X
Nunchukka Superfly
Box Freezer Romance
@ Newtown RSL
Saturday, June 23, 2001WORDS: John McPharlin
PICTURES: John McPharlin, The BarmanThe doors opened at 8pm and there were no advance bookings, so I couldn't afford to be too late just in case the natives of Newtown staged an early stampede and packed the place out. I got there not much after 8:30 but, as I should have expected, there was only a sparse crowd and nothing was happening yet. I got myself a drink and prepared to lounge about for a while.
One of the drawbacks of getting to a venue too early is that you can end up doing quite a lot of loitering, just waiting for something to happen (though if you are forced to wait long enough, even the roadies' aimless meanderings to and fro' across the stage eventually become vaguely entertaining).
Another drawback of arriving too early is that the ink pad for the stamp they use on your wrist (to prove that you've paid) has just been freshly charged up for the night. I wasn't even halfway through my first beer when I noticed that the stamp on the wrist of my drinking hand was now just a shapeless splodge and I'd got ink all over the front of my shirt. Serves me right for coming anywhere near Newtown (the goth, post-punk and body-piercing hub of Australia) wearing anything other than deep black.
First band up was the unknown (at least to me, though they appeared to have several friends in the audience) Box Freezer Romance. Kitchen Sink Flirtation might be a better name for them, as their repertoire was apparently undecided about where its priorities lay and compensated by mixing in snatches of almost every conceivable style and musical subgenre from the last half of the last century (though staying mercifully light on rap, I must say in their favour); the music often leaving in its wake the impression that several decades had just streaked past, sometimes waving their privates in my face as they went by, presumably in a hurry to be somewhere else.
It was a confused concoction that just didn't jell for me at all, though it was studded with occasional moments of interest. Every time I'd get to thinking, "Well there goes 40 minutes of my life that I'll never get back again", they'd veer into something which had the outline of an interesting melody and start to win me over, before the piano veered off over a cliff or the saxophone meandered off into an artist's impression of a walrus being tortured by a gang of malevolent trolls and they'd lost me again. Still what do I know? Maybe one day they'll be really famous and I'll have to adjust this review to say how I spotted their potential right from the very beginning; after all, that tactic's worked for plenty of other reviewers.
After the inevitable break, they were followed by those kings of the big noise, Nunchukka Superfly. Being two thirds of the Hard Ons, I think at first many punters had them pegged as merely the Hard Ons with a different drummer sitting in. I'll plead guilty to a bit of that as well, but it ain't the case, as everybody has had to acknowledge the moment they have heard them play, either by actually going to a venue where they are performing or simply by being anywhere within a two kilometre radius of ground zero when the performance starts. The first time I saw them they instantly got my vote for "band most likely to make your ears bleed". Since then they've mellowed a little, lowered the volume ever so slightly (but they are still really fuckin' loud) and continued to refine the interesting music that they are making, in the process causing both their influences and their originality to become self-evident.
Their style has been described most often as garage/psych or hardcore, but that's "garage" more in the sense that a garage was where Al Capone's boys lined up Bugs Moran's gang against the wall and went full throttle on their machine guns (ah, the old Chicago typewriter!) in what later became known as the Saint Valentine's Day massacre (listen carefully to Nunchukka Superfly when they play and you can still hear the sound of hot lead being pumped into those bootleggers' bodies even now) and "psych" as in psychosis, rather than psychedelic. "Hardcore" doesn't apply since, to me, that term implies music which is both harsh and unsubtle, neither of which is a fair description, though their sound certainly is monumentally aggressive and far removed from the pop/punk purveyed by the Hard Ons.
As Nunchukka Superfly and X are both trios, their two sets make for some interesting comparisons. In NS, Ray Ahn and Joel Ellis (bass & drums respectively) provide the platform upon which guitarist/vocalist Peter Black writhes in an apparent combination of ecstasy and torment (Black himself has described it as "standing in the eye of a hurricane waiting to be crushed"); in X, it's bassist Ian Rilen who provides the bulk of the histrionics, while Steve Lucas is the rocky shore against which Rilen's relentless waves break and Cathy Green sits protected above the high water mark inside the fortified stockade of her drum kit and riser.
Tonight's set by NS is a typically energetic workout covering both their first album (or EP, depending on whether you settled for the 7 track, budget priced release in the stores or went for the full 10 track release available in Australia only from the Citadel website) and their very recently released second album (or first album, depending on whether... etc, etc). At times it brings to mind the vision of Can having a shot at a Black Sabbath tribute; at other times it sounds like the MC5 trying to infiltrate the Montreux Jazz festival. It's music that's not easy to digest quickly; you have to chew it for a while first.
Then finally we arrived at the place where X marked the spot. Is Ian Rilen Mr Rock'n'Roll or wot? Their last headlining reunion show was at the Annandale back in 1998 (with Louis Tillett as the support act, not a bad night's entertainment all round!), but the stage there was so small they were jammed in together cheek by jowl the whole night with minimal room to move (and it was shoulder to shoulder and pretty damn oppressive down in the crowd as well, let me tell you).
Tonight the Newtown Rissole offered them a vastly superior podium and Ian Rilen fuckin' owned just about every square inch of it. While Cathy Green was
confined behind her drum kit and Steve Lucas was largely constrained by his vocal duties to stay in the one spot in front of the microphone, Rilen roamed the stage incessantly. Roamed, prowled, paced, stalked, strode, strutted, swaggered, sashayed once or twice and even pranced on occasion, simultaneously anchoring the entire onslaught to the ground with his brutal bass lines and at the same time challenging it to lift up and take wing. He neither ambled, nor did he stroll, but what's the name for that thing that ballerinas do when they get right up on their toes? Whatever it is, he did some of
that too, at least to the extent that you can do it in hand-tooled leather boots. Just in case you don't believe me, I've got almost a full reel of blurred photographs to prove it (e.g. far more fuzzy, out of focus photographs than is usual, even for me). This man is rarely still and never stagnant; physically or musically.
And talk about attitude: I reckon Ian Rilen has got more rock attitood than Keith Richards, Johnny Thunders and the entire line up of the Hellacopters (past and present) combined. Even if you didn't know that he was the guy who co-founded Rose Tattoo,
wrote their early hit "Bad Boy For Love" and then quit because he thought that having hit singles meant they were going soft, this show would have left you in no doubt that he is The Man and X is The Real Shit.
I don't know if they were chucking on a bit of a star turn before they started or if there was some real technical reason behind the scenes for the delay, but they kept us waiting for a considerable time after everything looked completely ready to go on stage. However when they finally appeared all was forgiven immediately and the crowd flowed
forward to the foot of the stage, as if consummating some long promised tryst. Amongst the many predictable pearls from their repertoire, including "Dipstick", "Movin' On" and "All Over Now", for me two musical high points dominated the night's extravaganza.
The first was the inevitable trip down to "El Salvador" (yep, those guerillas are still having fun down there) which was then followed by something that might owe a debt somewhere in its distant past to "Mother", but now seemed to be exploring areas of Oedipal anguish and loss unimagined of
in Mr Lennon's original outline. During this a woman sprang up onto the stage from out of the crowd and appropriated Ian Rilen's mike. However I couldn't hear a word she was singing, so either the soundman had turned that mike down or else it was too tightly directional and she wasn't singing into it from the right angle. As she left the stage at the end of the song, she said to those at the front of the crowd, "I've always wanted to do that", but she didn't make it clear whether she just meant getting up on stage generally or whether it was specifically joining X on stage that floated her boat for her.
Either way, she was well out to sea by the time the song ended.
The other peak as far as I was concerned was the searing rendition of "Hate City" which closed the main part of the set.
Though placid and worshipful to begin with, the crowd had grown increasingly agitated as the set unfolded, with a mosh germinating slowly from the seeds sown by a couple of exhibitionists into an active organism in its own right. Stage diving even began to occur, contrary to the explicit signs posted everywhere around the stage. Surprisingly there seemed
to be only a skeleton sentinel staff (i.e. bouncers) on hand and no move was made to scotch this senseless, lemmingesque ritual.
One young woman dancing close to me picked the wrong moment to turn her attention away from the stage, as she was then completely unaware of the diver hurtling headlong towards her until they connected, she coming off decidedly second best as he cleaned the floor with her comprehensively. Although she'd managed to drag herself back up onto her feet in time for the encores, she didn't seem to have any interest in dancing any more.
Still, she had been jostling me not long before, so there was a poetic symmetry to her misfortune; it's moments like that which make me wonder whether perhaps there may be a God after all. "Hate City" provided the perfect soundtrack to it all.
Now at long last the U.S.A. beckons and fuck me, X can still deliver the goods exactly as promised in the prospectus. Those Yanks don't know what they're in for.- John McPharlin
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