The Drones
Batpiss
The Forum, Melbourne
Saturday 5 September 2015
$48.20, plus fees = $57.48
Wait Long By The Mixing Desk and the Bodies of the
People In Front of You Will Move Away
There are four guys
and one girl in The Drones, which is also roughly the gender ratio in the crowd
at The Forum on this night. At one point towards the end of the show I looked
across the section where I was standing and it was almost entirely populated by
portly blokes with untucked shirts, holding a beer in one hand and nodding
their heads in approximate time with the beat. This is not meant as criticism
from some lofty or superior plane, for I pretty much fitted that identikit on
the night.
But I’m getting ahead
of myself, before The Drones came Batpiss. There are some bands who you can
tell from their name are not actively courting FM radio playlists or seeking
high rotation on MTV. Batpiss are such a band. Slugfuckers is another, and
there’s a wonderfully titled band around Melbourne at the moment called ‘Fuck
the Fitzroy Doom Scene’, but my favourite would have to be Anal Cunt – look
them up, they’re a real band. I
don’t know what they sound like, but I think I can guess. Likewise with Batpiss:
they sound reassuringly like their name suggests they sound – relentlessly
loud, aggro, shouty and with just a hint of that peculiar piquant stench given
off by bat secretions. Visit the Royal Botanical Gardens if you want the
authentic olfactory experience.
The bass player
conceded the point about their name, at one stage looking about the Roman columns,
statues and starlit ceiling and saying that when you call yourself Batpiss, you
don’t expect to be playing in a venue like this. “It’s awesome. We’re fucking
stoked” he added, before giving his instrument a decisive thrum and setting off
into another barrage of thundering bass.
What Batpiss lacked in
nuance and subtlety they more than made up for with energy and drive. Not my
kind of thing really, but the majority of the crowd seemed to appreciate it
judging by the cheers that greeted the momentary pauses in the maelstrom.
I’ve never seen The
Drones before, but my friend Nina insists they’re the best live band this side
of The Bad Seeds. I once saw lead singer Gareth Liddiard play a solo acoustic
show to support his extraordinary solo album, Strange Tourist. At that show he spent more time yakking than
playing, to the point where it spoiled the gig actually, so I was hoping for a
less garrulous performance with the full band.
This gig was
ostensibly a 10-year anniversary show for their pivotal second album, Wait Long By the River and the Bodies of
Your Enemies Will Float By. In my book about Hawthorn’s 2013 AFL
premiership, I borrowed that title for the chapter about our win over Geelong
in the Preliminary Final to overcome a 12 game losing streak against them. It
seemed apt. As for the album itself, it wasn’t one I knew about in 2005 (I
think I was listening exclusively to Ryan Adams that year), but when I did
start listening to The Drones, Nina recommended it as a classic so I picked it
up and on those occasions when I do listen to The Drones, it’s probably the
album I play most.
After Batpiss finished
I took up my usual Forum vantage point behind the mixing desk. I was a few
people deep when I started, but by the time The Drones took the stage, everyone
in front of me had cleared out to the bar, the toilets, the merch desk or the
mosh pit, and left me at the front of the first raised level. Perfect.
Just as a music
journalist writing about Courtney Barnett feels compelled to remind readers
that she once worked behind the bar at the Northcote Social Club, so it is that
when writing about The Drones, journalists trot out the fact that Shark Fin Blues, the opening track from
‘Wait Long By The River…’ was voted by peers (whoever they are) as the best
Australian song ever. I don’t know if it is the best Australian song ever
(let’s not rule out Joe Dolce’s Shaddup
Ya Face or Christie Allen’s Goosebumps),
but surely there's got to come a time when it can either be assumed we all know
this little factoid or that it simply doesn’t matter, and we can move on to the
topic at hand.
Which I shall do now,
for indeed, the band opened their set with said best Australian song ever as
they settled in to play the album. Notwithstanding the fact that the show was
celebrating the anniversary of Wait Long
By the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, the man behind
me began yelling for Supercargo,
despite the fact that it is from an entirely different album - 2009’s
Havilah. He obviously didn’t get
the memo.
In any case, the band
didn’t oblige and got on with playing more or less the entire album in more or
less the original sequence, working through Baby,
The Best You Can Believe In and an
impassioned reading of Locust –
probably the highlight of the night. These are not so much songs as exposes. The music is not so much played as wrung from
instruments and Liddiard doesn’t sing so much as expunge lyrics. At its best,
the music emanating from the stage is a glorious, raucous noise, all brimstone
and bombast, with Liddiard fulminating like a crazed preacher at the front.
Fiona Kitschin on bass stands with
her back to the audience for the best part of the evening, only turning to face
the audience when singing ‘Na Na Na’s’ into the microphone. I assume that this
is customary and the likely provenance of the t-shirt on sale at the merch desk
that says ‘For God’s Sake Turn Around’.
Dan Luscombe was as cool and casual
as you can get on guitar. He reminded me a bit of Blixa Bargeld, not because he
was attired in fetish wear, he wasn’t, but because he’s so relaxed on stage you
think he isn’t doing anything, and then he gives his guitar one almighty strum
and the glasses at the bar rattle and flakes of dust fall from the ceiling.
The first encore song was one I didn’t
recognise, subsequently identified by various websites as Private Execution, which I think is a new one. It followed the
typical Drones template but seemed more contained, almost restrained, and it
was that very aspect that gave it an edge. They followed this with The Miller’s Daughter and a cover of Kev
Carmody’s River of Tears.
They then invited Batpiss back on
stage for what Luscombe announced would be a cover of The Wipers. I write that
with an air of knowing familiarity, but to be honest, not only had I never
heard the song before, I’d never heard of The Wipers. Not such a crime perhaps,
they’re not exactly as ubiquitous as Coldplay, but when I subsequently looked
them up, I saw that they were mostly active in the early 1980s, and I
identified the song as Doom Town, one
recorded in 1983, the very period of independent music in which I was most
conversant. Or thought I was. But then I didn’t even know about ‘Wait Long by The River…’ in 2005 so what
would I know?
The Drones more or less lived up to
Nina’s extravagant hype – they put on a full-on show packed with songs that took
on new power in the live experience. A new album in 2016 is something to get
excited by.
Setlist
Shark Fin blues
Baby
The Best you Can Believe In
Locust
The Freedom In The Loot
This Time
Six Ways To Sunday
Sitting on The Edge of the Bed Cryin’
- - - - - - -
Private Execution
The Miller’s Daughter
- - - - - -
River of Tears
Doom Town
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