Ainslie Wills - 21 February 2016

Ainslie Wills

Sunday 21 February 2016

NGV Garden, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Free

Everyday is Like Sunday…if only

Just two days after seeing Black Cab in the Great Hall at the NGV as part of their Friday night series, I was back, this time to see Ainslie Wills in the NGV Garden for their Summer Sundays.

With all this music being used as a draw card to get people to visit art galleries, you wonder if they’ll ever have to hang Whiteleys and Nolans at places like the The Tote and The Corner Hotel to attract art lovers to rock gigs.

This was the Sunday afternoon on the day after White Night, Melbourne’s all-night music, art and projection extravaganzas, so I thought the city would be quiet. But if anything, it was more crowded than usual. Either the crowds hadn’t yet gone home, or the glorious day and balmy conditions had drawn people back out.

I can’t complain; the golden sunshine was, after all, one of the factors that had got me out of the house. The other reason was that Ainslie Wills was playing for free. After spending over $200 to see Prince earlier in the week, the universe owed me a free gig and here it was providing.

Ainslie Wills is an emerging singer-songwriter with a crystalline voice. I first heard her on the #1 Dads song, So Soldier, which she co-wrote with Tom Ionsek and on which she provided a beautiful vocal. I’ve since been listening to her Oh The Gold EP.

The NGV garden is an idyllic setting on such a day. A large canopy of bright pink and orange interlocking modules covers the stage and creates dappled light over the performers and the mosh pit, such as it is – at this gig, which was largely a sit down affair, it consisted of a few twirling toddlers. The surrounding gardens have shady trees, pop-up bars and a BBQ. People lounge on scattered chairs or loll on giant cushions under sailcloth shades. It’s the perfect set up to sip on an Asahi or two and take in Ainslie’s immaculate laid-back tunes. As with Black Cab, Ralph joined me for the afternoon.

A sit-down affair, even the Henry Moore sculptures were seated

 As the band kicked into the first song, Stop Pulling the Strings from her album, You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine, Ainslie started to twirl about on stage, flinging her arms and kicking out her legs, sort of like Kate Bush but without quite the same fluidity. I’m not one to criticize, after all, my jerky, uncoordinated moves have never won anyone’s admiration, but I don’t think Ainslie is going to steal Beyonce’s crown any time soon.

While dancing may not be her strong point, her voice was smooth and clear. As Ralph commented, she made singing beautifully seem effortless.

The band too, was slick and proficient. I missed their names, but the line-up was guitar, bass, drums and keyboards, with the woman on keys providing beautiful harmonies, particularly during But I’ll Try from the Oh The Gold EP.  If anything the band were too perfect and could perhaps have benefitted from a dissonant interruption or two – perhaps a Blixa Bargeld or Andy Gill giving their guitar a discordant swipe just to rough up the smooth sound.

But you can’t criticise a band for what they’re not – in this case the music and vocals complemented each other perfectly and suited the lazy Sunday afternoon those of us in the audience were enjoying. Where Ainslie Wills finds her point of difference is in song structure. Her songs don’t necessarily fit the 32 bar form of standard rock songs; they start out that way but veer off into other directions or they build to something else entirely. Some of them seem to be made up entirely of middle eights, or a succession of bridge sections, if such a thing is possible.

Constellations is a great song and it stood out as one of the highlights of this performance, along with So Soldier and her closing number Drive.

As Ainslie herself commented, we are fortunate in a city like Melbourne that these sorts of events are put on for free – she was speaking in more general terms, but it was certainly true for those of us in the audience there for her performance.

Set list

Stop Pulling the Strings

Hawaii

?

Wide Load

Lemon Japan

But I’ll Try

So Soldier

Never Know What To Say

Constellations

Fighting Kind

Drive

Encore: I bought a CD of Oh The Gold after the performance and Ainslie was good enough to sign it – see pic. Ainslie probably gets a reasonable share of the $15 I paid. Okay, so probably not much on its own I know, but let’s say 2 or 3 million people were to buy it – she’d make $20 or $30 million. This probably won’t happen for Ainslie, but it gave me an idea for Kanye West.

In the past week or so Kanye has claimed that he is US$53 in debt, clarifying of course that he still had money to buy furs and houses for his family – just in case we thought he wasn’t providing. Furthermore he wanted Mark Zuckerberg to invest $1 billion in what he called ‘Kanye West ideas’.

This is in the same week that he released his new album The Life of Pablo, but kept it exclusive to the Tidal streaming service, meaning it wasn’t available for purchase. The obvious upshot was that most people simply pirated the album from the internet, an outcome that not only surprised Kanye, but angered him.

If I was Mark Zuckerberg I’d suggest that one idea might be to release the album so people could buy it – that would bring some money in. At the risk of limiting a true Renaissance man, I’d be inclined to question the worth of his other ideas if he can’t even capitalize on the one thing we know he can actually do, which is make music. I’d buy a copy, if only to keep his family in furs.

Black Cab - 19 February 2016

Black Cab

Friday 19 February 2016

Great Hall, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

$30

Pop Art - Art Pop

The National Gallery of Victoria, or NGV to the locals, hosts Friday night museum entry during big exhibitions, with drinks, dining and local bands playing in the Great Hall.

There has been a good line-up of bands to coincide with the Andy Warhol / Ai Weiwei exhibition. Having been out of town when Norwegian singer, and one time Melbourne resident, Jenny Hval, played, I was keen to catch Black Cab. Black Cab are local purveyors of what is known as ‘Krautrock’ – a somewhat racist term originally invented by the English music press to describe German experimental and electronic music, but which has come to encapsulate pretty much any German music or music displaying hints of German influence.

While terms like Latin music or middle-eastern music are vaguely descriptive, I’m not sure that rock genres can necessarily be divided along national lines, particularly as Germany has produced bands as diverse as Kraftwerk, Einsturzende Neu Bauten, and even Boney M. After all, it’s not as if Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner and Bach’s music is clumped together under a banner called ‘Krautclassical.’

My friend Ralph, who has a keen instinct for discovering little-known bands that play innovative music, introduced me to Black Cab recently, and joined me at the NGV for the exhibition and gig. If the throng coursing through the gallery was any indication, however, Black Cab is anything but little-known. Though I suspected Warhol and Weiwei were the main drawcards.  

Andy Warhol is well-known as an innovator and art world subversive and Ai Weiwei is a Chinese dissident artist and activist who works in a similar tradition. The exhibition displayed their works side by side, highlighting the moments where they complement each other, but also contradicted each other. It was a thought-provoking and creatively curated exhibition.

At first there may seem to be little connection between the work of these two artists and the music of Black Cab, however, all three comment on authoritarian regimes. There is Warhol’s Mao and Stalin portraits – included in the exhibition alongside his celebrity portraits – and Ai Weiwei’s own Mao portraits, which of course carry a different connotation given his political activism and imprisonment in China.

Black Cab, on the other hand, has an abiding interest in the authoritarian regime of the former East Germany. Their 2009 album Call Signs was about surveillance by the East German secret police, the Stasi. Their latest album, Games of the XXI Olympiad, concerns itself with the East German state sponsored performance enhancing drugs program at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games. It may seem unlikely source material for a concept album, but perhaps no more so than Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII (the most common response to hearing that album is overwhelming relief that Henry only had six wives, mixed with surprise that an enraged populace didn’t rise up and drag Wakeman himself off to the chopping block.)  Having said that, you can imagine someone turning the Essendon supplements saga into a concept album, even a musical – Hird Mentality perhaps, or See the Bombers Shoot Up.

Black Cab’s album dispenses with the drone guitar sound of some of their earlier work and instead features pulsing up-tempo electronic music with crisp, metronomic beats and anthemic flourishes – as if Kraftwerk have had heir drink spiked.

The Great Hall was packed as the buzzing drone of Closing Ceremony introduced the show. Black Cab’s principal players, Andrew Coates and James Lee looked suitably serious as they stood at their respective workstations fiddling with knobs and flicking switches to program sounds and electronic beats on their laptops. At least that’s what I assume they were doing – they might simply have been catching up on their emails after pressing the ‘Go’ button. Drummer Wes Hall, however, was head down, wrists flexing as he kept up a steady rhythm at the kit.

Black Cab fans or not, the crowd was getting into it. It didn’t matter that the vast majority of the audience were unfamiliar with the material, for everyone understands the meaning of a running beat and a big bass drop. Whether stimulated by the art or just the wine and beer, a general air of abandon took hold as the disco thump of Supermadchen and Combat Boots propelled things along.

Despite the theme of the pieces, the music is quite joyous at times, capturing the fanfare nature of the world’s biggest sporting event. There were families with kids, older art enthusiasts, attractive twenty-somethings and Black Cab fans all bopping away while Coates intoned his snippets of Teutonic sporting supremacy. As the beats pumped and the synths swirled, you could easily imagine yourself at a nightclub. As an habitué of Studio 54 in the 1970s, Warhol would have felt right at home.

They ran through most of the Olympiad album, running one piece into the next with only the slightest pause in between. As befitting their general demeanour of cerebral detachment – or perhaps they were just concentrating – there was no audience interaction. To be honest I’m not even sure they knew we were there. But then the music didn’t lend itself to shout outs and banter.

Instead they programmed some diverting visuals on three big screens – mainly geometric shapes and patterns, but also a video of two silhouetted figures with fierce red eyes.

It was a good gig to accompany the exhibition and the audience stayed right until the end, which meant there was a good reception for the rousing Sexy Polizei with which they concluded. Overall, it was a good value $30 cab ride. 

We can now look forward to seeing what they make of the 2016 Rio Olympics, particularly if the zika virus runs amok.

Setlist (more or less)

Closing Ceremony

Supermadchen

Combat Boots

Kornelia Ender

?

Victorious

Opening ceremony?

Sexy Polizei

The Drones - 5 September 2015

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

Prince - 17 February 2016

Prince – Piano and a Microphone

State Theatre, Melbourne

Wednesday 17 February 2016

$223 (from a range of $100 to $750)

Piano and a Microphone – Just Add iPad and Prodigious Talent

A grand piano sits centre stage under a wash of purple hued lights.  Soft chamber music wafts through the auditorium and a cluster of candles in each corner of the stage flicker with gothic mystique. Suddenly a purple portal, wreathed in smoke, is illuminated in the backdrop. The smoke clears to highlight the silhouetted figure of a man with unmistakable afro leaning ever so debonairly on a cane.

It is of course Prince, here for the third of his ‘Piano and a Microphone’ shows in Melbourne – no band, no dancers, no extravagant production or costume changes, just Prince and his songs.

Announced with only two weeks notice, it was always going to be difficult to get tickets, particularly as the State Theatre – the one with the spire – only holds 2,000 people. However, as an Optus customer, I benefited from a perfectly timed Telstra outage that took out half the competition at the precise moment I had to get online to book. Strategically, I also selected the mid-price ticket option, knowing that competition for the relatively cheap $100 tickets would be the fiercest.

Prince walked out to a standing ovation and took his seat at the piano. He announced that, “everything begins with rhythm,” stomped his foot to establish a tempo and struck the opening chords to Electrum Plectrum’s funky opener, Wow. With a simple turn of the head he appealed to the audience to help with the exclamatory refrain of the title at the appropriate moments.

Even though Angela and I were looking down from the balcony (yes we were on level 3 - God knows then where the cheap seats were located), we didn’t feel too remote. The piano and voice were mixed loud and the sound was crystal clear.

As Wow ended, his playing changed seamlessly from funk to the boogie rhythms of Rocknroll Love Affair from his latest album, Hit n Run Phase Two.

Prince’s playing was astonishing and seemed effortless and masterful – changing from blues to jazz with ease, even improvising classical passages. You got the feeling he might bust out some Rachmaninoff at any moment.

Likewise, his singing was superb – exercising his full vocal range while maintaining complete control of his voice. As Kiss taught us all those years ago, no one screeches quite like Prince. Angela lost count of the octaves he was progressing through.

He played against a projected backdrop of psychedelic patterns that evolved and morphed in kaleidoscopic shapes and that also shone onto the stage itself. Plus he had snazzy red LED lights in his shoes that lit up every time he tapped his feet.

The setlist took in a mix of older album cuts, The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, new songs, Black Muse, B-sides, How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore, covers, Unchain My Heart, and monster hits, with Little Red Corvette providing an early group sing-a-long. His version of Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You was an another early highlight.

Within all of this were medleys, where one song bled into another, separated by splashes of piano, as well as songs dedicated to his former lover and colleague, Vanity, whose death had been announced the previous day. Reflecting on this he referenced the ‘Black lives matter’ movement in the US, simply commenting that ‘every life matters’.

I wasn’t familiar with all of the songs he played, but it didn’t matter for his virtuosity of piano and voice were completely absorbing. Evidently he also needed assistance, regularly scrolling through an iPad on top of the piano for the lyrics. Occasionally he would jump up form his stool mid-song to perform a little jig, as if the music was coursing through him and playing and singing were not sufficient as an outlet. He also took frequent turns to the front of the stage to accept the applause and take the outstretched hands of those at the front.

There was plenty of love in the room, with momentary silences filled by screeches of “I love you!” He would hit the opening chord of an obscure song and be greeted by loud whoops and cheers from aficionados who knew them, and wanted the rest of us to know they knew them.

In How Music Works David Byrne writes about the communion between artist and audience and comments that sometimes he thinks the audience are ‘applauding for themselves’. There was certainly a fair bit of that going on as long time fans showed their appreciation to Prince for drawing on his entire catalogue for unexpected songs - what David Byrne called ‘applauding their joint legacies as performers and audience'.

The only element of the show I don’t think worked was the taped accompaniment he employed on some of the slower songs. It consisted of wistful, soupy strings that added nothing, and if anything, detracted from his live playing. He more or less stopped using it in the second half of the show as the tempo lifted and he treated us to a series of encores featuring some of his best known songs.

Raspberry Beret precipitated a stage invasion by one girl who was bundled out of the way before she could get to Prince.

He followed this with Kiss, and any doubt about his funky piano chops were erased as the audience in the stalls was up and dancing by this point. The encore finished with an impassioned reading of Nothing Compares 2 U.

One final encore gave us Purple Music, an unreleased song from the early 1980s, followed by a rousing version of Purple Rain to close out the show with a mass sing-a-long.

Below is my best attempt at a setlist, though it may be incomplete and some songs may have been part of a medley.

Wow

Rocknroll Love Affair

I Love You In Me

The Ballad of Dorothy Parker

Little Red Corvette

Dirty Mind

Strange Relationship

Unchain My Heart (Ray Charles/Joe Cocker)

A Case of You (Joni Mitchell)

Waiting In Vain (Bob Marley) / If I Was Your Girlfriend

How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore

Black Muse

When She Comes

1000 X’s and O’s

Big City

The Love We Make

Raspberry Beret

Kiss

Nothing Compares 2 U

Purple Music

Purple Rain

Encore – It’s been a bizarre week in music. Tragically, UK indie band Viola Beach perished with their manager in a car accident in Sweden. Rolf Harris was charged in the UK with further counts of indecent sexual assault. Kanye West (sort of) released his new album, The Life of Pablo, after premiering it via his laptop, along with his new fashion range, at Madison Square Gardens, before going on a series of nutty Twitter rants, presumably by way of promotion – although the album is still only available on Tidal. Courtney Barnett lost out to Meaghan Trainor for Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards, in a decision that might one day be seen in the same light as the year Elvis Costello lost out to A Taste of Honey in the same category, or Neneh Cherry was pipped by Milli Vanilli, and Lady Gaga is being feted again, not for anything outrageous, but for her rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl.

Beach House - 11 February 2016

Beach House

170 Russell, Melbourne

Thursday 11 February 2016

$63

Beach Party

If you’re looking for a band to back up Martin Mull and Elvis Costello’s assertion that you can’t dance to architecture, then perhaps Beach House is it. Named after an architectural edifice, Beach House are many things – lush, elegant, spectral, majestic and atmospheric – but they’re not going to get the dance floor heaving. Gently swaying, perhaps, even quietly emoting, but heaving, no, as the tame mosh-pit at this gig illustrated.

Beach House are nonetheless very popular, not Beyonce level popular, but this was their second Melbourne sideshow ahead of their Laneway Festival appearance, and the place was packed. A positive for the band and the promoters of course, but perhaps less so for the audience. Not just because it made it crowded and harder to see, but because 170 Russell is about three levels underground, with no phone reception and only one narrow staircase to street level. So in the event of fire, there’s no point calling for help, and there’s even less point trying to escape.

But if you have to go down in flames, Beach House could quite possibly be the perfect soundtrack. There’s a soothing, ethereal quality to their music, the sort of music that might be appropriate as your soul slipped away. Elegy For The Void might be a suitable track for them to play to see us all out.

In raising the idea of shaking off ones mortal coil I’m cognisant of comparisons that might be made between Beach House’s sound and that of 1980s English collective, This Mortal Coil. Likewise perhaps with The Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance and The Cure’s slow keyboardy songs. While they all share a certain celestial, other-worldly quality, Beach House have their own sound and they do it all without a black lace fingerless glove in sight.

Indeed when the band took the stage at 170 Russell, singer and keyboard player, Victoria Legrand, appeared in an immaculate white suit with calf length coat. Maintaining their indie credentials, however, Alex Scally, and the other band members – Skyler Skjelset and Graham Hill – were adorned in standard rock ‘n’ roll black.

Legrand’s all white outfit, however, didn’t make it any easier to see her given the ill-lit stage. The entire band was submerged in the shadows that were only fleetingly illuminated throughout the gig. For the most part we just saw silhouettes on stage. The inky pitch was occasionally relieved by a simple light show; alternating panels of primary colours, a starry backdrop and the occasional moving projection casting shapes and more shadows over the band.

The gloomy mood lighting at least served to focus attention on the music, which from the first notes of Levitation was mesmerizing and performed with precision, intensity and a generous soaking of reverb.

I’m not particularly au fait with the bands complete discography, having come to them only after seeing them perform One Thing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in late 2015. I was impressed by their dense, layered sound and picked up the album from which it was taken, Thank Your Lucky Stars, as well as Depression Cherry, the album they’d released only a few months earlier. I particularly like TYLS but both are very good. However, whereas on record I find that my attention can drift in and out, live their sound was more muscular and powerful and packed more of a punch than I expected – partly due to energetic and precise drumming of Graham Hill who brought Scally’s guitar reverb and Legrand’s waves of keyboard wash into sharper focus.

The set featured songs from across their career, with notable highlights being Space Song, All Your Yeahs and a gripping 10 Mile Stereo that built to a dramatic crescendo. Elegy for The Void, was the feature of the night and perhaps would have been a good song to end on, not just because of its majestic climax, but because once you’ve reached the void, where is there left to go?

They did continue however, and the encore began with just Legrand and Scally performing 10.37 and then the full band playing a manic version of Sparks, with Scally channeling his inner Reid brother to wrench very last bit of fuzzy feedback from his instrument.

In saying goodnight Legrand referred to playing one last gig at Laneway “before we leave Melbourne forever”, a phrase that sparked immediate consternation and conspiracy theories among those around me. She might have just meant before they head off to Perth in a couple of days, but her use of the word ‘forever’ generated a buzz of speculation. 

If they are retiring, breaking up or just taking a rest, it was a fitting note on which to take it and I’m glad I saw them before the end.  

Encore: In an age when musicians routinely carp on about people downloading albums illegally, or not receiving suitable royalty payments from streaming services, Beach House have hit upon an ideal solution – rather than whinge and moan about it, they made the cover of Depression Cherry in a deep, cherry coloured velvet. It’s as much a tactile experience as an aural one - you can’t get that from streaming. 

Setlist

Levitation

Walk in the Park

PPP

All Your Yeahs

Space Song

Silver Soul

Myth

Elegy to the Void

10 Mile Stereo

Wishes

- - - - - - -

10.37 

Sparks

Earwax – Introduction

Earwax - Live Music in Melbourne

Elvis Costello is reported to have once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”  It wasn’t his line, he takes pains to clarify in his autobiography, ‘Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink’; although attributed to him it was actually uttered by American actor and comedian Martin Mull – who you may know as the school principal in ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch’.

Like Costello, Mull was also a musician, so you might assume they speak with some authority on the matter. But before you nod your head in agreement and condemn any attempts to write about music, consider that despite this comment, Costello made music about writing, ‘Everyday I Write the Book’. He also made music about dancing, ‘ Mystery Dance’ and as he himself points out, architecture, ‘Hoover Factory’. Likewise, Mull has been known to write music about architecture, or at least interior design, on his 1973 album, ‘Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room’.  I haven’t heard the album so I can’t vouch for its rug cutting qualities, but if these two can make music about writing, dancing and even architecture, who are they to draw such parallels and scoff at people who write about music?

Not only that, but in 1978 Talking Heads recorded an album called ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food’ that was actually very danceable, so while a temple might not get me twerking, or a bungalow boogying, I’m not sure their correlation carries much weight.

I go to lots of gigs in Melbourne, both local and international acts, and for the past couple of years I’ve been taking notes and writing about the shows – the sounds and the singers, the moshing and the merch, ticket prices and tape loops, the punters and the price of drinks.

I’ve seen bands in pubs, town halls, convents, convention centres, cinemas, street corners, markets, vineyards, the zoo, art galleries, amphitheatres, town halls, reception rooms, football stadiums, tennis courts and even, on very rare occasions, concert halls. The hills may not be alive with music, but the architecture sure is, and even if you can’t dance about architecture, as Messrs Costello and Mull assert, you can sure dance inside it (unless you’re upstairs at The Palais where there is strict enforcement of the ‘no dancing’ policy – an edict that provides very little comfort for those sitting under the lip of the Dress Circle).

Among the many plaudits Melbourne awards itself – sporting and cultural capital of Australia, cuisine capital, world’s most liveable city – we also boast of being the music capital of Australia. I suspect we’re also in the running for the most boastful capital. Our claim to being the music capital is supported by data on the number of live music venues operating and the number of people employed in them, the number of live performances per week and the amount of money spent by Melburnians on tickets – a sizeable proportion of which is mine. In 2014 and 2015, I spent approximately $3000 on tickets, and that’s not including credit card surcharges, booking fees and handling charges.

That may seem like a lot of discretionary spending, but I make up for it through careful thriftiness in other areas, like food and shelter. Besides, I’ve seen some magnificent performances during this period – some of the best of which are St Vincent at Howler, Adalita at the Northcote Social Club and Tame Impala at the Myer Music Bowl.

I’ve seen big ticket arena acts like AC-DC, Ed Sheeran and Kanye West; up and coming local acts like Teeth & Tongue, Totally Mild and Big Scary; old bands reuniting, The Sports, The Pop Group and blur; indie hipsters Courtney Barnett, Vampire Weekend and The National, and a few of my favourites; Bob Dylan, Nick Cave and The Fall.

During the period I’ve been tracking my musical adventures, big music news has continued to break; the tragic death of David Bowie, Kate Bush’s return to the stage after 40 years, and the performance by Katy Perry’s dancer, ‘left shark’ at Super Bowl XLIX.  Plus Kanye West released arguably the greatest album of all time. Well, he argued it at least.

Australian artists have also made news; there was the rise and rise of Courtney Barnett, the death of Doc Neeson, and Rolf Harris gaoled in the UK for indecent sexual assault against young girls and women – turns out Rolf was more rock ‘n’ roll than we gave him credit for.

The way we listen to music continues to change – downloading is out and streaming is in. CDs are out and vinyl is back in. iPods are out, made redundant by smartphones and big headphone cans are back in – you get on a tram now and it looks like everyone is on their way to work on an airport tarmac. I was in Thornbury Records recently and they were even selling cassettes! As in newly manufactured ones. As a child of the 1970s, I can vouch that cassettes are by far the least satisfying musical platform you’ll ever experience – in both sound quality and convenience. In fact they’re not so much a platform as a precarious ledge. The idea of a bearded hipster dude surrounded by all of his sleek, shiny Apple products spooling a thread of tape around an HB pencil to get it back into the case tells me that the tech bubble has burst.  

The change in formats has also brought about a change in the lexicon. Singles and albums are no longer ‘released’ but ‘dropped’ – which I suppose, if you think about it in relation to letting go of a ball, means pretty much the same thing. Music is no longer played, but streamed and when working together, artists no longer ‘vs’ or even collaborate, but simply ‘collab’.

The most notable change over the past few years has been the sheer number of artists touring Australia. Some of this is due to the festival circuit that brings more bands out to Australia, some of it is due to our summer coinciding with the northern hemisphere winter, but the major reason why so many more bands are coming out, according to conventional wisdom at least, is that due to widespread illegal downloading and stingy royalty payments from streaming services, artists no longer reap the same fortunes from recordings as they once did. So basically they have to work for a living.  

Which is great for those of us who like to go to live shows. I‘ve always loved the live experience, and when I was young I liked being right up the front. The advent of vigorous, verging on violent, moshing ended that, but I still love to be as close as possible – except at The Forum where the sound up the front is terrible.

The appeal for me, as David Byrne writes in ‘How Music Works’ is that ‘performance is ephemeral…it’s happening in front of you, and in a couple of hours it won’t be there anymore. You can’t press a button and experience it again…that’s part of the excitement.’ Which might explain why, except for a few rare exceptions, live albums aren’t worth listening to – the moment has passed. As Byrne says, ‘you simply have to be there.’

In fact the very first concert I paid my own money to see was Talking Heads’ ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food’ tour at Dallas Brooks Hall in 1979. I was just 15 years old and I went with my friends Mark and Jenny, and we were chaperoned by Jenny’s older brother Ross, who lived nearby in Fitzroy. It took a lot of convincing, and quite possibly a fair bit of sulking, to get my parents to agree to let me go. Not because of Talking Heads or being out late, but because the trip involved staying overnight at Ross’ apartment in Gertrude Street.

In 1979 Gertrude Street wasn’t the trendy, gentrified hipster haunt lined with quirky boutiques that it is today. It wasn’t even shabby chic – it was just shabby and was the sort of place cited when police were investigating a grizzly murder.

At the show I remember Ross pointing out a ramshackle bunch of blokes who he identified as local band The Boys Next Door. The defining moment of the night came during Psycho Killer, when a heavy booted punk strode up the centre aisle and plunged a large hunting knife into the floorboards of the stage. David Byrne, who at that stage of his career was a far shyer performer than the big-suited extrovert the world would later come to know. Up until that point he had barely ventured toward the front of the stage, and he beat an immediate retreat to the relative safety of the drum kit. It may have been one of the moments Byrne wishes he wasn’t there.

In any case, I’ve loved live gigs ever since and have seen many of my musical heroes swing through Melbourne over the past 30 years or so, and some, such as Nick Cave, even emerge through the Melbourne live scene.

Following at semi regular intervals are my articles about these shows – some from gigs recently experienced and some from the archives. I won’t post them in chronological order; rather, I’ll assemble them as a performer might a setlist. They are not so much reviews as records of nights out, odes to sore feet, aching backs, ringing ears, overpriced drinks and last trams home.  

Rock on!