RADIO BIRDMAN
Friday, May 31 2002
@ The Prince of Wales Hotel, Melbourne
WORDS AND PICTURES by JOHN McPHARLIN
After last night's show, I came away with the distinct impression that the Melbourne
crowds aren't quite as feverish as the Brisbane crowds. By the end of tonight's
show, that impression had been completely (and forcibly) dispelled.
Maybe it's because the Prince of Wales has a reputation as a punk venue or maybe it's because the Friday show simply attracted more arseholes determined to get out of their heads irrespective of who the band was (compared with the previous night, which was more one for the true believers, given that most punters would still have had to drag themselves off to work the following morning), but whatever the reason, the audience went completely apeshit. The band were unfazed. In fact, they responded by turning everything up a notch.
Opening band for the evening was the Greasy Hawaiians, playing a variety of innocuous instrumental surf music (though frankly "Aloha Steve and Danno" is about as close to surf music as I generally choose to get), and Hoss who I missed on their recent trip up to Sydney and who did not disappoint now that I've finally gotten to see them. The crowd for the Greasy Hawaiians was miniscule, but increased considerably while Hoss was playing.
Not surprisingly, all of these Birdman shows have been attracting lots of older fans to attend what is clearly their first live show in years. On a heartening note, they've also been attracting a lot of younger fans, who were too young to have seen the band in its original incarnation. On the Divine Rites email list, the inimitable Trashcan Betty even admitted that she was too young to have seen the band during its previous reunion tour in the mid '90s.
While it wasn't a completely aged and decrepit audience tonight, there was certainly a much higher representation of the geezer demographic, many of whom seemed to be sipping surreptitiously from small bottles of spirits. Is there something smaller than a quarter size bottle? These were all palm size, ideal for swigging from discretely without drawing unwanted attention from the hotel staff. Ominously all of these punters seemed to get though their bottles during the equipment changeover after Hoss finished. The balding guy near me, who between sips was grooving to the recorded sounds coming over the PA, moving his head from side to side slowly but expansively (as if he still had a vast mane of hair to wave around), was clearly off in a world of his own and more than ready to rage against the dying of the light one last time.
Strangely
there was no crash bar at the front of the stage to keep such rabid punters
at bay, the stage instead being fronted by a row of crotch high boxes which
turned out to be speaker cabinets facing outwards into the audience. I was initially
alarmed by this realisation, wondering just how fuckin' loud it was gonna be
standing right in front of them, but I needn't have worried. Once the band got
going and the crowd had pushed up to the foot of the stage, so that those of
us right at the front of the crowd had our private parts practically nestled
inside a speaker cone, you couldn't hear a thing (at least not out of those
speakers), although I could still feel the full force of the air being shoved
against my genitals by the speakers (and the thought occurs to me now that this
may mean that I have left it too late to have children).
So the band came on and the audience went off. Almost immediately I had to put up with some dickhead trying to launch himself into the air by grabbing my shoulder and leveraging himself above my head. Aside from the general annoyance factor (or rather, make that the extreme annoyance factor), this made it impossible to take a decent photograph (and the Lord knows how hard I find that, even under the best of conditions). What could be worse? Well, having some moron trying to arse fuck me for a start. Surely the gay community has come far enough in the last thirty or forty years for people who lean that way to be able to find others of their persuasion without having to rub and thrust themselves against the arses of complete (and unwilling) strangers?
What is it about a mosh that causes the intelligence of each mosher to be divided by the total number of other moshers? I mean, most of these clowns aren't too bright to begin with, so when you take an already low I.Q. and divide it by forty or fifty, you're left with barely enough brainpower to drive an earthworm. Strangely for a pub with such an extensive punk history, no one had had the foresight to station more than two bouncers anywhere near the front of the stage and while they tried valiantly to maintain some decorum and cull out the worst offenders, they were fighting a losing battle right from the beginning, with the crowd surfers and stage divers running riot for most of the night.
Despite such unwanted and unnecessary distractions, this was the best Birdman show yet. The band was positively on fire for the whole night. Having started with three banners at the beginning of the tour (a big one behind the drum kit and two smaller ones, one hanging from Pip Hoyle's keyboard and the other covering Deniz Tek's amp) they were down to just the big one tonight. While it was comforting to see those banners, a seemingly direct link back to the glory days of the seventies, once the band started playing, the glory days were right now.
Aside from "I-94" being "promoted" up out of the second encore into the main set, the setlist was consistent with previous shows, "Snake", "455 SD" and "Breaks My Heart" making it into the starting line up this time, while "Murder City Nights" and "Crying Sun" sat this one out on the reserves bench. However, if last night's show was a speeding express train, then tonight was the siege of Stalingrad with the band defending its ground and its legend unequivocally - against all comers, be they stage divers and other related retards, curious bystanders who had never seen the band before but were drawn by the promise of the myth, cynical journos out on a freebie, condescending industry types also on a freebie or any other ill bred barbarian at the gates of one of rock's greatest edifices.
Whenever a band reforms after a long period in abeyance, some punters will always rush to claim that it's just like it was in the halcyon days of yore, while others will be as quick to say that it's not like it was, that it never could be and that the legend has been tarnished irreparably just by trying to revive the magic. This is regardless of how the band actually performs. Personally, I just like to go out and see bands. Selfishly, I don't care who or what they once were, only what they can do for me now. Tonight Radio Birdman rocked me as hard as anyone ever has and even some shithead trying to slip his dick into my back pocket can't spoil it.
9/10
