Rob Younger at The Factory Theatre. Shona Ross photo.
Radio Birdman + Mick Medew & The Mesmerisers + East Coast Low Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle, NSW Friday, June 21, 2019
Radio Birdman + Mick Medew & The Mesmerisers + The Dark Clouds Factory Theatre, Marrickville, NSW Saturday, June 22, 2019
The Aints! + Colonel Kramer & The Eamon Dilworth One Man Brass Ensemble Factory Theatre, Marrickville, NSW Friday, June 28, 2019
Your own legacy is a hard act to follow. This is a tale of two bands.
On one hand you have Radio Birdman, a thoroughly re-tooled and different beast to its previous incarnations and still carrying a substantial reputation. They’re a prime reason why The I-94 Bar exists.
On the other, you have The Aints!, who are led by foundation Saints member Ed Kuepper and armed with a setlist partly planted in that band’s past, with the balance comprising songs that were written for the old band but never recorded.
The Schizophonics Grinding Eyes Sk8tergrrrl Marrickville Bowling Club Thursday, June 6, 2019 Photos by Tom Wilkinson
This gig was a bit of a big deal for Sydney’s spluttering live rock and roll scene. There’s an online buzz on San Diego’s Schizophonics, driven by their livewire videos and their reputation for spectacular shows. The Harbour City, however, was absent from their original travel plans.
A tour through New Zealand was being followed by just one Australian show - at The Tote Hotel in Collingwood, Melbourne - until last-minute intervention by a drummer in one of Oz’s most prominent bands (Russell Hopkinson of You Am I knows who he is) and another party who shall remain nameless.
So a side trip to Sydney was organised - for a Thursday night show at Marrickville Bowling Club. The night after a hurriedly organised, extra Melbourne show. Marrickville Bowlo has become a haunt for Sydney’s older rock and roll demographic. Lansdowne for the kids, Bowlo for the seniors. It’s a nice-sounding room with a great PA and friendly staff. The drinks are cheap.
Sand Pebbles John Curtin Hotel , Carlton Saturday, June 1 2019
I remember 2004. Living in a spacious weatherboard house in North Fitzroy, two small children, disrupted sleep patterns, fumbling through the fog of the embryonic years of parenthood.
Watching the Howard Years roll on. Mark Latham pushed his way into public view, tried to take up the fight with Howard. Toned down the more provocative aspects of his public discourse, held a press conference in front of a row of American flags, presented himself as the guy who understood the aspirations of the suburban demographic, but who wasn’t a product of an era that’d never return. Who’d have though 15 years later Latham would be a One Nation member in the NSW parliament? People thought Pauline Hanson was finished too. History is funny, innit?
"The Odd Night Out" Botanic Gordon + Leitmotiv Limbo + r.domain + Vomit of the Universe The Metro, Adelaide May 11, 2019 Photos by Somnambulist Dillinger
I'd never seen any of these outfits. Only heard of one of them, Vomit of the Universe (aka VoU), because my friends Adam Mondayitis (pictured right - sometime DJ at 3D Radio until they got gentrified, Hydrocephallus and Smallpox Confidentialist) and Jordy Dodd are VoU and ... well. You never know, do you? Might be dreadful. Might be wonderful.
The organiser wasn't sure what the order of play was until everyone more or less got there. So this is how the bands appeared on the FB event page (and yes, it's 'sic'):
Vomit of the Universe - guitar and drums duo plays slimey soiled rusty metal
r.domain - modular synths of megalopic proportions with a sea of wires
Botanic Gordon - formerly of the '70s organ synth, now renovating for future antiquity
Leitmotiv Limbo - clarinet sin storage, synth put aside, "just playing spring sculptures"
Hugh Cornwell The Manning Bar, Sydney Thuirsday, May 9, 2019
The Stranglers were the first UK Punk/New Wave band I ever saw. It was February 25, 1979, at the State Theatre in Sydney with opening band, The Hitmen.
Of course, The Stranglers were not punk or new wave or pub rock or ANYTHING. They played Strangler Music (god bless their drug taking, karate fighting, foul mouthed socks). A band like that couldn’t last forever. Lead singer/Guitarist Hugh Cornwell went one way, the rest of the band went another way…que sera sera …what ever will be will be.
Hugh Cornwell & band The Gov, Adelaide Sunday May 5, 2019 Richard De Pizzol photos
It's a chilly sort of night and I really don't feel like going out at all.
However, I have made arrangements and shall honour them.
Bad Bob arrives, leans on his horn and I am dragged from my chamber to encounter my chum, all chirpy and smoky, in a dinky little white car and we zoom off, leaving dazed possums and alarmed cats behind us.
Arlo Guthrie The Gov, Adelaide April 24, 2019 Jeremy Tomamak photos
One of the things that really got to me the very first time I saw the film "Alice's Restaurant" (on late night telly, back in the days when Adelaide only had four stations) was the mutation of black humour, intelligence, and improbability running through the film like a twisted thread of opal.
Not least is the fact that Arlo was (in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War and the draft) declared by the US Army as “not moral enough to join the army.”
As Arlo told Rolling Stone: "I never thought of “Alice’s Restaurant” as being an anti-war song, but you can’t run a war being that stupid. You won’t succeed in the war and you won’t succeed in other things either. And I think that’s some of the lessons we still have yet to learn, you know?"
And tonight, I wonder what we're in for. His father, underground folk guitar hero Woody Guthrie, died of Huntington's disease (HD), also known as Huntington's chorea in 1967, at the age of 55, and when Arlo was just 20.
The World's Forgotten Boy. Miriam Williamson photo.
Iggy Pop Sydney Opera House Monday, April 15 2019 Miriam Williamson photos
Iggy Pop and band put the torch to the Sydney Opera House the same night that a fire devastated Notre Dame in Paris. Coincidence? I think not.
The Pop has been a semi-regular tourist to Australia since 1983 and I’ve caught him on every run but one. Stooges excepted, this was close to his high-point.
It is true that at age 71 - a pubic hair’s breadth away from bringing up 72 - James Osterberg moves a little more gingerly these days. The stage-dives are gone - at least where hard-backed seats are fixed to the floor - and he’s clearly pacing himself to go the distance.
Iggy Pop Sydney Opera House Monday, April 15, 2019 Lisa Doust photo
Firstly, you have probably all heard that Iggy still has it and he does. But the damage is there. You can see how fucked his leg is. And when rugby prop forward size fans manhandle him, you see that he's actually a five-foot-one man* in his 70's who may have shrunk an inch or two.
Stage security takes much greater care of him. Iggy also takes more care of himself, adapting the old poses into well timed rest breaks. Once or twice, he lives on his back. He feigns leaps into the crowd only to step back. He has learnt how not to be dragged off stage. He makes robot like motions to cover the limp. He uses the stairs.
Tom Wilkinson photo.
"The Odd Night Out"
Arlo Guthrie
The World's Forgotten Boy. Miriam Williamson photo.