Jen Cloher - 27 November 2015

Jen Cloher

The Thin White Ukes

(supporting Robert Forster)

Thornbury Theatre

Friday 27 November 2015

$35

Go Betweens

I was with my friend John for a sold out Robert Forster gig at The Thornbury Theatre. We’d arrived in time for the support act, Jen Cloher whose most recent album, In Blood Memory, is startlingly good. I say ‘startlingly’ because it represents a stark change in direction for her.

Her previous albums; ‘Dead Wood Falls’ and ‘Hidden Hands’, tended to the folky singer-songwriter school, whereas In Blood Memory has a tougher, minimalist rock sound that suits her laconic delivery and emboldens the material. I had seen her perform live only once, just a month or so previous, as part of the Melbourne Festival’s tribute to Patti Smith’s Horses album, so I was keen to hear her playing her own material, especially given I was going to be there anyway.

The Thin White Ukes

As we entered the Thin White Ukes were playing. They came more or less as advertised – a woman and two men playing David Bowie songs on ukuleles. The only question mark might be the relative thinness of one of the men, but relative to Bowie, no one is thin, so to criticise them on this basis would just be quibbling. They worked through a selection of Bowie classics – The Man Who Sold The World, Starman, Golden Years and Ashes to Ashes with surprising conviction, even élan. The minimal accompaniment highlighted the inherent musicality of the songs.

They even embarked on Station to Station, the song that contains the eponymous reference to ‘the return of the thin white duke’, but rather than giving us the full 10 minute feedback drenched sonic extravaganzas, complete with steam train noises, they morphed it into the somewhat more sing-a-longable Let’s Dance. John was wanting to shout out for Art Decade or Warszawa, a couple of Bowie and Eno’s brooding electronic instrumental experiments from Low, but was only prevented from doing do out of concern they might actually attempt them.

It was refreshing to hear Bowie played with such a sense of fun. These were among the most refreshing Bowie covers I’d heard since Seu Jorge popped up in The Life Aquatic singing Rebel Rebel in Portugese.

Jen Cloher

I was a little bit disappointed that Jen Cloher played a solo acoustic guitar set without her band, but I suppose she was the support act for this gig, so you can understand why the stage crew only wanted to set up one set of amps and one drum kit. Besides the bulk of her band were probably in Sydney with Courtney Barnett at the ARIAs.

Nevertheless she gave an exuberant performance. She opened with one of her early songs, Rain, and then played Mount Beauty, the opening track from In Blood Memory, which she said was about a stalker – having one or being one I’m not sure.

Cloher was a warm and generous performer, giving credit to those who have inspired her, including Robert Forster, and she played a Gillian Welch song to celebrate the forthcoming tour by Welch and Dave Rawlings. She didn’t mention it as such, but her jet black hair style was also a sort of tribute to either Joan Jet or Noel Fielding.

She introduced songs with just enough context, telling us that Mother’s Desk is about the feeling of emptiness she felt upon the death of her mother.

The rest of the set featured songs from In Blood Memory, including Kamikaze Origami and David Bowie Eyes, just to continue the theme established by the Ukes. She invited The Thin White Ukes to join her on stage to perform Needle in the Hay, that she introduced as a split 7-inch single with “a young up and coming performer called Courtney Barnett who you might hear of one day.” Given that Barnett, Cloher’s partner, had swept the previous night’s ARIA awards, her comment received the requisite titter from the audience.  

The set concluded with a great version of Name In Lights, and even though it was Robert Forster’s name in lights on this occasion, Cloher’s name glowed faintly alongside it. Between sets we went and said hello at the merch stand and John bought a copy of In Blood Memory.

Set list

Rain

Mount Beauty

Gillian Welch cover

Mother’s desk

David Bowie Eyes

Kamikaze Origami

Needle in the Hay

Name in Lights

Robert Forster - 12 March 2016

Robert Forster

The Toff in Town, Melbourne

Saturday 12 March 2016

$40

I Love Robert Forster And I Always Have

There’s a song on Robert Forster’s new album, Songs To Play, called I Love Myself and I Always Have. As the second last song on the album, it is perhaps the exception that proves the second of his rules (from the 10 rules of rock and roll) that ‘the second last song on every album is the weakest’. If there are any weak songs on Songs To Play, then this isn’t it.

At an in-store launch of the album at Readings book shop in Carlton last October, Forster revealed that the genesis of this song was when his email broke down and to re-generate it he needed to send himself an email, but rather than simply send and email with “test” or a series of key strokes, he actually wrote himself a loving missive. When his wife later saw this, she observed that he really did have a good opinion of himself. From here he developed the song, for which he employed, he said, a favourite old trick of using a humorous title to mask a reasonably serious song.

The song might be about self-esteem, being true to yourself or a simple comment on onanism, but the general sentiment is one I share – I Iove Robert Forster and I always have.

Ever since I was 16 and sneaking in underage to Go Betweens gigs on Monday nights at The Tiger Lounge in Richmond, I’ve followed Forster’s career. When The Go Betweens split in the late 80s, I followed Robert Forster’s solo career more closely than Grant McLennan’s. Of the two, I preferred Forster’s left of centre approach, angular melodies and his lyrics that mixed the poetic with the prosaic, and the flippant with the fervent. I also responded to his sense of showmanship and his literary demeanour – I could easily picture him in Paris in the 1930s, sipping absinthe with Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust. This might say more about my pretentiousness than anything to do with him, but it is nevertheless symbolic of the esteem in which I’ve always held him.

I’ve been seeing Robert Forster perform for 35 years with both The Go Betweens and solo at numerous venues across Melbourne; the Central Club in Richmond, The Club in Collingwood, The Seaview Ballroom in St Kilda, The Exford Hotel in the city, Chaser’s nightclub in South Yarra, Melbourne University in Parkville, The Ferntree Gully Hotel in Ferntree Gully, Festival Hall in North Melbourne supporting REM, the Continental Café in Greville St Prahran, the Dan O Connell in South Melbourne, the Toff in Town in the city, the Thornbury Theatre, the Old Greek Theatre in Richmond and numerous other venues long closed down and forgotten. Somewhere in a cupboard, rolled up with old posters, I have a set list I pilfered from a gig at The Club around the Spring Hill Fair era.

From an earnest, nervy performer in The Tiger Lounge days prior to the release of their first album, Send Me a Lullaby, he gradually developed into a loquacious and extroverted performer. By the time Tallulah was released in 1987, he had long, peroxide blond hair and was returning to the stage for encores wearing dresses – full-length ball gowns and makeup. The song Draining The Pool For You was usually his cue for putting his guitar aside and embarking on slick, snake hip dancing and vocal extemporising.

At the Central Club in Richmond, the dressing room was upstairs. Most performers would finish their set and wait in the wings while the audience dispersed, rather than shouting an exhilarated “Goodnight!” followed by lots of “Excuse me’s” as they pushed through the crowd to get to the stairs. Not Forster. He concluded an encore one night with a commanding, even lordly gesture for the crowd to part, and as the rest of the band continued playing, Forster strode imperiously through the channel that opened up, like Moses through the Red Sea, and made his way unimpeded to the stairs and dressing room.

He is always entertaining. My friend John and I had seen him play at The Thornbury Theatre in November to support the new album, and when this show was announced to coincide with his visit to the Port Fairy Folk Festival, we decided to come along again.

The Toff in Town is an intimate little venue that hosts cabaret, music acts, comedy and theatre. It is located in Curtain House, an art nouveau building on Swanston Street that is also home to Metropolis bookshop, niche fashion boutiques, Cookie Bar and Thai restaurant and a rooftop cinema. We met our friend Manny in Cookie Bar, on the level below, for a pre-show drink.  

When the curtain parted the band was already on stage playing Learn To Burn, the opening track from Songs To Play. The band consisted of the John Steel Singers’ Scott Bromiley and Luke McDonald on guitars, bass and keyboards plus Chris O’Neill on drums and Forster’s wife Karin Baumler on violin.

At that Readings in-store appearance, Forster had said that Learn To Burn has a rockier edge and that when he wrote it, he did so as a Tom Verlaine type riff, played on the lower strings which was different to his normal method. It’s a great song and a suitable opener to this gig.

After the lyrical Let Me Imagine You, Forster introduced the group saying, “We’re from Brisbane and we’re a young band playing a new kind of folk rock” before they launched into I’m So Happy For You, also from the latest album. 

I was at the bar for Surfing Magazines, which he dedicated to the lapping waves of Port Fairy, but was back in my spot just a few people deep for the old Go Betweens number, Head Full of Steam. This set most of the audience into a nostalgic sway. Without his baseball cap I couldn’t be sure, but the bloke next to me looked a little like Glenn Bennie, the guitarist from Underground Lovers, who I had seen just the night before.

The band was tight and crisp throughout, providing just the right light touch for the material. Highlights included Songwriters on the Run, which he introduced by saying he’d played it at a panel show that morning at Port Fairy where it had absolutely bombed.

Also Finding You, originally sung by Grant McLennan on the Go Betweens’ Oceans Apart album, and Heart Out To Tender from his first solo album. For this song he forsook the guitar, took the mike from the stand and made earnest eye contact with every member of the audience as he told his tale about looking for love.

The set concluded with one of the best songs from the latest album, A Poet Walks and the rollicking Go Betweens song Here Comes a City, also from Ocean’s Apart, about a train ride through Germany.

The first song of the encore was Part Company that Forster and wife Karin Baumler performed as a duet with guitar and violin. The rest of the band returned to the stage for Make Her Day and a sprightly version of Spring Rain. At the Thornbury Theatre show a few months previous Forster had said that he always tries to include in the set a song with the word ‘rain’ in the title, and there is perhaps no better one than this classic 1986 Go Betweens song.

The full band returned for one final track, the marvellous Danger in the Past, to close out another fabulous Forster show.

Looking back, there is not a lot of danger in my own past, but there is an inordinate amount of time spent listening to Robert Forster. I couldn’t have been in safer hands.

Setlist

Learn To Burn

Let Me Imagine You

I’m So Happy For You

Surfing Magazines

Head Full of Steam

Born To a Family

Disaster In Motion

Songwriters on the Run

Finding You

Heart Out To Tender

I Can Do

I Love Myself and I Always Have

A Poet Walks

Here Comes a City

- - - - - - -

Part Company

Make Her Day

Spring Rain

- - - - - -

Danger in the Past

Encore: I’m not necessarily one for meeting my heroes, but I felt pretty safe with Robert Forster when I joined the signing queue at the Readings in-store appearance. I was one of those annoying people with multiple items for him to sign – the new album on vinyl that I bought on the night, as well as my copy of The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll and a CD version of my favourite Go Betweens album, Before Hollywood. Even then I thought I was keeping things to a minimum, and considered it a sign of maturity that I didn’t get him to sign my left breast. I can’t promise I’d play it quite so cool if armed with a permanent marker in the presence of PJ Harvey or FKA Twigs, but hey, I’m only human.

Underground Lovers - 11 March 2016

Underground Lovers

Gasometer Hotel, Collingwood

Friday 11 March 2016

$25

Going Underground

Vincent Giarusso dreaming it down

By the time my friend Ralph texted me to see if I wanted to catch Alpine, who were playing for free at the Moomba festival in the city, I was already sitting in The Gasometer Hotel with my brother Graeme waiting for the Underground Lovers to come on stage. As it happened we’d made the right decision not to go to see Alpine because later that night a youth gang known as Apex ignited a riot at the city’s Moomba festivities.

To be fair, it’s unlikely that Alpine’s shiny pop stylings fomented any of the trouble – I certainly didn’t see anyone wearing hot pants on the footage shown on the news – but then the pinnacle or peak of an alpine area is known as the apex, so you just never know - perhaps its the nickname their fans give themselves. Besides, after seeing both Sleater-Kinney and the Jesus and Mary Chain during the past week, I thought I might as well cap off the week with yet another reformed band from the 90s.

Underground Lovers were one of the few new Melbourne bands I used to go and see in the early 90s. All the other Australian acts I followed at the time – Ed Kuepper, Nick Cave, Died Pretty, Dave Graney, Tex Perkins, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, Dave McComb, Paul Kelly etc – had basically just hung around from the 1980s. Like me really. It’s not that there weren’t any good new bands back then, I just didn’t make much effort to find out about them. 

Part of the initial appeal of Underground Lovers was their name, incorporating as it does the names of two legendary US proto-punk bands –The Velvet Underground and the Modern Lovers. You wonder if they ever considered Modern Velvet?

The other part of course was the sound, particularly the layered, reverberating chords of Glenn Bennie’s guitar and the distinctive vocals of Vincent Giarusso. The Lovers sounded like a blend of Happy Mondays and New Order with a touch of Sonic Youth’s guitar approach, all filtered through an Australian prism. 

The sound evolved with each album, incorporating more experimental elements as well as dance beats. Plus they were always great live. I don’t know if it’s just that my brother Graeme is a fan, but my memory of Underground Lovers gigs is that they were generally beer soaked affairs. I recall a particularly exhilarating gig at The Palace in St Kilda for the Leaves Me Blind album and one at The Armadale Hotel in the mid 90s for the Rushall Station album, as well as numerous shows at pretty much every long lost venue in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

A group of us caught them a few years ago at the Northcote Social Club after they reformed, and John, Graeme and myself were back for this gig that had been advertised as a preview of their forthcoming album, Melbournism.

The Gasometer band room has a retractable roof that was open to the night sky as the band sauntered on stage. So there we were, underground yet looking at the stars. The staircase was crowded, as was the balcony. I saw Dave Graney and Clare Moore in the audience and I think Rob Snarski from the Blackeyed Susans as well (or at least, someone wearing a pork pie hat) – the Underground Lovers don’t play all that often so it is an event when they do.

An ominous bass and keyboard rumble started up just as Bennie gave his guitar an almighty thrash and veered into the riff for Eastside Stories, the brilliant opening track from arguably their best album, Leaves Me Blind. Bennie continued the wall of noise guitar into another track from that album, Got Off On It, which we duly did.

Our dancing became more expansive as the band lifted the tempo with the fiery Can For Now, one of the tracks from Weekend, their comeback album of a couple of years ago. There’s something dense and irresistibly hypnotic about the Lovers in full flight and it is simply impossible to not lose yourself in involuntary movement and incessant swaying. The beers helped as well.

Glenn Bennie - momentarily out of hiding

Giarusso set the scene – head down, his shoulders in a constant rolling motion as he tapped a tambourine and swayed from side to side. But I like watching Bennie. While most lead guitarists pose up front, perhaps pouting while shaking the arm of the guitar over the front rows, Bennie hides up the back near the drummer wearing a baseball cap pulled over his eyes, and already small of stature, he hunches over his guitar like a scientist at a microscope. You almost can’t see him, which appears to be his aim. He might be more at home in a band like Slipknot where he could hide behind a mask. But he is making the most noise out of anyone. He may look like a greengrocer from Vic Market, but he’s a cracking guitarist.

We did get a few of the promised new songs before keyboardist Philippa Nihill delivered I Was Right in her trademark deadpan fashion. I don’t think she’d necessarily be able to pull off a Foo Fighters song at karaoke, which is possibly a good thing, but she adds some light and shade to the Lovers’ sound.

The set concluded with a rollicking version of Au Pair from Weekend. The song has an uptempo 60s spy movie vibe and saw Giaruusso bellowing out the title repeatedly as it built to a raucous conclusion. By then I was quite pissed and was belting it out with him. Happily the band was so loud no one could hear me.

My singing threatened to become a nuisance, however, when they returned for an encore and played one of my favourite UL songs, Dream It Down, a slow, hazy number that is carried along by a beautiful, hypnotic melody.

Philippa Nihill - she was right

A second encore began with Earth Manna and morphed into Las Vegas with its big sing-a-long chorus. They sent us into the night with our ears ringing to the peerless and barreling Promenade, the song that perhaps best encapsulates their sound.

Knowing the Underground Lovers, they won’t play again for another three years, so I’m glad I went along this time. Admittedly I drank so much that my memory of the show remains a little hazy. Likewise the new songs they played – I can’t recall in any detail what they sounded like, but I can look forward to listening to them when the record comes out.

Set list

Eastside Stories

Got Off On It

Can For Now

Feels So Good To Be Free

Every Sign

St Kilda Regret

I Was Right

The Lie That Sets You Free

Country Art Rock

Au Pair

- - - -

Dream It Down

- - - -

Earth Manna/Las Vegas

Promenade

Encore: It was a week of carnage in rock ‘n’ roll. George Martin, the Beatles long-time producer, self-appointed genius of the band and incessant prattler in countless Beatles documentaries, passed away, as did Keith Emerson of prog rockers Emerson, Lake and Palmer – or ELP as they’d be known if they existed today. Locally, singer Jon English and Daddy Cool guitarist Ross Hannaford also died. One of my first musical memories is playing my brother’s Daddy Cool album with the pink cover – my seven year old self couldn’t tell whether or not Ross Hannaford was a good guitarist, but I did know he was the one who wore the helicopter hat.

On a positive note however, Brian Johnson was forced to quit AC-DC on doctor’s orders or risk going deaf. Not that I’m glad he’s ill, but his particular brand of screeching makes Jimmy Barnes sound refined. And if you’ve seen the banks of amps lining the stage at an AC-DC show, the only surprise is that he lasted this long. Unlikely as it seems, with all this going on, news that Anthony Callea was voted out of the jungle on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here barely registered with the music public. However, if nothing else, he’s out just in time as a possible replacement to Johnson in Acca Dacca.

Sleater-Kinney - 10 March 2016

Sleater-Kinney

Ouch My Face

Croxton Park Hotel

Thursday 10 March 2016

$55

It’s The Weather We Love

It was International Women’s Day just a couple of days ago and what better way to celebrate than a Sleater-Kinney gig? Okay, I suppose some pedants may argue that equal pay for women, proportional representation in parliament, more women on boards of ASX 500 companies and freedom from sexual oppression and domestic violence might be more desirable, but failing all of that, three strong women rocking it out loudly at the Croxton is at least something.

This is the second of three sold out nights for Sleater-Kinney and my first time at the Croxton Park Hotel. A well-known venue in the 70s – ‘Rock at the Croc’ was the catch cry – it reopened to bands in late 2015 with The Drones and has some good acts coming up, including The Residents.

The title track from Sleater-Kinney’s latest album, No Cities To Love, declares that it’s not the cities they love, but the weather. Such a sentiment was being tested, however, for this was a wet night in Melbourne, with rain falling for most of the afternoon and into the evening. It didn’t seem to bother the locals, for the outdoor eateries on High Street Thornbury were crowded with diners and people milled about in the rain, unconcerned about getting wet.

Ouch My Face

When I walked in I was hit by a force I had never previously encountered - the sound barrage of Ouch My Face who were belting it out on stage. It was not so much music as a force field of noise. Their sound was explosively loud and had a visceral punch to it that literally set me back a step or two, like a sonic assault. I thought I’d stepped into a warzone. Any veterans in the room might have experienced flashbacks.

The band consisted of just two women on guitars, bass and vocals, and a bloke on drums, although such was the din it sounded like there might have been upwards of a dozen musicians thrumming heavily away. I couldn’t actually get close enough to tell. As it was I had to mime Mountain Goat Steam Ale to the girl behind the bar, a pantomime that tested my thespian reach.

Never, I suspect, has a band operated under a more accurate and evocative moniker, except perhaps Throbbing Gristle. But my face was the least of my problems; I feared mainly for my internal organs. One song called Graveyard the singer dedicated to her amp that had died that day – I suspect she goes through one or two each week.

Despite the physical discomfort they caused, there was something joyously cathartic about their sound and their willingness to make it. And while I have nothing against Dami Im, who was announced this week as Australia’s entrant in Eurovision 2016, I feel we’ve missed an opportunity to make a real impression at Eurovision by not sending Ouch My Face instead.

Sleater–Kinney

The crowd had built during Ouch My Face’s set and it was a long wait to get a drink during the interval. While the expected high quotient of girls with crew-cuts wearing singlets, denim and combat boots were in attendance, it was a largely mixed audience of women and men from diverse age groups.  

I’m only a recent convert to Sleater-Kinney’s particular kind of racket, picking up their album No Cities To Love on the strength of reviews when it came out. Somehow, not only had Sleater-Kinney escaped my attention in the 90s, but so had the entire Riot Grrrl movement!

Now I know that a male in Australia entering his 30s can perhaps be forgiven for not being au fait with neo feminist youth subcultures developing on the other side of the world. It is still surprising however, that I missed the growth of an entire musical genre. In my defence, it isn’t that dissimilar to grunge, fuzzy guitars and shouty vocals, except with women, so I probably just lumped the sounds together. I wasn’t particularly into grunge, although I did like some of it, but what I liked most about it at the time was that you no longer had to iron your shirts. As far as musical movements go, it was a real time saver.

I felt a little bit better about missing Riot Grrrl when I read in Carrie Brownstein’s book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, that Riot Grrrl operated along similar strictures to Fight Club, in that participants were not permitted to talk about it. In fact they had a self-imposed media black ban. So I wasn’t even meant to know about it…phew! It was more a secret sorority than a subculture. In all likelihood, they probably didn’t want to be confused with the Spice Girls’ simultaneous girl power push, which was, let’s face it, more a marketing term to sell merchandise than a proto feminist movement or a musical genre.

There was plenty of love in the room for Sleater-Kinney when they came on stage around 9.30 pm and launched into Price Tag, the opening song from comeback album, No Cities To Love. Carrie Brownstein stood stage left and provided the tough, angular guitar riff while Corin Tucker wailed her way through the lyrical agitprop about the cost of consumerism, and Janet Weiss pummeled the track along with a driving tempo on the drums. There was also a mysterious blond lurking in the shadows on bass guitar, tambourine and possibly a keyboard.

Corin Tucker lets loose her larynx

They followed this with Fangless, in which Brownstein added some vocal contrast in the chorus. The two frontwomen worked very well together. Tucker is a seriously good singer – she has an arresting timbre and brings real intensity to her vocal delivery. She has one of those wailing, shouty voices, but in addition to being powerful, it is surprisingly tuneful. I thought it might grate over the course of 90 minutes, but far from it, she had enough variety and maintained good control of her voice right to the end of the show.

Brownstein bolstered the singing in some of the big anthemic choruses and took the lead vocal on a few tracks, most notably No Cities To Love, A New Wave, and the final song of the encore, Modern Girl. Elsewhere she added an alternative voice within songs, most effectively in Words and Guitar where dual voices sing over each other. On the whole though, it was her guitar playing that cranked the show along. Her angular, jerky movements, high kicks and Townsend-esque windmilling playing arm provided a focal point for the audience, and she was not beyond pursing her lips and pulling the occasional guitar goddess move.

Where Tucker and Brownstein took most of the attention, Janet Weiss anchored the sound with powerful drumming. More than providing the beat, she contributed surging propulsion, adding thrust and impetus to the sound, and even a touch of lilting harmonica on Modern Girl.

It was a very impressive performance, so good that one of the security personnel guarding the entry through to the back stage left his post to ask me the name of the band – I had to type it into his phone.

Carrie Brownstein: modern girl & guitar goddess

Although I knew some of their older material, I was most familiar with the songs from No Cities To Love, so for me the highlights were Bury Our Friends and a soaring rendition of A New Wave. The set however, took in tracks from across their entire career. The concluding quartet of I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, Words and Guitar, Entertain and Jumpers built to a suitably raucous sonic climax. The encore concluded with the sing-a-long folk of Modern Girl.

Sleater-Kinney may insist that there are no cities to love, but they recorded their first album in Melbourne 20 years ago, so we’d like to think we hold some place in their collective heart – even if only for the weather.

Setlist

Price Tag

Fangless

Oh!

Far Away

One More Hour

What’s Mine Is Yours

No Cities To Love

Surface Envy

One Beat

Bury Our Friends

Was it a Lie?

A New Wave

The Fox

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

Words and Guitar

Entertain

Jumpers

- - - - -

Let’s Call It Love

Modern Girl

Source: www.setlist.fm.com

Encore: While SK fans sweated it out at the Croxton, Madonna fans queued in Hosier Lane waiting for Madonna’s one-off club show, Tears of a Clown, at The Forum. It was invite only for fan club members and free, but fans were kept waiting in the rain until after midnight while Madonna rehearsed inside.  Her show was a curious mix of songs, circus tricks, stand-up and even unsworn testimony in her custody battle for her son, Rocco.  

The Jesus and Mary Chain - 7 March 2016

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Alvvays

The Forum

Monday 7 March 2016

$95

Due Reverence

The author in his JAMC merch

Sets of siblings in rock bands do not generally share happy histories. From the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Bee Gees, The Kinks and of course Oasis, fraternal friction tends to be the rule rather than the exception.

Added to this list, somewhere between the Everly brothers and the Gallagher brothers, came the Reid brothers – Jim and William from Scottish band The Jesus and Mary Chain, who were reportedly every bit as fractious as their American and Manchester counterparts, just with more gel in their hair.

Musically, The Jesus and Mary Chain overlaid 60s bubblegum pop melodies with slathers of fizzing, crackling guitar feedback and a disdainful sneering attitude, creating in the process a unique sound.

Michaelangelo reportedly said that ‘every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor is to discover it.’ The Jesus and Mary Chain offer a similar challenge to the listener; buried somewhere within the marble screen of screeching guitar and bass drum thump is a beautiful pop song just waiting to get out, the listener just has to discover it. It is the tension between these two styles that creates the trademark Jesus and Mary Chain sound, and also allows you to simultaneously shimmy and bang your head while listening to them.

This sound was best expressed on their 1985 debut album, Psychocandy, and this tour is ostensibly to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of that landmark release – it’s just taken until the 31^st year to reach Australia.

The first time I saw The Jesus and Mary Chain was also one of the early dates I went on with my now wife, Angela. It was the Darklands tour in late 1987 or early 1988 at The Metro at the top of Bourke Street. At the time Angela was studying performance and classical singing and possessed reasonably refined tastes for someone in their early 20s. Quite aside from the tuneless noise, she was appalled that a band would not only play in such a dense fog – we were only a few metres from the stage and we could barely make them out – but that they would have their backs to the audience for most of the show. Being what I thought of as more savvy, but in reality was probably just that I more susceptible to fashionable tastes, I thought they were brilliant.

Needless to say, Angela didn’t join me when they returned to Australia in the mid 1990s to play The Palace in St Kilda in support of their Stoned and Dethroned album, and nor was she joining me for this gig.

Time has not softened her stance on The Jesus and Mary Chain, which I see as a testament to the power of their artistic vision.

On a side note, I’m beginning to fear for the fate of the Forum. The second JAMC show in Melbourne was at The Palace in St Kilda, which eventually burnt down and is now a car park. The venue for that first show, The Metro, which was subsequently taken over by the team at the Palace, is now an empty shell awaiting destruction. Is it the Palace group who are unlucky or is it possible that the Jesus and Mary Chain bring a curse down on any Melbourne venue at which they play?

Alvvays

This show coincided with the opening night of Virgin Melbourne Fashion Week, so it was important, I felt, to dress with appropriate aplomb. When I go to watch Hawthorn play, I wear brown and gold, so it seemed only right that I should don an all-black ensemble to see The Jesus and Mary Chain. One never really grows out of their Goth tendencies.

Before we got the chance to revel in the louche lolly shop of Psychocandy, however, there was a support set from Canadian popsters, Alvvays – I had arrived too late to see the first act Grinding Eyes.

‘Alvvays’ is apparently pronounced ‘Always’, but why it is not spelt that way I couldn’t say – presumably a cultural reference, joke or generational thing I don’t get. It is, however, in keeping with a recent trend in young bands to use the letter ’v’ in places it would not normally have any business being – Chvrches and Wavves being other examples.

A five-piece band, they play a variant on melodic, jangling guitar pop. Pretty good actually, although the sound was bit trebly where I was standing. I put that down to the mix or The Forum’s uneven acoustics, but the band’s melodies were catchy and the songs skipped along pleasantly.

I later listened to the album and could pick out a couple of the songs they played; Atop a Cake, Adult Diversion and Archie, Marry Me.

Lead singer Molly Rankin was wearing a peach jumpsuit, so she had obviously been alerted to the opening of Fashion Week. At one point she congratulated us on not using our phones at gigs, but perhaps people were just saving their battery for The Jesus and Mary Chain. If so, they would be sorely disappointed, because as the roadies readied the stage for the headline act, the thick Kilburn fog started to blow in to thwart any would be iPhone photographers.

The Jesus and Mary Chain

The Jesus ad Mary Chain - they're in there somewhere

Those with good eyesight could make out in the gloaming the shadowy figures of the JAMC band members walking on stage. I detected the outline of William’s untamed fro. Jim Reid stood in what light there was at the front of the stage and laid out the itinerary – there would be a short set of songs not from Psychocandy, then the band would take a two minute break, and return to play the album in full.

At which point the familiar chug of April Skies started up and we were away. If Alvvays were a bit trebly, the sound people had overcompensated for JAMC who sounded a bit bassy. That’s not such a bad thing for April Skies, and by the time its mid-tempo chug had quickened to the faster chug of Head On, my ears had nearly accustomed. The short opening set included a selection of JAMC evergreen tracks including a euphoric Some Candy Talking and a piercing and clamorous Reverence.

Reverence was infamous upon release for magnificent opening lyrical gambit, “I wanna die like Jesus Christ, I wanna die on a bed of spikes…I wanna die like JFK, I wanna die on a sunny day” delivered in Jim Reid’s distinctive sneer. However, it should also be remembered for its tumultuous marriage of ferocious fuzz guitar with techno dance beats, a combination U2 also successfully employed on Achtung Baby around the same time, just not quite as manically.

In any case, it took us lurching into the break in a tumult of glorious guitar noise, before Jim Reid announced they were off to ‘have a cup of tea’. There was a time when I assumed any food or drink item mentioned in a JAMC song, i.e. ‘candy’, was a drug reference, so I don’t know if the ‘cup of tea’ in question was a metaphor for a traditional rock ‘n’ roll ‘pick me up’, or a sign of their dotage.

Sadly they hadn’t played anything from Stoned and Dethroned, but mercifully, nor had they played anything from Munki.

Before the lights lifted, such as they were, the distinctive opening beat of Just Like Honey signaled the beginning of the Psychocandy set. Molly Rankin from Alvvays stood to the side to add the requisite ‘honeyed’ tones to the title’s refrain – a role filled on one famous occasion by another well-known blond, Scarlett Johanssen.  

Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream famously played drums on Psychocandy, and for all I could tell he was behind the kit for this gig as well. The minimal lighting and a dry ice machine set to max made the stage virtually impenetrable. I could make out a guitarist, bass player and a drummer to round out the brothers’ sound, but if not for Jim’s distinctive vocals and William’s coiffure, it could have been anyone up there.

The band worked methodically through the album in its original order, moving from the lush Just Like Honey to the blistering The Living End and the even more abrasive Taste The Floor. Any thoughts that this was going to be an overly reverential homage to former glories were blown aside by the sheer noise and acerbic barrage of these tracks and In a Hole.

There was minimal break between songs, and as expected, no banter, bar the occasional ‘thank you’ with Jim Reid raising a hand in acknowledgement to the crowd.

There was a core group of moshers down the front and by the time we moved into ‘side 2’ and Never Understand, the security team were handing out bottles of water to anyone who raised their arm. I was up near the mixing desk with lots of other middle-aged types, and appreciated the break afforded us by the relatively quiet strum and slow plod of Sowing Seeds. Any relief was short-lived however, with a blast of William Reid’s industrial chainsaw guitar on My Little Undergound.

As on the record, You Trip Me Up was a masterpiece of melody amid the maelstrom, while closing track It’s So Hard was extended into a ten-minute vortex of spiky feedback and reverb. What better way to finish.

There was no encore; in a way they’d played it at the beginning of the show, but really, where do you go after Psychocandy? Other than Darklands of course, and it is the 30^th anniversary of that album next year. Already looking forward to it.

Setlist

April Skies

Head On

Blues From a Gun

Some Candy Talking

Nine Million Rainy Days

Between Planets

Reverence

- - - - - - - - - -

Just Like Honey

The Living End

Taste the Floor

The Hardest Walk

Cut Dead

In a Hole

Taste of Cindy

Never Understand

Inside Me

Sowing Seeds

My Little underground

You Trip Me Up

Something’s Wrong

It’s So Hard

Encore – The blow-ups between brothers in bands is well documented – only Bros, the Finns of Split Enz and the Youngs of AC-DC seem immune. But what of sisters? There seem to be very few stories of sisterly spats or sororal fallout. Is this because unlike brothers, sisters can operate together artistically in sibling harmony? Or do they just keep their fights to themselves? Or even more bizarre, resolve them?

There have been a number of bands with sisters; The Breeders, The Coors, All Saints, Haim, Heart, The Bangles, Stonefield, Vika and Linda Bull, the Webb Sisters, Tegan and Sara, to say nothing of The Andrews Sisters, The Pointer Sisters, Sister Sledge et al. (The Scissor Sisters and Twisted Sister are not included; the former doesn’t contain any siblings and the latter doesn’t even contain any females – just men in drag.)

There is surprisingly little scuttlebutt and gossip from the sisterhood. Perhaps it just that the music press doesn’t cover female bands or musicians with the same avid attention as their male counterparts. So come on girls, a couple of punches thrown in public, some strategic hair pulling or sniping in the press and your band could be headed for legendary status.