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A few years ago, some friends and I travelled up to Sydney to catch the Sleater-Kinney concert. The ladies were out for what would essentially be their farewell tour, and there was no way we were going to miss checking them at their side show – they were also on the Big Day Out bill, but who wants a shortened set?
Anyway, that concert was as great as it should have been, packed on in to the Gaelic Club, but after that, a friend of mine suggested we head on down to Purple Sneakers, a popular indie night nearby Sydney Uni and UTS. Sneakers was a blast. Touring bands got to play dj sets (I think I saw Broken Social Scene spin there once, though I cant be too sure, and the night that Quan from Regurgitator played still rates as one of the best of my life). But, kind of exactly like my experience with the band that sang the song the night is named after, it was easy to both overload whilst simultaniously drift apart from the connection I felt with the regular Friday night dance party. For me, the crowd kept getting younger, and the music kept, more and more accomodating that. Now, far be it from me to tell people what they should or shouldn’t like, but it was beginning to become very rare to hear some ‘actual’ indie at the now Presets, MSTRKRFT and Teenager dominated Sneakers. So essentially we stopped going.
I arrived relatively early for their third birthday – seeing a disappointed ‘older type’ get told he wasn’t on the door list, only to then be saved by the founder of Sneakers, PhDJ, come, shake his hand, and usher him inside, much to the chagrin of the door girl who had failed to find his name on her list. She found mine ok, and overhearing that there was both Wons Freely playing upstairs a bit later, as well as Guitar Hero in the VIP, I headed straight up there.
VIP sections to me are always amusing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an important person in one in my entire time of being invited to them, and certainly the ones making the most noise aren’t them. Two girls on the couches looked me up and down and decided I was no threat to their men (or something), and promptly ignored me. I sucked on a cigarette, eavesdropping on their phone conversations. Blondie was a bit drunk already, and I pegged her as about 20 years old, but definitely the one that was revelling in being upstairs.
“Oh, we will be down there in a bit, you should see if you can get up here but”
she demanded over the phone to whoever it was she had rung to brag about being in the VIP. Her little friend wanted to go downstairs, Blondie screwing her face at the thought of breaking the magic that an exclusive section should give. Her friend persisted for good reason though – there was no bar in the VIP, and to even deal with the banality of this section, we needed more drinks.
Indeed. I left before they could get their act together, going downstairs and grabbing a beer. And seeing the devastating impact Kevin Rudd’s new taxes on alcopops wreaked through busy bars like this one – the poor bar staff, run off their feet making mixed drinks, now that cruisers are up to $9.50 a pop. Mr Rudd should be made aware that at no point did the new taxes curb under-age binge drinking in my experience last Friday – it just made lines longer.
Don’t get me wrong – there were a lot of under-age people there. Id put it as high as 30% possibly. I met several. I was first alerted to this by a boy trying to hit on me, in a manner I had forgotten existed when I left school, so I replied with the old “Ah what school do you go to?” line from back then, and then he answered. “Year 12 huh?”
“Uh, yeah. Where do you go?”
I don’t, any more.
I took time out from interrogating little ones to dance for a while. Gosh I love that “Ruby” track by The Kaiser Chiefs, and I’m really happy it seemed to crop up once ever second set, as well as hear someone belt it out on Guitar Hero on on of my escapes back to the VIP couches. Chris Taylor from The Chaser was standing behind the decks with a massive smile on his face, I think letting most of the work be done by one of his friends, but “9 to 5″ by Dolly Parton is dance floor gold no matter where you are or who you ripped the idea from. so 10 more awesome points to you Chris. Jane Gazzo played a killer set too (actually, i don’t know if it was her – i couldn’t see, and didn’t look, but thats who it was listed as and I’m running with it). Wons Phreely is a pretty singer songwriter, who made me fall in love with one of his songs, that turns out not to be on the CD I acquired a day later. His CD is still kind of good though. All night, I was singing along, having a dance, and hearing heaps of my favourite songs played loudly. And with the constant reminder that even if the music was going astray, someone soon enough would drop some Kaiser Chiefs, it was all ok.
Despite my cynicism going in, the guests played awesome Sneakers sets, and by the time the regulars were stepping up, I was ready to step out. I slipped home, boozed but happy. I’ll go back in a year.
The perception, when you aren’t from somewhere big and famous, is that big, famous, populated places have so much more ‘night-life’ than wherever you live. When I didn’t live in Sydney, the dream was to either move there or Melbourne, or if not, London, New York or somewhere else that knows how to party, because there would be enough people there to support the kind of scene that us perma-alterna kids so long for.
Now, I’m not suggesting that Sydney isn’t all that, but it takes its sweet time exposing the true flavours of awesome that you dreamed of before moving up here, and for me it exposed them pretty much a week or two after I got over the whole wishing for some scene to save me anyway. So sucks to be it, but at least that allowed me to go along on Thursday night to the intimate, not quite there venue “The Sound Lounge” in the Seymour Centre, to catch the first of Feral Media’s PowWow events. Essentially, over the last year or so, this Sydney based label-of-awesome has been putting out a really great selection of low-fi, indie, underground, eclectic musicians work in a series called PowWow, but also have got around to releasing acclaimed records by groups such as Sydney bliss-rockers Underlapper… Understandably I was curious to check out what their night would be like, and the kind of post-rocky shoegazy Longest Day.
Upon arrival I was caught my the incredibly good looking merch table… It reminded me of a more organised idea of what the punk boys used to do back home – just go to shows and set up a table, selling all manner of different records they chose to be the local distro for – a box of 7″s and a couple of racks of cds. This was that, but more colourful (the whole set of Pow Wow discs is really pretty on display), and all obviously to do with the record label itself.
Upon entering, I slunk across to the bar and ordered a wine – this wasn’t a night where one smacks back longnecks in paper bags stamped with the clubs brand on the bag, nor the type of place that scene kids would create a new dance for. This is a classy little space, with tables, red lighting, tea candles and a grand piano. The sound system wasn’t cranking too hard, which was nice, but Alistair Erskine’s tunes were nicely presented in stereo by the set-up. He played a mixture of downtempo electronica – from the bassy to the funky to the glitchy, not particularly well mixed, but really quite well chosen. I think I heard tracks by Cepia, The Flashbulb and Boom Bip in there, and was kind of chuffed.
The bands were good. Aheadphonehome comes across kind of like if Billy Corgan got boxes and never was famous and he probably had a little more creativity and heart, and due to some calling infulenced by his tropical surrounds, he would make music kind of as endearing and ultimately beautiful amongst its abrasiveness as what we witnessed. Honest, sometimes almost awkwardly so, the songs were played with a video beamed into the background – two African girls attempting to halt the work of a labourer, just trying to unravel a bunch of cords. It was a pretty blatant metaphor, but reminded me of old ACAT end of year projects, and thats a nice bit of nostalgia.
The Longest Day take the shoegazy-post-rocky place from another angle – more spacey, atmospheric, ultimately definably British influenced. I had first come across them when someone pointed me towards one of the members Livejourals a few years ago and they had decided to just put their entire album online for free – one of the first local artists I had ever seen do that. Their music has gone a long, long way from then, and is now quite encapsulating and warm. Indeed, it lulled me into a false sense of doonaness, and once the DJ started up again, I took my leave and tottled off home to maintain that comfort.
But it was a grand night of music, and I’m really glad I went along. Not only did it dispel, for the evening anyway, the notion that nothing good ever happens in this town, but I didn’t feel alone or under any pressure to be a stalwart of keeping this scene alive, and I consider that a very healthy thing, something that a lot of other marginalised music scenes in this town might do well to learn from.
Anyway, tonight I am going to battle an entirely different beast – the typical rammed Sydney indie night. I may or may not report back.
If you don’t have that Neon Neon sleaze banger curling around your head right now after reading that title, then you haven’t been paying enough attention to the words that I’ve been saying.
So it might be an opportune time to tell you about some of the other words you should be listening to, the ones sprouted by the kids that reside in the (always amusingly titled) blogroll of links down the side… I am alerted to this cause because todays post by John Darnielle in his brilliant Last Plane To Jakarta blog, I completely disagree with.
the album-opener, “Another Day,” is absolutely the most perfect song for putting on first thing in the morning that I have heard in ages: that piano! that melody!
he writes, showing just how different we must be as people, when the only time I’ve put on Jamie Lidell’s “Jim” album in the morning has been whilst driving somewhere, and within 2 songs almost crashed my car on the Anzac Bridge frantically trying to find the skip button/change albums function on my ipod.
The rest of the album is as good. It went directly to the year’s-best list. Nobody who wants or needs the affirmation of goodness that great pop music can sometimes give should put off hearing this record for long.
More lies! There are actually two relatively awesome moments on the album compared to the sappy pap that makes up the majority of it, those two songs are big, soulful, funky numbers “Little Bit Of Feel Good” and “Hurricane”. The rest are appalling… as though someone heard Flight Of The Conchord’s “The Most Beautiful Girl In The Room” and decided maybe that style of song was really good, and maybe they should make an entire album of songs like that but maybe less funny. “Jim” for the most part is slimy, revolting and completely everything that makes me glad I have noone attempting romance on me at present…
The reason this is important, is that John Darnielle is so often on the money. Or close to it. And you should read his blog, often.
I would talk about some of the others with a bit more depth, but its too cold for that today, Instead I will just mention briefly that I met one of the girls talked about in Matt Levinson’s “Fortune Grey” blog at a gallery opening the other week (and being reminded of Jess by this blog gave me a thrill of sorts), and that I really like Emmy Hennings writing for music magazines and so on, and her blog, Fangirl, does her justice.
