mad Charlie, plus burlesque and Mexican wrestling, the El Vez Australian God Save The King tour proudly presented by The Music.

fest

Eamon Stewart, Brendon Wellwood, Julian De Bono

ADMIN & ACCOUNTS Loretta Zoppolone Shelley Neergaard Jarrod Kendall Leanne Simpson accounts@themusic.com.au

DISTRO Anita D’Angelo distro@themusic.com.au

SUBSCRIPTIONS store@themusic.com.au

CONTACT US PO Box 2440 Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 Level 1/142 Chalmers St Surry Hills NSW Phone (02) 9331 7077 info@themusic.com.au www.themusic.com.au

SYDNEY

Sydney Festival announce their 2014 program tonight before esteemed guests and media, opening a mini festival hub at Town Hall from Thursday through to Sunday. It’s a place to learn more about the festival, along with a jukebox and interactive multimedia exhibition, and you can even purchase tickets to the gigs most important to you. Expect to be surrounded by hipsters and artistic types, and to later feel better about your previously poor culturally uninformed self.

The NME Music Photography Awards with Nikon is a competition that aims to unearth new talent and celebrate the best in music photography. And guess what? They found some of that talent right here. One of The Music’s regular contributors Josh Groom (you may remember him from such things as last week’s Peking Duk cover and this week’s Our Last Enemy cover for The Guide) was announced as a winner in the Festivals category for this very shot he took for The Music/Drum Media at the scorcher of a Big Day Out in Sydney this year. If you happen to find yourself in London, you can check out his shot (as well as other winners, runners up and favourite entries) on display at The Printspace from 23 Oct until 6 Nov, or continue to enjoy his work right here in The Music and online at themusic.com.au.

morph

He was once “laying that, playing that G-thang” as Snoop Doggy Dogg, then he emerged from a giant cloud of smoke as the enlightened reggae don Snoop Lion.

But wait for it... Now Calvin Broadus Jr is set to shake cities as Snoopzilla, the new title giving props to funk maverick Bootsy Collins – the great Bootzilla – and tying in with his forthcoming album 7 Days of Funk. We, for one welcome the cornrowed beast, and look forward to his sidewalk splitting booty-shaking jams at Big Day Out early next year.

rummage

It’s the Garage Sale Trail 2013! For your yearly dose of junk you definitely don’t want or need, but on a whim purchase. This Saturday is the day to get yourself the weird fish brooch you always desired, the ridiculous Indian headdress you think you’ll wear to a party one day (you wont/shouldn’t), and a pair of granny slippers. It’s also the perfect excuse to walk into other people’s garages and take a stickybeak through their possessions. There were 7,000 open across the country last year, and presumably there’ll be more this time around.

watch

Tonight is the premiere of Ja’mie: Private School Girl on ABC at 9pm.

Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes/Summer Heights High creation doesn’t need the publicity, she’s perfectly capable of handling all that herself, but we figured we’d throw in our two cents.

It’s going to be great – we finally get to see the divine Miss King in her natural habitat. The sixpart series will be aired

by HBO in the US and

by BBC in the UK. Ja’mazing.

read

Get ready for plenty of juicy truths in Ricky Ponting’s tell-all autobiography. A few choice extracts have already started doing the rounds, and it seems that whether the former Aussie cricket captain is discussing our board of selectors or dressing room issues with Pup Clarke, he’s not going to hold back. Ponting: At The Close Of Play comes out 1 Nov through HarperCollins.

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national news news@themusic.com.au EMINEM

THE AMITY AFFLICTION

WARPED RAMPS UP WITH SECOND ANNOUNCE

HIS NAME IS WHAT?

Marshall Mathers. Slim Shady. Eminem. Call him whatever you want, just make sure you’re calling that name from the stadium grass when the Detroit MC – one of the biggest rappers in the game – brings his ludicrously large Rapture event to east coast capitals.

The bill, headed up obviously by the real Slim sizzle, will also feature a veritable feast of smooth MCs, including Compton wunderkind Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z favourite J. Cole and our very own 360. It happens 19 Feb, Etihad Stadium, Melbourne; 20 Feb, Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane; and 22 Feb, ANZ Stadium, Sydney, with tickets on sale 31 Oct.

FLUME SET TO MAKE A SPLASH AT 2013 ARIAS

Having already been announced as the producer of the year – for work from his bedroom no less – Flume looks set to scoop another set of awards with eight nominations in total for the 2013 ARIA Awards. Flume’s fighting it out against Birds Of Tokyo, Guy Sebastian, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Tame Impala for the highly coveted album of the year. Other multiple-nominated names include Big Scary, Sarah Blasko, RüFüS, Vance Joy and The Drones, while acts including Thy Art Is Murder, Sheppard and The Preatures have collected their first ever nominations.

For the full list of this year’s nominees head to ariaawards.com.au, and make sure you tune in on GO! 1 Dec when the event is staged at The Star Event Centre, Sydney.

ALL SHOOK UP

The King is dead – all hail the king of psychobilly! Canadian horror roller Evil Elvis will be putting down the burgers and picking up the guitar when he arrives Down Under for his biggest run of shows here yet. The Surfin’ To Hell tour sees the Toronto legend fronting an all-Aussie all-star backing band, featuring Joey Phantom from Fireballs, Andy Wicked of Dogsday and Rory ‘The Panther’ George. The band play 31 Oct, Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle; 1 Nov, The Music Lounge, Sydney; 2 Nov, Transcontinental Hotel, Brisbane; 4 Nov, Reverence Hotel, Melbourne; 8 Nov, The LuWow, Melbourne; and 9 Nov, Devilles Pad, Perth.

THE DISEASE SPREADS FURTHER

Adding to an already ball-tearing rock’n’roll line-up, wrestling great Chris Jericho will be leading his Fozzy troops back out our way to latch on to the S.T.D. party with headliners Steel Panther and Buckcherry. Get along early for a body slamming of epic proportions when then five-piece open up these dates: 6 Dec, Brisbane Riverstage; 7 Dec, Hordern Pavilion, Sydney; 8 Dec, Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne; 12 Dec, Metro City, Perth.

UNDER THE HAMMER OF FROST

Following the success of last year’s tour, Iced Earth will be spreading their Worldwide Plagues tour, playing east coast shows next year in support of forthcoming record Plagues Of Babylon, which will land in January.

One of the most formidable forces in heavy metal, the Americans will perform with Elm Street 14 Mar, The Hi-Fi, Brisbane; 15 Mar, Manning Bar, Sydney; and 16 Mar, Billboard The Venue, Melbourne.

“FACIAL DISCRIMINATION” [@ROYALCHANT] NICELY SUMMARISING THE BEARDS GETTING REFUSED US VISAS. 14 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

A few legends and some locals have joined the Warped Tour bill for 2013, with Swedish champs Millencolin heading up the list, alongside local titans The Amity Affliction, ska dudes Reel Big Fish, as well as Confession, Hands Like Houses, Buried In Verona and Hand Of Mercy.

They join already announced names like The Offspring, The Used and Parkway Drive, making this a kick-arse event for all the punk and hardcore heads out there. Warped Tour Australia takes place 29 Nov, RNA Showgrounds, Brisbane; 1 Dec, Barangaroo, Sydney; 6 Dec, Exhibition Park, Canberra; and 7 Dec, Birrarung Marr, Melbourne.

STEVE EARLE & THE DUKES

EARLE-Y BLUESFEST SIDESHOW ANNOUNCED

Hot damn there are some sweet Bluesfest sideshows getting announced, with a bunch starting to trickle in. The bearded champion of Americana Steve Earle will lead The Dukes along with Kasey Chambers at three dates, happening 15 Apr, The Tivoli, Brisbane; 23 Apr, Enmore Theatre, Sydney; and 24 Apr, Forum Theatre, Melbourne. Wrap yourself up in some of the finest storytelling this side of Nashville. Proudly presented by The Music.

national news news@themusic.com.au ALLEN STONE

BETH ORTON

ROLLING ON REGARDLESS Another Bluesfest sideshow presented

by The Music is that of Allen Stone, the young Washington soul musician with those shining blonde locks and incredible pipes. You will be hypnotised and on your feet when he performs 12 Apr, Corner Hotel, Melbourne; 13 Apr, Metro Theatre, Sydney; and 16 Apr, The Zoo, Brisbane.

KICK YOUR SHOES OFF

Dance with Newcastle quintet Seabellies when they embark on a large national tour to show off Fever Belle, the band’s second album, and one which has come from sessions in Sydney, Melbourne and Berlin.

Witness the nomadic tales come to life 21 Nov, Alhambra Lounge, Brisbane; 29 Nov, Flyrite, Perth; 30 Nov, Prince Of Wales, Bunbury; 1 Dec, Mojos Bar, Fremantle; 11 Dec, Brass Monkey, Sydney; 12 Dec, Heritage Hotel, Bulli; 13 Dec, Rad, Wollongong; 14 Dec, Goodgod Small Club, Sydney; 21 Dec, Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle; and 27 Dec, Northcote Social Club, Melbourne.

FROLIC IN THE FOREST

An iconic annual staple of the festival calendar is Woodford Folk Festival, and it will return from 27 Dec to 1 Jan for its 28th year, featuring a program that is spilling over with acts from every pocket of arts you could imagine. A few of the 500 performers that will taking part in this year’s event include Beth Orton, The Basics, Clare Bowditch, Matt Corby, Tim Finn, Half Moon Run, Julian Marley, Busby Marou, Buffalo Tales, Chance Waters, Thelma Plum, Brendan Maclean, GANGgajang, Jordie Lane, Babylon Circus and The Twoks, while speakers such as Benjamin Law, Denise Scott and even former Prime Minister Bob Hawke will be sharing colourful tales. In addition, there’ll also be cabaret, burlesque, arts and crafts, food, fashion, a children’s festival and plenty more, so try something new this new year’s period, or simply reconnect with your dear old friend, Woodford. Presented by The Music.

“PUMPKIN SPICE LATTES ARE LIKE METH FOR RICH WHITE GIRLS” THE STARBUCKS CRANK IS MOVING ACCORDING TO @SPENCERLENOX

KC & THE SUNSHINE BAND

GOOD TIME RAYS

Finally, the sellers of 100 million albums, shakers of da rump KC & The Sunshine Band will be wheeling out all their classic tracks – Get Down Tonight, That’s The Way (I Like It) and more – on headline dates across the three east coast capitals. Celebrate a group that changed the face of pop music by heading out 17 Apr, Enmore Theatre, Sydney; 18 Apr, The Palace, Melbourne; and 19 Apr, The Tivoli, Brisbane. And you guessed it, all dates are proudly presented by The Music.

EVOLUTION OF A MAN

POST UP IN THE PAINT

HAVE TO BE HEARD

SOLDIER ON

Forget about a sole man and a microphone, Brian McKnight is ready to give us the full experience, announcing a full band tour for next year. The American R&B superstar plays 2 Mar, QPAC, Brisbane; 3 Mar, Enmore Theatre, Sydney; 5 Mar, Palais Theatre, Melbourne; and 7 Mar, Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre.

Whether they are working through postrock density, shoegaze layers or black metal bloodshed, Deafhaven stand as a unique and uncontainable band and for the very first time they are bringing their far-reaching musical horizons to Australia, with capital city dates early next year. The five-piece play 8 Jan, Crowbar, Brisbane; 9 Jan, Annandale Hotel, Sydney; 10 Jan, Corner Hotel, Melbourne; and 11 Jan, Rosemount Hotel, Perth.

You already know that Waka Flocka Flame goes hard, so all that’s left for you is to go hard with him when the Atlanta MC shows off his smooth flow in our parts for the very first time. He plays 18 Dec, Billboard The Venue, Melbourne; 19 Dec, Metropolis, Fremantle; 20 Dec, The Hi-Fi, Sydney; and 21 Dec, The Hi-Fi, Brisbane.

Ol’ mate James Blunt is getting in plenty early with these dates, but hey, it just gives you a bit more time to stretch the pipes to belt out You’re Beautiful with him, are we right or are we right? The Brit strummer will tour mid 2014, playing 30 May, State Theatre, Sydney; 1 Jun, Civic Theatre, Newcastle; 2 Jun, Brisbane Convention Centre; 7 Jun, Royal Theatre, Canberra; 8 Jun, The Plenary, Melbourne; and 13 Jun, Riverside Theatre, Perth. Tickets for these all ages dates are available Monday.

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local news nsw.news@themusic.com.au JOHN MAYER

MAYER MAY NOT

CATHERINE TRAICOS & THE STARRY NIGHT

COMING HOME TO YOU

STARRY SKY

Catherine Traicos & The Starry Night release their new album The Earth, The Sea, The Moon, The Sky on 29 Nov and have announced a short but sweet tour to support it. Hear it in a live setting when Traicos and co come to Petersham Bowling Club on 13 Dec. Presented by The Music.

HEY SISTER

Sydney five-piece Sister Jane are set to launch their brand new single Whole Wide World, taken off their forthcoming second album Frontier, at Brighton Up Bar, 16 Nov with guests Buried Feather.

WHAT A STEAL

CRONIN GLORY

Bay Area garage-pop master and feel-good rocker Mikal Cronin is headed to Australia for the first time this November. No longer simply Ty Seagall’s bassist, Cronin’s been getting tongues wagging with his fresh sunny, fuzzy take on punk rock. Catch Cronin at Goodgod Small Club, 20 Nov.

Brisbane hard rockers Like Thieves, fronted by powerhouse vocalist Clint Boge (The Butterfly Effect), have announced an east coast tour in the wake of the recent success of their EP The Wolves At Winter’s Edge. To accompany their new single Killing Reason, the band have released a live video of the song. See Like Thieves at the Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle, 15 Nov and Annandale Hotel, 16 Nov.

NATIONAL COMPOSITION

SHED YOUR SKIN

RUFFIAN IT UP

Techno auteur Shed has announced his debut Australian tour. On his latest album, 2012’s The Killer, the German producer melts and merges rough and demanding dancefloor skeletons with detailed melodies, harmonic structures, hooks and airy arrangements.

He comes to The Basement, 15 Nov.

John Mayer has announced a run of headline shows while he’s visiting our fair country for West Coast Blues & Roots, Bluesfest and Deni Blues & Roots Festival.

Catch him at Allphones Arena on 24 Apr, with Vermont rock outfit Grace Potter & The Nocturnals in tow as support act.

On November 2, Bryce Dessner’s classical composition Aheym For String Quartet will be performed in the first of three intimate chamber music concerts at Pier 2/3. A quartet of musicians from the ACO will perform Aheym alongside string quartets by Haydn and Shostakovich. The concert is held on 2, 3 and 10 Nov at Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay.

It’s been three years since Canadian indie rock trio, Born Ruffians, graced our shores, and they’re soon to return for a couple of shows including one at Oxford Art Factory, 3 Jan. Now touring as a four-piece, the Ruffians bring with them new material from their latest release Birthmarks.

Southern rock royalty Lynyrd Skynyrd has heralded the calls of their devoted fans, announcing their very first Australian shows since the band’s formation. They are reunited and reignited, and will deliver a fiery, guitar-driven assault on the Sydney Entertainment Centre, 13 Feb.

THE GREAT GADSBY

Award-winning comedian Hannah Gadsby knows happiness – well, she does now, after reaching the lowest point in her life (thus far) and eventually finding it in a piece of furniture. She shares why it brings her such joy in her new show, Happiness Is A Bedside Table, at Sydney Comedy Store from 21 to 24 Nov.

LIFE SOUNDTRACK

Songs That Made Me unites four of Australia’s finest female singer-songwriters, Katie Noonan, Abby Dobson, Angie Hart and Martha Marlow, to share stories of their influences, artistic journeys and the landmark songs that have soundtracked their lives. The performance will be held at the Factory Theatre, 5 Dec.

“EARLIER THIS YEAR, I WAS AT A BAR AND THE DJ PLAYED GANGNAM STYLE INTO HARLEM AARON & JOHN SHAKE. I FELT SO PLEASED. IT WAS SPRINGTIME IN MY HEART.”

AARON NEVILLE AND DR JOHN

VAMPIRE WEEKEND’S @ARZE TAKES JOY IN THE SIMPLE THINGS 16 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

‘The sweetest voice in music’ Aaron Neville and ‘voodoo music masters’ Dr John & The Nite Trippers are teaming up for a double-header of a Bluesfest sideshow, celebrating the musical diversity of New Orleans blues. See both acts at the State Theatre on 24 Apr. Presented by The Music.

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 17

local news nsw.news@themusic.com.au JIMMIE VAUGHAN

SUPERCHUNK

GET A CHUNK O’ THIS

Indie rock entrepreneurs Superchunk have announced a one-off Sydney-only headline show at the Annandale Hotel on 13 Nov. Their most recent offering, I Hate Music, reflects the joys of a life spent immersed in music but there’s a dark undercurrent as well. Here’s your chance to see it live.

SPACED OUT

The Murlocs return with Space Cadet. The song packs some very clever R&B guitar muscle with Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s distinct vocal stamp finely counter-balanced by floating on top with reckless spontaneity. They launch the single at the Beach Road Hotel, 14 Nov and Goodgod Small Club, 15 Nov.

JAM WITH JIMMIE

Jimmie Vaughan, one of the greatest and most respected guitarists in the world of popular music, is coming Down Under for Bluesfest and some sideshows.

Supporting him at his headline show at the Metro Theatre on 16 Apr will be Nikki Hill, who has been hailed as “The Staple Singers meet AC/DC”.

“I’M THINKING ABOUT YOU RIGHT NOW” @JAREDLETO ATTEMPTS TO SEXT

PHIL IT RIGHT UP

Best known as the frontman of Grinspoon, Phil Jamieson will embark on a string of solo shows around NSW, joined by Jackson McLaren at Lizotte’s, Newcastle 6 Nov; Brass Monkey, Cronulla, 8 Nov; Lizotte’s, Kincumber, 24 Nov; Clarendon, Katoomba, 29 Nov; Heritage Hotel, Bulli 30 Nov; and Lizotte’s, Dee Why, 5 Dec.

SUPPORTIN’ THE SINGERS

With just weeks before their new album hits shelves and they play across the nation, The John Steel Singers welcome fellow Brisbanites Go Violets to their Everything’s A Thread album tour this November.

Opening the show at The Den, Wollongong, 14 Nov and Oxford Art Factory, 16 Nov is Donny Benet promising a sordid affair.

Benet also appears at The Small Ballroom, Newcastle show with Goldsmith, 15 Nov.

PARK IT

Sydney’s Belmore Park will transform into Cinema Park in November as part of the inaugural Sydney Intercultural Film Festival.

Running from 13 to 17 Nov, Cinema Park will feature special film screenings, musical performances, star meet-andgreets, themed family fun days, stand-up comedy performances, film exhibitions and demonstrations, international food stalls, children’s rides, and prize and cash giveaways – open to the public for a $2 entry fee.

18 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

THE MASTER

STAY ACTIVE

FOR RON

FEEL MY VÄTH

LLOYD ‘N’ LIONS

KILBEY COMIN’ ROUND

Mix Master Mike’s gone from cutting his chops at comps, parties and weddings to winning the DMC World title, forming influential turntablist crew Invisible Skratch Picklz (ISP) and becoming the Beastie Boys’ resident DJ. See him at Upstairs Beresford, 20 Nov.

The untimely passing of Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton in January 2009 was felt around the world, but particularly in Australia. A stellar line-up of Australian bands including The Visitors, Hoodoo Gurus, New Christs, SC5 and Four Stooges will recognise that fact by playing a tribute show benefitting the Ron Asheton Foundation – a fund for animal welfare and sponsor of music for children – at Manning Bar, 6 Dec.

Announcing his first national tour in five years, Alex Lloyd will be showing off his new album Urban Wilderness with the help of a full band. Along with The Young Lions, Lloyd will stop off at Entrance Leagues, Bateau Bay, 13 Nov; Lismore Workers Club, 17 Nov; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, 21 Nov; Revesby Workers Club, Sydney, 22 Nov; The Small Ballroom, Newcastle, 23 Nov; and Hornsby RSL, 24 Nov.

Active Child has this week released his new EP Rapor, and is heading our way to perform at Melbourne Festival. Sydney fans, never fear, because he has also announced a one-off Sydney headline show too, held at 24 Oct at the Green Room. That ought to keep Active Child lovers Hanging On.

Notorious partier, techno don and Future Music Festival favourite Sven Väth will be making his annual pilgrimage south for the national dance event, and will curate his Cocoon Stage once again, headed up

by Chilean superstar Luciano. He’s also called on a few other names from the bill to drop by, including Dubfire, Maya Jane Coles and Guy Gerber. The festival’s on 8 Mar at Royal Randwick Racecourse.

Modern day renaissance man Steve Kilbey is touring Australia in November. Backed

by Fremantle music identities Shaun and Adrian Hoffmann and a string section, he delves into his unrivalled back catalogue of solo releases, collaborations and The Church classics. The Morning Night will be providing support as they tour the launch of their album Amberola. Catch the show on 6 Nov at The Vanguard.

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20 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

drink

Dan Aykroyd Words Lachlan Marks. Photos Kane Hibberd.

Drink Words Stephanie Liew, Hannah Story, Benny Doyle, Callum Twigger, Sally-Anne Hurley.

Photos Holly Engelhardt.

drink

HIGH SOCIETY D

an Aykroyd used to be on a mission from God. Now he’s on a mission from Globefill Inc to sell as much of his world-famous Crystal Head Vodka as damn possible. So you gotta start with the vodka questions, otherwise you run the risk of being called a “fucking hosebag”, as was the case when an SBS host refused to let him steer the conversation last week. That said, The Music is all about the booze and blues so we give him a light stir and set him off about his holy grail of alcohols. He means business: the shades are on (and they’re not coming off as our photographer will soon find out), he’s sharply dressed in his official CHV suit and ready to spiel.

“Yes, we’re running at battle speed,” he admits. “Anyone selling a book or a DVD or a record or a download would be doing the same thing – it’s just basic Marketing 101. That said I’m so thankful that I’m pushing a product that I can really believe in. You know what? I did sell a few bad movies… selling it on Wednesday and knowing it was gonna be dead by Friday. Having a quadruple award-winning fluid in this beautiful bottle that people are embracing makes my ‘selling’ job really easy and fun.”

The design of the product alone, which is based on the same legend of the 13 crystal skulls that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg used to cook up the fourth Indiana Jones film, has proven widely popular, with Crystal Head Vodka bottles now lining the shelves of everyone from your local metalhead to upmarket bars worldwide. Aykroyd acknowledges that its success in Australia mirrors that of his homeland of Canada. “I think it appeals to a rebellious, anarchic streak that we share.” He grins.

Popularity does have its drawbacks, however; plenty of liquor stores are forced to keep the prized bottles under lock and key and back in 2011 a group of thieves in Los Angeles made off with a whopping 21,000 skulls that were then sold on the black market.

“We had a tractor trailer in one of our distribution point warehouses and a team got in, they got into the tractor, which was still attached to the trailer, and they drove straight through the fence and got away with it! I didn’t reveal it publicly. I waited till we needed it. We had a launch coming up and the LAPD had been so ineffective in finding out who it was, and the insurance guys couldn’t work it out either, so we gave them three to four months so as not to interfere with the investigation then I revealed it. It was half-a-million dollars’ worth of the vodka. My quote at the time was, ‘I don’t condone crime, but I’m really happy that people can consume my vodka at a discounted price!’”

As you can tell, Aykroyd is a businessman and he knows a good publicity op when he sees one. When The Rolling Stones 50th Anniversary Tour came into view, he and his counterparts put into action a proposal to see his company enter a partnership with the ageing rock titans, the result of which is his most prized accolade: becoming the official vodka of the tour. At first it seems 22 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

like a tasty cash grab for the Xmas dollars you’re gonna spend on dad (and it is), but Aykroyd explains his friendship with the band is longstanding and includes him inviting Keith, Ronnie and Daryl for an extended stay on his farm only a few years ago. Before he’s even finished his sentence we’ve blurted out a question almost as a reflex -– “holy shit, did you guys jam?”

“Absolutely. Every night around the campfire they pulled out the guitars and harp and we sang old blues songs. My uncle is right into George Formby and he plays the banjo. Of course Keith knew exactly who Formby was so we had a wonderful time eating and drinking and staying up till four or five in the morning playing those songs. Keith would rise at three the next day of course… that said, I did most of my real partying with those guys a long time ago.”

There are plenty of people that would say Aykroyd indeed partied too hard back then, given his very public discussion of a deep belief in ghosts and extraterrestrials. Ghostbusters may have been a straight-up comedy, but its roots are within Aykroyd’s own passion for the supernatural, growing up in a household that celebrated what lies beyond our own known dimensions.

“Look if you wanna talk survival of the consciousness after death, residual spirit phantom energy, mediumship, transmediumship, channelling spirits from the beyond – well that’s a multi-generational thing in my family starting with my great, great grandfather Sam, an Edwardian spiritualist. In the ‘30s and ‘40s we had our own transmedium, his name was Walter Ashhurst… one day in a trance he knelt over the back of a chair and drew a diagram. It turns out later that he was channelling [Charles Proteus] Steinmetz, the physicist. My grandfather, a Bell Telephone engineer, took it to the engineers

Dan Aykroyd’s Crystal Head Vodka campaign blitzes through Aus as he announces the spirit is the official vodka for The Rolling Stones 50th Anniversary Tour. Lachlan Marks learns the OG Blues Brother also has his own Ghostbusters hotline these days, advising on mediums that might help in “getting people to cross over successfully”.

“OH I’VE ADVISED PEOPLE ON WHO TO CALL...”

at Bell Telephone who explained it was a diagram for a very high-oscillating crystal radio, which my grandfather then concluded was probably designed to communicate with the beyond.”

Despite his unnerving and wide-eyed enthusiasm for the paranormal it does seem like the lights have dimmed on the prospect of a third Ghostbusters film, with Bill Murray now famously playing the elusive Roadrunner to

his Wyle E Coyote. When future projects are raised he says he treasures a solid 30-year run in the business and harbours no bitterness if his marketability as a leading man may have “dropped off over the years”. So rather than titillate fans with minor trivia about a film we kinda know isn’t getting made anytime soon (like everybody else will be doing), we’ll leave you with the one and only Dr Raymond Stantz directing us to the real Ghostbusters that he believes deserve the attention nowadays.

“Oh I’ve advised people on who to call... in terms of mediums that might help them with getting people to cross over successfully. All the time. People come to me with ghost stories everyday,” he says earnestly.

“The parallel world is right beside us. Every single state in the USA has a serious paranormal investigation team, if not every county. Everywhere I go people ask me to come and see their great team work and they go about it in a very, very professional way.”

“EVERY NIGHT AROUND THE CAMPFIRE THEY PULLED OUT THE GUITARS AND HARP AND WE SANG OLD BLUES SONGS.”

AYKROYD ON THE ORIGINS OF ECTOPLASM: “Charles Richet coined the word ectoplasm. He saw an ectoplasmic hand come out of a medium’s stomach. He said, ‘I hate this. I’m a medical researcher and this defies everything I believe in but now I know I have to believe in it’.

Is that DNA from the medium or from the entity they are channelling? That is a great scientific quest.

Eusapia Palladino, who my dad writes about in his book A History Of Ghosts, was a young woman who could transchannel and she would open her mouth really wide and ectoplasmic forms would come out. I would love to get some of that and test it. I wish that some serious scientist would link arms with me to go forward on this but they don’t. They’re not interested in this.”

CELEBRITYENDORSED BEVERAGES CIROC

P Diddy endorses the suave grape vodka Ciroc, promoting an elite lifestyle accompanied by friends and glamour. Features flavours such as Coconut. Diddy also refers to himself as “Ciroc Obama” on ocassion.

CRUNK!!!

If your libido is a little lacklustre, Lil Jon created an energy drink infused with horny goat weed and other energy-promoting extracts to get the cogs of your rusty sex machine moving.

ABSOLUT VODKA

Zach Galifianakis, and Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, promote Absolut by creating a Golden Girls-style skit featuring beehive wigs and dramatised shaken martinis.

MMMHOPS

If you’re still harbouring some nostalgia for ‘90s pop music, and you wish you could almost taste it, well, we’d like to introduce you to Mmmhops pale ale beer. (MMM) Bop to MMMBop while drinking Hanson’s own Mmmhops. Mmm.

AVION TEQUILA

This real brand of tequila was given free publicity in the TV show Entourage when one of its characters, Turtle, promoted it. The endorsement came about because the tequila’s creator, Marquis Jet tycoon Kenny Dichter, grew up with the show’s creator and director Doug Ellin.

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 23

drink

INCIDER INFO With more kinds and flavours of cider than ever before, Sally-Anne Hurley explains why the apple-based brew ain’t just for ‘weak-stomached girls’ and ‘hated-on hipsters’.

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ike 40 is supposedly the new 30, or orange the new black, cider could very well be the new beer. Now hold on a minute, I’m not bagging out the goodness of the latter nor assuming anything could ever really replace it as our nation’s favourite type of alcohol. I mean, I love a cold, frothy schooner or a Corona with lime on a hot afternoon as much as the next person. But our love affair with cider is growing by the minute and it’s staking a big claim as the new, trendy drink ‘round town.

Cider has long been a popular choice of beverage in Europe, particularly the UK. Maybe our close connection to our brothers and sisters from the motherland is a contributing factor to our newfound love of cider and the rise of our consumption of the beverage over the past few years. According to a recent report released by market research company Roy Morgan Research, since 2011, consumption of cider by men between the ages of 18-24 alone has increased 50%, with the number of women drinking cider in the same age bracket rising by a staggering 132%. These statistics represent a number of things to different people. Someone like myself, a cider lover, would look at that and say, “Wow, that’s a whole lot of Aussie cider drinkers and woohoo, I am one of those awesome (and young) people.” Others interpret this as cider being a drink for the “hipsters” or for girls

“IT’S NOT JUST FOR THE GIRLS WHO ALLEGEDLY CAN’T HANDLE THEIR GROG.” who can’t handle “real grog” – I have in fact been told both these on several occasions. So what is it about this drop that has young Aussies frothing at the mouth and how can we, the weak-stomached girls or the hated-on hipsters, possibly convince the non-believers why cider is just so gosh darn good? Let’s break it down, shall we?

First of all, there’s a bit of history behind the drink.

I don’t know about you, but I personally love stories about the good ol’ days and the way things used to be.

Everyone and everything has a backstory and when people are a part of something with tradition, they generally feel like they are a part of something special (whether it is or not is another thing, but who gives a toss what others think, right?). People have been crushing and chopping up apples to make cider for centuries – even in the BC era. So that means there is a huge chance even Jesus had a drink of apple cider at some point. I 24 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

mean, he liked wine, so clearly the man had good taste. You don’t see people sitting around a table late Saturday night discussing the history of Bacardi Breezers now, is my point. There isn’t a deep and meaningful story behind it that adds a timeless quality or links generations together.

Secondly, humans need and want variety. Cider has come a long way from its traditional apple days. Nowadays, you can get all kinds of different flavours and tastes in both dry and sweet ciders.

Wild berry, strawberry and lime, mango and raspberry, blackcurrant, winter cider (still not

fully sure what that consists of, but it tastes good) and more. Not to mention, all the different brands of cider that you can get now – Bulmers, Rekorderlig, Pipsqueak, Castaway and Magners are just some that spring to mind. Generally, Gen Y doesn’t like to stand still, so to speak, and stay in their comfort zones. Perhaps the spike in cider love over the last couple of years is a reflection of young Aussies wanting to continue to try new things and think (or drink) outside the norm.

Finally, in the interest of breaking down barriers, cider doesn’t discriminate. It really does appeal to almost anyone. I mean, put the two points I’ve been banging on about previously together and you can see that the appeal of cider is almost endless. It’s not just for the girls who allegedly can’t handle their grog, or for the hipsters, or even the old European chaps who used to crush the apples themselves, or – God willing (excuse the pun) – Jesus. I like to think of it as the Switzerland of alcohol: a neutral domain that can bring people from all walks of life together – obviously not in a war safehaven kind of sense, but to bring on good times, happy taste buds and thoroughly quenched thirsts. Embrace it, alcohol lovers, cause something tells me the ol’ cider isn’t going anywhere.

DRINKING GAMES We know you’re not meant to play drinking games after the age of 16, but hey, sometimes nostalgia gets the best of you, and no one has any drugs, and there’s no gigs on, and you’ve just got to gather around the kitchen table with more alcohol than you could probably get through in a year. Make some sangria, call some friends, eat an entire loaf of bread and get prepared: Hannah Story talks you through it.

KING CUP

NEVER EVER HAVE I EVER

King Cup is your standard drinking game. Everyone has played it, everyone has a horror story, everyone wishes they hadn’t hurled in the sink afterwards. It’s just the way it goes. It’s disputable what the real rules are (everyone has their own variations), but it goes like this: lay out your cards in a circle face-down. Take turns picking a card. You do the action that corresponds to the card: usually, drinking. When you get a king you put booze into the vessel and make a rule. It continues until the final king is picked up, and someone has to drink the King Cup. One time the vessel was a dog’s bowl. One time the lethal mixture was two parts bourbon, one part Cruiser. We all thanked God we didn’t get that one.

Usually a number in King Cup leads to a quick game of Never Ever Have I Ever. But we figured it deserves its own spot in the Drinking Game Hall of Fame because of its capacity to humiliate and bring people together, all at the same time. One person will make a statement about something they’ve never done. Everyone who has done the thing drinks. And so it continues. It usually reveals something horrible you never knew, and is a perfect way to break the ice with a new group of friends. What better way to bond than by admitting that you have both watched Paris Hilton’s porno? It’s a relationship killer though, so don’t play with your significant other.

GOON OF FORTUNE

“MAKE SOME SANGRIA, CALL SOME FRIENDS AND GET PREPARED.”

Goon of Fortune is a decidedly ‘rural’ drinking game, apparently. It seems to generally involve the great outdoors, which is just not something city-dwellers are good at. You tie a goon sack (cask wine, whatever) to a clothesline and then spin it around. Whoever it lands on drinks the goon. Because of the position (hanging) it goes straight down your throat/all over your face. If you don’t own a clothesline, try a ceiling fan, but in that case maybe go with white wine? It wont stain your carpet so bad. Note: you will vomit, even if it’s just because you’ve been watching the clothesline spin for two hours.

MAO Because every time we play Mao, we have already been drinking, we can’t be sure if Mao has no rules, or if it has lots of rules. It’s a standard card game: you get seven cards from the deck, you take turns putting a card down. There seem to be four or five set rules that one player knows, and then penalises the others – with a shot and a card. You’re supposed to be able to discern what the rules are by watching other people fuck it up. If you win the round (call Mao at one card left, when you have none you win), you make up a rule, and penalise the others. It goes on until everyone either passes out or leaves the authoritarian state. We can’t tell you what the rules are though, that’ll spoil it.

RIDE THE BUS Ride the Bus is exhausting to explain. When we first played I had no idea what was happening, and then everyone somehow managed to gang up on one person who ended up having a pretty bad night. Set out ten cards in the shape of a triangle. Everyone playing gets four cards. A card from the wide end of the triangle is turned over. If you have a card with the same face value, you put your card down, and the set is discarded.

Then you nominate someone to drink. Keep turning over cards along the row, and then on the other rows.

In the other rows of the triangle, you can up the amount of drinks allocated. It’s over once the bus is gone, and whoever has the most cards left is the loser.

WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN YOU’RE DRUNK

drink

CALL YOUR EX

Or text them. Same goes for your mum.

And also your friends’ mums. Just put down the phone.

FACEBOOK OR TWEET

Your insightful stream-ofconsciousness observations and witty quips are actually hideously misspelled nonsensical ramblings.

PLAY SPORT

Even if you’re actually co-ordinated, balls, bats and booze don’t mix. Also, it is not the appropriate time to show off your handstand skills lest you land on your neck.

VISIT THE ATM

You WILL walk away leaving your card or cash or both behind.

BIKE RIDE

Don’t drink and drive; don’t drink and ride.

GO TO THE MOVIES/THEATRE

You don’t wanna be the guy reeking of booze and laughing constantly at things that aren’t even funny.

People hate that guy.

GROOM YOURSELF

The inebriated should not attempt to shave or remove body hair using other methods (particularly around the genital area), cut or colour their hair or paint their nails.

COOK AN ELABORATE MEAL

No one wants to see you stumbling around half-naked preparing a roast and trimmings while muttering “I’m Nigella, mmm, scrumptious!” and narrowly avoiding burning yourself.

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 25

drink

AN ALTERNATE GUIDE TO OUTDOOR DRINKING Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, Camperdown With graffiti sprayed on the walls and a children’s playground, this, the home of Newtown Festival, is the perfect place for a few beers on a Sunday afternoon.

There’s a creepy as fuck cemetery behind the park too, in case you get slaughtered and decide to wake the dead.

Your own house Surprise! House parties are the best parties, even if they’re a party for one or two. You wont regret drinking too much in your own home because you wont have to pay for a cab home, and your bed is right there. Hopefully you stocked up beforehand on hangover cures.

Your old high school By this point in your life you know how to get into your old high school without using the front gate: whether you used to jig class and had to sneak in, or you were looking for a quiet place to suck face. Go down nostalgia lane and get tanked at high school during the summer break.

Hyde Park, Sydney Tried and true. Many a goon sack has been consumed in this park.

Many a drinking game has been played. Loads of people have passed out or rubbed up against each other here. Go be a part of the institution that is drinking in Hyde Park.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney Probably more champagne picnic lunch appropriate than drinks until dawn, but you wouldn’t be the first to get wasted and pass out under a tree there. Just keep an eye out for rangers, who may send you home, and seagulls, who may eat your cheeseburger.

drink

OUR TOP OUTDOOR DRINKING VENUES Courthouse Hotel, Newtown Lovingly nicknamed The Courty, and not to be confused with Courthouse Hotel, Darlinghurst (that’s on Oxford Street and it’s – shudder – carpeted), Courthouse Hotel, Newtown, is where uni students go to drink self-jugs while writing essays, and where your mum probably hung out when she was your age.

The Abercrombie, Chippendale Or The Blabbercrombie or The Shabbercrombie or whatever other ‘ab’ word you want to shove at the front. This old pub has $10 cider jugs and a courtyard with fairy lights. Students drink here. So do respectable adults. Enough said.

Hotel Sweeney’s, Sydney It’s in the thick of the CBD, and a good place to stop and have a piss before getting on the bus home after a night out. It also has a rooftop bar, in case you’d like to start your night there with the sometimes frightening but generally friendly regulars.

26 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

Pyrmont Bridge Hotel, Pyrmont PBH is where your dignity goes to die.

You will without fail stumble home much drunker than you intended to be, but who cares, you were drinking with a view of the city skyline and Pyrmont Bay on a “rooftop terrace”.

Sweethearts Rooftop Barbecue, Potts Point When a place is described as in “Potts Point” it’s code for Kings Cross, just so you know. Sweethearts is a little rooftop oasis away from the hubbub of the rest of the Cross with a chill vibe. And you can always go pick up a hooker later.

DAN AYKROYD’S COCKTAILS CRYSTAL HEAD COCKTAIL PARTY “It has no sugar. It has no glycerine.

It has no citrus oil. It’s the virgin canvas for bartenders.”

DAN AYKROYD’S PUNCH IN THE HEAD “It’s 2 ounces of Crystal Head, pineapple juice, lychee, liqueur from Pernod Ricard and a little soda water.

PORTLAND SWEET ‘LIL PIGGY “In Portland, Oregon I saw a guy do this: a maple sugar cube, wrapped in bacon with bitters, blueberry syrup, hibiscus syrup and the Vodka.”

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 27

theatre

TOO CLOSE TO HOME As she prepares for the Australian premier of controversial play Anaconda, writer/director Sarah Doyle talks to Dave Drayton about distance and drama.

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hen Sarah Doyle takes the phone call she’s been back on Australian soil for less than a fortnight and only known the cast – Martin Broome, Simon Lynden, Damian de Montemas, and Leeanna Walsman – for the upcoming production of lauded and controversial play Anaconda for as long. “I know a lot of people in Sydney, I grew up in Sydney, but I’d actually never met any of my actors, so there was a lot of anticipation!”

theatre

Doyle had cast the production from Los Angeles, the location of Anaconda’s writing and premiere and where she’s been living and working. Inspired by the sexual abuse and extreme bullying scandal that engulfed the prominent private Trinity Grammar School in 2000 (and sharing a name with the infamous woodworking tool at its centre) the play – which experienced a sold out run and Best Of Fringe extension at the 2012 Hollywood Fringe, as well as a Best International Award nomination – drew some criticism from parties affiliated with the school despite its overseas premiere.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision to premiere it overseas; I was living there and it got picked up for the Fringe.

It was also a good way to test the waters; it’s very different here because the events that inspired it did happen here and that’s going to have more of an effect towards the context. Sometimes I wonder if I would have written it if I was in Sydney,” Doyle ponders, “because even when I was researching it and looking into it, I just felt quite sick. I think the distance helped me, the removal away from it helped me go there.”

Most Australian media coverage of the play has focused on its connection to the events at Trinity, but less attention has been given to the work they inspired, which is set years after the abuse. “In the play you’ve got the victim and the bystander and the bystander’s wife and an old school friend, and they all sort of realise that they never reached out and saw how he was,” explain Doyle.

“People can be aware of an event, or the media trail of an event, and sometimes what’s lost in that is the actual victim. It’s like when someone dies and you don’t know what to say, so you don’t say anything. That’s what the main character is going through, he’s looking back on not saying anything, just mortified. But it’s understandable, we’ve all been in that position where we don’t speak up.”

What remains to be seen is whether Australian audiences can distance themselves from the scandal of real life drama and focus on the work of theatre that tackles important questions about the culture of silence, bullying and the lasting effects of abuse.

WHAT: Anaconda WHEN & WHERE: 29 Oct to 23 Nov, Rock Surfers, Bondi Pavilion

WORLDS COLLIDE Poet, playwright and proponent of verse drama Dale Turner talks to Dave Drayton about exploring mythology and history in his new play The Westlands.

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here’s a rich history of verse drama – the Greeks, Racine, Shakespeare – but since the latter half of the last century it seems the form has been dying out. Though there has been a few torch bearers in recent times, with Sydney Theatre Company’s Under Milk Wood last year proving audiences are still hungry for it.

In fact, it was the latter play that inspired, in part, Dale Turner to return to the form for his latest play, The Westlands, which paints a polyphonic impressionistic picture of a mythical suburb in Western Sydney and will, appropriately, play as part of the True West Theatre programme at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres.

“I’d written a previous verse drama called A Door Ajar and I got a lovely card from Les Murray in which he very, very kindly said that in parts it outdid Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, which was very nice,” Turner explains, before adding, with residual dumbstruck pride, “and I’ve got it framed and up on my wall.”

Heralded as perhaps the greatest play for voices, the favourable comparison no doubt added a little fuel to the fire. With his latest outing Turner wanted to further explore the genre, concocting this expansive work for eight actors across 30 different parts. Mixing verse and prose, Turner says, enabled him to mix different kinds of worlds within his fictitious suburb – the internal 28 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

and the external, the real and the imagined.

“I thought I wanted to develop the genre further and decided to look at a mythical suburb of western Sydney and what that comprised of and the history of that.

And the characters of the people, how they filled that landscape both physically and historically, and mentally in terms of their dreams, and their aspirations and their successes and failures – the whole consciousness of this mythical place called the Westlands itself.

“By doing it that way it allows, from the writing point of view, a great deal of freedom because you’re exploring

inner and outer worlds. You’re exploring mythologies and you’re also exploring history and hence I could use both prose and verse in a very broad way.”

Each of these characters’ lives is linked by the Stranger, who arrives at the beginning of the Westlands and acts as a guide through the suburb painted by stories.

Turner’s poetic approach breathes life into them, and he hopes, into this genre with such enormous history.

“Poetry has an ancient and long, long tradition in writing for the theatre and hopefully this is successfully part of a continuation of that tradition. We don’t see verse drama so much nowadays... However, there is a very definite place for this form of writing within the theatre and I think, given the use of it in the right places, it really does heighten and intensify the language. I think it gives the audience a great depth of feeling; they become involved with the piece, and it enables the audience to be taken on that journey that the Stranger and the characters and indeed the Westlands itself want to take them on.”

WHAT: The Westlands WHEN & WHERE: 17 to 26 Oct, Rafferty’s Theatre, Riverside Theatres

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music

MAKING WAVES

bass – the Aria Pro II – and that’s the bass that she played in the Pixies. And that guitar – her Les Paul – ended up being the guitar that Joe [Santiago] played in the Pixies.

It’s been 20 years since iconic album Last Splash marked the transformation of The Breeders from a side-project to stars in their own right, and to celebrate they’ve pulled the classic line-up back together. Guitarist Kelley Deal tells Steve Bell about learning your instrument on the job and being caught in an alterna-rock tidal wave.

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riginally forming in 1990 as a vehicle for then Pixies’ bassist Kim Deal to get her stockpile of songs out into the world at large, The Breeders eventually became one of the most influential bands of the massive ‘90s alternative rock boom. They’ve continued on to this day in various incarnations – coalescing around dual guitarists Kim and her identical twin sister Kelley – but it’s their 1993 second album Last Splash for which they’re most remembered, and to celebrate its birthday the Deals have brought the “classic” rhythm section (bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim Macpherson) back into the fray to tour the album as it was intended.

“It’s been going fantastic – it’s been super fun,” Kelley enthuses about the US leg of the reunion tour.

“Everybody knows what you’re going to play and they want to hear that record, so they’ve given us permission – it’s like this wonderful clean contract with the audience: ‘This is what we’re doing and you obviously want to see this, otherwise you wouldn’t be here, so now we’re all going to have a good time and enjoy ourselves!’ That’s what it feels like, a big celebration.

“It’s been a blast working with [ Jim and Josephine] again. It doesn’t feel like any time has gone by – I feel like that’s probably not a good thing somehow.

Somehow one of us should have morphed into something really, really special somewhere along the line, but everybody seems to be exactly the same as they were twenty years ago, myself included.”

Fittingly, the milestone celebration began in rather ad hoc fashion, with the Deal sisters perched on the couch reflecting on the passage of time.

“That’s exactly what happened, exactly,” Kelley laughs.

“It was one of those things, like, ‘I don’t know, it’s been twenty years – should we do something about that?’ and the answer straight away was, ‘Yeah, we should probably play a show’. ‘Where would we play?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Want to just play one show?’ ‘I dunno.’ Should we ask the others?’ ‘Yeah, awesome!’ So [Kim] touched base with Josephine and I touched with Jim, and we got answers back straight away going, ‘Yeah, that sounds great!’ Then we just went from there, and of course [The Breeders’ UK label] 4AD heard about it and re-issued Last Splash [as LSXX] – it’s a beautiful package.

“It was really fun [finding the bonus material]. Some of the live stuff – not all of them – sounded really good, but some of them were really hard for me to listen to; ‘My god, why am I singing so out of tune? No, we’re not using it!’ But then a lot of it was really good, because we’d practiced and practiced and played and practiced – a lot – so we were good live.”

The story of how Kelley couldn’t actually play guitar before joining The Breeders has become rock’n’roll lore, but it seems that it was this unfamiliarity with her instrument – combined with some traits of laziness – which ended up forging The Breeders’ live talents.

“That is indeed true,” she smiles of her initial ineptitude. “I did own a bass guitar and a bass amp, although I couldn’t really play it – I played like somebody who couldn’t play bass guitar. Kim would play acoustic guitar for an early duo that we played in occasionally – we both sang and Kim played guitar – and I tried to join her on bass for a couple of tunes, to step it up a bit. And it’s weird, because Kim took that

“But we practiced a lot. I’m really bad at practicing by myself. Josephine said recently that when we’d play festivals – which are notorious for not having good monitors and you not being able to hear anything – that it was such a good thing that we’d practiced as much as we did, because it was so easy to play live. But the reason that we practiced so much was that I needed the practice, but I wouldn’t practice by myself – I needed the whole band to gather round and practice with me.

It’s one thing to sit there and play your part on guitar by yourself, but it’s another to stand up and hear the racket that everybody else is making and then play your part and sing at the same time. So yeah, I needed a lot of practice.”

Little could Kelley have known at the time that the album they were crafting – anchored by its brilliantly off-kilter single Cannonball – would go on to be so revered, and that The Breeders would play such a pivotal role in that ‘90s guitar explosion.

“IF YOU’RE CAUGHT IN A TIDAL WAVE YOU DON’T KNOW HOW BIG THE WAVE IS, YOU’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT WITH NO CLUE” “It’s one of those things where you don’t realise at the time – I knew, ‘Ooh, this grunge thing certainly seems to be taking off ’, of course you’re aware of it – but it’s not until years later that you realise, ‘Wow, that was a movement’, like the Sixties was a movement,” she reflects. “You don’t know while you’re in the middle of it how big it was. If you’re caught in a tidal wave you don’t know how big the wave is, you’re in the middle of it with no clue, so it’s interesting now that the dust has settled and some years have gone by to look back and see what impact it had. We’ll see if it becomes just yet another footnote, like hair metal for instance, or if it’s something that keeps resonating with people.”

WHEN & WHERE: 28 Oct, Enmore Theatre

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 31

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ROCK THE CRADLE Once a contributing member of the Australian experimental collective Decoder Ring, Lenka’s move to America has seen her transform into an international superstar, writes Jazmine O’Sullivan.

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enka has embraced her recent journey into motherhood with open arms – it’s more than evident upon listening to her latest album Shadows, which contains samples of the in-utero heartbeat of her son on the track Two Heartbeats, a lullaby – No Harm Tonight – which was written for him during the late stages of her pregnancy, and a more maternal energy when compared to her previous albums.

Lenka reveals that while she’s happy with the album title Shadows, it wasn’t her first choice. “I was originally going

to call it Lullabies For Adults,” Lenka confesses, “because that’s how I made it to sound. But my managers said, ‘Maybe think about something else...’ It’s a lullaby album, and that to me means night time; you listen to it when you’re toning down your day, so shadowy.

There are also some references to shadows in [the album], and I also see the songs as my shadows; this vague idea that they are remnants of me. It’s about reflection, reminiscing, dreaming, regret, memories and things like that.”

It was all the way back in 2009 when Lenka performed in Australia last,

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and with so much changing for her since then she’s thrilled to have the opportunity to share her new sound and concept with audiences in her home country. “[This tour] has been a long time coming.

I’ve been trying to get back for the last few years but because I’m signed to a US major label they didn’t really want me to tour over here, so I’m just very excited. It’s been hard to get it going and now it’s finally happening! Hopefully I can put on some really good shows and make it worthwhile.”

Fans can expect a heavily string-laden band to accompany Lenka for her upcoming shows. “I’m trying some new stuff [with this tour]. It forces you to re-imagine the songs when you strip them back acoustically, or in a different way. I mean, sometimes I amp them up, like I’ll add a chorus or a disco beat, but at the moment I’m bringing them down with violin and acoustic guitars, because it’s a lullaby album and I want to keep that sort of tone.

“I’ve been enjoying this [new] line-up,” Lenka continues, “I recently did a tour like this in the States and it was so nice; it just created this really mellow, yummy vibe, I almost wanted everyone to have a nap!” she laughs. “It was just really cosy and sweet and the strings are such beautiful instruments, they bring such emotion. Having done so much touring and jumping around the stage I’m happy to have a little break from that. I might go back to it further down the track, but it’s nice at the moment to just focus on the music and let it breathe.”

WHAT: Shadows (Skipalong) WHEN & WHERE: 25 Oct, The Vanguard

JOURNEY AGENTS Fuck Buttons have no idea why anyone (other than themselves) listens to their music. They also “don’t have an interest in travelling”, Andrew Hung informs Anthony Carew.

“T

o be honest, I don’t have an interest in travelling at all,” admits Andy Hung, one half of the English electro-noise duo Fuck Buttons, aka Hung and Benjamin John Power. “So, the touring lifestyle has been an interesting development in my life.” Hung is on the line from Rome, about to depart for Bologna. How can he have no interest in travelling? “There’s a lot of things I want to do at home!” Hung laughs. “We’re both very creative people; we want to be making things all the time. And you can’t really do that when you’re travelling. Without wanting to sound like a hippy: there’s as much exploration you can do internally as there is to do externally.”

Across three LPs – 2008’s Street Horrrsing, 2009’s Tarot Sport and 2013’s Slow Focus – Fuck Buttons have staged explorations in sound. “What’s fun about music is that it takes you on a journey without you having to plan and intellectualise that,” Hung says. “When you’re making something, a good sign is when you start surprising yourselves. The time in which you’re doing something that feels a bit dangerous to you, that’s what you strive for; I think any artist can empathise with that. You want to feel like you’re exploring, otherwise you’re just going through the motions.”

Part of the intuitive, exploratory nature of Fuck Buttons’ music comes from its instrumental nature, which lends it an interpretive quality that makes it perfect for 32 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

film placements and/ or Olympic opening ceremonies. But are Fuck Buttons’ songs, y’know, about anything? “Not really. But kind of. There’s certain imagery that it conjures for us, and it’s exciting for us to have that, but in terms of, like, themes or stories or narrative, there’s none of that,” says Hung. So what kind of imagery does it conjure for them? “No!” Hung yelps, defiantly. “Not saying!

We’ve been hesitant to talk about that at all. Not because we’re secretive, but because that’s part of the fun about the music.

We wouldn’t want to rob any listeners of that joy of getting their own imagery from whatever they’re listening to.

Once, this guy on one

of our YouTube videos, can’t remember which song it was, said it was like lying on a lake of ice, watching shooting stars. That’s a pretty incredible image.”

“We write it for ourselves, always, without any regard for how anyone else will perceive it,” says Hung. “We think it’s amazing that anyone else listens to our music at all, but we have no idea why they do. Because it’s just the two of us, we’re only really trying to satisfy each other.

By reading each other’s expression, when we’re writing or jamming music, [we] can tell when something’s going right. When we’re playing for ‘that’ face, we’re playing for each other; and it goes back and forth between us as a dialogue. I can’t say that we don’t write for an audience, because we’re writing for each other.”

WHAT: Slow Focus (ATP/Fuse) WHEN & WHERE: 24 Oct, Oxford Art Factory

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music

IN WITH THE OLD Most fans prefer Limp Bizkit’s older material and won’t even give their new record a second listen, but Fred Durst couldn’t care less. The vocalist talks with Daniel Cribb about overcoming tragedy and freeing themselves of expectation.

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uggling a million things at once, it’s the developments of the latest Eastbound & Down episode that is in the foreground of Fred Durst’s mind when he answers his phone. “I’m a big fan of Danny McBride and I’ve been watching it since the get-go. I really enjoy it, man. It’s really funny, and it just seems like it’s going to be really outrageous,” the frontman begins from the midst of an intense recording session.

“I’m doing a little something here with, believe it or not, Billy Ray Cyrus,” he says. “He’s got this song about paying attention to what’s going on in the world and getting your shit together and doing something about it.”

It’s not a stretch to conclude the song may have something to do with Miley’s twerking in August, but when asked his thoughts on the subject, it becomes clear that Billy is probably within earshot. “I think she’s doing her own thing, you know, and whatever she’s doing is obviously to leave a mark, and it looks like it’s working.”

Durst spends most of his time in the studio these days, and when he’s not working with other artists, he’s finalising mixes for the new Limp Bizkit record, which, after numerous release date changes, will finally see the light of day in the first quarter of next year.

But, unlike the Cyrus family, Durst admits Limp Bizkit aren’t really expecting to produce career-defining material in Stampede Of The Disco Elephants. “This whole thing of people only touring an album or something to market or push, I mean, realistically, with Limp Bizkit, how many of you guys are going to sit around and want us to play a bunch of songs that no one knows?

How many of those songs can we possibly fit into our set without boring the shit out of everybody?”

Soundwave 2012 was the band’s first Australian tour since fan Jessica Michalik died during their set at the 2001 Sydney Big Day Out, so the reunion was always going to be an emotional one. “It was good to come back and dedicate our whole experience and our return to [ Jessica].

It was amazing; we loved it and didn’t want to come home.

It just felt like there was so much emotion and passion...

We promised our fans that we would come back and do a proper tour outside of the festival market, so we’re

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coming back over there to get our feet wet and have some fun. Limp Bizkit is a very unique experience and we want to share it with you guys.”

Stampede Of The Disco Elephants’ first single, Ready To Go, which features Lil Wayne, was released in April, and will no doubt be one of the new songs

something fresh and exciting that I’m prone to be drawn to a little bit more right now.”

One of the aforementioned trials was the departure of DJ Lethal last year. After leaving the band at the start of 2012 due to drug and alcohol abuse, he made amends and was welcomed back, only to be kicked out shortly after. “We decided he needed some time to work on some personal things. It wasn’t great for us, it was shocking, but we have nothing but the greatest wishes for Lethal and we just sort of kept quiet about it and are just trying to stay focused and move forward and be better people.”

Before the new record comes out next year, the band will be releasing a couple more singles. Such a drip-feed

“HOW MANY OF THOSE SONGS CAN WE POSSIBLY FIT INTO OUR SET WITHOUT BORING THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYBODY?” incorporated into the set.

It sits somewhere between 2011’s Gold Cobra and 1999’s Significant Other.

“We wanted to leave some character in there and not polish things up. I think it feels very exciting. I love all the things we’ve done because I’ve lived through them and I put my heart into them and went through the trials and tribulation of being in our band and appreciate everything we’ve done. I surely think this album has

approach to releasing a record is only possible due to the band leaving major label Interscope and signing up with Cash Money Records in February. “There’s no pressure; no one over your shoulder at all, everyone’s doing their own thing. [Cash Money Records] are like, ‘Hey, you’re Limp Bizkit, go be Limp Lizkit and enjoy yourselves’. Nobody’s chasing another hit, chasing a song that sounds like an old song or chasing a format that’s popular amongst music buyers. It’s put the excitement back into the seed that was planted when we got together and first started making music for ourselves when there was no one listening. It’s still hard to erase the fact that there are people anticipating and there’s opinions out, but for the most part, we’re back to no pressure.”

WHEN & WHERE: 26 Oct, Sydney Entertainment Centre

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music

BREAKING TRADITION Although embracing classic rock, guitarist Joe Trohman tells Brendan Crabb that US superstars Fall Out Boy have no desire to be revivalists churning out “someone else’s record that was written thirty years ago”.

“I

think guys are pretty shitty at multi-tasking,” Fall Out Boy lead guitarist Joe Trohman laughs during a recent tour stopover in Washington DC. “So it’s better for us guys to focus on one thing at a time. I personally don’t believe anybody’s good at multi-tasking. I think even when someone seems like they’ve been working on a lot of projects at once, in real time they probably haven’t. It’s very hard to sit there and change mindsets constantly. I prefer to put [total] focus into each thing that I do, therefore hopefully it won’t come out like crap.”

Despite their multitude of ventures, this career tunnel vision means the Chicago pop/punk/rockers have never sought to undertake any half-heartedly. Thus, after four mega-selling studio albums, a comic book, fashion line, video game remake and more, in 2009 they announced an indefinite hiatus to pursue other projects. Frontman Patrick Stump released his solo debut, Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley played in metal supergroup The Damned Things and bassist Pete Wentz kept busy with electro-pop project Black Cards, wrote a novel and hosted reality show Best Ink. In February, their comeback was confirmed. Alleviating any fears their drawing power had waned, the global success of latest LP, Save Rock And Roll – featuring collabs with Big Sean, Courtney Love and Elton John – has cemented their major player status.

“I think the word fresh is a good attachment,” Trohman enthuses. “We’re not sitting there going like, ‘We’re here to save rock‘n’roll’. We’re putting into play the thought that rock‘n’roll doesn’t have to be this traditionalist style of music. If you want to be traditionalist about it, go listen to Dixieland jazz, Christian gospel music and Delta blues, which is where a lot of it came from, and old country stuff.

“Otherwise, it really doesn’t just have to sound like Led Zeppelin, whom I love, or Black Sabbath, whom I also love. It should be constantly pushing things forward, constantly changing and growing, and I think it’s been doing that since it was dubbed ‘rock‘n’roll’ in the fifties. To turn it into a retro genre will only bury it six feet under. So that’s sort of what we’re trying to 36 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

get across; the idea that it should be pushing boundaries and doing something fresh.”

So the ‘retro rock’ movement doesn’t really wash with him?

“I’m not saying it

“[Classic rock] is an important part, just as much as music itself. Tonnes of classic genres are very evident within our back catalogue and our new record. It’s just that if you believe that only classic rock, or only old blues rock [is] the only rock that should exist then you’re stagnating rock’s growth and the idea of rock becoming this future music.

Rock is an attitude and it is a mindset, too.”

“WE’RE NOT SITTING THERE GOING LIKE, ‘WE’RE HERE TO SAVE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL’.

WE’RE PUTTING INTO PLAY THE THOUGHT THAT ROCK‘N’ROLL DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS TRADITIONALIST STYLE OF MUSIC.” doesn’t wash with us,” the axeman clarifies.

“I think a lot of it can be great, and a lot of it can be done in a really interesting way.

If you listen to our records, we incorporate plenty of that. We incorporate tonnes of classic rock influences.

We also don’t limit ourselves to what we listen to, and we’re not out there trying to write someone else’s record that was written thirty years ago.

Australian fans will witness this forward-thinking ethos on stage during their upcoming arena tour with Melbourne’s British India. This follows Fall Out Boy’s intimate theatre shows here in March. “We didn’t go away for maybe a long time in terms of actual time, but in the music world nowadays, where everything really relies on the fifteen minutes and then refresh your blog kind of timeframe, three-anda-half, four years is kind of a long while. We know we still have a lot of real diehard fans in Australia, but as far as the response [in March], we had no idea that would come into play. That obviously warranted us coming back and doing something bigger.”

WHAT: Save Rock And Roll (Universal) WHEN & WHERE: 25 Oct, Sydney Entertainment Centre

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style

IT’S A SHOE-IN

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n Their Shoes is a major worldwide creative project that involves musicians across the globe coming together in the name of charity to hand design Converse sneakers. These oneof-a-kind shoes will be auctioned off on eBay this month, which is our national Breast Cancer Awareness

Shoe and music enthusiasts, prepare yourselves. You could potentially be the owner of sneakers that your favourite artist has not only touched, but personally designed. Some local and international bands got out the textas, drew on some Converses and are auctioning them off to raise much-needed funds for charity.

NUGGETS INSPIRED (ART BY JASON GALEA)

PORTUGAL. THE MAN

BLOODS THE BLACK KEYS

GROUPLOVE

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Month, with all proceeds going to the National Breast Cancer Foundation or a charity of the artist’s choice.

Over the course of 18 months, local and touring musicians were asked to create a design using nothing more than a pair of plain white Converse sneakers and Sharpie fabric markers. Bands such as Portugal.

The Man, Bloods, The Black Keys, Grouplove (whose vocalist Hannah Hooper’s own Converse creation for her tour manager actually inspired the initiative), Frightened Rabbit, Bon Iver, Santigold, You Am I, Skrillex, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, James Blunt, New Order, Kimbra, Macklemore & Ryan

Lewis and Red Hot Chili Peppers all rolled up their sleeves and exercised their art skills for a good cause.

and close on Tuesday 29 Oct, with starting bids from $99. The designs and full list of contributing artists can all be found at intheirshoes.com.au.

The auction will go live at ebay.com. au/intheirshoes from Thursday 24 Oct at 6pm

YOU AM I

BON IVER SKRILLEX SANTIGOLD

FRIGHTENED RABBIT

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theatre

OH JACKIE

there, because you jump from the image she presented to the world, and in the play we’re going to be exploring everything that’s underneath that,” Schebesta explains.

Lizzie Schebesta chats to Dave Drayton about pulling down the mask of the best and least known first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.

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963, Dallas, Texas. President John F Kennedy is assassinated while travelling in a motorcade with his wife, Jacqueline, the Texas Governor, and his wife.

The event was cemented in cultural as well as political history thanks to the then new technology of personal video cameras. The seconds preceding the events in Ron Elisha’s new play Love Field – which presents Jacqueline Kennedy (Lizzie Schebesta) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (Ben Wood) on their plane trip from Love Field airport to Washington aboard Air Force One – are some of

PIC OF LIZZIE SCHEBESTA BY TESSA TRAN

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the most watched and rewatched in history, but those that followed, like the true, private personality of the woman Schebesta will portray, remain illusive. “Jackie Kennedy was such a famously private person, and spoke in such a high voice that really showed no emotion, it’s hard to tell when you listen to her what she actually really thinks about anything.

The playwright’s idea in the play is to take the mask down and show her in a really raw state of honesty and privacy.

Even the footage of her at the funeral, she’s got the big black veil all down her face and no one is allowed to see into what she’s feeling so there’s a great invention

The role of Jackie is quite a departure from her recent role as the coquettish young Vivie in Sydney Theatre Company’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. Daily listening sessions of oral history cassettes recorded by Jacqueline and extensive documentary watching have all been part of Schebesta’s research as she’s launched into the challenge. “When you play someone famous you’re going: ‘Well, okay, there’s a certain amount of technical requirements I must meet and a skill level that I have to be at’, but then you’ve also got to be brave enough to take the creative leaps for invention, because it is theatre and it is fiction too. So no one just wants to see you up there, dry, just performing some imitation documentary footage; they want to see you inhabiting her.”

Schebesta and her Love Field co-star Ben Wood, who plays LBJ, have appeared prolifically in Bell Shakespeare and Sport For Jove productions of late, but not yet together on stage. Though there was one job together, for television, that bears a remarkable resemblance to the emotional exchanges of the script. “We worked once together on Rescue Special Ops actually. I was a miner’s wife and he played a miner. And it’s quite funny because my character was stuck down a well and it was sort of a similar predicament; he was the best friend that was trying to help me and I was the grieving window, so it’s very strangely similar!”

WHAT: Love Field WHEN & WHERE: 23 Oct to 2 Nov, TAP Gallery

NEGATIVE OUTLOOK Caitlin Rose’s music is “pretty dark, at the core”, she tells Anthony Carew, and that darkness is an aspect of her personality that she taps into for songwriting.

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ell Caitlin Rose that you’re calling from Melbourne, and it’s like you’re on the line from her home away from home. The Nashville native spent a week hanging out in Fitzroy on her first Australian tour in 2011, played a show at a suburban RSL and journeyed out to country Victoria to play at Boogie festival. Wherever she went, Rose was surprised by the vocal nature of local audiences; even if, for the 26 year old, dealing with crowds hollering things at her is par for the show-playin’ course.

“I definitely seem to encourage [crowd interaction], whether knowingly or unknowingly,” says Rose.

“Sometimes I enjoy it, but it can go either way. There’s some people who are just trying to create a vibe, an atmosphere in the room, and I like that – it feels communal. But there are others who think they can have this real one-to-one, personal moment with you despite the fact that there’s several hundred other people in the room. That’s when it gets weird.”

When stopping to consider why Rose – quietly spoken yet slyly humorous in conversation, but vocally blessed with an old-fashioned, heartbreaking country warble – might encourage crowd interaction, she’s unsure. Could it be that listeners, tuning into records that have her name and face on the cover, feel like they already know her? “Yeah, but you can never really know someone all

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that much just through hearing their music, you can only know a certain part of them,” Rose considers. “You may know the part of them that creates, but there’s always a lot more to people than that. People tap into different aspects of their personality when they write, it’s never a whole personality kind of a thing. I don’t think, just by listening to somebody’s records, you can ever get to know them.”

Rose’s records walk a line between straight country and gentle transgression; her wry, observationist character sketches told in a drawl over golden-toned guitars and lingering swipes of pedal steel. Since her first

record, 2008’s Dead Flowers, they’ve grown both more luxuriant and darker, the warm country hues of 2010’s breakout Own Side Now giving way to the nocturnal, barfly tales of the more dramatic The Stand-In. “There’s a strong undercurrent of negativity going through my music, even at live shows,” Rose says, somewhat cryptically. Negativity? “Well, it’s not exactly light-hearted, is it?” she responds. “I don’t think the music that I create has a positive outlook to it, at all. It’s pretty dark, at the core. Which goes back to what I say: it’s only one aspect of who you are that comes out when you play.

I’m not a particularly serious person, and I definitely try to have a sense of humour about my music, about the things that people say – the repetition of it. But none of that actually comes out on the records themselves.”

WHAT: The Stand-In (ATO) WHEN & WHERE: 25 Oct, The Basement

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music

REVEALING THEIR BONES On almost a decade ago to the day, violin-wielding pop punks Yellowcard released their fourth studio album, Ocean Avenue.

Frontman Ryan Key looks back – and forwards – as he talks to Dave Drayton about acoustic music and anniversaries.

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here’s been a trend in recent years, for better or for worse, of bands playing seminal (the qualifying factors of such status varies) albums from their back-catalogue in full live. Often enough it’s an out-of-the-blue trip down memory lane, or a full retrospective for a new audience, though increasingly such tours seem to be par for the course for bands who survived ten years after the album in question’s release, and bands (perhaps low on money, self-esteem or ideas) who didn’t survive and instead reformed in one state or another eager to celebrate or capitalise once again.

Being that the early-noughties sparked a new wave of emo- and punk-influenced bands and a broader recognition of their music it serves to reason that, in the early teens of this millennium, their ten-year milestones should roll around with the same frequency that the then upstarts started hitting airwaves and bigger stages a decade ago. “It’s coming up on or has been the ten-year anniversary for a lot of really kind of important records in our genre of music: New Found Glory, Taking Back Sunday, Story Of The Year – lots of bands are kind of celebrating this time,” confirms Ryan Key, the frontman of Yellowcard, who have just joined the party with the announcement of their plans to celebrate a decade passing since their breakthrough album, Ocean Avenue.

down acoustic stuff, and I think that after doing [WYTT,SY acoustic] when we thought what could we do for Ocean Avenue, I think the hardcore fanbase really enjoyed the fact that we recorded that record and so we thought let’s take it to the next level and do another acoustic record but actually do drums and bass and full string section and some of those things that make the record come to life even a little more,” says Key. The 2003 release of Ocean Avenue marked Yellowcard’s debut on a major label, and spawned three singles – the title track, Way Away, and Only One – eventually

there wasn’t even really a Facebook, I mean, it was 2004, people were getting Facebook but it was just coming off being a college campus only kind of thing. The record grew in a really organic way, based on the music not on the social networking way, and I will always hold that close to my heart and I will always be proud of the record because of how it performed in the pre-internet explosion era.”

The acoustic version of Ocean Avenue was produced and mixed by Key and Erich Talaba, the engineer used on all of Yellowcard’s records with producer Neal Avron since 2007’s Paper Walls. Taking the hands-on approach across a couple of studios in Los Angeles gave Key the opportunity to reflect not only on the success and impact of the album, but on the songs themselves. “It was a lot different performing the songs vocally. Obviously they mean different things now than they did then; there’s a lot of discovering, saying to yourself, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I wrote this at that age’, y’know, and some other times I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really ridiculous that I wrote this’, and a lot of ‘Oh man, I wish we had done this differently’, and a lot of going, ‘Wow, remember when we did that? Why have we not done that again or another record?’. A lot of the songs are just actual acoustic renditions of the songs and then a couple of them are re-imagined in a new way that sounds kind of different to the original song. It was cool. The whole process was super fun.”

When it came to booking the tour to accompany the acoustic re-release Key says Australia was a no-brainer.

The reception they received throughout their September tour last year – their first in five years with the exception of Counter Revolution in 2011 – solidified the band’s desire to return as soon as possible. “We hadn’t headlined a show in Australia since 2007 and even then we were co-headlining with Sum 41, so it had been a long time

“I WILL ALWAYS BE PROUD OF THE RECORD BECAUSE OF HOW IT PERFORMED IN THE PRE-INTERNET EXPLOSION ERA.” It will be released, completely re-recorded as an acoustic album, and performed as such in full on a world tour. A day after our conversation, as if Key made premonitions over the phone from Colorado, Taking Back Sunday announced the release of TAYF10 Acoustic, a film and full live album recorded during the band’s Tell All Your Friends tenth anniversary tour last year. “We didn’t want to just do a tour, you know,” says Key. “We figured we would do that anyways, but we wanted to do something a little more than that for the fans, and we have the capability to do a lot of recording on our own now and that’s something that we really enjoy doing so we decided we would just take our time over a few months and put it together and I think it came out awesome.”

The band had already ventured into acoustic territory in 2011 when they revisited the then-recently released When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes, the first album they released following a two-year hiatus. “It’s something we’ve been exploring more lately, recording more sit 42 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

garnering platinum status for sales in excess of a million copies.

Undeniably the band’s most successful album, Key looks back on its release with pride and awe. “One of the things I love so much about Ocean Avenue was that it’s by far – leaps and bounds and miles or kilometres or whatever you want to say – our most successful record, and I don’t think that the internet had that much to do with it.

There was no Twitter, there was no Instagram,

since we had come and played our own shows. Not many people had come to a Yellowcard show and bought a T-shirt in god knows how long – in Australia it was just a really positively overwhelming experience for us; it was pretty emotional, to be honest,” Key admits.

“We were just blown away, like how our band hadn’t been here in six years but it’s not a novelty, these people are here because they love our band and they love our music and we could feel that it wasn’t like, ‘Oh cool, Yellowcard’s coming back and I liked them back then so I’m gonna come see them now’; it was the same vibe if not even more intense than it was before. That’s why that tour was so special for us – it was somewhere that we hadn’t been in a long time and we got a response that, I dunno, I guess I didn’t know what were expecting, but we got more, definitely more than we were expecting.”

WHEN & WHERE: 26 Oct, Enmore Theatre

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With Marquee Moon they set out to capture the energy of the band performing live. They achieved exactly this; the verve of the album ensures it still sounds fresh, and the prospect of the eight numbers in order is electrifying. While Verlaine is coy about whether he believes the songs stack up to his standards today, he’s gratified that there’s still demand to see them performed live and says, despite having written the lyrics 30-something years ago, he wouldn’t change much if he were given the opportunity to do so. “It’s not dated in any way because it’s not a generic rock record based on blues changes, or rockabilly changes, or Beatles imitations or something like that,” he says. “I think that’s why it’s still a little fresh... I don’t think I’d rewrite any of them... There are songs on our records where I’ve thought, ‘That verse could’ve been better, or certain verbs could have been better’ – little things that could have been better, but not a whole lot.”

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TRANSMISSION REBOOT Frontman Tom Verlaine explains to Samson McDougall how Television’s illusion of improvisatory genius was carved through diligence and hard work rather than gifted by chemistry or destiny.

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elevision singer-songwriter-guitar player Tom Verlaine doesn’t listen to a lot of new music: “Only what people send me,” he says, “and then half of the time I don’t even get halfway through it.” But recently he was surprised by a YouTube link sent to him by Television bass player Fred Smith. The footage featured a band of teenagers covering Television’s title track from the 1977 album Marquee Moon. “What’s incredible is that it’s the best version I’ve ever heard anybody play,” Verlaine continues. “The bass player loses it a bit but the two guitar players, for being that young, play it really good. The singer is a girl, which is really strange; I don’t know what to make of the girl’s voice. But I thought, ‘Geez, these two guitar guys really got this thing down’.”

The song is a behemoth: ten-plus minutes of duelling guitar parts and sparse lyrics cutting through clean instrumentation. In ’77, the album arrived in the midst of what would later be looked back on as the punk explosion; incongruous in its considered arrangements and clean tones.

The cover art of the record features a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of four spotty young men standing against a flat backdrop. The colour levels are way out of whack and this renders their faces off-white with red blotches – they look unhealthy, the four of them. “It’s ‘cause of the Xerox effect,” says Verlaine, “it makes all our faces look pockmarked and criminal too. We got the photo back and we picked the best one, and we thought, it looks a little too clean, you know? Colour Xerox machines had just become available so I took it to the copy shop and stuck it in the Xerox machine and changed the colour settings on it, which I thought, ‘Yeah, this is more striking’. It wasn’t more flattering, that’s for sure, but we never actually thought about that.”

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Verlaine’s been playing many of the Marquee Moon songs over the years in the various emergences of Television and as a solo artist, so, he says, the prospect of their Release The Bats performance of the album start-to-finish is no big deal. “As the band and as a solo artist I’ve played half of these songs since the record came out so it’s not a bunch of new stuff,” he says.

“A couple of them we have to rehearse a bit more because we haven’t played them, I haven’t actually sung them, in so long – I don’t think I’ve sung Torn Curtain in 30 years. But, you know, once I figured out some of the chords it’s not a big deal... I sometimes play chords that I don’t know the names for, there were a couple that I could not find the fingerings for but I’ve got all but one figured out.”

The solos are individually credited on the back sleeve of Marquee Moon – an almost even split between Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. Much has been made of the double-lead guitar interplay genius of Verlaine and Lloyd, who left the band in 2007, but Verlaine plays down the guitar-playing relationship insisting that he and Jimmy Rip’s 15 years of ‘solo’ shows more than qualify the ‘newcomer’ for filling Lloyd’s spot.

Verlaine puts the quality of the guitar work on the record down to careful consideration and arrangement more than any special connection between he and Lloyd – it was no happy accident or blind luck.

“SO MUCH OF WHAT’S WRITTEN ABOUT THE BAND IS TOTAL BALONEY.” “So much of what’s written about the band is total baloney,” Verlaine says of the guitarists’ famed chemistry. “Lloyd himself has often said that [I] showed [him] a lot of what to play, maybe as much as 80 per cent or more. I would never show him solos, but I would show him a part. And generally I would go to rehearsal, because I don’t like to rehearse a lot, with parts made up, even in the ‘70s, and I would say, ‘Let’s try this’, and it would go from there. Sometimes the parts would be instantly good, sometimes we would change things and sometimes we would forget about them. So things are not so spontaneous as people seem to think.

“It’s very, very simple arrangements for two instruments. A lot of the stuff I played on piano, the left-hand part became Richard and the right-hand part became me, then we would tweak it – change it, take notes out of it, change rhythms... There was very much a sense of arrangement. It’s not like walking into a rehearsal room and having some magical song appear because the two guitars gelled so instantly. It was very, very arranged, you might say – it was thoughtful.”

WHEN & WHERE: 30 Oct, Enmore Theatre

POSITIVE AGGRESSION

to use a PA and really need to go for it to properly fill out a room, there’s not a lot of shortcuts left.”

As one of the wildest, most frenetic drummers on the planet, Brian Chippendale is a man apart. He breaks down the perceived intricacies of Lightning Bolt with Brendan Telford.

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ightning Bolt have crafted a truly unique trajectory into the world of noise rock. The duo, made up of Brian Chippendale (drums, vocals) and Brian Gibson (bass), have evolved in their own inimitable way, crafting five albums in the process.

Lightning Bolt started as an art project, and certain features of their shows - playing in amongst the crowd,

Chippendale’s crudely crafted mask, and the staccato anythinggoes delivery of both instrumentation and vocals - are alluring aspects of this enigmatic act. “The process has made them, or reinforced the themes and steered the ship in that direction, for sure,” Chippendale agrees. “That is one thing that I am grateful for from playing on the floor for so long is that it’s made me become a much more physical drummer than I was... There are many shortcuts for a drummer, but if you are on the floor, not willing

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It’s the catharsis of getting behind the kit that really drives Chippendale. “For the last two years the elevator in the building where Brian and I practice has been broken, so after I play, say, a solo show, I’ve got 700 pounds of really awkward equipment to carry up these three really long flight of stairs. When I take it down it takes a day, it’s like 23 trips or something up and down these stairs. But I noticed recently after a solo show I was lazy, so it took me two days to get it all upstairs, then set the shit up on the third day, and I felt kind of depressed for those couple of days. Then as soon as I got it all and set it up and sat down to drum, I felt good again...

It’s a great exercise routine for me, and it’s important – it’s survival, like my daily dose of mental stability.”

The incremental shifts in aesthetic have been from something garish and larger-than-life to an outfit willing to embrace their darker side. Chippendale admits that such a shift is indicative of life: as much as things change, things remain the same.“At the very beginning I think we were very cartoonish, and I think over time we lost a little of that. Definitely not as people, but for some reason the music has lost a little of that sense of humour, I sometimes think. Maybe even my vocal stylings have gotten a little more serious whereas before it was a little chirpier... It’s this strange balance; some of our shows can be quite aggressive, which then turns the set into something pretty dark.

But at the same time it feels weird, I mean, c’mon! This is Lightning Bolt! We’re not Slayer or anything. For the most part people are there to have a good time.”

WHEN & WHERE: 25 Oct, The Standard

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 45

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LETTING THE ROCK OUT The hyperactive multi-tasking Cosmo Jarvis releasing a mere EP? Is he slowing down? Not on your life, he tells Michael Smith.

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t’s half-past-one in the morning at his end of the conversation, so the ridiculously multitalented singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker Cosmo Jarvis is sounding a bit vague. Not that he isn’t bursting with ideas and projects as always – it’s more he’s not used to talking about so short a format as an EP. “The album’s ready to go,” he explains, sounding a little worse for wear. “I just had to do an EP ‘cause we’ve got to wait a little bit longer for the album, due to unforeseeable complications. Two of the four tracks are brand new and two of them… one was written when I was 16 or something, so two of them are pretty old, but they’re new recordings of those songs. Yeah, it’s a mixture of different stuff – lot of rock. Um, some kind of dancy rock I guess.”

Jarvis also growls a bit more on the new EP, They Don’t Build Hearts – something of a reflection of the impact of having a proper band to play with these days, which includes his brother Fletcher on drums, Harry Mackaill on bass and Chris Haddon on guitar.

“Definitely,” he admits. “I’ve actually realised I prefer recording that way; it’s just easier to deal with dynamically. It’s more honest. I know it’s not perfect but I’m trying to get a realistic sound again.

“When I wrote a song before and tried to find a beat to put behind it, using sequencing meant that sooner or later down the line that the song, maybe in the middle eight or a chorus, I’d have to compromise something to adhere to the sequencing limitations that I had at the time. Now I guess a groove can find itself more naturally and evolve through trial and error until something decent and solid comes.”

Only just 24, Jarvis – who was born in New Jersey but grew up in Devon in the south of England and whose musical sensibilities are very much steeped in English pop and rock in all its manifestations – is something of a wunderkind, having not only started writing but recording and making short films from the age of 12. Prolific to say the least, he was 17 when

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he released his 19-song eponymous debut album independently in 2006, while his first “label” release, on Wall Of Sound, was a double-album,

“I’ve been working on another film,” he reveals. “It hasn’t been made but the script has been written.

It’s called Abandon Hope and I’m trying to get that made as soon as possible. A slight up in production values would be wonderful but if it’s not it doesn’t matter; it’ll get made anyway. Otherwise I’ve been recording a lot, getting this EP and the album

“I ACTUALLY PREFER RECORDING THAT WAY; IT’S JUST EASIER TO DEAL WITH DYNAMICALLY. IT’S MORE HONEST. I KNOW IT’S NOT PERFECT BUT I’M TRYING TO GET A REALISTIC SOUND AGAIN.” 2009’s Humasyouhitch/ Sonofabitch. There have been two more albums – 2011’s Is The World Strange Or Am I Strange? and last year’s Think Bigger – and a stack of short films as well as clips accompanying his singles. in the case of the latest he’s showcasing on his site, the hilarious tongue-in-cheek gangsta rap parody, Collaborating With Rihanna. And there’s been a full-blown feature film, The Naughty Room, which is getting a screening at this year’s Sydney Film Festival.

ready, and toured around a lot of Germany, a lot of Holland and some stuff round England.

“I think the feel of the next album is a lot like the EP. There are a few songs presented in that way, in that, I dunno, rudimentary rock way. But then there are a few that are like ballads but they’re not heavy enough to be, like, rock ballads, but they’re, I dunno, shabby ballads.

Very much the band sound – not a huge amount of self-indulgent instrumental parts as there was before.”

WHAT: They Don’t Build Hearts EP (Independent) WHEN & WHERE: 24 Oct, Annandale Hotel; 25 Oct, Mona Vale Hotel; 26 Oct, Fat As Butter, Newcastle; 27 Oct, Splashes, Wollongong

BORN HUNGRY

on charges he insulted religious sentiment when he called the Catholic Church “the most murderous cult on the planet” and tore up a Bible during a 2007 performance.

Cancer battles, legal strife, relationship breakdowns; Poland’s blasphemous death metallers Behemoth have been to hell and back. Frontman Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski tells Brendan Crabb about challenging himself.

“M

y life has always been all about questioning things, and this album doesn’t give you [many] answers,” Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski remarks of forthcoming disc The Satanist, Behemoth’s first LP since 2009. “All the experiences I’ve collected throughout the years after [previous record] Evangelion, there’s been so much stuff happening that it’s all there in the music. That’s why we create music, to incorporate all of those feelings and emotions into notes and riffs. It’s metaphysics, it’s not mathematics, you know?” he laughs.

Considering the ferocious death metal crafted throughout two decades fronting the Polish crew, the opening sentence of the aforementioned quote seems a no-brainer. Factor in events of the past half-decade and it’s even more striking, because the obstacles encountered would have left many desperately scrambling to comprehend their misfortune.

There was Nergal’s five-month bout with leukaemia, eventually overcome in 2011, and the dissolving of his relationship with fiancée, Polish pop singer Doda. He also faces another trial and possible imprisonment in Poland

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“It is what it is; I take it day-by-day,” he reflects.

“There’s advantages of the fact I’m Polish and live in this country. This country makes me so hungry for being an artist, for travelling and being creative and inspired. But at the same time, it’s give and take.

There’s a lot of opportunities that this country gives you... But it’s very conservative. But then I’m thinking if it wasn’t conservative, would I be into this at all?”

It’s not solely his homeland the vocalist/guitarist believes is resistant to change either. “The way I see extreme metal is it lacks the danger factor. The majority of bands, they just lack real, true emotion and something that can move you. Extreme metal these days is just a definition.

It’s very friendly, and not being friendly in the way I’d like it to be. It’s not challenging, it’s not stimulating.

“Extreme metal should be about being something that puts you into a very uncomfortable position. It’s like with any form of extreme art. When you go and see Antichrist by Lars von Trier, you believe that the actor is disturbed. That’s what I consider extreme. These days, bands think that when they put all the pieces of the puzzle together, they become extreme. But they hardly ever fucking do anything. What we seriously stand for is that Behemoth is a 100 per cent real band, made of real humans, with real relations, blood and emotions.

I’m proud of being part of this band. I know that we stand opposite to the current, on our own, and we are inspiration for ourselves solely. That’s what makes us stand out and special in these days’ metal business.”

WHEN & WHERE: 26 Oct, Manning Bar

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 47

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BREAKING THE MOULD Six albums in and Eskimo Joe have managed to reinvent themselves – much to the distaste of a long-term rival.

Frontman Kav Temperley explains to Daniel Cribb how they injected new life into something they feared was becoming stale.

“W

e walked into our new record knowing we needed to do something completely different; we needed to do something a bit more dangerous, otherwise it would just get boring,” frontman Kav Temperley begins. “I think what happened, especially on Ghosts Of The Past, and I don’t discount that record at all, but all of us were really exhausted by the industry as a whole. You almost feel like you become a bit of a cliché of yourself; I felt like we started to make records according to what people expected us to make, and there’s no danger in that and no adventure.”

It’s the eve of the Wastelands album tour, and the studio Temperley is about to head to was the nest in which the band and producer Burke Reid spent months writing, recording and perfecting their new, electronic sound, which features strong drum grooves supported by solid bass lines and gentle vocals resting on a wealth of synth and drum samples. “Being able to go into a studio which sounds great and is our own space was really inspiring because what’s happened on every other record is, we’ll be in our jam room and the crazy mouldy, funky vibes build up and then you have to step out of that environment into this really sterile, state-of-the-art recording studio, and you can get a little bit of stage fright, like you walk up to the urinal to do a wee and nothing comes out,” he laughs.

Having left their label before entering the studio, they needed to somehow raise $40,000 to get the ball rolling, which is where their crowdfunding Pozible project came into effect. The campaign generated $60,737. “Smack, hookers, Ferraris…” Temperley jokes when asked what the funding went towards.

“Basically the forty grand we asked for was pretty much just for Reid to come over. We had our own studio so we were just going to cover the costs of that… the crowdfunding thing was something we had all been following in the States and thought it was a really interesting idea, but was quite scary because it can blow up in your face. But I think that was part of the process; we wanted something a little more edgy because we felt we needed that injection.”

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When they initially launched their Pozible campaign, some people seemed to find the project unnecessary for a band of Eskimo Joe’s status. Grinspoon’s Phil Jamieson was amongst

company is like a really bad bank loan. To do something independently is tough and that’s why crowdfunding is so great in the creative world.

“We have had an ongoing war with Phil Jamieson since about 2000. He kind of wants to be our best friend and in the band in some strange way, but any point of weakness he can see to take us down he jumps in there in a heartbeat, it’s hilarious…

“I FELT LIKE WE STARTED TO MAKE RECORDS ACCORDING TO WHAT PEOPLE EXPECTED US TO MAKE, AND THERE’S NO DANGER IN THAT AND NO ADVENTURE.” those taking a dig.

“Phil’s comments were pretty naïve,” says Temperley. “He was like, ‘Why don’t you just go do a gig and pay for it?’ It doesn’t work like that and he knows that. You do gigs to keep the business rolling and maybe pay yourself a wage, but as far as making quality records goes, you need an initial investment of cash, and that’s why people like Phil are still signed to a label and getting their money.

A deal with a record

“Stu [MacLeod – guitar] and Joel [Quartermain – guitar] were on the Big Day Out in 2000 and were having this jokey banter stuff going on – basically Phil’s really good at giving shit, but really bad at taking it. So one night at an after party they gave him heaps of shit and he went really, really dark and that’s kind of where it started. But Phil calls Joel a couple times of year and chats to him and when a new record comes out always says, ‘Yeah, man, it sounds really good’, or rings him and gives him shit. But Phil loves banters; he loves giving it, but he’s terrible at taking it. It’s been on again, off again for years and years. It keeps us all entertained.”

WHAT: Wastelands (Dirt Diamonds/Inertia) WHEN & WHERE: 24 Oct, Newcastle Panthers; 25 Oct, Metro Theatre; 26 Oct, Waves, Wollongong; 6 Dec, Homebake, Sydney Opera House Forecourt

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 49

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FIELD OF DREAMS When Andy Hazel catches up with two of the four Stonefield sisters, singer/ drummer Amy and guitarist Hannah Findlay, they discuss striving for a “big” sound, trusting their instincts and youngest sister/bassist Holly’s propensity to disagree with the rest of the band. ith the release of their debut album, Stonefield move from being a band about which the talk of their gender, age and hype may actually be drowned out by the music. Many have opinions about the Findlay sisters (and some who have an opinion can even name a Stonefield song), but soon their crashing riffs, pile-driving drums and fullthroated vocals look likely to be leaving firm impressions the nation over. When making the album, bigness, the sisters agree, was the goal.

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expand. Touring followed, including a set at Glastonbury, an all-important ‘whoah!’-inducing visit to Corner Hotel to see Band Of Skulls that resulted in the band using their producer Ian Davenport, and hours and hours of practice.

“It’s so nerve-wracking,” says drummer, singer and songwriter Amy Findlay with a laugh. “You distance yourself from it, and you’re not sure if it’s big as you think it is. You keep on listening more, and as time goes on you think: ‘Ahh, maybe it’s not that good’,” she laughs nervously.

While three years may seem a long time, it’s also a mark of careful confidence. “I think it worked out perfectly,” says Amy. Guitarist Hannah agrees: “It was good for us because we had that extra time to write. Our songwriting developed and it gave us time for our experiences to sink in so we knew that this is really what we want to do.”

Nerves are to be expected for an album on which so much is riding. Since exploding onto the scene in 2010, the four sisters released singles and EPs that garnered high rotation and quickly saw their fanbase

The album itself is the product of much collaboration. Not only with Davenport

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and engineer Tim Palmer (U2, Pearl Jam) but for the songwriting too. A worthwhile experience, says Amy: “We didn’t want to write with anyone; we had to feel like we had the same vibe going on. We wrote a few things with Adalita, that was really, really fun, but that song didn’t end up fitting with the album. It’s an awesome song, but it was a completely different thing to everything else. We also wrote with The Delta Riggs, which was completely cool.

They came up to our place, set up in the lounge room, we kicked mum and dad out for a couple of days and jammed,” the sisters laugh. “That was fun.

Jared from Eagle & The Worm as well. Those two [collaborative efforts] made the album,” says Amy. While a fun energy courses through the album, lyrically a couple of themes recur: power dynamics and proving yourself. “Because we’re all sort of at this age where everything changes and so much happens in your life – becoming an adult, that kind of thing,” she says matter-of-factly. “The whole ‘proving yourself ’ thing… obviously that’s a big part of it and it’s important because… debut album, here we are!

Especially because it’s been three years since we were Unearthed by triple j, so it was important that we came back with something really good and we weren’t just a hype band. We definitely wanted to prove ourselves,” she says, pausing. “I think that we’ve got good instincts – that’s pretty much what we’ve run off of the whole way through. Even picking a manager and label and all that stuff, it’s all about instinct.”

Amy’s instinct is a guiding force for the band as Hannah explains: “Mostly we do agree on stuff but,

“OUR SONGWRITING DEVELOPED AND IT GAVE US TIME FOR OUR EXPERIENCES TO SINK IN SO WE KNEW THAT THIS IS REALLY WHAT WE WANT TO DO.”

if we don’t, normally it’s just one person that doesn’t agree – Holly, the youngest,” she laughs. “Normally Amy is the leader and if she thinks really strongly about something then we have a lot of trust and faith in her.”

A word likely to be used a lot over the coming months, and one they’re not bothered by, is ‘mature’. “I feel like we have probably matured,” Hannah smiles before Amy interjects, “As people and musically… I don’t know, we’re still very youthful,” she laughs. Hannah continues, “I guess we are for 15-23 year olds, compared to when we first started. I guess we have matured a lot.” One thing

that hasn’t changed however, is their love of rock.

Other teenagers might go from twee folk to hard house in the space of three years, not the Findlays.

“Well, Sarah who plays keys is really into bands like Parkway Drive,” says Amy, attempting to outline the diversity of her sister’s listening habits, “which is weird because she’s probably the most placid… very pretty and cute,” the sisters crack up laughing. “But she’s into…” starts Amy, “really heavy stuff as well,” continues Hannah.

“And you pretty much did a jazz course.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, “but I was never really into jazz.

I was open to trying it and learning about it and stuff but always felt out of my depth singing anything but rock. It’s so true that as teenagers you’re into rock and later something else. So many people we know were into grunge when they were teenagers and now they’re into ‘tekkers’ [laughs], which is weird. But we’ve carried through with a love of it.”

WHAT: Stonefield (Wunderkind/Illusive) WHEN & WHERE: 13 Nov, Zierholz , Canberra; 14 Nov, Beach Bar, Wollongong; 15 Nov, The Annandale; 16 Nov, Hope Estate; 14 Dec, Festival Of The Sun, Port Macquarie THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 51

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LIVING THE DREAM After working on his debut album for most of his adult life, Perth-based MC Mr Grevis has turned his follow up My Escape around in less than a year. He tells Chris Yates why he wanted to keep the momentum rolling.

“P

eople seem to forget you pretty quickly!”

Mr Grevis (born Gary McPhee) states when asked why he wanted to keep rolling after his well received debut The Sampler. He also confirms he’s very happy with how it turned out and is glad he decided to try this approach.

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“Yeah 100 per cent,” he confirms. “There are so many little things I’d like to change but as soon as I listened to the master – I literally listened to my final master in my car on the way to press it – I knew it was the right decision. I didn’t expect the first one to get the response that it did.

I knew I had to get to work and strike quickly.

Hopefully this one is strong enough that I can take two years off and work on my next one, my masterpiece.” He laughs after this but you can tell he really wants to spend some more time on the follow-up. While the desire to return to a much more slowly crafted

process must be appealing, the spontaneity and more off-the-cuff nature of My Escape really shines through.

“I would have liked to have put some more breaks and bridges in there as well but then maybe people would have thought I was trying to be a bit too musical with it,” he explains. “I definitely focused on having something for everybody...I wanted the songs to sound really different and be different with subjects and topics. Drapht is a big influence of mine and a good friend, and I find that with his stuff it sounds so different, and he’s so on point with his topics. A lot of rappers try to stay on topic but before long they start to stray and just do random bars.”

He also wanted to show some other sides of himself as a rapper that he didn’t get into on the debut record.

“After my first record when I had that track The Youth, I seemed to get a lot of comments from people who were at least 40 years old on my Facebook and I felt like I sort of still needed to cater a bit more to them.

The only complaints I got last time were that I wasn’t doing any fast raps. I can rap fast but I just find most of the time when dudes are doing that double-time shit, generally 90 per cent of them aren’t saying anything.

So I did that on the intro, and I don’t even really say anything,” he laughs. “It’s just a bunch of bars, but I really wanted to show cats that I could do that sort of stuff.”

WHAT: My Escape (Obese) WHEN & WHERE: 24 Oct, Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle; 25 Oct, Brighton Up Bar; 26 Oct, Rad Bar, Wollongong

HAVING IT ALL

Stephanie Crase has cut her teeth in a number of loved Australian bands. But as Summer Flake she steps out of the shadows and into the much deserved spotlight. She speaks to Brendan Telford.

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wo years ago Stephanie Crase found herself in a figurative corner. Over the course of a year two sets of friends moved from Adelaide, effectively ending her musical projects, and providing her with extremely idle hands. So in the comfort of her home she crafted Summer Flake – not that anyone was meant to find out. “There were never thoughts about doing anything with it, it was just something to do to pass time and keep active with playing the guitar,” Crase admits. “It’s been daunting, especially when I became used to recording on my own, adding reverb and cutting and pasting, to playing live and being solely responsible. I had only been in collaborative bands before, so it was pretty scary. I also thought when I started it wasn’t worth getting others involved; there was a lot of things I had to overcome.”

Such self-deprecating insights goes some way to underscoring the warmth that sits at the core of debut record You Can Have It All, an album of loose yet personal musings that Crase admits was borne out of a sense of isolation as she was left to her own devices. “I was so used to doing two band practices a week with Batrider and another with Hit The Jackpot, that was happily my nights and weekends for five years or so. So when that was gone I got weirded out and bored... so 52 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

I had to keep myself occupied. Playing music is one of those go-to things for me, where if I’m feeling angry or bored I put my head down and not notice five hours fly by. I’m proud of myself for going there. It could be quite strange to not have someone there to share the glory with, or indeed the criticism.

But I don’t know where the fear was, because it’s gone now. Regardless of whether the music is great or the music is shit, your friends are still there, and there will be at least two people who can find time for it.”

You Can Have It All is a testament to Crase’s

evolution as a songwriter. There is a lot of space created within the album that accentuates the languorous guitar and Crase’s soft, contemplative vocals, the overall effect one of hope amidst the tiring minutiae of life.

“About eight of the songs across the album and two EPs use the same chord progression. So it is the lyrics that alter things, where one can be about giving up on the world and the next a pretty pop song that stems from a rough time of my life. I don’t mean to write like that; I tried to write songs about walking around and everything’s fine, and on paper it looks good, but you feel that you are at the bottom of a well where it all feels a long way away. It’s not me, really, but it suits me.”

WHAT: You Can Have It All (Rice Is Nice) WHEN & WHERE: 24 Oct, Croatian Wickham Sports Club, Newcastle; 25 Oct, The Square

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 53

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POWER METAL NEMESIS In Nemesis, Finnish power metal masters Stratovarius have released one of the greatest albums of their entire career. Mark Hebblewhite sat down with bass player Lauri Porra to discuss the band’s renaissance and their hotly anticipated Australian tour.

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hen you’ve been going 25 years it becomes harder and harder to impress people. Most metal bands who manage to hit that mark become cabaret acts delivering what the fans want – their ‘classic’ material often recorded decades earlier. A couple of years ago this was Stratovarius’ fate. After a string of poor albums and the soap opera of founding member Timo Tolkki’s departure, the band was at a very low ebb.

Fast forward to 2013 and Stratovarius has risen from the

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ashes with a superb new album in Nemesis, which melds the band’s timeless brand of melodic power metal with a penchant for experimentation.

“The response to the album has been really good and as a band we couldn’t be happier with how the songs turned out,” confirms Porra.

“It’s really interesting actually, some fans think the album sounds like older Stratovarius – you know, Fourth Dimension or Visions – but other people tell us that they think the album is more experimental than what we’ve been doing.

When people react so differently you know you’ve made a good

album because it means different things to different people. To be honest, we didn’t start writing the songs with any goal except to do the best we could. We had no idea how the songs would be received – you never really know – we’re just grateful people like the album.”

As modest as the band remains about their craft, they are more than happy to admit that their future is now far brighter with all the intrigue regarding line-up changes over and done. “Of course when Timo left things were pretty hard for us because of all the things being said in the press,” admits Porra.

“But really this band has always had the attitude that everything could end tomorrow. We’ve never taken anything for granted – and I think that attitude helped us get through the Timo situation and carry on.”

As for their upcoming first-ever Australian tour, Stratovarius are understandably excited, and Porra promises that the band will be marking the occasion with suitable aplomb.

“To be finally coming to Australia is a dream come true for the entire band,” he says. “We’ve wanted to come for a long time but because we’re not a big band over there we never really had the chance. Instead of playing a lot of the new album we’re going to try and give you a bit of everything because we know most people coming to the shows will never have had the chance to see Stratovarius live. So if you liked Visions or the Elements albums – or really any of our albums – there will be something for you. I think the band is tighter than its ever been and because we’ve all being looking forward to this for such a long time I think our Australian shows will definitely be ones to remember – both for us and for you guys.”

WHEN & WHERE: 25 Oct, The Hi-Fi

TITILLATION

Porter Robinson’s upcoming DJ tour is selling out – but it may be the final time Australians see the American electro-house prodigy as they know him, as Cyclone discovers.

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obinson is developing a ‘live’ show for 2014.

That the genial quick-mix DJ, who’s twice joined our festival circuit, has committed to a club run is significant – it’s always been his endgame. “It allows you to do some stuff you otherwise couldn’t when you’re fighting for people’s attention against other artists and when there’s tonnes of stages and distractions.” However, Robinson is looking to challenges beyond DJing. “It’s maybe the last tour I do before I start a new style of show.”

The EDM “saviour”, ranked No. 40 in DJ Mag’s poll, never planned to DJ, but produce. He studied production techniques online, while connecting with other EDM aspirants and eliciting feedback on tunes. Though Robinson, who turns 21 this month, issued music early on as Ekowraith, he’d shed that handle for 2010’s breakthrough Say My Name. Skrillex picked up Robinson’s Spitfire EP to launch OWSLA. Next, Robinson aired the vocal Language via Ministry Of Sound. When he played his inaugural DJ gig in San Francisco, it was only his second visit to a club. “Culturally, I’m not a dance music person. I’ve always been an electronic music person.” Ironically, Robinson now has a residency in Las Vegas at the Wynn resort nightclub complex.

54 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

Robinson pioneered the post-dubstep ‘complextro’ (complex electro) – less a genre than an approach, like IDM. He’s not interested in pop, famously spurning Katy Perry. “That headline has been so, so very circulated!” demurs Robinson. Indeed, Robinson’s rise hasn’t been without drama. The veteran BT accused him of being “self-focussed and selfish” on Twitter for apparently abandoning a collab. Today Robinson maintains a dignified silence on the subject: “I think I’ll probably leave it alone!” Over the past year Robinson, his most recent tune Easy with Brit Mat Zo, has been

absorbed in his debut album, already suggesting that it will be melodic, experimental and “goosebumpsy”. He’s scaled back on DJing, hiding in his old bedroom and labouring for ten hours every day. Robinson isn’t rushing it. He doesn’t even have a label, preferring to hold out for a major or independent that shares his “vision”.

“I’ve put my whole heart and soul into this thing.”

DJing and producing are no longer symbiotic for him, Robinson moving away from club bangers with Language (a crossover hit, regardless). “A lot of music that I’m writing is meant to be more emotional and sentimental. Part of that whole thing strategically is that I will be starting a new show next year which won’t be so much a conventional DJ set. It’ll be a lot more personal and emotional – and I think a lot more unique. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do ever since I started.” Mind, Robinson is “not promising to quit DJing” entirely. “I still really do love DJing.”

WHEN & WHERE: 23 & 24 Oct, Metro Theatre; 26 Oct, Fat As Butter, The Foreshore Newcastle

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 55

You know when you hear a song that’s the perfect soundtrack for whatever you’re doing? I love when that happens. It makes an ordinary moment feel so...extraordinary.

That’s why wherever we go,

our music

goes with us.

mini.bose.com.au | 1800 173 371

56 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

reviews

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

This week: See an edgier and meaner Hugh Jackman in Prisoners, Ron S. Peno gets darker and melancholic with The Superstitions and Young & Restless + The Nation Blue = the awesome noise of High Tension.

FUTURE OF THE LEFT

How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident Prescriptions/Remote Control Wow. Check your expectations at the door, because How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident – the fourth long-player from Welsh reprobates Future Of The Left – is an insane voyage down the rabbit hole, an endless gamut of trippy twists and tawdry turns. Their usual unrelenting pace has been superseded by a new respect for nuance and space, including some forays into slow tempo realms, but even these moments are caustic and creepy.

★★★★ ½

TRACK LISTING 1. Bread, Cheese, Bow And Arrow 2. Johnny Borrell Afterlife 3. Future Child Embarrassment Matrix 4. The Male Gaze 5. Singing Of The Bonesaws 6. I Don’t Know What You Ketamine 7. French Lessons 8. How To Spot A Record Company

9. Donny Of The Decks 10. She Gets Passed Around At Parties 11. Something Happened 12. The Real Meaning Of Christmas 13. Things To Say To Friendly Policemen 14. Why Aren’t I Going To Hell?

Of course frontman Andy ‘Falco’ Falkous’ awesomely twisted worldview is still proudly prevalent – waved frantically throughout like a pennant at some fucked up pageant – and the stylistic change in how it’s musically shrouded doesn’t dilute its impact one iota. The lyrics are brilliantly acerbic, targeting a slew of disparate marks and skewering them mercilessly. The stand-out is undoubtedly Singing Of The Bonesaws – a razor-sharp diatribe delivered in a hammy ‘60s TV presenter voice – although Falco’s croon during near-ballad French Lessons is fantastically unnerving, How To Spot A Record Company marries power and precision perfectly and closer Why Aren’t I Going To Hell?’s faux-gothic country shtick works wonderfully before descending into relative chaos.

Musically, the recently reconfigured four-piece is in fine fettle – the guitars are requisitely heavy and the rhythm section both in sync and innovative – and they hold nothing back, meaning that the aesthetic risks are richly rewarded as the band’s undeniable charm seeps through the carnage. Ballsy, bizarre and brilliant.

Steve Bell

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 57

album reviews

RON S PENO & THE SUPERSTITIONS

HIGH TENSION Death Beat Cooking Vinyl

Anywhere And Everything Is Bright Rocket

Under the Superstitions banner, the idiosyncratic but genuine talents of Peno are allowed to range across a variety of styles, but remain identifiably his. The high plains country keening of his Darling Downs work is mostly – though not completely – sidelined. The songs here more often come on his darker croon, still of an often melancholic longing, but delivered as part of possibly the most complementary and cradling band he’s fronted since Died Pretty’s finest hours.

In fact, in the jangle of the opening Say It Isn’t So, the urgent Myself In Thee, and even more so as Tim Deane’s rippling piano and organ entwine with Mark Dawson’s distinctive softly martial drumming on Destination Unknown, DP enthusiasts will feel very comfortable.

★★★★ As main collaborator and guitarist, Cam Butler seems to have helped find the balance of heart and head that lets Peno wrench the emotion from his guts, but to remember it’s there to serve some very good songs, and not just fall into melodrama.

But it tends to all lead up to the final Call Your Name (To Say Goodbye) – an ebbing and flowing moody little epic with Peno’s increasing desperate loss hauling the band along with him as it goes. Even the crack in his vocal as he calls “It’s the time…” on the relationship seems both uncontrived but just right.

Ross Clelland

Bringing together members of Young & Restless and The Nation Blue was always going to be a blueprint for great things. But don’t call this a supergroup. High Tension are nothing but their own entity, and with Death Beat they put a sizable rocket under the Aussie hard rock community.

The record roars into life with Blaze Up, the track leaving you in no doubt the quartet are playing for keeps. And if volatile songs like Collingwood and Mountain Of Dead could spit in your face they would, and do so with a smile. The shrieks of frontwoman Karina Utomo cut into your skin like knife blades and are omnipresent across this debut. She loses her shit at will while vitriolic punk rock explodes forth relentlessly.

Guitarist Ash Pegram maintains that perfect balance between fully charged and completely lost, while the formidable bass work of Matt Weston gives

MOTORHEAD

FEELINGS

ADA

Create/Control

Motorhead don’t appear too concerned with winning new fans. Instead, they seem intent on delivering more of the fast-paced, no bullshit rock they’ve been cranking out for almost four decades. And if that was the aim of Aftershock, mission accomplished.

Before Philadelphia Grand Jury’s untimely demise, fans of lo-fi indie rock wouldn’t have been too hyperbolic to foresee the Sydney trio leading the sound into the future, even if it took them the rest of their lives.

Aftershock

Songs like End Of Time and Going To Mexico fill the Ace Of Spades and Doctor Rock-shaped holes. Even though they don’t really offer anything new, it’s a formula that works and the slightly fresh take on it delivers two more solid rockers. With Silence When You Speak To Me, Motorhead deliver the kind of boot-stomping, chest-thumping chantable crowd-pleaser that you know would sound even better live. And Last Woman Blues makes for the perfect early album breather, with its strippeddown blues a stark contrast to every other track. But the real stand-out in Aftershock is Death Machine. It’s exactly what you 58 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

★★★ ½ these tracks enough weight to drag you to the bottom of the ocean. Once Dan McKay has banged the whole thing into shape with his rhythms, Death Beat is all but ready for war.

Produced by Melbourne-based Kiwi rock pig Tom Larkin, the Shihad drummer has managed to capture and contain High Tension’s fire without diluting it on record. And although there are slight reprieves like Astral Plane, for the most part this is music designed to maim. Fire warnings need to go out in capital cities and regional areas before these guys return to the road.

Benny Doyle

Be Kind, Unwind

★★★ ½ want from a Motorhead song called Death Machine. In a pretty consistent track listing of one heartstarter after another, the only real letdown is Dust And Glass. Does anyone really need a slow jam where Lemmy huskily laments lost days, lost nights and some other old clichéd slow song bollocks?

Although, Phil “Wizzo” Campbell’s shredding solo almost saves the day. Almost.

Kilmister is 67. Motorhead is 38. No man or band should be rocking this hard after so many years. But if you told Aftershock that, it would kick you in your balls before rocking them right off.

Pete Laurie

Thankfully the premature disbandment has something of a happy ending with frontman Simon Berkfinger’s Feelings providing somewhat of the follow-up. But is it any good? Well, Be Kind, Unwind doesn’t match the spark or the enthusiasm of his previous outfit’s debut and, it certainly seems, he really misses his old bandmates. Breaking it down track by track proves more challenging as there simply isn’t a Casino or a Ready To Roll or a Good News or anything that could truly become one of those staple triple j classics.

Forerunning single One In A Million does however feature one of Berkfinger’s finest hooks and delivers its sentiment

★★★ beautifully, while Intercourse only just falls short. New York Summer cooks with some of the fine ingredients of old, but losing a lover has always sparked Berkfinger’s creative side nicely.

Be Kind, Unwind will quench the thirst of some diehard Philly Jays fans, some will even find some solace in at least some of these tunes. But overall, the material just isn’t quite there, the album tends to fall short as an entity and simply just doesn’t quite reach the heights or the hooks the Berkfinger we all know and love is entirely capable of.

Ben Preece

album reviews

★★★★

★★★

★★★ ½

★★★ ½

ANGIE

HELLOGOODBYE

KATAKLYSM

PAPA

Turning

Everything Is Debatable

Waiting For The End To Come

Tender Madness

Old Friends/Shock

Nuclear Blast

With the maturity of their songwriting and charismatic vocals of Forrest Kline, it’s hard to believe Hellogoodbye are only onto album number three. On Everything Is Debatable’s 11 electro folk pop-fuelled tunes, synths and guitar leads play just as an important role as Kline’s vocals in the winning over the listener.

2010’s Would It Kill You? seemed to lack something the band’s debut promised, but with a new drummer and bassist this release pertains an unbridled energy and intriguing sense of depth and dynamic. You might question the overuse of synth or drum samples, but you can’t deny the record’s solidity.

Canadian extreme metal exports Kataklysm continue to keep it real, this time enlisting the tidy production talents of Zeuss, who has worked with Suffocation and Chimaira in the past. There’s plenty for the whole family to enjoy here; from the groove laden If I Was God - I’d Burn It All, to the military stomp of Under Lawless Skies. The sound is crisp and full, there’s good separation of all instruments and Maurizio Iacono’s vocals cut through like a frickin’ laser beam. Tear the scab off a beer can and try not to bob your skull to this one.

There’s a pop sensibility and sentimentality weaving throughout Tender Madness’s 12 tracks that makes it the ideal summertime soundtrack for those whose tastes lean towards the commerciality of Kings Of Leon or The Killers. The vocals of Darren Weiss (who doubles as drummer) actually smacks a little of Brandon Flowers, with a fragile mid range timbre that sounds on the verge of breaking at any given time. Put Me To Work sets the grandiose tone for an album with tracks that flow from pop-infused rock (Young Rut) to introspective ballad (If The Moon Rises) without skipping a beat.

Daniel Cribb

Glenn Waller

Glenn Waller

Rice Is Nice Sydney’s queen of punks Angie Garrick ditches the bands and her last name in Turning, her first solo foray.

Lead single Parallels is a lo-fi scuzzball chugging along on a staccato rhythm while Garrick sneers with static-fuelled disdain and a seductively sleazy guitar line weaves in and out. But this track is the exception. Most of the eight songs lurch, stutter and crawl through a deliberate myopic haze, dystopic, anguished laments from a psychotropic underground, clawing their way out of the scum-lined mire long enough to leave aural scars before disappearing back down the hole.

Brendan Telford

★★★

SEPULTURA

★★★ ½

Loma Vista/Caroline

★★★ ½

★★★ ½

THE HEAD & THE HEART

VARIOUS

VARIOUS

Kitsuné Maison 15

Let’s Be Still

Kitsuné/[PIAS] Australia

Love To Love You Donna

Sub Pop/Inertia

The undisputed kings of South American metal have released an LP with a title that sounds more emo band name than thrash album; does this mean Sepultura are mellowing with age? Not really, but this album is a departure from the colossal riffery of previous efforts.

Grittier and sounding more like their first few albums in terms of sloppy production value, the intentions may have been noble in an up-yours punk ethos kind of way, but unfortunately the riffs are instantly forgettable.

Let’s Be Still is as bold as it is versatile, The Head & The Heart sampling styles and beautifully utilising the three voices on offer. From melancholic to spritely, the record’s subtle genre shifts are exciting – Charity Rose Thielin’s Summertime is a surprise burst of energy following some poignant storytelling and the appropriately-named Shake, climactic in turn. Josiah Johnson’s inherently sad Josh McBride explodes into a magical, unexpected three-part harmony, contributing to the extraordinary collection of the album’s first – and better – half.

Sadly, the record plateaus, but where else could they go?

With every season, French fashion and music label Kitsuné release another swishy compilation to soundtrack their catwalk shows. And like their wearable creations, their 15th signature collection comes tastefully coordinated to appease aspiring hipsters, though this one lacks the diversity of previous adventures. It’s possible to generalise offerings by Go Wolf and Jonny Pierce as being ‘a bit Phoenix’, or to celebrate The Swiss and Horixon as downtempo Mylo-isms. But knowing what goes with what is the fashionistas forte, and even when Kitsuné aren’t presenting their best face they’re still putting on a decent show.

Glenn Waller

Mat Lee

Mac McNaughton

The Mediator Between The Head And The Hands Must Be The Heart Nuclear Blast

Universal Almost 40 years ago Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte rather seminally introduced Donna Summer to the delights of the electro disco dancefloor. This month a bunch of seasoned dance producers salute the late great diva with this mixed bag of stomping remixes. Frankie Knuckles works over Hot Stuff, Chromeo funk up Love Is In Control and Laidback Luke blows up MacArthur Park into an electro tech workout. While it’s impossible to improve I Feel Love, the application of modern production and even more banging beats to Summer’s many solid gold classics produces fun irreverent results.

Guido Farnell THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 59

singles/albums/eps

★★★

THE JEZABELS

ALEX LLOYD

★★★

★★★

GUINEAFOWL

PAUL MCCARTNEY New

The End

MGM

I Hope My City Loves Me Still

MGM

Black Cat opens Lloyd’s latest album up with a punch; beginning with rustic production and minimalist orchestration, it almost draws comparisons to Junip until it builds beyond the verses. Lloyd’s shown us in recent years with his various collaborations that he’s capable of producing high-quality output. As the first solo album since 2008’s Good In The Face Of A Stranger, though, this album seems to lack direction without a collaborator alongside Lloyd. However, tracks such as Light On You, Untouchable Moon and Reign On Me prove Lloyd’s strengths lie in his softer, more heartfelt compositions.

This punchy offering pairs the often overlooked, rhythmic qualities of ‘80s pop with ultracatchy melodies. Guineafowl’s commanding vocals in Little Death (Make It Rain) drive this beat-heavy single, which showers the listener in a concoction of electronica throughout the chorus. The synth-laden title track effectively employs a groovier, more subtle pulse that launches into a typically upbeat, anthemic party chorus. The highly polished production on this EP ensures a smooth, pop offering, but unfortunately it lacks heart, surrendering moments of intimacy through techniques such as double-tracked vocals.

Paul McCartney is still pushing his songwriter’s pen, seemingly with a desire to prove his worth in each successive generation. The last few decades haven’t been his strongest yet New, surprisingly, is something of a return to the essence of the ex-Beatle in terms of strong melodic pop songs. Not everything works, particularly on the lyrical front where he too often settles for simplistic wordplay, yet there are many superb moments.

The infectious groove of I Can Bet, the glorious Beatles-esque single New and the trippedout beats of Appreciate are just some making a strong case for McCartney’s continued relevance.

Stephanie Tell

Chris Familton

Keeping their clever balance of indie, synths and Hayley Mary’s arcing vocals, this is just bigger and more anthemic, probably in keeping with their upward international trajectory.

INFINITY BROKE Swing A Kitten Independent Newest group guise for Jamie Hutchings (Bluebottle Kiss and such) comes with familiar nervous chop in guitar and nervous desperation in the vocal, over thick layers of rhythmic churning racket.

SHARON JONES & THE DAP-KINGS

Urban Wilderness

Lukas Murphy

Dew Process/Universal

Hear Music/Universal

Retreat!

Daptone/Shock Boys and girls, the absolute business. 1957 juke joint, 1967 Motown, a clang of Phil Spector bells, and herself marching into battle with 21-gun horn section just showing how it should be done. Glory.

★★★½

★★★★

★★★

RED FANG

THE GRAND RAPIDS

THE SINKING TEETH

Whales And Leeches

Great Shakes

White Water

Collision Boogie

Relapse/Rocket

Psyche Ward

Home Surgery

[PIAS] Australia

His Crayon Fields work showed he knew guitar pop. As Sly Hats, and now simply himself, Geoffy is making bubbling analogue synth pop that would make boys in Essex in 1982 dance awkwardly, then weep.

Forget Metallica and The Offspring – stoner heroes Red Fang were the breakout stars of Soundwave 2013. And on album number three the Portlandbased beardoes continue their quest to destroy the world one heavy yet catchy riff at a time.

While there’s nothing here as immediate as YouTube sensation Prehistoric Dog, the pure energy of Blood Like Cream and fuzzedout Every Little Twist remains highly infectious for the unwary listener. Red Fang have gone beyond being simply another ‘stoner’ band – their stellar riffs and unquestioned passion have them poised for breakout success.

This debut possesses a striking sense of purpose and confidence.

This isn’t the skinny, frazzlednerve psych rock many contemporary acts trade in; this is muscular music, widescreen and bold. They employ many of the classic elements of drone and psych but nothing sounds particularly generic, referencing everything from Jane’s Addiction to The Chills and Wooden Shjips. In many cases it’s singer Sasha L Smith’s voice giving the music its intensity and authority, all ‘80s post punk dramatics.

The title track and Julia Now are two of many highlights that make this a real thrill.

There will always be a place for rough-edged punky spits of young blokes – and yes, it usually is blokes – that works like a soundtrack as you pass inner suburban share houses that you thought were derelict, and tend to smell of beer and various smokes. This is The Sinking Teeth’s natural environment, and across this they get some of their angst out. Sometimes it works: Tongues and the selfexplanatory closer Temporary Living are rightly righteous, but elsewhere their grumpy sounds feel a bit forced, although would likely still work in a correctly sticky carpeted live environment.

Ross Clelland

Mark Hebblewhite

Chris Familton

Ross Clelland

THE JIM JONES REVUE Dancehall piano – 51 per cent New Orleans, 49 per cent Jamaica – goes into a syncopated rattle with various things being hit and/or shook. Then everybody yells roughly in tune, and it ends up irresistible.

GEOFFREY O’CONNOR Jacqueline Chapter Music

60 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

live reviews

ADALITA, LAURA JEAN The Annandale 18 Oct Adalita has come back strong with her new album, All Day Venus, filling in all that vast space that existed in her sombre self-titled debut with driving rhythms and buzzing guitars.

It’s a louder listen, and a better one for it, and her Annandale set drove the point home.

Fellow Melbourne musician Laura Jean has been touring with Adalita, and her gothic pastoral folk songs were a haunting and vivid accompaniment. Laura Jean has released several records and so she had a good catalogue to draw from, and her set felt

robbed some of Adalita’s Spartan songwriting of its power. Being preachy and didactic isn’t our job here at The Music, but sometimes it’s tempting. Songs like Perfection would sound absolutely amazing if folks quit flapping their gums and supped their beers in silence for three lousy minutes. Nevertheless, small irritations were worth it to hear her (and her quality new band) belt out Blue Sky, a crunchy indie epic with some great hooks.

It was a solid gig that showcased a great new set of songs from a master craftswoman, and it felt good to have her back again.

She hasn’t slowed down in the face of personal adversity and has written some of her best and loudest work since Magic Dirt’s glory days. It also felt fitting to have the Annandale hosting.

Matt MacMaster

ADALITA @ THE ANNANDALE. PIC: JODIE MATHEWS

too short (in a good way).

There’s a subtle sense of strength and force behind her delicate voice that elevated her sound above some generic acoustic folk singer-songwriter, and her arrangements were really nicely played.

appear, given the headliners’ genre-hopping it was even easier than usual for Canberra’s I Exist to assimilate. Marrying bluesy, sludge metal-dripping guitars and ferocious hardcore in unholy, devastatingly heavy matrimony and boasting their three-guitar complement, they road-tested material from forthcoming record From Darkness. Vocalist Jake Willoughby prowled the stage, counterpointed by axeman Josh Nixon utilising tricks from his rock move arsenal and fellow guitarist Aaron Osborne’s crushing tone. Blisteringly efficient, their new LP can’t arrive soon enough for headbangers and ‘core aficionados alike.

The previous occasion that Every Time I Die performed in Sydney they battled the

ADALITA @ THE ANNANDALE. PIC: JODIE MATHEWS

EVERY TIME I DIE, I EXIST, HELLIONS Manning Bar 19 Oct

Adalita’s set was a roughly 70-30 ratio of new songs to old, and the setlist was a great selection that covered a lot of ground. I Want Your Love is a great pop song given a razor-sharp edge thanks to Adalita’s dead-serious delivery, and Trust Is Rust sounded far meatier than expected thanks to a guitar-centric mix.

All Day Venus turned into a sludgy grunge jam barrelling along with a hundred cymbal hits splashing all around it.

From the ashes of The Bride, hardcore crew Hellions have hit the ground running this year. The Sydneysiders swiftly clicked into gear, although the modest early attendance didn’t quite reciprocate their enthusiasm. Laden with metallic riffs and breakdowns packing steroid-enhanced muscle, frontman Dre Faivre also brought their high energy, Rage Against The Machineinfused fare to the venue’s floor.

Slower ballads like the classic Fool Around had to compete with a chatty crowd, which

Seemingly effortlessly able to musically contort themselves to fit whatever bill on which they

unseasonably sweltering conditions of this year’s Big Day Out. Thankfully there were no such issues for the certified party-starters this time around; although they did have to dodge a constant stream of stage invaders, and at the set’s conclusion, a mass stampede of eager punters. However, much to the chagrin of security – already having to contend with no barricade to assist them in their rather busy endeavours – the Buffalo heavy-hitters actively championed such behaviour.

There were more dives than the FIFA World Cup, but the southern rock-tinged metalcore outfit weren’t solely focused on such shape-throwing, guitarflinging carnage. Screamer Keith Buckley further espoused the biting, often sarcastic sense of humour that has long been their modus operandi. He briefly sported sunglasses and

a flower in his hair, reminding all present that, “this is a hardcore show, motherfuckers – go back to being angry”.

In between the chaos and occasional band member launching themselves into the pit, an hour of efficiently delivered, deliriously received cuts also ensued, meshing the sizeable fury of Underwater Bimbos From Outer Space, No Son Of Mine, widespread singalong The New Black and Apocalypse Now And Then with earlier favourites like Floater and Ebolarama. No frills, no fireworks and no banner – but whether one of the already converted or just attending out of curiosity on a Saturday night, few left without a grin that you would have required a sandblaster to remove.

Brendan Crabb

IMAGINE DRAGONS @ ENMORE THEATRE. PIC: CLARE HAWLEY

IMAGINE DRAGONS, 44TH SUNSET Enmore Theatre 18 Oct The energy was palpable as Imagine Dragons took the stage for a sold out crowd at the Enmore Theatre last Friday night.

Opening the night with a bang was Perth group 44th Sunset and from the very first note, they were captivating. Frontman Nik Thompson performs with energy reminiscent of a young Peter Garrett circa Midnight Oil, meanwhile delivering unwavering vocals from start to finish. They played a selection of songs from their album The Boa Constrictor Hat to a crowd made up almost entirely of screaming teenagers and THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 61

live reviews their chaperones, armed with a handful of catchy tunes, pumping up the energy in the crowd with their undeniable stage presence.

But it was when headliners Imagine Dragons took the stage that the crowd really went mental.

From the very first note of Round And Round, absolutely everybody in the audience was up and out of their seats dancing, and trying to push their way closer to the stage.

The energy from the stage didn’t waver as frontman Dan Reynolds delivered renditions of songs from their debut album Night Visions. It is no wonder why Billboard dubbed these guys as one of “2012’s Brightest Stars”, as they have essentially exploded onto the scene and taken the industry by storm.

IMAGINE DRAGONS @ ENMORE THEATRE. PIC: CLARE HAWLEY

With their unique instrumentation and larger than life anthems, the guys have achieved multi-platinum success with their debut album, and Radioactive was heralded

by Rolling Stone as “the biggest song of the year”. This translates live into an epic show that is definitely one not to be missed.

Making their way through hit after hit, it is almost impossible to choose a highlight from their set, although renditions of It’s Time, Radioactive, Demons and On Top Of The World did elicit extraordinary reactions from the crowd, who were singing along to every lyric.

This was a great night of indie rock, showcased by one of the biggest bands in the world, Imagine Dragons. From their 62 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

sound to their showmanship, these guys are definitely on top of the world, and don’t look to be coming down from that high anytime soon.

Deborah Jackson

STICKY FINGERS, LYALL MALONEY, PROJECT COLLECTIVE SKA Manning Bar 18 Oct Taking a page out of the ‘90s ska scene, Project Collective Ska found a few people who were willing to skank along to their Reel Big Fish-inspired riddims,

from a successful Euro tour, the four lads from Newtown (now with a fifth member on keys) who used to struggle to get a slot at the ‘Dale demonstrated why they’re a popular live act, commanding audience attention from start to finish and at the same time making terry towelling popular again (you could buy an official band one from the merch desk for a measly $25, which is in my opinion a god damn bargain). Tracks from both EPs and the long player got a run and received a ridiculously enthusiastic response from the sold-out crowd, the performance a few notches higher, tighter and more focused than perhaps a year ago, no doubt due to the mega hours they’ve clocked up from their time on the road.

LORDE @ METRO THEATRE. PIC: PETER SHARP

rounding out a performance complete with a full brass section which I’d be willing to bet all met in a high school music class.

Taking cues from everything that was fun about the genre, the band functioned well as a unit, impressing even more given the collective age looks about 17.

Lyall Maloney proved to be a rising hit with the kids, relying on a mix of reggae licks and the odd rap-off to get his message to the people. With assistance from the lads from Bootleg Rascal it was a well-received performance, the people swelling in numbers, even though the songs were occasionally mundane pop and rock numbers.

Sticky Fingers’ momentum on the live circuit shows no signs of slowing down. Fresh

Always a pleasure to watch, this could well have been one of the last times you’ll have got to see a band poised for even bigger and better things.

Adam Wilding

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT, SLEEP PARADE, TEAL The Annandale 19 Oct There is no doubt that every punter at The Annandale Hotel on Saturday night was there to see one person and one person only: The Butterfly Effect’s new lead singer. Like it or not, there’s no denying a frontman can make or break a band.

In the case of opening act Teal, that frontman displays an amazing natural talent. His impressive falsetto was the perfect vehicle for the band’s dramatic and theatrical sound. The man out the front of Sleep Parade is all about the performance, known for his confident, almost flamboyant style.

Then there is the frontman who has it all: an incredible vocal range, self-assured performance, the ability to throw himself around the stage one minute and deliver a tear-inducing moment the next, all while holding us in the palm of his hand. The Butterfly Effect’s long-time lead singer Clint Boge had all that and more but as was revealed so publicly through their recent documentary,

KATCHAFIRE @ BIG TOP LUNA PARK. PIC: JOSH GROOM

that voice began to struggle and apparently he had to go.

Symbolically The Butterfly Effect walked on stage to the intro of Begins Here. New singer Paul Gallagher was formally introduced and the audience started chanting his name. It was a surprisingly embracing welcome by a crowd who received every song with genuine enthusiasm.

Gallagher experienced technical difficulties from the start that took several songs to be resolved.

It was obvious he favours the use of an effect on his voice, which seemed unnecessary as he is a strong singer. He moved comfortably from favourites like Filling Silence to One Second, Perception Twin and Crave. There were however times when it was difficult to watch Gallagher

live reviews deliver the songs that Boge had lived, written and made his own.

Gallagher definitely appeared most comfortable performing their three new songs, which each had a classic hard rock feel, Eyes Down being the highlight.

The biggest thing lacking from Gallagher’s performance was just that – performance. There was no emotion, no personality, no sense he had made the songs his own. There were suggestions that a new The Butterfly Effect album may be on the horizon. There’s no doubt the audience enjoyed themselves on Saturday night but it will be interesting to see if, after satisfying their curiosity, they will return for another taste.

Monique Cowper

or two in the audience when he closed with his haunting track Beautiful. Such a talent.

Then it was time. Bathed in a constant golden glow, with her long curls cascading left and right to the music, little Lorde came out and effortlessly sung her big heart out on the trials, tribulations and dreams of 16-year-old girls around the world.

From opener Bravado, Lorde demonstrated why she is currently topping charts worldwide, as her husky voice managed to easily gain the attention of the heaving, soldout crowd. With the confidence of a seasoned performer Lorde soared through tracks off her LP The Love Club and her

STICKY FINGERS @ MANNING BAR. PIC: ANGELA PADOVAN

LORDE, OLIVER TANK Metro Theatre 17 Oct Quiet and reserved Oliver Tank began the processions at the Metro Theatre last night, playing to an intimidatingly packed audience that were impatiently waiting to see a young, small Kiwi girl.

Tank is a beautiful lyricist and a fantastic musician and the Metro Theatre is not a venue that does him justice. It’s hard to truly appreciate someone’s music when they are playing in a big, uninviting space full of people drinking and talking. Having said that there was definitely a tear

debut album Pure Heroine.

She lamented about young crushes on boys in the dreamy Buzzcut Season and told us what it was that White Teeth Teens wanted.

Throughout her set Lorde proved time and time again that whilst still a fledgling artist, she has the talent and the prowess to stick around.

Her cover of Kanye West’s Hold My Liquor was an unexpected delight and it was true testament to her talent as a performer that she was able to naturally morph from that song into her own Ribs.

Tennis Court and her charttopping Royals delivered the biggest response from the audience, the latter developing into an all-encompassing chant throughout the crowd.

It’s hard to watch Lorde perform and believe that she is really only 16 years old. Her songs encapsulate maturity far beyond one’s teen years, and her effortless poise live gives the impression of years of experience. Considering she has already captured the world’s attention, it will be exciting to see just how far Lorde can go.

Caitlin Summers

KATCHAFIRE, COMMON KINGS Big Top, Luna Park 18 Oct In an international affair at Sydney’s Big Top, the South

reggae, rock’n’roll and Motown.

People seemed to know, but didn’t know they knew, R&B anthem Alcoholic causing dancing and clumsy attempts to lyricise.

The tiny orange glows on people’s fingertips being passed from friend to friend and the cloud of particularly ‘reggaescented’ smoke above the crowd had the audience feeling dandy, and still on a high from Common King’s set, before Luna Park collectively lost its shit as Katchafire emerged.

The multi-talented sax demon Jamey Ferguson sang Groove Again first, his high-pitched and ultra-chilled-out vocals just one quarter of the vocal talent that has made Katchafire such a big deal. Haani Totorewa

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT @ THE ANNANDALE. PIC: JOSH GROOM

Pacific-born, Orange Countybred Common Kings opened for New Zealand’s hottest reggae export Katchafire before an audience made up mainly of Kiwis, though with a large Australian and South American component (a crowd survey from Logan Bell sorted that out).

Common Kings, fronted by the exceptionally talented vocalist JR King, were exceptional. Formerly a cover band, Common Kings didn’t shy away from borrowing songs from other artists, starting and finishing their set with a huge mash-up that saw them take on Michael Jackson, then everything from Niggas In Paris to Fun’s We Are Young. In between these monster mashups was 40 minutes of soulful R&B with elements taken from

and Jordan Bell pitched in vocally, shirking their respective keyboard and bongo duties, but Logan Bell’s frontman talents held the band together for the monster two-hour, 20-song set.

The smoke cloud overhead thickened with the opening notes of Collie Herb Man, and other favourites, Seriously and Get Away, brought out Sydney’s inner Rasta. Bringing Common Kings back out for Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds kind of felt like cheating – you would have to be made of stone to not close your eyes, throw your head back and groove to that. But Katchafire’s sound was perfect, passing on good vibes and ultra-chill sounds to the eager and gloriously stoned crowd.

Cameron Warner THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 63

arts reviews

PRISONERS

PRISONERS Film

In cinemas Prisoners is a surprisingly strong film. ‘Surprisingly’, because, from the outset, it didn’t look to have much going for it. I expected a rote, straight-to-DVD story – something enjoyable enough, but that was hampered

by Hugh Jackman’s perfect beard and wavering American accent. Instead, it is exactly those things, but made pretty damn sublime by the incredible eye of cinematographer Roger Deakins, who expertly mines the film’s

64 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

pallid suburban neighbourhoods for all their oppressive normalcy, and finds such earthy, elemental qualities in scenes shot inside mere campervans and muted office spaces. And there’s flashes of something else, too – something edgier and meaner in Jackman that I’d not seen before. His cartoonish physicality here is hulking and brimming with a genuine menace.

I’d really wondered what Jake Gyllenhaal would bring to his role. I’ve seen great potential in him go to waste on bad movies.

But here, he’s all backstory, which starts him on strong footing. He has a facial tic, which in many other actors’ eyes would play as affected, but he makes it part of the language of his character. He hunches and shuffles around with the heavy air of a funeral, which is such a wonderful inversion for the character of a cop – and a Gyllenhaal hero cop, at that – in a film like this. There is atmosphere, and elegance to every frame of Prisoners. It isn’t amazing, but it is strong, memorable and gorgeous.

Samuel Hobson

HAMLET Theatre

Belvoir Upstairs Theatre to 1 Dec In a black box line with chairs – Benjamin Cisterne’s smoky lighting evoking an almost noir essence – Hamlet and his dead father sit on opposing sides of the stage. Anthony Phelan’s deceased King Hamlet appears retired from existence, a ghostly presence, almost vacant if he didn’t look so wronged. Toby Schmitz’s Hamlet is restless, twitchy and tired – a world

HAMLET

without reason isn’t worth his time so he doesn’t give it, retreating to surveillance and scheming. He barely has time to blink between thoughts, eyes only closing when clenched in angst or frustration, there are fluid scene changes soundtracked by a counter tenor - these match the momentum with which Hamlet propels himself towards extinction. This is Hamlet’s Hamlet, so much so that his demons prematurely bear the still sodden scars that mark their transition to the afterlife, as though a madman’s resolve is enough to convert machinations to inevitability.

Under Simon Stone’s direction physical action gradually grinds to a halt; death isn’t inflicted as much as imagined, but is all too real and bafflingly blameless despite the web of deceit. Ralph Myers’ bare set (barely more than a piano) highlights Hamlet’s role in the construction of this world, and small flourishes – a bloody potpourri accumulating slowly – stand out starkly.

Dave Drayton

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 65

muso

PRODUCT NEWS

ELLIOT EASTON

THE ELLIOT EASTON FIREBIRD Elliot Easton of The Cars has always been a fan of Gibson electric guitars and Gibson recently unveiled a new signature guitar created hand-in-hand with Easton – The Elliot Easton Firebird.

Available in both left- and right-handed models, the guitar sports an exclusive new gold mist poly finish in highgloss nitrocellulose lacquer in the classic and ever-radical “reverse body” Firebird design, along with Steinberger gearless tuners. The guitar is powered by a pair of Gibson’s most popular humbucking pickups with versatile coil splitting and phase-reverse wiring for unprecedented sonic variety. A Bigsby vibrato tailpiece with Vibramate Spoiler for easy string loading gives you “emotive dips and tremulous wobbles”, while a new TonePros locking Tuneo-matic bridge with nylon saddles offers excellent returnto-pitch during vibrato use.

MEET THE VOX AC15C1X First introduced in 1958, the Vox AC15 combo has been the amp of choice for countless guitar players in the intervening years, from The Beatles to contemporary surf guitarist Martin Cilia.

Drawing on more than 50 years of amp-building expertise, the AC15C1 Custom Series offers maximum tonal dexterity, while Alnico Blue speakers made by the Celestion Company are an especially great match. Now, a model featuring these Alnico Blue speakers is available in the 15W series. It’s called, naturally, the AC15C1X.

66 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

ANOTHER HIT Armed with a pair of drumsticks, his drum kit and a camera, Newcastle-drummergone-internet-star Kye Smith has the international punk scene and his idols in awe. Daniel Cribb gets some time with the mastermind.

“F

ucking AMAZING!” tweeted NOFX frontman and Fat Wreck Chords label owner Fat Mike after watching and sharing Newcastle drummer Kye Smith’s Fat Wreck medley at the end of May. Coming from a man who seems to have a problem with almost everything, that’s saying something. The video exploded on Twitter and Facebook with Lagwagon, Anti-Flag, Propagandhi and more sharing it, leading it to go viral, and prompting a follow-up even more ambitious.

Epitaph’s catalogue came next, and Smith somehow managed to cram 279 songs into an 18-minute medley. It blew up like his first effort, and even Chris Lilley gave it a share. “It went online and within half an hour I got a call straight from one of the dudes at the label who then sent me a bunch of merch and it was all over music news websites, which was kind of cool because I didn’t really think the label would see it, let alone within half an hour,” Smith tells, in the car from Newcastle to Sydney to fill in on drums for a band supporting Me First & The Gimme Gimmes.

Smith’s passion for drumming picked up after school where he went from playing in the school band to learning Green Day tunes – his latest YouTube effort is a five-minute, 40-song Green Day medley. Unsurprisingly, his interests drifted and evolved from pop punk covers as he joined Local Resident Failure. When the touring cycle for the band’s latest record began winding down at the start of this year, he began filming drum covers in his

bedroom as a way to kill time, but he wasn’t expecting anyone to take notice, especially not the bands whose songs he was playing. “It happened with Frenzal Rhomb when we played with them; I was talking to Jay [Whalley, vocals] for ages and at the end of the night he was like, ‘Aww, you’re that guy who does all the drum videos, right?’, which was cool.”

Having toured Australia with Local Resident Failure, supporting a slew of big name acts, and more recently being flown around the country to play with other bands and record on their albums, he has a fairly wide scope of what state the Australian punk scene is in. “It’s kind of annoying, you know, you go and see a band that you love and it’s

“YOU DO IT BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT, NOT BECAUSE IT’S POPULAR.” awesome that there’s so many people there, but then you play a local show with very similar stuff and there’s not that many people there, which kind of bums you out a bit. Then you realise that these bands have been doing this for 20 or 30 years, so it takes a long time to build that up.”

Frenzal Rhomb and Gimme Gimmes are both Fat Wreck bands. Formed around the same time, Fat Wreck and Epitaph have drifted apart quite a lot since their inception; Epitaph evolving with the times and Fat staying true to its punk rock roots. As Smith headed down the homestretch on the Epitaph catalogue, he realised just how irrelevant punk is becoming.

“A lot of labels kind of stick with what they know and eventually fizzle out because people move onto something else. It’s kind of cool that Epitaph have gone and done what they’ve done… I guess the whole time I’ve been into punk and playing it, it’s never really been that popular. It’s not like I’m getting bummed out because it’s going downhill, you know; you do it because you love it, not because it’s popular, because it’s obviously not.”

It’s hard to argue that Fat Wreck haven’t fallen behind over the years as they refuse to branch out and engage with what the current trends are, so how does Smith feel about being one of the best drummers in a genre that’s not as prominent as it used to be? “I’ve never really had a goal doing it, it’s always just been something fun and it’s gone beyond expectation, so I might as well keep doing it and see what happens.”

You can check out Kye Smith’s videos at youtube.com/ SomethingAboutDrums

MADCDs cos Cos we g ive a sh it

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THE MUSIC â&#x20AC;¢ 23RD OCTOBER 2013 â&#x20AC;¢ 67

muso

BKE BEAT THANG DRUM MACHINE

Drum machines always spin me out. On one hand I can’t keep my hands off them and on the other I lose interest when I have to start programming. I don’t like chores! This, however, is cool. BKE have made the effort to provide pads and buttons that are dedicated to almost every sound you’ll need at any given time. This is a simple machine to use yet incredibly powerful. You can use it on the go with its battery charged or you can integrate it with your

BOOMERANG III PHRASE SAMPLER

computer and use the BTV VSTi application that comes with each Beat Thang. There are numerous I/O options and you can use the unit as a controller for your computer for increased processing power while maintaining that hands-on feel. This is a pretty affordable option, at $799, that will bring the fun back to making grooves, loaded as it is with guitar and keyboard effects and a squillion drum samples.

Barry Gilmour

FOCAL SM9 STUDIO MONITOR

This week I thought we’d look at one product that really takes itself seriously – the Focal SM9.

These are studio monitors at a level most engineers never come across. With a three-way monitor and a two-way monitor in one cabinet, Focal have produced something that can really put itself in any environment comfortably. You can reduce the amount of bass to listen to all the details in your mids and really bring out those micro details.

There are controls on the side panel to switch between StandBy, Direct and Focus modes 68 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

The latest incarnation of the original Boomerang launched in 1995 is the Boomerang III Phrase Sampler, which sports a ton of new features, including the hosting of up to four independent loops, different play modes, half speed/one octave down, reverse, fade and many other functions.

The sound quality is fantastic at 48Khz/20 bit, so the pedal won’t affect your tone in the slightest, and having multiple loops at the same time enables the user to erase and re-record loops

while other loops are playing. In addition, having a master loop enables you set up a percussive beat to quantize to so all your loops stay perfectly in time.

Add the ability to sync loops together, have them run in freeform (for ambient soundscapes), and to drop the pitch and speed down an octave for basslines, and you have an extremely versatile tool for composition, live performance and improvisation.

Reza Nasseri

GOLDEN AGE PROJECT COMP 54 COMPRESSOR

depending on what you want from the monitor and the level of transparency is what you’d expect from high-end esoteric studio monitors. These are not cheap at a tad over $8000 and considering their size, at 35kg each, they’re not light. There’s so much to say about them, and the technical details, pure Beryllium inverted dome tweeter and the level of detail produced speak for themselves. These are true reference monitors from a true master of loudspeaker design.

Barry Gilmour

I loved this as soon as I saw it. A true old-school compressor, built the old-fashioned way before integrated circuits took over, with proper resistors and transformer balanced line input and output.

You can link two of these together for stereo operation and it even has true relay-switched bypass to completely remove the circuitry from the signal path.

It’s often the case with vintage

equipment that the sound quality delivered is so desirable that prices on the second-hand market are relatively high. With this unit delivering the same kind of qualities as classics like the 2254 yet only costing around $449, that beautiful vintage sound and old-school build quality is at hand without paying a fortune.

Barry Gilmour

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 69

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72 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

the guide SPECIAL HALLOWEEN FEATURE INSIDE

Answered by: Matt Heywood, bass How did you all meet? The band has been together since late 2006. Jeff and myself played in a previous band together; Oli and Zot also played together in a previous band. In 2010 we were looking for a guitarist – Bizz had just left the Genitorturers and had moved from the US to Australia. Then this year Zot jumped in on drums.

You’re on tour in the van – which band or artist is going to keep the most people happy if you throw them on the stereo? Faith No More. Covers a lot of bases!

Would you rather be a busted broke-but-revered Hank Williams f igure or some kind of Metallica monster?

We’re already busted broke! But probably not revered. Anyone who said they wouldn’t want the achievements and money that Metallica has made, with their own music, would be a liar or deluded.

What part do you think Sydney plays in the music you make? A lot. The grit of any city affects its inhabitants.

Sydney definitely plays into what we do with its industrial landscapes, artery-like train tracks, cranes and the older, unkempt graffiti buildings. People who are succeeding and suffering all in the same place.

OUR LAST ENEMY

What’s in the pipeline for the band in the short term? We’ve just been signed to Eclipse Records in North America, so our album will be released there early next year. We’ll then head to the US for a tour, hopefully. Also playing Black Cherry at The Factory Theatre this Saturday.

Pic by Josh Groom

eat

travel

music

opinion

halloween

BLACK LABEL

BLIND VALLEY

CABINS

EGO

Name: Laurie Marlow

Name: Tommy Nunez

Name: Leroy Francis

Name: Mark Egan

Trick or treat? Why? Firstly, Halloween is an American celebration. The last thing our kids need is more sugar, so trick away! Ask a kid what Halloween is about and they have no idea.

Trick or treat? Why? It’s an excuse to raid the streets and chase other people who are actually trick or treating.

Trick or treat? Why? Trick. The possibilities are endless. You never get the treat you really want anyway, so what’s there to lose?

Trick or treat? Why? Treat.

I get scared easily. You don’t wanna see that.

What’s your favourite scary movie? Scary Movie.

What’s your favourite scary movie? Gremlins.

What’s your favourite scary movie? Nightmare On Elm Street.

What scares the shit out of you?

The new lizard overlord and his merry men. Fony Shabbot.

What scares the shit out of you? Snakes, Roy Orbison wrapped in plastic, failure and the Northampton clown. Also being the only person awake on a plane really creeps me out; it’s too silent and still.

What scares the shit out of you? Heights scare me. I can’t even watch it on TV without my legs turning to jelly.

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why?

Bieber or Cyrus, ‘cause they are both out of control. Somebody needs to reign them in a bit; did ya hear that, Billy Ray? Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if…

It’s been a good Halloween when the lolly basket is still full. More for me, heheheh!

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig? You don’t have to compete with all the sevenyear-olds for the treats.

We’ll give ya treats RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES! When and where for your next gig? Nov 3 Beaches Hotel Thirroul Website link for more info? blacklabelaustralia.com.au

74 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why?

Nick Cave. His good looks give me regular nightmares.

Him or Barry Manilow.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if…

You snap into consciousness with a pumpkin up the wrong way. Not-so-sweet pumpkin.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig?

There are rumours going around that we have a new member...

They say he is gorgeous.

When and where for your next gig? 1 Nov, Oxford Art Factory’s Halloween 6th Birthday Party. We have lots of safe and considerate fun.

A whole family adventure.

Website link for more info? facebook.com/blindvalley

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why? Chris Brown. I can’t believe someone can brutally beat his girlfriend or wife and yet still be adored and admired by so many young women... Donny Benét comes close because he is scary good.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if…

You wake up in an unknown (probably stolen) boat floating underneath the harbour bridge with half a case of Carlton left.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig?

There will be loads of free drinks and great live music. Our new songs will cut your ears off.

When and where for your next gig? 1 Nov, Oxford Art Factory’s Halloween 6th Birthday Party.

Website link for more info? facebook.com/cabinsband

What’s your favourite scary movie? Stephen King’s It. What scares the shit out of you?

Being trapped, that scares the hell out of me. Mind you, even just sitting in the middle backseat of a car freaks me out.

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment? Flume. It’s scary how good the dude is.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if… You go to the party dressed as Gandalf and leave looking like Gollum.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig?

‘Cause it’s all your favourite scary movies slammed together in a creepy visual show over some great new club music.

When and where for your next gig? This Halloween tour will take me to Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Townsville either side of Halloween: Karnevil, Luna Park Big Top, 26 Oct; SoScareMe, Beach Road Hotel, 30 Oct Website link for more info? watchyourego.com

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 75

halloween

EL VEZ THE MEXICAN ELVIS

Trick or treat? Why? Treat for me, please! Treat can still mean a bottle of tequila... tricks can be treats too.

What’s your favourite scary movie? Alien. Classic scary!

What scares the shit out of you?

People living in fear and forcing their beliefs on others is the scariest thing in the world. That and imagining a world without gold jumpsuits, of course!

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why? Miley Cyrus scariest by a long shot, for obviously unfortunate reasons.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if… You wake up alone with someone else’s makeup all over your body. Buenos días!

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig? I’ll be the best Mexican experience you can have in Australia! El Vez and Lucha wrestlers, Mariachis, taco truck... Arriba!

When and where for your next gig? 26 Oct, headlining Black Cherry’s Halloween Fiesta at Factory Theatre.

Website link for more info? elvez.net

76 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

FLICK THE BEAN

FRIGHTNIGHT COMEDY THEATRE RESTAURANT

Name: Luke Colombo

Name: Rob Griffiths

Trick or treat? Why? Trick, because we are sweet enough as it is and love a bit of excitement!

Trick or treat? Why? Trick, as I like to be entertained.

What’s your favourite scary movie? Mirrors.

What scares the shit out of you?

People who call on private numbers! There’s always something bad to say if you’ve got your number on private.

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why?

Justin Bieber. It’s scary how someone can slip through the industry like that and be allowed to make music!

What’s your favourite scary movie? Scary Movie – it’s funny.

What scares the shit out of you?

Apart from going really fast on the back of a motorcycle I would say spiders and crabs crawling on me. Now that scares the shit out of me. Oh and my mother-in-law – just kidding.

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why? Miley Cyrus. Now how scary are those new moves and that butt of hers.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if…

If you wake up in somebody’s dungeon with nothing but a bag of lollies to your name.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if… You go to Frightnight Comedy Theatre Restaurant.

We all want a great laugh and Frightnight is the place to go.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig? There’s nothing scarier than Halloween, unless it’s a Halloween spent in Maroubra...

BYO 12-pack of eggs.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig? It’s one of the funniest nights you’ll ever see and suits Halloween to a T. Dinner/ show and dance party.

When and where for your next gig? Halloween At The Sands, Maroubra, 26 Oct

When and where for your next gig? 6pm every Saturday night and Friday andSaturdays for your Christmas parties.

Website link for more info? facebook.com/flickthebean

Website link for more info? frightnight.com.au

NINA LAS VEGAS

Trick or treat? Why? Trick, because I do my best to avoid sugar.

What’s your favourite scary movie? The Blair Witch Project.

What scares the shit out of you?

Walking home late at night/early morning. (I live in Kings Cross!)

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment? Deadmau5, ‘cause he’ll internet bitch about you.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if… No one else is wearing your costume.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig? Dance like zombies.

When and where for your next gig? Karnevil, Luna Park Big Top, 26 Oct (with What So Not!) Website link for more info? facebook.com/ninalasvegas

the guide nsw.live@themusic.com.au

FRONTLASH

TOURING THIS WEEK

BILL SHORTEN

While we must admit we had a soft spot for Albo (but so did most of us plebs it seems), Shorten got over the line as Labor leader.

Good, now can everyone just channel their energies into defeating Tony Abbott? Ta.

THE DUFFIN Look, we’re not interested in the legal matters as to whether Starbucks stole the idea of the doughnut/muffin cross, but could someone bring a variation here to Australia? Yet again Zumbo, we’re looking at you.

JON BON JOVI Walks an Australian fan down the aisle in a Vegas chapel wedding. Knock his music all you want, but gotta love him doing something like this. Did he sing at the reception though?

IGGY AZALEA

BACKLASH MILEY CYRUS

Knocks Lorde from the #1 album position, yet again proving hype outweighs talent at times.

PENIS BEAKER How have we gotten through our sexual lives without this apparently vital postcoital clean up item?

IGGY AZALEA Shows are on, then off. then one is apparently on again. Can everyone just make up their mind as to what’s happening please?

76 • THE MUSIC • 16TH OCTOBER 2013

THIS WEEK’S RELEASES… BEST COAST Fade Away Kobalt/Jewel City KID MAC Head Noise MGM SEABELLIES Fever Belle Shock THE AVETT BROTHERS Magpie & The Dandelion Caroline

BOOT SCOOTIN’

STICKY SITUATION

Folk pop old soul Gordi has a soon-to-be-released debut EP, but before the long-awaited launch, Gordi will be supporting The Boots and Imogen Clark at Brighton Up Bar on Thursday.

Sticky Fingers have narrowly avoided the firm hand of law recently, and are able to continue their debauched behaviour on the Sydney leg of the Freddy Crabs tour this Friday at Manning Bar with Lyall Moloney and Bootleg Rascal.

AROUND THE WORLD

YOUNG GUNS

Off the back of a recent sold out performance as part of Sydney Fringe Festival, dynamic modern flamenco Nuevo ensemble Pêna Flamenca will return to The Basement on Wednesday for this week’s instalment of World Music Wednesdays.

This Saturday evening at the Bondi Pavilion, BLYMP will be celebrating young local music in an under 18’s event. Amongst the many fresh-faced bands performing at BLYMP will be Gone Electric, The Citizens, Go Mason Go and The Dawsons.

SOMETHING NEW

MAKE OR BREAK

The freshly released album from Melbourne’s Adalita sees her treading unfamiliar territory.

She’ll be backed by a full band this Friday at the Annandale and again on Saturday at the Great Northern in Newcastle.

Surf-rockers The Breaks were set to tour after the second album, buta portion of the tour was unable to commence. As such, the band will be embarking on round two of the tour this Saturday at the Standard.

BROTHERS ON TOUR

HART OF MICK

The Amity Affliction, will be touring alongside Chelsea Grin, Stick To Your Guns and In Hearts Wake in the aptly titled Brothers In Arms tour.

The tour heads to Panthers in Newcastle on Saturday and Luna Park’s Big Top on Sunday.

Australian singer-songwriter Mick Hart is on the mend.

Coincidentally, his recovery and consequent return to the live scene has roughly coincided with the release of his latest album, which he’ll be celebrating this Friday at the Brewhouse.

FOR MORE HEAD TO THEMUSIC.COM.AU

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 77

halloween

RAISE A LITTLE HELL – HALLOWEEN AT HARD ROCK

HARD ROCK CAFE SYDNEY

THE FABERGETTES

RETURN OF THE STRIPPING DEAD

SYDNEY INTERACTIVE THEATRE

Name: Nat Martin

Name: Venus Vamp

Name: Gabriel McCarthy

Trick or treat? Why? Both. We like tricks and we like treats.

Trick or treat? Why? Always treat... that’s the trick.

What’s your favourite scary movie? The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

What’s your favourite scary movie? Scary Movie Volume 16?

Trick or treat? Why? Trick. I know those apples with razor blades.

Trick or treat? Why? We trick and we reward with treats.

Involving the audience is always full of trickery, but the better they interact, the greater the pay-off of treats is.

What scares the shit out of you?

People who don’t like music.

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment? Miley Cyrus.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if… You won the costume contest and got a free bar tab.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig?

‘Cause we’ll be delivering an authentic Halloween that rocks!

When and where for your next gig? New Years Eve at Hard Rock Café Sydney.

Fireworks, open bar and DJs. Stay tuned for details...

Website link for more info? facebook.com/ HardRockCafeSydney

What scares the shit out of you?

Eyeballs. Since dissecting a bull’s eye in year 9 science class, I have never fully recovered.

Any exposed eyeball sends me into all kinds of gah! Not sure why I’m telling you this. People usually react by showing me messed up eyeball photos.

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why?

Miley Cyrus, like, duh.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if…

You get stuck in Hurricane Sandy. Well, that’s what happened to me last year in New York. My flight was delayed which meant I got to stay in Brooklyn, NY for Halloween.

Stoop trick or treating is the best.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig? We know all the moves to Thriller...

When and where for your next gig? Lady Killers at The Standard with She Rex, The Dark Hawks and Lily So & The Below. 31 Oct. Website link for more info? tinyurl.com/LadyKillerTix

78 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

What’s your favourite scary movie? Zombie Strippers.

What scares the shit out of you? The thought that life could be like a Jennifer Lopez film *shivers*.

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why? Miley Cyrus and that bloody tongue of hers. She’s the devil, you know.

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if…

You’re still finding body parts in your home a month later.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig?

Blood! Boobs! Boys! Babes!

Where else do you get to see scenes from your favourite horror films combined with striptease!

When and where for your next gig? On Halloween night, 31 Oct, 8pm, The Imperial Hotel, Erskineville.

Website link for more info? daisytix.com

What’s your favourite scary movie? The Blair Witch Project.

What scares the shit out of you?

Usually a very strong laxative... other than that: spiders, snakes, pine nuts, tadpoles – you know, the usual stuff.

Who’s the scariest person in music at the moment and why? Miley Cyrus. It’s scary how many people like her and actually listen to her music... without being forced to!

Complete this sentence: You know it’s been a good Halloween if… You wind up in a hot tub in Mexico with a shaved head, your mouth tasting of Vegemite, and the local town worshiping you as their new deity.

Why should we celebrate Halloween with you at your gig? Zombies, tapas, cocktails and awesome interactive games.

What more could you want?

When and where for your next gig? The Barricade, Surry Hills, 7pm, Sunday 3 Nov. Website link for more info? sydneyinteractivetheatre.com.au/ breakthrough-halloween-special

INTERACTIVE THEATRE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL SUNDAY 3RD NOVEMBER · DOORS 7PM ENTRY $85

** Tickets include production ticket, canapea, welcome cocktail, decadent tapas platter and churros with chocolate dessert.

Featuring live entertainment, themed cocktails and fine tapas dining you can get through the apocalypse in style.

The audience is hands on as they try discover “THE BREAKTHROUGH” first and save all of humanity and everything in this world as we know it…

413 BOURKE ST SURRY HILLS | 1300 663 386 | SYDNEYINTERACTIVETHEATRE.COM.AU

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 79

eat

THE SLAP The time has come when all Australians heed the call to gather around the barbecue, sink a few ales, swat at the inevitable flies and share something imbued with the essence of charcoal to eat, as Dylan Stewart eulogises.

GET CREATIVE ON THE BARBECUE OYSTERS

If you think this salty mollusc is only palatable when raw and zesty, cheese and herbs have the ability to transform any food.

DOUGHNUTS

These diabeticinducing desserts are greatly enhanced by the barbecuing process, the heat helping to caramelise the sugars. Nothing is better than one of these warmed crispy treats!

WATERMELON

O

ctober’s a funny time of year. The winter chill, its sporting codes and long nights are rapidly moving into the abyss of our collective psyche, and although daylight savings has kicked in, we’re still getting used to functioning in a different – albeit only slightly – timezone. Summer is on the horizon, but it will take a few really warm days before shorts and singlets become the fashion du jour (yes, some parts of Australia have experienced unseasonable warmth already, but bear with me here, I’m making a point).

The hum of lawnmowers can be heard on the suburban soundscape and the smell of freshly cut grass wafts over fences to indicate we are in the throes of spring. Soon, though, these sensations will be joined by that other glorious mainstay of the warmer months: the barbecue.

First comes the faint smell of charcoal, growing more and more aromatic over those first few minutes.

Then that sudden, shocking sizzle of the first piece of food slapping upon the grill hits your ears and human nature instinctively draws us to the cooking process. Whether meat or vegetable, all distractions are ignored, our eyes and ears honing in on preparing a sumptuous, char-grilled meal for ourselves – or, as is often the case, for our friends and family.

It’s been this way for millennia. Although the stainless steel hood, the gas tank and the pasta salad that often form part of the barbecuing experience have been around a relatively short time, the concept of cooking food over an open flame is as old as fire itself.

We might mock them as precursors to the presentday human race, but the cavemen and women who first managed to control fire in the Middle Pleistocene period (think 781-126 thousand years ago) had larger brains than their own predecessors.

It’s unsurprising, then, that one of the first things they did with their newfound intelligence was find an animal, kill it and cook it over a fire.

Sure, the furthest many of us come to hunting for food these days is stalking the supermarket aisles, and even

80 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

when we’re camping we’ll throw up a cast-iron plate over the embers to cook more accurately. There’s something appealing, though, about the primitive notion of cooking a piece of flesh to the point where it’s not only rid of bacteria, but also draws that smoky flavour of the flames.

If we just wanted to eat a hot meal, we would no doubt use one of the multitudes of modern cooking appliances found in the average kitchen. Oven, stovetop, microwave, steamer, kettle, toaster, slow cooker; the list goes on.

There seems to be less skill required when cooking in the kitchen though. An oven can be pre-heated to a precise temperature. A steamer or rice cooker can automatically tell you when your food has reached the desired state. And the only ‘work’ involved in cooking in a microwave is to remove any foil from your meal.

Try telling a story to friends while you all huddle around a rice cooker. It would not only have to be as riveting as a Hollywood thriller, but you’d also be telling it in a race against “the ding” that indicates your food is ready.

There’s a certain kind of nostalgic romance about cooking on a barbecue that’s not just limited to the act of cooking itself. In the fresh air of a backyard, a park or a campground, voices are naturally freer of inhibitions, allowing stories to be told enthusiastically, flamboyantly and with gestures.

There’s no bench space restricting your movements; no competing conversation that needs to be respected (as much). And the neighbours? When paired with the slap and sizzle of food on the grill, the sounds of laughter and a crappy stereo blaring through a bathroom window is, if not an invitation to pop round with a six-pack of their own, then a validation that everything is alright with the world.

When you fire up the barbecue this summer, take a moment to tip your hat to our ancestors, their primitive fire-cooking ways and, for God’s sake, make sure the grill is hot before you slap that steak down.

Already a popular partner for goat cheese and rocket salads, this fruit has progressed to patty status in making sweet/savoury burgers. You can also experiment with other fruits as well, such as bananas in their skins, peaches, pears, etc.

ROMAINE LETTUCE

Lettuce, as well as its leafy cousins like cabbage and brussels sprouts, go great with oil, herbs or salad dressing on the grill. It’s all about supplementing the fluid lost in the cooking process with added fats and sauces.

AVOCADO

If your average guacamole isn’t cutting it anymore, the process of grilling avocados provides a great smoky flavour. Be sure to use olive oil and lemon juice and have a clean grill on a low heat.

travel

BLUE LAGOON ETIQUETTE: BEST PRACTICES

THE EDGES OF TWILIGHT

NUDE UP IN THE LOCKER ROOMS

Nothing says, ‘I’m iffy on you locals’ like covering yourself with a towel when you’re getting changed. Let it hang out, relax and enjoy the welcoming nods from the regulars.

You havent haven’t lived until yyou you’ve ve ridden a snowmobile on an active volcano. Iceland gives Benny Doyle such an opportunity.

SCRUB YO’SELF

And while you’re standing around just as God made you, have a shower and scrub yourself down. This will make sure the lagoon remains as clean and hygienic as possible.

MINIMAL MOTION IN THE OCEAN

Well, geothermal spa – but you get it. Your mad bomb dives might score you perfect tens at your backyard pool parties but here they’ll win you no friends.

GET DIRTY

That soft stuff beneath your toes is silica mud, and it exfoliates, brings out inner glow and does all sorts of other things you read about on lady products.

Smear that gear on.

CLOSE YOUR EYES

You are swimming in an open-air lagoon in Iceland surrounded by molten rock – it doesn’t get much more relaxing, so soak it up and enjoy.

T

he temperature has dropped into minus territory and I’m rugged up like the Michelin Man, trying to squeeze a racing helmet down over my head. Our husky Icelandic guide notices that I’m struggling and gives it a little tap on top which does the trick. We’re about to go snowmobiling on Mýrdalsjökull, a glacier that rests expectedly on an active volcano named Katla. Scientists have stated that the cavity should erupt every 40 to 80 years; the last recorded eruption was in 1918. Our guide says that we can only go out for an hour so if the thing blows we can outrun the lava. I’ve never felt so alive.

This is Iceland. It’s a country that stirs something inside you and causes you to breathe deeper, gaze longer and think just a little bit more. Most things you experience here are so unique you can’t completely compute them, and even in reflection it’s hard to put yourself back in that moment and acknowledge the magnitude and scope that came with whatever you were doing. Like speeding at 60 clicks across a volcano; gazing at the crevasse between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates; watching icebergs break off a glacier. It’s a country that makes you feel small and insignificant in the massive scheme of it all.

Because there’s culture shock. When you visit a foreign destination and can’t read a train map, or you point at a menu and end up with pig’s ear stew.

Then there’s Iceland. At many points on the trip it doesn’t even seem like we’re on Earth. The remote Nordic island spits, steams and bubbles, filling us with childlike curiosity as an elaborate science experiment plays out all around. And outside of Reykjavík, the horizon is generally devoid of trees, with moss quickly replacing grass and minimal fauna to be seen. Far from seeming cold, however, all this comes across as cinematic and inspiring.

From the moment we depart London and begin chasing the spring sun north around the earth’s curvature, the trip immediately feels like something extraordinary and

about as far removed from a standard ‘weekend break’ as could be. At one point I’m lying in the back of a people mover as it powers down a single lane road and all that surrounds us is hardened black lava. The desolation seems to roll into the infinite. Tool plays on the stereo and the prog metal whirs with the same intensity; it sounds like it was written for the moment. I remember reading an article about the making of Bjork’s Post, and how she sourced a long microphone cord so she could sing out to the ocean. It all makes complete sense.

Basing ourselves out of Reykjavik City Hostel isn’t so much a smart decision as the only choice on our backpacking budget. But it gives us a central base to explore the city and surrounding areas, and provides us with a social environment where we can share stories and pick up handy tips on where to eat and what to check out around the place. During our four days in Iceland I see more water cascading over cliff edges that I ever have in my life. I eat lobster soup and freshly caught flounder that practically dissolves in my mouth. I even manage to learn a bit about the country’s Viking heritage, which the Icelandic people are immensely proud of.

The sun doesn’t disappear the entire time we’re here. The closest we come to darkness is between the hours of 11pm and 3am, when a perpetual dusk settles over our heads. When we appear from Pravda, one of the prize clubs in Reykjavik on Sunday morning at 4am, the sun is belting down like it’s noon. It makes the street meat hot dog just a little harder to digest, but it’s pretty unique nonetheless.

And no trip to Iceland is complete without a visit to the Blue Lagoon, the iconic geothermal spa situated in the country’s south-west tip. It’s on the way to the airport, making it the perfect final stop for any holiday in the north, and the experience is medicinal, extracting the last of the Jägermeister from our pores to see us leaving totally refreshed and invigorated. Because this is an island getaway, but just not as you know it.

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 81

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FRONTLASH

LAUNCHING THIS WEEK

GLOBAL NEWS TEAM

The cast of Anchorman 2 is coming out for the Australian premiere of the film. You stay classy Sydney.

GUESS WHO’S BACK? Eminem returns, with a massive support line-up in massive venues.

LORDE She’s currently conquering Australia with her live shows, but the good news continues in the US for her with a third week at #1 on the US singles chart.

ANCHORMAN 2

BACKLASH

COSMO CORDIAL

PEDAL TO THE METAL

A considerably short time ago, Lime Cordiale launched their most recent single to a sold out crowd. Now, they’re about to release their EP, with shows lined up at the Annandale, Thursday and Rad, Wollongong, Sunday, both with Cosmo Jarvis.

Brisbane melodic metalcore act Bound For Ruin have been getting a whole lot done. Since their formation a year ago, they’re already up to album number two, which they’ll be launching on Wednesday at the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle.

CHOICE VOICE

MOON MOVEMENT

From former street busker to finalist on The Voice, Alex Gibson has continually been proving his worth, having recently tallied up an impressive five singles in the iTunes chart. Now, he releases his new album, with the launch this Thursday at the Factory Theatre.

Sydney three-piece Movement have been killing it, continuing to slay their festival slots, and recently landing themselves the title of Best New Music on Pitchfork. This Saturday, they launch their new single at Goodgod with Moon Holiday.

COLOUR OF MONEY

SWINGING GYPSIES

Ahead of the band’s forthcoming LP, Paul Greene & The Other Colours will perform this Thursday at the Brass Monkey, where they’ll be launching the first single. If you fail to catch that, they’ll be in Bulli on Sunday performing at the Heritage Hotel.

They’ve only just finished a two-month tour of Europe, yet raucous gypsy swingers The Barons of Tang are back on the road again to support their debut album. This Friday, they’re down in Wollongong, performing at Rad.

JD’S LP

SWEET SHADOW

JD Love Band have just completed their new album, and to celebrate the band will be launching the LP/CD this Thursday at the Petersham Bowling Club with the support of the lovely Annaliesse Monaro.

Released on her very own label, the third solo release from sweet singer-songwriter Lenka was dropped a couple of months ago, and is only now being launched in a small run of shows. On Thursday, she’ll be launching Shadows at the Vanguard.

POLITICIANS

Just shitting us in general, with views and acts on MPs expenses, climate change and same-sex marriages.

CMJ Nothing against the music conference itself, it’s just that a lot of people are over there having awesome fun while we’re not.

BUSHFIRES Jesus, it’s only October and the state is alight. The coming summer scares us.

THIS WEEK’S RELEASES… LINKIN PARK Recharged Warner FUTURE OF THE LEFT How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident Remote Control KATAKLYSM Waiting For The End To Come Universal FEELINGS Be Kind, Unwind Create Control

82 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

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CLOSING DOWN SALE

25% OFF ALL STOCK

*except customer orders, existing sale items and some current titles.

121 Macleay Street Potts Point t PH 9331 6088

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 83

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ALBUM FOCUS

ALBUM FOCUS

LAUNCHING THIS WEEK

CHARLIE HORSE Answered by: Paul McDonald

ALEX GIBSON

Album title: Strange Passengers

PAPER MACHE POP

HONKY TONK WOMAN

Album title: This Is Life

Where did the title of your new album come from? These songs have been tapping on my shoulder and setting up houses in my head for the last 12 months.

They have attached themselves and have become our little army of ‘strange passengers’ for now.

Currently in the midst of touring her most recent single Paper Mache City which is lifted from her album of the same name, Sydney jazz/pop artist Briana Colishaw will be heading to Blue Beat this Thursday with her six-piece band behind her.

Piano enthusiast Jan Preston has very recently released a full-length album dedicated to her lifelong love with pianos.

Joined by her three-piece band, the honky tonk pianist will be launching the album at the Seymour Centre this Sunday.

How many releases do you have now? Two albums. The first album Monster was well loved by us and released last year into the wild.

BATTLE BEARS

KILLER BILL

Following the quickly-gained glory of their second album Harlequin Dream, Boy & Bear will be joined by Battleships and Dustin Tebbutt as they tour in support of the new record.

The three will be hitting the Enmore Theatre on Friday.

After a long wait, Young Sydney quartet Kill Appeal will be launching their second single (a follow-up to last year’s debut) this Friday at Spectrum along with Rattlesnake, The Bitter Sweehearts and Pyromance.

PERCH CREEK BIN RATS

DECLAN JAMS

Following the release of their most recent single, roots/indiefolk outfit The Perch Creek Family Jugband will be joined by Papa Pilko & The Bin Rats and Bob Harrow this Thursday at the Vanguard, then again on Sunday.

In the world of world music, Declan Kelly & The Rising Suns head to the recently opened Jam Gallery in Bondi on Friday.

They’re touring in the leadup to the release of their third album of roots reggae madness.

WIZARD OF PROG

SQUEEZE ME

Last year, heavy prog outfit Chaos Divine offered up a tribute to Toto’s Africa. Since then, they’ve been working on a full-length album, which they’ll road-test Friday at the Bald Faced Stag with Anubis, Head Filled Attraction and Mercury Sky.

Swinging Sydney-based blues outfit The Squeezers are touring this week, stopping into the Merton Hotel in Rozelle on Friday and Katoomba RSL the following day. Neither event will cost you a dime, with both evenings free of an admission fee.

Where did the title come from? It came from the first song I ever wrote, I Remember. All of the songs from the record are based on experiences I’ve had, or stories I’ve heard, so it made sense.

How long did it take to write/record? I have been writing the songs since I first picked up the guitar. Most of the tracks were recorded live in the studio in a day.

The pre-production/postproduction, adding textural layers, is what took time.

Was anything in particular inspiring you during the making? The best part of the experience was recording the album live over 13 non-stop hours in Studios 301. All the instruments were recorded at the same time (mostly). It was such an organic experience.

What’s your favourite song on it? My favourite song is Hard For The Money as it is the most relatable to me as a busker/singer-songwriter.

Will you do anything differently next time? I’d like to record the next album live onto tape. I’d also like to add some unique textural layers using instruments that are rare and not so commonly used.

When and where is your launch/next gig? 24 Oct, Factory Theatre Website link for more info? alexgibsonmusic.com

How long did it take to write/ record? Pretty much nine months – as soon as the last album was released and evicted.

Was anything in particular inspiring you during the making? Listening to artists like Siouxsie, Jack Ladder, Talk Talk and Angelo Badalamenti – people that weren’t afraid to put their art out there and fly in the face of the fashionistas.

What’s your favourite song on it? Morphine And Nicotine, a dark and stormy brew of cliches and dwarf imagery.

Will you do anything differently next time? If somebody else was willing to pick up the tab it might make sense to work with a producer. Maybe Tony Cohen or Mick Harvey would be fruitful. Mark Hollis?

When and where is your launch/next gig? 25 Oct, Old Manly Boat Shed and 26 Oct, The Vanguard.

Website link for more info? charliehorseband.net

FOR MORE HEAD TO THEMUSIC.COM.AU 84 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 85

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EP FOCUS

AIMEE FRANCIS Single title: Losers’ Game

TIM CHAISSON EP title: The Last Shower EP How many releases do you have now? Broken Hearted Beat (2009), The Other Side (2012), and The Last Shower EP with Diesel (2013).

Was anything in particular inspiring you during the making? Working with Diesel was very inspiring for me while making this EP. He’s ridiculously talented and an amazing producer.

Being with him in the studio makes you want to give 125 per cent at all times.

What’s your favourite song on it? I think The Last Shower.

Diesel and I co-wrote it and I love how it turned out musically and lyrically.

We’ll like this EP if we like...

I think it has something for everyone. There’s a bit of folk, country, pop and rock...

A lot of different elements.

When and where is your launch/next gig? 23 Oct, The Vanguard and 24 Oct, Lizotte’s Dee Why. Website link for more info? timchaisson.com

TOURING THIS WEEK

ALBUM FOCUS

What’s the song about? Your heart being trodden on.

Or smashed into a million pieces. Or just the feeling of heartbreak – you choose.

How long did it take to write/ record? It was written very quickly, one of those, ‘I know how this feels, let’s roll with it’ kinda songs.

Is this track from a forthcoming release/existing release? That’s for me to know and you to find out...

What was inspiring you during writing and recording? Writing: a mixture of watching people’s relationships around me breaking down and learning how to keep a relationship! How positive!

Recording: the abundance of cups of teas I was allowed to drink.

BEST & WEST

BIKINI BEATS

Another Inner Western session will happen this Sunday with local songwriters playing homage to their favourite artists. Performing: Katie Brianna, Fanny Lumsden, The Ramalamas, James Thomson, Roland K Smith and Emma Swift.

Prior to the release of his debut EP, Sydney beat architect Kitler will be opening for Danish songstress MØ ahead of the release of her first official EP Bikini Daze. The two will be taking the Goodgod stage this coming Tuesday.

IRISH REBEL

HOOTENANY FROM HELL

The Glasgow-born Irish folk singer Gary Og is back in Australia for the seventh time due to his rabid fan base, and is set to fire up the crowd at Jam Gallery on Saturday from 7pm.

Described as a “rebel artist” this is one gig you want to watch.

This Saturday, Black Cherry will be in Halloween mode as they put on a hell of a final hurrah for the year and celebrate seven years of debauched rock’n’roll. Our Last Enemy will partake, along with The Art and Mesa Cosa amongst a good deal of other acts.

GOT SOUL

BREW VS BOB

Californian-born neo-soul artist Steve Clisby has a lifetime cemented in music. After making it through to the semi-finals in The Voice, Clisby continues his musical journey in a lengthy tour, which sees him performing twice at The Basement this Saturday.

Two years after the release of their last album, Brewster Brothers are getting back on the road to perform a series of acoustic sounds celebrating the works of Bob Dylan. They’ll be taking the show to the Brass Monkey on Saturday.

BAROQUE RHAPSODY

KARNEVIL BOMBS

Following the success of AIM’s staging of RENT earlier this year, the Classical Department of the Australian Institute of Music will present Henry Purcell’s baroque masterpiece The Fairy Queen twice on Thursday and again on Saturday at the Australian Hall.

To celebrate Halloween at Luna Park’s Big Top, Karnevil will be a massive dance part spooktacular.

This Saturday is the night, with Bombs Away headlining, and sets from Nina Las Vegas, What So Not and Ego.

We’ll like this song if we like...

Somewhat intellectually written pop songs, wallowing in music during a break-up, appreciating the lover you have.

Do you play it differently live?

It’s a lot dirtier live... my band are a bunch of cute beasts and I like to punish my guitar.

Ouch. Good ouch. Hopefully.

When and where is your launch/ next gig? 24 Oct, Frankie’s Pizza Website link for more info? aimeefrancis.com

FOR MORE HEAD TO THEMUSIC.COM.AU 86 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

· THIS WEEK ·

THURSDAY 24TH OCTOBER

COSMO JARVIS (UK) + LIME CORDIALE FRIDAY 25TH OCTOBER

SCREAMFEEDER + SMUDGE

· COMING UP · SATURDAY 2ND NOVEMBER

DREAM ON DREAMER

FRIDAY 15TH NOVEMBER

STONEFIELD

FRIDAY 22ND NOVEMBER

THE BELLRAYS

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Friday 25th October

Friday 6th December

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Sunday 15th December

Friday 15th November

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THE MUSIC â&#x20AC;¢ 23RD OCTOBER 2013 â&#x20AC;¢ 87

the guide nsw.live@themusic.com.au

SINGLE FOCUS

GORDI Answered by: Sophie Payten

J D LOVE

EP title: Gordi

Album title: Two Days

How many releases do you have now? This is my first EP; it’s out this Friday 25 Oct.

Where did the title of your new album come from? I had written some songs and I wanted to record them like we used to back in 1974. I had enough money to pay for two days in a good studio.

How many releases do you have now? I have played on lots of recordings since the ‘70s. This is my first release as J D Love.

How long did it take to write/record? I took my time with the demos and the rewrites, so it took about a year. I got myself a hideout on a mountain which is where I did the writing. It’s the cover shot.

Was anything in particular inspiring you during the making? Oh yeah. I asked my daughter Georgia Fields to help me. She and the rest of the band, Dave Bramble, Matty Vehl and Tim Coghill plus recording engineer Dave McCluney made magic.

What’s your favourite song on it? Love Is A Train – track one, side two.

Will you do anything differently next time? I’m really happy with this album.

When and where is your launch/next gig? We have a show on 24 Oct at Petersham Bowling Club. Special guest Annaliesse Monaro.

Website link for more info? reverbnation.com/jdlove335

88 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

TOURING THIS WEEK

EP FOCUS

Was anything in particular inspiring you during the making?

The songs’ inspiration spans the last few years, the 17-20-yearold phase when most are trying to pinpoint the direction they want their life to go, before discovering the secret – that no one actually knows!

What’s your favourite song on it? Take Your Time has a lot of meaning for me and producing it, ironically, took hardly any time.

RIDE THE RIFF

ENJOY THE VIOLENCE

Riff lords The Devil Rides Out will be bringing their typified doom blues all the way over from Perth this Saturday in their own headline show at Hermann’s Bar a day before they support stoner metal legends Sleep at Manning Bar.

With their third LP Hungry Ghost done and dusted, hardcore punk/grunge Queenslanders Violent Soho are in the midst of a tour to support said release.

This Friday, with the support of Straight Arrows, they’ll play the Oxford Art Factory.

SLEEPY SPRINGS

YOUNG GUNS

Once a month The Sleepwalkers’Club takes over FBi Social for a night of psychedelic debauchery. Headliners Black Springs bring their sonic ‘60s revival to the stage, with the help of The Electric Vogues and Hank Haint.

In an effort to offer our local youth access to underground music, Kobra Kai and Foreigndub DJs will be teaming up for Truth For The Youth at Waterloo Skate Park this Saturday.

FLEMEN-CAYOTE

BLOODY GUMS

Traditional flemenco inspired outfit Hiatus Kaiyote will be performing again for the first time in close to five months in a small series of homecoming shows. On Saturday, they’ll be in Sydney performing at the Standard.

Frankie’s Pizza By The Slice are holding a Bleedin’Gums Bluesfest this Sunday, with a huge bill and plenty of soulful blues rock. Acts include The Spitfires, Big Blind Ray, Little Big Wolf, Anchors Of Tortuga, Cherrywood and more.

WAKING UP

FLOYD FACTORY

The legendary Screamfeeder have come out of hibernation and will be performing this Friday at the Annandale with Smudge, Sounds Like Sunset and The Majestic Horses, then supporting The Breeders on Tuesday at the Enmore.

The Great Gig In The Sky is an aural and visual experience paying homage to Pink Floyd. Featuring Mitchell Anderson, Krishna & Spencer Jones, Emma Kirk and Jenelle Watkins, the event goes on Friday at Factory Theatre and Saturday at Dee Why RSL.

We’ll like this EP if we like...

Missy Higgins, Sara Bareilles, Ingrid Michaelson, Joni Mitchell, Carole King. I love folk, pop, blues and country and I think all these genres come out in the EP tracks.

When and where is your launch/ next gig? I’m launching the EP next Wednesday 30 Oct at The Vanguard on King St, with full band. Supported

by Sydney act Revier.

Website link for more info? facebook.com/music.gordi

FOR MORE HEAD TO THEMUSIC.COM.AU

opinion

WAKE THE DEAD

THE HEAVY SHIT

OG FLAVAS

PUNK AND HARDCORE WITH SARAH PETCHELL

METAL AND HARD ROCK WITH CHRIS MARIC

URBAN AND R’N’B NEWS BY CYCLONE

This week I’ve been pretty amazed at how the punk and hardcore communities rally around their members. When someone gets into a spot of trouble, people are always willing to help out. Newcastle hardcore act, Safe Hands, had been touring Far North Queensland with Rolo Tomassi when they came to a sudden stop after hitting a kangaroo. Thankfully, no one was hurt but the band was left with quite the dent in their van and their budgets.

Anyone that has hit a ‘roo before knows that it is not a cheap fix, so the band put out a call for any help their fans could offer.

Within a few hours, the word had spread virally with people in other bands sharing Facebook posts to try and help Safe Hands in whatever way they could.

Within 24 hours, according to a subsequent Facebook post from the band, they had almost been cleared out of shirts and “bought so many records that we were actually charting on Bandcamp”. The generosity and help of fans and a community of bands did help put a dent in the debts the band now has and “also restored all of our collective faiths in humanity”.

The band reports that they are not out of debt yet, but they’re closer. To be realistic, their EP Oh The Humanity and their debut full-length Montenegro are fantastic records, so if you’re a fan of the band or loud, heavy, noisy hardcore you can still help the band out by buying a couple of records and keeping an ear out for a benefit show in the coming months. wakethedead@themusic.com.au

What was Lil Wayne thinking?

The rapper has signed Paris Hilton, with her “tantalising voice”, to Cash Money Records, and guests on her EDM-fuelled comeback single Good Time.

CRATE DIGGING

I remember, growing up in the bushy suburb of Campbelltown, how isolated it felt being so far from the city, let alone the great wide world we barely knew even existed. There was nothing for a young metal-head to do besides save his cash for the next train ride into Utopia, and didn’t we all long for that. In my late teens, as a naïve uni student, a shop opened up in C/town called Acid Reign that was a fairly decent attempt at bringing a Helvete/ Utopia-styled retail experience to us young westies. It was great albeit seriously overpriced but you could actually find some decent stuff you’d never heard of. If, that is, you avoided the owner’s old man and his psychotic obsession with Zappa and his full-on eastern Euro personality.

“You like, yes? You buy!”

The shop was opposite Guitar Factory and my radio show was right next door. I think I’ve told you before about giving yourself an Earache and if I haven’t, that was the name of my show. So for a few years it was a trinity of good times – the show, the shop and the guitars – and what a bunch of Bill and Ted dickheads we made.

That same sense of togetherness repeated itself when Utopia moved to the Metro side of George Street in 1995. We used to say that if the world ended and only this block survived we’d be fine. We had the Metro, Utopia, Hungry Jack’s and around the corner was the Century Tavern, which up until it was Justin Hemmesified and chromed to hell, actually had a decent jukebox, sticky carpet and crappy pool tables – perfect!

Those days are long gone, Utopia having moved three times since then – they’re currently down in Kent Street near Town Hall.

They’ve actually been in seven

different locations around the city in their 35 years, an amazing feat not only for a retail store, but for one that specialises in our favourite stuff in a city that’s quite hostile to it.

I know I harp on about buying CDs but Utopia and places like it that used to exist, like the Hammerhouse in Parramatta, are institutions anyone under 30 or so has unfortunately no idea about. That feeling of discovery, of reaching the Mecca of metal and seeing shit you only saw in magazines gave much more weight to the music than simply streaming a song and maybe streaming it again if you liked it.

Even beyond Utopia, Sydney used to be covered in specialist music stores like Phantom, Waterfront, Timewarp and Red Eye (who do actually still exist and quite healthily too), along with a stack of secondhand shops where you could find real gems in and also flog off your unwanted. Which I stupidly did with a set of Crue LPs I decided I didn’t need since everything was going CD. Argh!

Independent stores are literally counted in single units in each state these days. The Yellow and Black giant with its 120plus stores nationwide has put a mini-Utopia in seemingly every suburb but you don’t get that feeling of being somewhere special with 50 TVs glaring at you, some horrible pap on the stereo and a sea of neon light.

I can hear most of you saying ‘so fucking what?’ To me it’s like drinking at home versus drinking at a great pub with your friends. Sure the drink is the same but the atmosphere makes that beer taste totally different. heavyshit@themusic.com.au

Hilton debuted with 2006’s Paris, entailing the ska Stars Are Blind (actually, a guilty pleasure).

Hilton’s celebutante status has been challenged by Kim Kardashian, but she’s shrewdly transformed herself into a DJ, even playing Ibiza’s Amnesia.

But the year’s reinvention is surely that of Destiny “Miley” Cyrus, who, having “murdered” her Disney alter ego Hannah Montana, is now a subversively provocative urban/country/rave star. Nashville’s ‘trashy’ Princess Of Twerking has exposed the limitations of mainstream feminists, whose didactic commentaries and tut-tutting reinforce patriarchal stereotypes of good girl/bad girl, rather than ask why, when a female rebels, her body – or sexuality – is her only available tool or weapon.

(Cyrus was once a pro-abstinence teen.) Dr Luke’s Wrecking Ball is an epic Rihanna-esque dubstep ballad that deals with emotional vulnerability – Cyrus’ split from her The Last Song co-star Liam Hemsworth – as well as the blurring between iconoclasm and (self )-destruction. The streetwise Bangerz features rappers galore – Nelly is perfect for Pharrell Williams’ hillbilly punk 4X4. Yet Cyrus’ main producer is Atlanta’s Mike Will Made-It, previously responsible for Ciara’s ace Body Party.

Here, his Drive symbolically mimics Adina Howard’s ‘90s Freak Like Me. Ironically, Cyrus has revealed West as her mentor – some hot mess. ogflavas@themusic.com.au

LIL WAYNE THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 89

opinion

ROOTS DOWN

MODERATELY HIGHBROW

GET IT TOGETHER

BLUES ‘N’ ROOTS WITH DAN CONDON

VISUAL ART WANK AND THEATRE FOYERS WITH DAVE DRAYTON

HIP HOP WITH JAMES D’APICE

CORY CHISEL

The team at Love Police have a knack for bringing truly brilliant young, burgeoning country and blues acts to Australia before pretty much anyone over here has heard of them. Then, following that, they bring them back. And then hopefully back again. Justin Townes Earle’s first Aussie shows were in tiny rooms to not many people; now he pulls in hundreds.

It was with JTE that Robert Ellis made his first visit to Australia, a mere few months ago, and now Ellis is on his way back to capitalise on all the new fans he made on that visit.

He’s a pretty great songwriter and guitarist, but the most powerful weapon this Houston, Texas-bred country artist has is his rich, powerful, warm voice.

His is a more traditional – for want of a better word – style of country music than a lot of his alt-country compatriots; things are a little glossier with a little less grit, but rest assured this guy is one hell of a performer.

The new blood being introduced to Australian audiences on this tour will be Cory Chisel, a Wisconsin-based Americana artist who is said to be an “old soul”. Apparently his style owes plenty to the likes of old blues artists as well as somewhat more contemporary “old souls” like Dylan, Cohen and Van Morrison.

Recent tours with Murder By Death and Norah Jones speak to his diverse appeal, so hopefully Australia falls for him when he’s here in a couple of weeks.

Both artists tour Australia next month; dates are available at themusic.com.au/events. rootsdown@themusic.com.au 90 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

In which we examine what the hell happens to stories when a generational penchant for promiscuity means that a ménage à trois is about as risqué as cuisses de grenouilles.

Wonderland, and just about every other show on television, and it’s all fucking! Revenge, power, tragedy, love: they’re all borne of sex. All of Booker’s plots are pivoted on or propelled by sex.

I’m going to begin with an admission. I’ve never seen Lantana. Rather, I should say I had never seen Lantana, because as luck would have it Lantana was on telly last week when I was on the couch.

Half the people that are married are getting divorced and most of those that aren’t yet married won’t be because if you can’t settle on an occupation, an internet provider, an operating system, or a hair colour why the hell would your love and/ or sex life be any different? This is a generation of choice. A generation that takes the poison from Romeo’s hand and places in it an iPhone with a Zoosk app open. A generation that shrugs its shoulders at The Wild Duck. So what is to become of the central role of sex in stories as the act and culture and education and examination of sex continues headlong towards hyperbole?

What happens when we become so accustomed to adultery and orgies that we’re desensitised to it? Our love triangles become squares. These many messy consummations become love tesseracts. And the heart and the sexual body are forced into even more uncanny scenarios as fiction, storytelling, this great artistic method of social and human enquiry, must muster enough intertwined and convoluted eroticism to mirror the society it supposedly measures.

Originally released in 2001, the film won 7 AFI awards.

I won’t bore you with a recap of all the ways it blew me away, but I will say this – all of them, and countless more were deserved, and, my little brother’s email address used to be vincecolosimo@hotmail.com (it’s really fun to say) and an eBay package was once delivered to our house, addressed to Vince himself.

Unfortunately, being a free-toair broadcast, as rapt as I was in the film, I was subjected to more than a few ad breaks. And while I spent them mainly mulling over the quiet horror unfolding in the film, one ad pierced my concentration. It was an ad for Hostages – a show I’ve never watched and can you tell nothing about – that featured a close up on Tate Donovan. He face was a mix of puppy dog guilt and incredulity, and I immediately thought of him as Jimmy Cooper in The OC. Looking back on The OC I remember a few things: an endless supply of bagels; a realisation that no amount of comic books, skateboards, black eyes or siphoned vodka could make puberty any easier; and that everyone pretty much wanted to bump uglies with everyone else.

Later that night I saw an ad for

Hervé Le Tellier provides a vision for the fluid fury of this future in his densely constrained novel (of sorts) The Sextine Chapel – 26 characters copulate with six apiece in a flurry of perverted permutations in the erotic vignettes. And even then the sex isn’t that great.

LANTANA

DIDDY

You know the magazine Forbes?

Before it was a website dripping with click-bait it was a well respected magazine. Anyway, one of its favoured pastimes is ranking the world’s rich people. A few years ago it began comparing “hip hop artists” and their yearly earnings. What’s striking about this year’s list is how few relevant artists it features. All but two of the top ten – Nicki Minaj and Kanye, and even those are arguable – are past their prime.

The remainder are a collection of has-beens, soon-to-be-has-beens, or never-weres: Diddy, Dre, Jay, Ludacris, Birdman and more.

This could be cause for optimism; a small glimmer of hope that commercial rap is not, or is at least not completely, about the money. 2013 will shortly have delivered to us new albums from (again, arguably) all the world’s biggest rappers: Hov, Ye, Em and Drake. Half of those guys don’t even make the Forbes list.

What we draw from this is several things. First, we can take Forbes with a grain of salt. Suggesting Dr Dre earns much of his income from making music feels ludicrous. Suggesting Eminem is not making silly money feels more so. Second, it’s nice to see that we have not yet crossed over into the new world where rap equals money. We’re close, and the fetishisation of jewellery and cars brings us closer. But – for now – we can all cling tight to the idea that some of the big names in rap are enjoying making music for us to listen to, not just making headphones for us to laugh at. getittogether@themusic.com.au

opinion Tanks For Everything, getting ready to drive a tank over a car.

BEYOND THE SPEAKERS FILLING THE DEAD AIR WITH RACHEL CORBETT

TANK GIRL

I’m pretty sure no woman has ever gone to war wearing a pair of heeled boots, but as I looked down past my ‘one size fits no one’ camouflage onesie, I realised: there has to be a first time for everything.

Audio equipment in hand, our little radio show arrived at a scene of unimaginable carnage ready to document an important historical moment. Acres of land lay out before us, pockmarked with ditches and puddles, huge tracks dug deep into the earth from the countless battles that had been waged and won, and over to our left stood five lone tanks

slowly idling in the sun, preparing to engage with the enemy. The fact that we had made our long journey here by air-conditioned bus, with a driver waxing lyrical about the recent date he’d had in a food court with a woman he met in a massage parlour, was indication enough that we were in no real danger here, despite the dress code and the scene laid out before us. We were not deep within the hot and perilous valleys of Afghanistan or seeking shelter from angry enemy fire. We were, in fact, in a field 20 minutes out of Christchurch, NZ with a couple of hobbyists from a company called

This all began when Universal Pictures approached us wanting to find a way to celebrate the release of Fast & Furious 6 on DVD and remembering there was a car chase that involved a tank, we realised we had our tenuous link sorted. Within no time our producing team had ascertained that while driving a tank is illegal in Australia, over in the land of the long white cloud you can not only drive one, you can also plough one right over the top of a car. What a glorious display of destruction and waste! We knew this was a battle we needed to fight. Looking out over the tanks and the muddy paddock we would be driving them through, I knew, even with my limited understanding of the male mind, that when blokes imagine heaven, this is probably what they see.

I knew then and there that my ovaries would be of little use to me here, so I sent them a message to take the day off and strode confidently to my first wild stead.

Flash forward three hours and I was covered head to toe in dried

mud with steam rising from my underpants as the midday sun heated my sopping wet onesie.

Those giant puddles that had laid out before us were not just for show, they were opportunities and as I ploughed each vehicle through them with increasing pressure on the accelerator, it became clear that the skinny jeans I had on under my borrowed army gear were probably destined for the garbage bin; climbing in and out of an armoured vehicle really isn’t aided in any way by wearing a pair of strides that can only be described as ‘painted on’.

Sartorial mistake aside, by the end of the day I had gone from the quiet captain of a 1998 Toyota Paseo to the daring master of a Ferret, Saracen, FV432, T-55AM2 and Centurion Battle Tank.

As the sun set over the muddy field, five cars lay crushed and broken in our wake. Three radio announcers stood proud and confident, the victors of an epic battle. And one set of ovaries, slowly returned to their post, ready to readjust once again to civilian life, never to forget their time at war.

TRAILER TRASH DIVES INTO YOUR SCREENS AND IDIOT BOXES WITH GUY DAVIS The post-movie debrief is de rigueur among my circle of film-reviewing pals, and so it was that a few of us recently shuffled out of a screening of Robert Rodriguez’s latest fauxgrindhouse epic, Machete Kills, and allowed the healing to begin.

A friend aptly pointed out that Rodriguez (whose industriousness and ingenuity as a mini-mogul I increasingly admire much more than his chops as a screenwriter or director) has basically evolved into a super-villain known as The Trapmaster. “You think Machete Kills was lame? You’ve fallen into my trap!” he said, channelling Rodriguez. “If you think my movie is shit, you’re right – it’s meant to be shit! And if you think it’s great... well, thanks! Whatever view of Machete Kills you choose, YOU LOSE! Muahahaha!” The rest of us looked at him strangely before conceding he had a point. Then we started working out the plot of The Trapmaster, which is probably never coming

soon to a cinema near you.

Maybe it’s symptomatic of a deeper malaise or disenchantment, maybe it’s just the mood I’m in as I write this, but I’m lately finding myself kinda burnt-out when it comes to ‘so bad it’s good’.

Sure, I jumped about with the Sharknado bandwagon when that masterpiece was doing the rounds but looking back I just feel dirty and a little ashamed that I gave such a non-entity the time of day. Yes, it had all the stuff any rational human would scoff at – a tornado full of sharks! The hero chainsawing his way out of a shark’s belly! – but in hindsight I realise I wasn’t even vaguely amused in any organic fashion.

Indeed, any laughter would have felt like a polite reaction – or worse, an obligation – to its desperately hacky schtick.

One expects Sharknado-style nonsense from bottom-end hustlers looking to make a few bucks, but shouldn’t we

PLANET TERROR

be asking more from someone like Rodriguez? Even if the guy is renowned for his B-movie aesthetic, his work in the past has tended towards hotted-up, tricked-out B-movies with a dash of spice and verve. (We’re talking about the likes of From Dusk Till Dawn or his Grindhouse chapter, Planet Terror, here; some of his other stuff has been slapdash and sloppy.)

Maybe being part of the ill-fated Grindhouse experiment was the worst thing that could have happened to Rodriguez. Yes, I dug Planet Terror the way one might dig a particularly greasy cheeseburger when nursing a

particularly gnarly hangover.

But his other submission, the Machete trailer, seems to have given rise to a franchise that should have been tossed in a sack and dumped in a creek the minute someone suggested transforming a two-minute gag into a full-length feature that has somehow spawned a sequel that’s equal parts shrill and sluggish. And seriously, if you can’t make effective use of Mel Gibson’s emergent craziness when you’ve cast him as a megalomaniacal nutjob out to establish a new world order from his space-station base, you might wanna reconsider this whole making-movies career.

THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 91

the guide nsw.gigguide@themusic.com.au Kate Winchester: Bexley North Hotel, Bexley North

THE MUSIC PRESENTS

Briana Cowlishaw: Blue Beat, Double Bay The Bucket List feat. Annabelle Kay: Bondi Pavillion, Bondi Beach Paul Greene & The Other Colours + Ashleigh Mannix: Brass Monkey, Cronulla

GIG OF THE WEEK FAT AS BUTTER FT GYM CLASS HEROES AND MORE: OCT 26 THE FORESHORE NEWCASTLE PATRICK JAMES World Music Wednesdays ft Watussi: Oct 23 The Basement The Cribs: Oct 23 Small Ballroom Newcastle; 24 Upstairs Beresford Dan Sultan: Oct 23 Lizotte’s Newcastle; 24 The Basement; 25 Heritage Hotel Bulli

Guesthouse Katoomba; 16 The Basement; 17 Grand Junction, Maitland; 18 Music Lounge, Manly; 20 Lizotte’s Central Coast; 21 – Lizotte’s Newcastle

Hitseekers: 3 Wise Monkeys, Sydney

Chris Stretton: Stamford Grand North Ryde, North Ryde

Mike Nock Trio + Casey Golden Trio: 505, Surry Hills

Greg Agar: Summer Hill Hotel, Summer Hill

Nancy Vandal: Nov 16 The Lair

Dave Seaside: Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly

World Music Wednesday feat. Watussi: The Basement, Circular Quay

Mullum Music Festival: Nov 21 – 24 Mullumbimby

The Barons Of Tang: Oct 24 Hotel Steyne Manly; 25 Yours & Owls Wollongong; 26 Factory Theatre

The Drones: Nov 22 Cambridge Hotel World Music Wednesdays ft Bobby Alu: Nov 27 The Basement

Boy & Bear: Oct 24 ANU Bar Canberra; 25 Enmore Theatre; Nov 15 Waves Wollongong

Homebake: Dec 6 – 8 Sydney Opera House Forecourt

The Crooked Fiddle Band: Oct 25 The Small Ballroom; Nov 14 Hotel Steyne Manly; 15 City Diggers Wollongong; 22 Baroque Katoomba; 23 The Standard; Dec 14 Entrance Leagues Bateau Bay

Catherine Traicos & The Starry Night: Dec 13 Petersham Bowls Club Festival Of The Sun: Dec 13 – 14 Sundowner Breakwall Tourist Park, Port Macquarie

Fat As Butter: Oct 26 The Foreshore Newcastle

Pond: Dec 20 Metro Theatre

El Vez: Oct 26 Factory Theatre

Woodford Folk Festival: Dec 27 – Jan 1, Woodford

The Breeders: Oct 28 Enmore Theatre

Solange: Jan 8 Metro Theatre

World Music Wednesdays ft Kriola Collective: Oct 30 The Basement

Half Moon Run: Jan 9 The Small Ballroom Newcastle; 10 The Heritage Hotel Bulli; 11 The Standard; 14 The Brass Monkey Cronulla

World Music Wednesdays ft Dereb The Ambassador: Nov 6 The Basement Bonjah: Nov 7 Beach Road Hotel

Future Music Festival: Mar 8 Randwick Racecourse Billy Bragg: Mar 16 Sydney Opera House

Patrick James: Nov 7 Yours & Owls Wollongong; 9 Oxford Art Factory Newtown Festival: Nov 10 Camperdown Memorial Rest Park

WED 23

Allen Stone: Apr 13 Metro Theatre Bluesfest: Apr 17 – 21 Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm Byron Bay

Songs On Stage feat. Greg Sita + Guests: Avalon Beach RSL, Avalon Beach Musos Club Jam Night: Bald Faced Stag, Leichhardt The Drifters: Bankstown Paceway, Bankstown Shining Bird + I Am Apollo + Jimmy Tait: Brass Monkey, Cronulla

The Cribs + The Guppies + The Owls: The Small Ballroom, Newcastle

Morgan Bain + A Girls A Gun + Tiger & The Rogues + Lust Lunar: Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst

Gym Class Heroes: The Star Event Centre, Pyrmont

Clive Hay: Campbelltown Catholic Club (Caf Samba), Campbelltown Musos Club Jam Night: Carousel Inn, Rooty Hill Day Ravies: Croatian Wickham Sports Club, Wickham Andy Mammers: Dee Why Hotel, Dee Why Alex Gibson: Factory Theatre, Marrickville Songs On Stage feat. Peach Montgomery + Guests: Forest Lodge Hotel, Forest Lodge Josh Kyle: Foundry 616, Ultimo Aimee Francis: Frankies Pizza, Sydney Matt Jones: Hillside Hotel, Castle Hill The Barons Of Tang: Hotel Steyne (Moonshine Bar), Manly

Songs On Stage feat. TAOS + John Chesher + Gavin Fitzgerald + Pauline Scarf + Guests: Charing Cross Hotel, Waverley Songs On Stage feat. Angelene + Confession & Denial + Guests: Collector Hotel, Parramatta Red Remedy: Fitzroy Hotel, Windsor Victoria Avenue: Hillside Hotel, Castle Hill Aaron Michael Band: LazyBones Lounge, Marrickville Live & Local: Lizottes Central Coast, Kincumber Dan Sultan: Lizottes Newcastle, New Lambton

The John Steel Singers: Nov 13 Beach Road Hotel; 14 City Diggers Wollongong; 15 The Small Ballroom; 16 Oxford Art Factory

KC & The Sunshine Band: Apr 17 Enmore Theatre

Andy Mammers Duo: Maloneys Hotel, Sydney

Steve Earle & The Dukes: Apr 23 Enmore Theatre

Dan Spillane: Mean Fiddler Hotel (Courtyard) Rouse Hill

Jordie Lane: Nov 13 Street Theatre Canberra; 14 Yours & Owls Wollongong; 15 Clarendon

Aaron Neville, Dr John & The Nite Trippers: Apr 24 State Theatre

THE CRIBS: OCT 23 SMALL BALLROOM NEWCASTLE; 24 UPSTAIRS BERESFORD Tim Chaisson: The Vanguard, Newtown

Azadoota: Jam Gallery, Bondi Junction

Justin Hamilton + Mikey Robins: The Workers, Balmain

Chuck Yates Trio: LazyBones Lounge, Marrickville

Marosi Di Buriana + Tessitura + Olajuwan + The Captains Of Industries: Valve @ Agincourt, Sydney

Jeff Lang: Lizottes Newcastle, New Lambton

Whip It +Sherlock Bones + Robust + Harper: Whaat Club, Potts Point

THU 24

Rodney Rude: Merrylands RSL, Merrylands

Wildcatz: 3 Wise Monkeys, Sydney

Porter Robinson + The M Machine: Metro Theatre, Sydney

The Bucket Lounge feat. Les Grinder + Anthony Ousback + Nick Kingswell: 34 Degrees South, Bondi Beach

Dog Trumpet: Milton Theatre, Milton Joe Echo Duo: O’Malleys Hotel, Kings Cross

Sarah Blasko: 505, Surry Hills Boy & Bear: ANU Bar, Acton

Wilson Diesel (Chris Wilson & Diesel) + Tim Chaisson: Lizottes Sydney, Dee Why Dave White Duo: Maloneys Hotel, Sydney Rooney West: Manly Leagues Club (Menzies Lounge), Brookvale Songs On Stage feat.

John Chesher + Vincent Pham + Guests: Mars Hill Cafe, Parramatta Porter Robinson + The M Machine: Metro Theatre, Sydney Eric Bogle: Mittagong Playhouse Theatre, Mittagong

Carl Fidler: Observer Hotel, The Rocks

Dean Gray: Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly

Eskimo Joe + Special Guests: Newcastle Panthers, Newcastle West

Mark Travers: Orient Hotel, Sydney

Daniel T + Sam Outch + DJ Anthony K: Australian Hotel & Brewery (Cool Room), Rouse Hill

Ziggy: Newport Arms Hotel, Newport

Songs On Stage feat. Peach Montgomery + Bradley Primmer + Guests: Sackville Hotel, Rozelle

Geoff Rana: Australian Hotel & Brewery, Rouse Hill

1000S OF GIGS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. FOR MORE HEAD TO THEMUSIC.COM.AU 92 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

Salsa Jam with Malo Malo: Camelot Lounge (Django Bar), Marrickville

Bound For Ruin: Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle West

Jimmie Vaughan: Apr 17 Metro Theatre

BONJAH

The Petting Zoo: The Little Guy, Glebe Songs On Stage feat.

Helmut Uhlmann + Anthony Silvistrini + Carla Burke: The Loft, UTS, Broadway

Live & Local feat. Ben Kelly & Band + Victor Steele + Halfway Homebuoy: Lizottes Sydney, Dee Why

World Music Wednesdays ft The Hi Tops Brass Band: Nov 13 The Basement

Oh Pep! + Hashemoto: Smiths Alternative Bookshop, Canberra

Bec Sandridge + Charlie Gradon + Dominic Youdan: Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst

Open Mic Night with Alex Hopkins: Northies (Beach Bar), Cronulla

www.thebasement.com.au

BVS 6][S ]T :WdS ;caWQ AW\QS '%!

FRI 15 & SAT 16 NOV

JU ANNOUST NCED

ASTRAL PEOPLE PRESENTS CONCEPT A 2 DAY EVENT FEATURING SHED (LIVE/GER), ANDY STOTT (LIVE/UK), PHAELAH (UK) & SHIGETO (US).

LATE SHOWS (11PM).

2 X DAY PASSES AVAILABLE.

WED 23 OCT

W WATUSSI (WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAYS)

THURS 24 OCT

DAN SULTAN FRI 25 OCT

CAITLIN ROSE & BAND (USA) + JIMMY TAIT + LOVE POLICE VS. SPUNK DJ CASH

SAT 26 OCT

PETERNORTHCOTEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S ANNUAL BIRTHDAY GIG SUN 27 OCT

NORTHSIDE RADIO 30TH ANNIVERSARY FUNDRAISER TUES 29 OCT

SWING TUESDAYS

WITH THE BASEMENT BIG BAND

WED 30 OCT

KRIOLA COLLECTIVE (WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAYS) NEWS FROM THE BASEMENT

COMING SOONâ&#x20AC;¦ SAT 9 NOV

HOME BREW (NZ/LATE SHOW) FRI 15 NOV

SARAH MCLEOD SAT 16 OCT

JORDIE LANE (EARLY SHOW) FOLLOW W US: ON FACEBOOK @ THEE BASEMENT & ON TWITTER @ #BASEMENTSYD RESTUARANT OPENS AT 11AM, SERVING FOOD ALL DAY

THE MUSIC â&#x20AC;¢ 23RD OCTOBER 2013 â&#x20AC;¢ 93

the guide nsw.gigguide@themusic.com.au Redlight Ruby: O’Malleys Hotel, Kings Cross

Owl Eyes + Willow Beats: ANU Bar, Acton

Sarah Paton: Observer Hotel, The Rocks

Otto Marr & Nigel Hearn: Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly

Anthems of Oz: Orient Hotel, Sydney

Jonny Rock: Australian Hotel & Brewery, Rouse Hill

Fuck Buttons: Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst

Rocking Horse: Avoca Beach Hotel, Avoca Beach

JD Love Band + Annaliesse Monaro: Petersham Bowling Club, Petersham

Chaos Divine + Anubis + Head Filled Attraction + Mercury Sky: Bald Faced Stag, Leichhardt

Bart Thrupp: Port Macquarie Hotel, Port Macquarie

Dean Kyrwood: Bar Petite, Newcastle

Dianna Corcoran: Rooty Hill RSL, Rooty Hill

Motley: Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Beach

Songs On Stage feat. Chris Raicevich + Stuart Jammin + Paul Ackroyd + Guests: Ruby L’Otel, Rozelle

Livewirez: Beachcomber Hotel, Toukley

Gary Johns: Scruffy Murphy’s, Sydney Hot Damn! feat. Sound Of Seasons + The Sweet Apes + Far Away Stables + Stickmike + The Reprize: Spectrum, Darlinghurst Cosmo Jarvis + Lime Cordiale: The Annandale, Annandale Dan Sultan: The Basement, Circular Quay AGT: The Exchange Hotel, Hamilton Oh Pep! + All Our Exes Live In Texas: The Gaelic, Surry Hills Jimmy Tait: The Green Room, Enmore Pat Tierney: The Little Guy, Glebe The Cellar Jazz Jam with Phil Stack + Guests: The Spice Cellar, Sydney The Perch Creek Family Jugband + Papa Pilko & The Bin Rats + Bob Harrow: The Vanguard, Newtown Owl Eyes + Willow Beats: Uni Bar, Wollongong The Cribs + Glass Towers: Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills Cybridian + Snuff + Machina + Noveaux + AR12 + The Arbitrary Method: Valve @ Agincourt, Sydney Sydney Blues & Roots Festival feat. Wilson/Diesel + Russell Morris + Diesel + Ash Grunwald + Dave Hole + The Cyril B Bunter Band + Charlie Parr + The Foreday Riders + Chris Wilson + more: Various Venues, Windsor

On The Prowl: Belmont 16’s, Belmont The Platters: Belmont 16’s (Auditorium), Belmont Dr Zoom Duo: Belmore Hotel, Maitland Ebony Black + The Hot Potato Band + Jorja Carroll: Brass Monkey, Cronulla L.A. Experiment Duo: Briars Inn, Bowral Mr Grevis + Mr Hill + Electric Elements Crew: Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst Thunderstruck AC/DC Show: Bull & Bush, Baulkham Hills The Shuffle Demons: Camelot Lounge, Marrickville DJ Tom Annetts: Campbelltown Catholic Club (Club Lounge), Campbelltown The Underground Battleground DJ Comp feat. Harper + Dosage + Oh Dear: Candys Apartment, Potts Point Paul Greene & The Other Colours Captains At Mariners, Batemans Bay Ben Finn: Castle Hill RSL (Terrace Bar), Castle Hill

DAN SULTAN: OCT 23 LIZOTTE’S NEWCASTLE; 24 THE BASEMENT; 25 HERITAGE HOTEL BULLI Renae Stone: Customs House Bar, Circular Quay

Grayson: Lizottes Newcastle, New Lambton

Nicky Kurta: Dee Why Hotel, Dee Why

Jeff Lang: Lizottes Sydney, Dee Why

Rodney Rude: Dee Why RSL, Dee Why

Tony Remedios + Joanna Melas: Manly Leagues Club, Brookvale

Furious Monk + Kaleidoscope + Sheriff + Red Remedy: Dicey Riley’s Hotel, Wollongong

Korpiklaani + Guests: Manning Bar, Camperdown

Greg Bryce & The Bad Bad Things: Duke of Wellington Hotel, New Lambton Open Mic Night with +Champagne Jam: Dundas Sports Club, Dundas Southerly Busters: Engadine Tavern, Engadine Boy & Bear + Battleships + Dustin Tebbutt: Enmore Theatre, Enmore The Great Gig In The Sky - Pink Floyd Celebration feat. Mitchell Anderson + Krishna Jones + Emma Kirk + Spencer Jones + more: Factory Theatre, Marrickville Jodie Michael: Foundry 616, Ultimo Ryan Thomas: General Gordon Hotel, Sydenham

Pat O’Grady: Chatswood RSL, Chatswood

Pete Cornelius: Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle

Hucci + Chenzo + Spenda-C + Hydraulix + more: Chinese Laundry, Sydney

Leon Fallon: Greystanes Inn, Greystanes

The Brewster Brothers: Clarendon Guest House, Katoomba

Jack Thompson Twins: Club Windang, Windang Pete Hunt: Cock’n Bull, Bondi Junction Russell Nelson: Commercial Hotel, Parramatta The Trav & Rosco Show: Coogee Diggers (The Bunker), Coogee

DJ Patsan: 5 Sawyers, Newcastle

One World: Courthouse Hotel, Darlinghurst

Feel Good Friday Jazz Session: 505, Surry Hills

Zoltan: Cronulla RSL, Cronulla

Craig Thommo Duo: Ambervale Tavern, Ambervale

Clash Of The Bands: Rock Lily, Pyrmont

Matt Boylan-Smith: Grand Hotel, Rockdale

Franky Valentyn: Club Five Dock, Five Dock

Zoltan: Adria Bar & Restaurant, Sydney

Saturday Night Diva’s: Revesby Workers (Infinity Lounge), Revesby

Black Bird Blue: Charlestown Bowling Club, Charlestown

Cool For Cats +Camo + Valentino + DJ Bronx: Whaat Club, Potts Point

Big Rich: 3 Wise Monkeys, Sydney

Prince Rama: Red Rattler, Marrickville

Literary Lunch with Tim Ferguson: Glen Street Theatre (12.30pm), Belrose

Hue Williams: Club Ashfield, Ashfield

FRI 25

Soul Tattoo: Ramsgate RSL, Sans Souci

Zane Penn Duo: Cessnock Supporters Club, Cessnock

Rodney Rude: Western Suburbs Leagues Club, Leumeah

Summer Flake + Day Ravies + Sadfaces: White’s Records, Newcastle

KP: Quakers Inn, Quakers Hill

Ebony & Ivory: Crown Hotel, Sydney East Coast Band + Greg Agar: Crows Nest Hotel, Crows Nest

Matt Jones: Harbord Beach Hotel, Freshwater Dan Sultan: Heritage Hotel, Bulli Dora D: Hillside Hotel, Castle Hill Hello Cleveland: Horse & Jockey Hotel, Homebush Sundays Record Duo: Hotel Jesmond, Jesmond Armchair Travellers Duo: Ingleburn RSL, Ingleburn Ryan Daley: Jewells Tavern, Jewells Ricky Lynch Band: Kiama Leagues Club, Kiama GTS: Kingswood Sports Club, Kingswood Castlecomer: Kirribilli Hotel, Milsons Point Jack Daniels & Co: Lakeside Village Tavern, Raymond Terrace Adam Harvey + Chelsea Basham: Lizottes Central Coast, Kincumber

Grand Theft Audio: Royal Federal Hotel, Branxton Bounce: Scruffy Murphy’s, Sydney DJ Tim Helmy: Seaview Tavern, Woolgoolga Cath & Him: Seven Hills/ Toongabbie RSL (Gaming Lounge), Seven Hills Eric Bogle: Southern Cross Club, Woden

The Lonely Boys: Marlborough Hotel, Newtown

Kill Appeal + Rattlesnake + The Bitter Sweethearts + Pyromance: Spectrum, Darlinghurst

Grant Smillie + G-Wizard: Marquee, Pyrmont

JJ Duo: Springwood Sports Club, Springwood

Victoria Avenue: Mean Fiddler Hotel, Rouse Hill

Nathan Cole + Will Teague: St George Leagues, Kogarah

Eskimo Joe + Special Guests: Metro Theatre, Sydney

Acoustic Dave: St Leonards Tavern, St Leonards

Cosmo Jarvis + Lime Cordiale: Mona Vale Hotel, Mona Vale

Fall Out Boy + British India: Sydney Entertainment Centre, Darling Harbour

Wildcatz: Moorebank Sports Club, Hammondville Terry Batu: Mortdale Hotel, Mortdale The Levymen: Nelson Bay Diggers Club, Nelson Bay Dave White Experience: New Brighton Hotel, Manly Rock Solid Duo: North Sydney Leagues, Cammeray Heath Burdell: Northies (Sports Bar), Cronulla Brien McVernon: Northumberland Hotel, Lambton Evie Dean: Novotel Darling Harbour, Pyrmont Brendan Deehan: O’Malleys Hotel, Kings Cross Mattt: Oasis on Beamish Hotel, Campsie Van Sereno + Carl Fidler: Observer Hotel, The Rocks Gareth Hudson: Ocean Beach Hotel, Shellharbour Cass Eager + Charlie Horse: Old Manly Boatshed, Manly Krossfyre: Orana Hotel, Blacksmiths Reckless + Soul Principle: Orient Hotel, Sydney Violent Soho + Straight Arrows: Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst

Partison Code + Amalgam + A Girls A Gun: Tattersalls Hotel, Penrith Steve Clisby: The Abbey, Nicholls Screamfeeder + Smudge + Sounds Like Sunset + The Majestic Horse: The Annandale, Annandale Caitlin Rose + Jimmy Tait: The Basement, Circular Quay Darkc3ll + Guests: The Basement, Belconnen Bec & Ben + Doc Holliday Takes The Shotgun + The Fixators: The Chatswood Club, Chatswood Hornet: The Exchange Hotel, Hamilton Ready Steady Fro: The Green Room, Enmore Stratovarius + Eyefear + Darker Half: The Hi-Fi, Moore Park Evacuate The Fallen: The King Street Brewhouse, Sydney Punkfish: The Mark Hotel, Lambton The Squeezers: The Merton Hotel, Rozelle David Agius: The Ranch Hotel, Eastwood Carribean Soul: The Sly Fox, Enmore

Tour De Force - Tribute Show: Parramatta Leagues, Parramatta

The Crooked Fiddle Band + The Main Guy & The Other Guys: The Small Ballroom, Newcastle

Daniel Lawrence: Parramatta RSL, Parramatta

Soft & Slow feat. Myles Mac: The Spice Cellar, Sydney

Skyz The Limit: Penrith Gaels, Kingswood

Summer Flake + Parading + Mope City + The Friendsters + Weak Boys: The Square, Haymarket

Ange: Pittwater RSL, Mona Vale Joe Echo & Mark Oates Duo: PJ Gallaghers, Leichhardt The Perch Creek Family Jugband + Moochers Inc.: Polish White Eagle Club, Turner

1000S OF GIGS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. FOR MORE HEAD TO THEMUSIC.COM.AU 94 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

Ivory + Little Smoke + The Troubled Romantics + The Wildbloods: Roxbury Hotel, Glebe

Lightning Bolt: The Standard, Surry Hills

the guide nsw.gigguide@themusic.com.au Lenka + Tom Kline: The Vanguard, Newtown

Mitch Twins: Huskisson Hotel, Huskisson

Time Warpt: Penrith RSL (Castle Lounge), Penrith

Fatt Lipp: The Vineyard Hotel, Vineyard

Rock Solid Duo: Ingleburn RSL, Ingleburn

Joe Echo: PJ Gallaghers, Moore Park

Hayden Johns: The Windsor Castle Hotel, Newcastle

Wellsy: Iron Horse Inn, Cardiff

Mark Oats & Cara Kavanagh Duo: PJ Gallaghers, Leichhardt

The Squeezers: Katoomba RSL, Katoomba

A-Team Duo: Town Hall Hotel, Balmain Spit Syndicate + Joyride: Towradgi Beach Hotel (Waves), Towradgi DJ Hansom + more: Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills Dead Dieties + Na Maza + Temtris + Vintage Vulva + Unrest + Torch The Village: Valve @ Agincourt (Basement / 7pm), Sydney Chris Duke & The Royals + The Kujo Kings + Ebolagoldfish + Handball Deathmatch + General Pants & The Privates + Laura Palmer: Valve @ Agincourt (First Level / 9pm), Sydney Sydney Blues & Roots Festival feat. Wilson/Diesel + Russell Morris + Diesel + Ash Grunwald + Dave Hole + The Cyril B Bunter Band + Charlie Parr + The Foreday Riders + Chris Wilson + more: Various Venues, Windsor Loose Bazooka: Warners at the Bay, Warners Bay Yuki Kumagai & John Mackie: Well Connected Cafe, Glebe Alex Hopkins + DJ Marty: Wentworthville Leagues Club, Wentworthville Dusk +DJ Bronx + Aaron & Sang + Them Again: Whaat Club, Potts Point The Mike Whitney Band: Windsor Leagues Club, South Windsor The Barons Of Tang: Yours & Owls, Wollongong

SAT 26

Ignition: 3 Wise Monkeys, Sydney

DJ Fooey: 5 Sawyers, Newcastle

Apart From This + Mowgli + Death Mountain: Beatdisc Records (All Ages / 7pm), Parramatta John Larder: Beauford Hotel, Mayfield Talk of The Town: Belmont 16’s, Belmont 24 Hours: Belmore Hotel, Maitland Karnevil + Bombs Away + Nina Las Vegas + What So Not + more: Big Top Sydney, North Sydney The Brewster Brothers: Brass Monkey, Cronulla Bede Kennedy: Brewhouse, Kings Park Smile + Parading + Adults + Worm Movies: Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst 80s Rock Revival: Bull & Bush, Baulkham Hills Bakoomba + Berias Masseque: Camelot Lounge, Marrickville Endless Summer Beach Party: Campbelltown Catholic Club (Club Lounge), Campbelltown Ritual with SMS + 2 Busy 2 Kiss + DJ Bronx: Candys Apartment, Potts Point

Afro Moses 505, Surry Hills David McMaster: Abbotts Hotel, Waterloo

Luke Robinson: Castle Hill RSL (Terrace Bar), Castle Hill

Matt Purcell Duo: Absolute Thai, Charlestown

Angie Dean: Castle Hill RSL (Piano Lounge), Castle Hill

Zoltan: Adria Bar & Restaurant, Sydney

Pop Fiction: Castle Hill RSL (Cocktail Lounge), Castle Hill

Baby Animals: ANU Bar, Acton

Dave Cochrane: Cessnock Supporters Club, Cessnock

Rodney Rude: Asquith Leagues, Waitara KP: Australian Hotel & Brewery, Rouse Hill Daxton Monaghan: Avoca Beach Hotel, Avoca Beach Hobbs Angel Of Death + Albatross + Bastardizer + Exekute + Paralysis: Bald Faced Stag, Leichhardt Kirsty Larkin: Bar Petite, Newcastle Moonlight Drive: Bay Hotel, Bonnells Bay Peachy: Bayview Tavern, Gladesville

Audego + Friendships + Nakagin + East To West DJs: Kings Cross Hotel, Kings Cross

One Hit Wonders: Ramsgate RSL, Sans Souci

Alex Hopkins: Kirribilli Hotel, Milsons Point

Fatt Lipp: Carousel Inn, Rooty Hill

Neandertown: Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly

Kelly Hope: Quay West Magenta Shores, Magenta

Hands Up!: Kings Cross Hotel (Late), Kings Cross

THE BARONS OF TANG: 24 OCT HOTEL STEYNE; 25 YOURS & OWLS WOLLONGONG; 26 FACTORY THEATRE

Ben Sims + A-Tonez + Natnoiz + Kyro & Bomber + more: Chinese Laundry, Sydney Garden Party with Booka Shade + Digitalism: Chinese Laundry (Afternoon), Sydney

Bounce: PJ’s Irish Pub, Parramatta

A Different Beautiful: Kiama Leagues Club, Kiama

The Levymen: Lakeside Village Tavern, Raymond Terrace Dave Hole + Charlie A’Court: Lizottes Central Coast, Kincumber

Alan Kash: Revesby Markets, Revesby Everyday People Band: Revesby Workers (Infinity Lounge), Revesby The Platters + James Monro: Revesby Workers (Whitlam Theatre), Revesby Wildcatz: RG McGees, Richmond

Teal Jakubenko: Coffs Harbour Hotel, Coffs Harbour

Adam Harvey + Chelsea Basham: Lizottes Newcastle, New Lambton

Blaming Vegas: Riverwood Inn, Riverwood

DJ Nights Aglow: Coffs Harbour Hotel (Ye Olde Bottle Shop), Coffs Harbour

Kickstar Duo + Julianne Jessop: Manly Leagues Club, Brookvale

Furnace & Fundamentals: Rock Lily, Pyrmont

Bon Jovi Tribute Show: Manly Leagues Club (Menzies Lounge), Brookvale

Among The Ether + Strange Karma + Pleasure Overload: Roxbury Hotel, Glebe

Behemoth + Hour Of Penance: Manning Bar, Camperdown

The Gaudrys Duo: Royal Federal Hotel, Branxton

Havana Brown: Marquee, Pyrmont

Altitude: Scruffy Murphy’s, Sydney

Nicky Kurta Duo: Mean Fiddler Hotel (Courtyard), Rouse Hill

Ben Francis: Seaview Tavern, Woolgoolga

Ben Finn Duo: Mean Fiddler Hotel (Fiddler Bar), Rouse Hill

Surprise Party: Seven Hills/ Toongabbie RSL, Seven Hills

Caramel: Mean Fiddler Hotel (Woolshed), Rouse Hill

Bec Laughton: Sheoak Shack, Fingal Head

Three Rams: Mercantile Hotel, The Rocks

Geoff Rana: Sir Joseph Banks Hotel, Botany

3 Way Split: Moorebank Sports Club, Hammondville

Last Stand - Cold Chisel Show: South Hurstville RSL, South Hurstville

Jeff Lang: Coogee Diggers (The Bunker), Coogee Joey: Crown Hotel, Sydney Mark Da Costa + Cam Nacson: Crows Nest Hotel, Crows Nest JJ Duo: Dapto Leagues Club, Dapto Heath Burdell: Dee Why Hotel, Dee Why The Great Gig In The Sky - Pink Floyd Celebration feat. Mitchell Anderson + Krishna Jones + Emma Kirk + Spencer Jones + more: Dee Why RSL, Dee Why Ryan Thomas: Dicks Hotel, Balmain Bobby C: Duke of Wellington Hotel, New Lambton Smooth Criminals - The Michael Jackson Show: Eastern Suburbs Legion Club, Waverley Yellowcard + Toy Boats: Enmore Theatre, Enmore Black Cherry Halloween / Day Of The Dead Fiesta feat. El Vez + The Barons Of Tang + Mariachi Trio + The Art + Mesa Cosa + Our Last Enemy + The Drey Rollan Band + Mad Charlie + more: Factory Theatre, Marrickville Truth For The Youth feat.

Kobra Kai + Stolen Records DJs + Foreign Dub + more: Fernside Skate Park (All Ages / 11am), Waterloo The Music of Bernie McGann Part 1 feat. Andrew Dickenson + John Harkins + Michael Griffin: Foundry 616, Ultimo Acoustic Dave: General Gordon Hotel, Sydenham

The Perch Creek Family Jugband + Papa Pilko & The Bin Rats + Bob Harrow: City Diggers, Wollongong

Bootleg Rascal: Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle

Steve Clisby: Clarendon Guest House, Katoomba

Brendan Deehan: Harbord Beach Hotel, Freshwater

David Mason-Cox + The Wild Armadillos: Clovelly Bowling & Recreational Club, Clovelly

The Devil Rides Out + Daredevil + Los Hombre Del Diablo: Hermanns Bar, Darlington

The Good Stuff: Club Marconi (Lounge Bar), Bossley Park

Andy Mammers Duo: Hillside Hotel, Castle Hill

What The: Club Windang, Windang

Caffeine Crunch: Hotel Jesmond, Jesmond

Antoine: Greystanes Inn, Greystanes

Funkstar + DJ Shayne Alsop: Mounties (Terrace Bar), Mt Pritchard 2GoodReasons: Nelson Bay Diggers Club, Nelson Bay Kirk Burgess: Newport Arms Hotel, Newport Thunderstruck AC/DC Show: North Ryde RSL, North Ryde Am 2 Pm: North Sydney Leagues, Cammeray Jake McDougall: North Wollongong Hotel, North Wollongong Sarah Paton Duo: Northies (Sports Bar), Cronulla Gemma + Rob Henry + Carl Fidler + Leon Fallon: Observer Hotel, The Rocks Spenda C + Leah Mencel: OneFiveOne, Wollongong VDubs: Orana Hotel, Blacksmiths Souled Out + James Parrino: Orient Hotel, Sydney Merilyn Steele: Overlander Hotel, Cambridge Gardens Gene & Sofie: Parramatta Leagues (The Firehouse), Parramatta Macson: Parramatta Leagues (The Firehouse), Parramatta Soundproofed: Peachtree Hotel, Penrith Gerard Masters Trio: Penrith RSL (Castle Lounge / 2pm), Penrith

Abbalanche - The Australian ABBA Tribute Show: South Sydney Juniors (Auditorium), Kingsford Tokyo Denmark Sweden + Barefoot Alley + Berlin Blue + Meare: Spectrum, Darlinghurst Groovology: St Johns Park Bowling Club (Lounge Stage), St Johns Park Limp Bizkit: Sydney Entertainment Centre, Darling Harbour Matt Lion Duo: Tattersalls Hotel, Penrith Dan Sultan + Guests: The Abbey, Nicholls Annual Birthday Gig with +Peter Northcote: The Basement, Circular Quay Kotadama: The Exchange Hotel, Hamilton Fat As Butter feat. Gym Class Heroes + Bliss N Eso + Matt Corby + Boy & Bear + The Rubens + Porter Robinson + Digitalism (DJ Set) + Booka Shade (DJ Set) + Mickey Avalon + Bluejuice + Bombs Away + British India + The Aston Shuffle (DJ Set) + Cosmo Jarvis + Owl Eyes + Glass Towers + Kilter + Gold Fields (DJ Set) + Spit Syndicate + The Holidays + Peking Duk + The M Machine + Dialectrix + Battleships + Willow Beats + Super Best Friends + more: The Foreshore, Newcastle

1000S OF GIGS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. FOR MORE HEAD TO THEMUSIC.COM.AU THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 95

the guide nsw.gigguide@themusic.com.au The Vinyl Schminyl! with+DJ Nic Dalton: The Green Room, Enmore Kid Ink: The Hi-Fi (All Ages), Moore Park Pacha feat. Sandro Silva + DJ Minx + Mo’Funk + Chris Fraser + more: The Ivy, Sydney Double Chamber: The King Street Brewhouse (All Ages / Afternoon), Sydney Fastrack Singing Showcase: The King Street Brewhouse, Sydney Daniel Arvidson: The Mark Hotel, Lambton Dead Rabids + Headless Thompson Drummers + Kill Grill Cult: The Record Crate, Glebe Titanium 22: The Sly Fox, Enmore James Barnsley: The Spice Cellar, Sydney Hiatus Kaiyote + Silent Jay: The Standard, Surry Hills

Craig Thommo: Ambervale Tavern, Ambervale

Jeff Lang: Lizottes Central Coast, Kincumber

Blues Sunday feat. Mark Hopper: Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly

Dave Hole + Charlie A’Court: Lizottes Newcastle, New Lambton

Stoneage Romeo’s (Duo): Bar Petite, Newcastle

Sleep + Summonus + The Devil Rides Out: Manning Bar, Camperdown

Cosmo Jarvis + Lime Cordiale: Beach Bar @ Splashes, Wollongong

Heath Burdell: Mill Hill Hotel, Bondi Junction

Lily Dior + Friends: Blue Beat, Double Bay

Cath & Him: Mounties (Terrace Bar), Mt Pritchard

Sydney Blues Society: Botany View Hotel, Newtown

Greg Agar: Narrabeen Sands, Narrabeen

Carus Thompson: Brass Monkey, Cronulla

James Chatburn: Nelson Bay Diggers Club, Nelson Bay

Sydney Blues & Roots Festival feat. Wilson/Diesel + Russell Morris + Diesel + Ash Grunwald + Dave Hole + The Cyril B Bunter Band + Charlie Parr + The Foreday Riders + Chris Wilson + more: Various Venues, Windsor

Charlie Parr + Andrew Morris: Camelot Lounge, Marrickville

Redlight Ruby: Northies (Sports Bar), Cronulla

Ryan Thomas: Waverley Bowling & Recreation Club, Waverley

Songs On Stage feat.

Samantha Johnson + Guests: George IV Hotel, Picton

Anton Zammit: Campbelltown Catholic Club (Club Lounge), Campbelltown

Stormcellar: Oberon RSL, Oberon

Greg Lines: Western Suburbs Leagues Club, Leumeah

Mo + Kilter: Goodgod Small Club, Sydney

Rob Henry + Three Wise Men: Observer Hotel, The Rocks

Nicky Kurta Duo: Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel, Woolloomooloo

Songs On Stage feat. Angelene Harris + Guests: Hampshire Hotel, Camperdown

Scratch: The Windsor Castle Hotel, Newcastle Heath Burdell: Time & Tide Hotel, Dee Why

Sharon Bowman: Collingwood Hotel (4pm), Liverpool

Paul Hayward + Friends: Town & Country Hotel (4pm), St Peters

Cherrywood: Coogee Diggers (The Bunker), Coogee

Matt Jones Duo: Town Hall Hotel, Balmain

Darker Half + Albatross + Sylvain + Rampage: Dicey Riley’s Hotel, Wollongong

Deli + Manjazz + LSD5 + Albert Hunt + C Money + Epique + more: Valve @ Agincourt (3pm), Sydney Sydney Blues & Roots Festival feat. Wilson/Diesel + Russell Morris + Diesel + Ash Grunwald + Dave Hole + The Cyril B Bunter Band + Charlie Parr + The Foreday Riders + Chris Wilson + more: Various Venues, Windsor Love That Hat: Warners at the Bay, Warners Bay Yuki Kumagai & John Mackie: Well Co Cafe/ Bar (11am), Leichhardt Panorama Duo + DJ Marty: Wentworthville Leagues Club, Wentworthville Smoke + Mirrors + Nocturnal + House Bears + Vinnie Ward: Whaat Club, Potts Point

SUN 27

Matt Jones Band: 3 Wise Monkeys, Sydney DJ Jonathan: 5 Sawyers, Newcastle

Jeff Neve: 505, Surry Hills City Groove: Abbotts Hotel, Waterloo

Boy & Bear + Battleships + Dustin Tebbutt: Enmore Theatre, Enmore Mark Travers: Ettamogah Hotel, Kellyville Ridge Tori Darke: Family Inn, Rydalmere Bleedin’ Gums Bluesfest feat. Transvaal Diamond Syndicate + Cherrywood + Barefoot Alley + Big Blind Ray + The Spitfires + Anchors of Tortuga + Little Big Wolf: Frankies Pizza (6pm), Sydney Songs On Stage feat. Andrew Denniston + Guests: Gary Owen Hotel, Rozelle Lachlan Bryan: Grand Junction Hotel (The Junkyard), Maitland David Agius: Harbord Beach Hotel, Freshwater Paul Greene & The Other Colours Heritage Hotel, Bulli Sticky Fingers + Lyall Moloney + Pat Tierney: Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Joe Echo: Horse & Jockey Hotel, Homebush Benjalu: Hotel Steyne (Moonshine Bar), Manly The White Horizons: Huskisson Hotel (4pm), Huskisson Moonlight Drive Duo: Jewells Tavern, Jewells The Shuffle Demons: Joan Sutherland Theatre, Penrith Kirk Davis: Kiama Leagues Club, Kiama Brassholes: LazyBones Lounge, Marrickville Ultrabeat + The Lostboyz + Various DJs: Lizard Log Amphitheatre, Abbotsbury

The Levymen: Ocean Beach Hotel, Shellharbour Big Arvo: Orana Hotel, Blacksmiths The White Bros + Lonesome Train: Orient Hotel, Sydney Black Rose: Overlander Hotel, Cambridge Gardens Am 2 Pm: Parramatta RSL, Parramatta Nathan Cole: Peachtree Hotel, Penrith Bryen & The Bayou Boogie Boys: Penrith RSL (Castle Lounge / 2pm), Penrith Inner Western 2 feat. Katie Brianna + Fanny Lumsden + The Ramalamas + James Thomson + Roland K Smith + Emma Swift: Petersham Bowling Club, Petersham

MON 28

Happy Monday!: 505, Surry Hills The Breeders + Screamfeeder: Enmore Theatre, Enmore Songs On Stage feat. John Chesher + Chris Brookes + Massimo Presti + Guests: Kellys on King, Newtown Sonic Mayhem Orchestra: LazyBones Lounge, Marrickville Steve Tonge: Observer Hotel, The Rocks

Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen + Dreamer’s Circus + Annaliese Szota: Camelot Lounge, Marrickville Open Mic Night with Champagne Jam: Dundas Sports Club, Dundas Enmore Comedy Club feat. Shane Mauss: Enmore Theatre, Enmore

Chris Franklin + Lilyanne Slade + Mikey Robins: Harold Park Hotel, Glebe Anh Do: Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong Alice Terry & The Skinny White Boys: LazyBones Lounge, Marrickville Dave Hole + Charlie A’Court: Lizottes Sydney, Dee Why Rob Henry: Observer Hotel, The Rocks Nick Kingswell: Orient Hotel, Sydney

Adam Gorecki: Orient Hotel, Sydney

Charlie Parr + Andrew Morris: The Front Cafe & Gallery, Lyneham

Big Swing Band: Tattersalls Hotel, Penrith

Plug and Play (Open Mic): The Little Guy, Glebe

Joanna Melas: Ramsgate RSL, Sans Souci Underground Airforce: Roxbury Hotel, Glebe Finn: Ruby L’Otel, Rozelle Jan Preston: Seymour Centre (3pm), Chippendale Matt Price: St George Motor Boat Club, Sans Souci 40th Anniversary Concert feat. Deborah Mailman + Baz Luhrmann + Sarah Blasko + Teddy Tahu Rhodes + John Butler + Megan Washington + Paul Grabowsky + more: Sydney Opera House, Sydney Open Mic: Tattersalls Hotel (4pm), Penrith Emma Swift + Not Good With Horses + The Gloomchasers: The Green Room, Enmore Kid Ink: The Hi-Fi, Moore Park Fastrack Singing Showcase: The King Street Brewhouse, Sydney Little Sundays: The Little Guy, Glebe Love That Hat: The Mark Hotel, Lambton The Perch Creek Family Jugband + Papa Pilko & The Bin Rats + Bob Harrow: The Vanguard, Newtown

1000S OF GIGS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. FOR MORE HEAD TO THEMUSIC.COM.AU 96 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013

The Kin + Jordan Millar + Kisshead: Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst

Stephen R Cheney: Belmont 16’s, Belmont

Run The Red: Club Windang (On The Green/ 2pm), Windang

Hot Dub Time Machine + Bec & Ben + Camden: Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills

Psychic Sun + The Plasmon Resonance Band + Leslie Speaker: Valve @ Agincourt (5pm), Sydney

Open Mic: Avoca Beach Hotel, Avoca Beach

Alex Hopkins: Mean Fiddler Hotel, Rouse Hill

Russell Flannery: Campbelltown Catholic Club (Caf Samba / 1pm), Campbelltown

SurvivorL The Stone Week Finale feat. Yahtzel + Fox & Fowl + Party Gravy + The Second Hand Salmon + The Steptones + Two Lead Fish + more: University of Canberra, Bruce

Oakseer + Tomorrow Never Comes + Harmony Of Hate + Facing Zero + Kunvuk + A Vengeance: Valve @ Agincourt (12pm), Sydney

TUE 29

Old School Funk & Groove Night+Various: 505, Surry Hills

Lachy Doley Beaches Hotel, Thirroul

Charlie Horse + Suzie Stapleton + The Slow Push The Vanguard, Newtown

Eskimo Joe + Special Guests Towradgi Beach Hotel (Waves), Towradgi

Cash Only: Marrickville Bowling Club, Marrickville

One Day Sunday feat. DJ Izm + Spit Syndicate + Horrorshow + Joyride + Jackie Onassis: The Vic (1pm), Enmore

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SUN

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27 OCT

CLAUDE HAY, GENEVIEVE CHADWICK, JOHN CASS, TWO RIVERS BLUES, BIG ERLE, ILUKA, EDDIE BOYD & THE PHATAPILLARS, SKIP COBAL, DAMION STIRLING 2 STAGES - TICKETS $25 @ DOOR - DOORS @ 6.30

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22 The Promenade, King Street Wharf, Sydney NSW THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013 • 97

the end

IS TONY ABBOTT RIGHT? CLIMATE CHANGE HUH?

Abbott & Co. are not great believers that humanity’s fuckingup of the planet has caused our environmental mayhem.

PROS No more carbon tax.

CONS No more humanity.

FUTURE Abbott dreams of a future where we all wear weather-resistant Lycra.

GAY MARRIAGE HUH?

The Libs aren’t too big on guys holding hands, let alone imagining a bare-backing honeymoon.

PROS No same-sex marriage registers for cashstrapped wedding guests to worry about.

CONS A slump in the local market for “Congratulations on your big fat gay wedding” cards.

FUTURE We are guessing Abbott won’t be invited to his lesbian sister’s engagement party…

EVOLUTION HUH?

“I don’t say that evolution is a complete and entirely satisfactory scientific explanation of the origin of man.” (2010, Fairfax)

PROS He’s not looking so foolish following the discovery of the homo erectus skull in Georgia.

CONS But how does he explain all the monkey business with that tax-funded expense rorting?

FUTURE Same as it ever was.

98 • THE MUSIC • 23RD OCTOBER 2013