The Adelaide scene: to many of you it may be little more than a touring speed bump between Melbourne and Perth but to us it's a way of life. Feast within, on all its dysfunctional splendour, as we bring you the highly satirical, laughingly fictional and intellectually imbecile tales from our rock & roll wasteland...
BEFORE THE AFTERMATH + YOUR MOTIVE FOR LIVE @ JADE MONKEY / Saturday September 22nd 2007
Oooooh what a wild and crazy time we had Friday night! The madness, the wonder, the glory! The utter and complete self destruction! Painting the town red, black and blue! Booster, Dead Popes Of The Vatican, Kasavett and the Warsaw Flowers! Lo, we stared deep into the belly of the beast and lo did our ears bleed a rainbow of the infinite! It rained flaming wreckage for days! Craters spread over a five mile radius! Satellites knocked out've orbit! The entire planet played ping pong with the moon and WON! WOWEEEEE!! and then just when I thought it couldn't get ANY better, I met THIS guy! Oh the magic we had! We wined, we dined! He brought me flowers, I propose! It was a modest ceremony just me, him and a donkey but the wedding night? OH MY FREAKING GAAWWD! I got tingles down me spine just thinking about it! and then the honeymoon? need I say more? aye? aye!? *nudge nudge* you getting me!? PHWOAAAAR!! :)
*ahem* yes ok I admit it, that was probably a little TOO far even for me. Seriously, have I finally cracked? Have I totally lost my fucking mind!? Will that random bearded loon from last night EVER read this blog!? Will he ever pay me that child support? (wuh?) Who knows!? The only thing I can tell for certain is that 16 hours later I wash ashore at the Jade Monkey, both my kidneys are missing and I have NO freaking clue how the hell I got here but hey, what's new? :)
ZETA LEAGUE so here we are arriving just in time for a live gig (weird how this shit always seems to happen to me!) with the first band for the night the Zeta League. As much as my raging insomnia this week allows me to recollect, they sound rather like a cruisier version of the Bloc Party as fronted by Julian Casablancas from The Strokes: or at least Julian Casablancas if he happened to play a live set just after he lost his record contract, his girlfriend, someone shot his dog and his apartment burnt down whilst suffering a head cold. You could also compare them to Something For Kate minus all of Paul Dempsey's weird fuckarse lyrics about quantum physics but then someone would hafta drag you out into the street, shoot you and then write a song about it.. and perhaps this band could write that song as they're actually surprisingly pretty damn fucking good. There's some really lush melodic guitar layerings here, ecclectic percussion, vocals with distinct and altogether deranged nasal twang. Seriously, if I ever wanted to fake my own funeral for tax reasons, these guys would easily be the 4th or 5th band I'd call to play it.. YEAAAS!
Now that I'm sufficiently buried under 6ft of compacted dirt and covered in worms all singing high-C (whoaaaaaaaah!) the next band to hit the stage does it's very best to dig me out again, and as much as I would love to write something endlessly witty to caption the following photo: fuckit, the sticker on the drumkit pretty much speaks for itself..
YOUR MOTIVE FOR This is Your Motive For. They are the masters of the well-crafted mid 90's Aussie indie pop-rock song, which either makes them a laughable anachronism or at least 5 years ahead of the curve. As such, comparisons in their sound could easily be made to You Am I, Augie March and a bunch of drunks trying to start a singalong at the pub at 3AM before the bouncers bring out the fire extinguishers to shoo them all away. This easily places them mere inches away from becoming the new soundtrack to a West End Draught or Tooheys ad. Of course I could go on and on about the music here, but we ALL know the main entertainment to be found in this band and that is hungover trainwreck that is Heath Weber. For throughout his gig he's often known to employ the fiendish power-rock move known simply as "the hair flick": sure it may resemble anywhere between a bad Fabio commercial (I can't believe it's not butter!) and a shaggy dog attempting to dry itself, but apparently I've been told on good authority that it's also an a-grade fangirl panty remover. Yeah, I don't quite get it either, but do you see ME cutting my hair short anytime soon? OOOOH FUCK NO!! (shit damn I gotta get my own band again!).
BEFORE THE AFTERMATH And now the final band for the night, Before the Aftermath. Picture in your head the following things: AC/DC blasted at full from a busted up boombox, a carton of beer, a brown Datsun with red flames and a naked chick painted on it, a whole stack of Meatloaf "Bat Out Of Hell" CD's (selling for $1 each at Crime Converters) all fading on the dashboard and a Friday night out in the Elizabeth Shopping Centre parking lot and that'd be just about a spot-on facsimile for what I experienced tonight. They're bogan as all fuck but DAMN do they still rock the fuck out! :)
With my brain happily liquified to a fine grey pulp by Before The Aftermath, I soon find myself in a lobotomised haze staring vacuously into the red lit foliage growing in the beer garden. I must've been here for hours on end, till Zac the psychic bartender eventually found me making weird squeaking noises whilst randomly chewing on the foliage and sent me on my way..
I initially made a quick stop-over at my usual haunt at the Cranka, but to my dismay I soon found my beloved crap-shack near empty and whistling a lonesome tune despite all of Fatboy Slum's attempts to whip the 8 people there on the dancefloor into a frenzy. Of course it really didn't take long to find where all the crowds went: turns out they were HERE at Jive making absolute twits of themselves to another fortnightly party by DJ Craig instead.
Understandably I have little or no recollection of the hours that followed: of anything (beyond an incoherant blur) I can only say for sure that an excessive amount of beer was involved, a particularly ill-advised trip to The Village for some 3AM chicken drumsticks and springrolls and me being kidnapped by these two strangely familiar idiots for more drunken food at Pizza Rev..
before pissing the last of the night away here at Supermild with an entirely different bunch of grinning fools than the geniuses I originally came here with (funny how that always happens), till I eventually collapse dead into the last late night bus home at 4:30AM..
and one wonders why I have nary a braincell left to write these blogs these days? What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.. what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.. hey look kids, it's my head in a jar and it's rolling down the hill into the circling drain below! WAaAHAHahAhAHA!! :)
BOOSTER + DEAD POPES OF THE VATICAN LIVE @ JIVE / Friday September 21st 2007
Welcome to Jive: home to Adelaide's friendliest barstaff and the almightly Jager machine of doom! Home to the free foosball, the finest art resplendant under impossibly dim lights, all the wondrous balcony seating, lush velvet stage curtains, spastic kindergarten carnival decor and the glorious purple fur facade of a thousand slain muppets! Jive, home of the brave, the drunk, the loud and the golden pee that flows so free.. ooooooh saaaay caaaan't you seeeeeee how blind drunk this place makes me want to beeeee!! (hyperbole? HA! what hyperbole?) *cough* and as for why I'm here on a god forsaken night like this: lawn bowls? croquet? table tennis? quilt making? the first annual international tournament of tiddly-winks? do I need to spell it out in letters large enough to blot out the sun? oooooh fuck no, you know the score!
THE WARSAW FLOWERS
aand so here we are with the first band (victim) of the night by the name of The Warsaw Flowers. Besides potentially namesaking a dubious penchant for popping cherries in the Polish capital, this band very much reminds me of the doom and gloom 80's sound of The Smiths; or better yet a freaky alternative reality of The Smiths as fronted by an Ian Curtis from Joy Division, who after discovering after numerous failed attempts with a belt buckle and a ceiling fan that he's cursed with an inescapable immortality, resigns to the fate of his perpetual misery by inflicting upon everyone ELSE the ultimate party time soundtrack to murder suicide your whole family to. Yup, to put it mildly The Warsaw Flowers write music so freakingly maudline they make Nick Cave's classic ode to woe "Shiver" sound like the giddy handclap spastic attack of Patience Hodgson; they're that near brilliant and damn near fatal to experience! They should come with a warning label, a 24 hour hotline and a team of paramedics! They are hands down (and slashing wrists) the most awesome choice of opening act EVER.. WEEEEEEEEE! :)
KASAVETT
With the Warsaw Flowers absolutely flooring the crowds from aisle to aisle it's no small wonder there's anyone still left alive to enjoy the 2nd act of the night, Kasavett: the loutish brit-pop punk blast we were begging for, quite like Uma Therman getting skewered in the chest with a shot of adrenaline by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. They're Blur's self titled album, Ash's "Nu-Clear Sounds", The Rakes and Greenday back in the 90's (ie: back when they didn't suck hairy testicles) punching holes in the walls and raining down plaster from above. They're everything you love about ferrets, weasels, minks, stoats, polecats and other eye gouging members of the Mustelidae family. They're Humphrey B Bear playing the drums. They're lead singer Dan looking altogether too much like Paul MacCartney in a pair of reading glasses. They're the amazingly unkillable Phil on bass (believe me WE TRIED!). They are all things to all people and better yet they really remarkably don't suck as a live band in the slightest.. YEEAAS!!
Such is the giddy hysteria (and out've control alcoholism) that this band inspires, that members of the crowd are soon seen swarming the stage, hooting and flailing about exciteably like the closing minute of the Muppet Show. Any minute now Kermit is gonna come flying through those red velvet curtains flapping his tiny arms in the air and it'll all be over.. woooooooo!
DEAD POPES OF THE VATICAN
So in effort to sedate the crowds we're next treated to the soothing sounds of The Dead Popes Of The Vatican. They're everyone's favourite Sunday recovery band. They're snarling, vinegar pissing, fist fucking aggression, buzzing with catchy chainsaw riffs and endless scream-along lyrics. They're everything you love about AC/DC, Shihad, The Ramones and the Sex Pistols being beaten to death in the Jive parking lot. They're Lynda (formerly of Blow Up Betty), Nick Hadley (formerly of Angelik), Captain Caveman (formerly of the Pleistocene) and what appears to be Elvis Presley squinting out a pineapple the size of the moon. Tonight they're nothing short of on fire, screaming and hurtling towards you with arms outstretched. If there's only one band you'd rather see before you die, then let it be THIS one that puts you there. This is Dead Popes Of The Vatican, bring a shovel and they'll take care of the rest.. OOOOH FUCK YEAAH! :)
BOOSTER
Normally this would be more than enough to satisfy any bloodthirsty mob on a Friday night, but like all good horror movies it pays to have one more kill shot up your sleeve lest the multitudes rise again; and so it is that we're treated to the final solution: the horror, the white knuckled terror, the rockpig manifestation they call Booster. Seriously I don't know how the hell I got out've here alive: so few words can encompass the apocalypse wraught, so few witnesses can form the words, so few braincells and so much alcohol at this late an hour can hope to recollect. Was it a tornado engulfing Josh Homme, Jesse "The Devil" Hughes, Justin Hawkins and spitting out nothing but toothpicks? Was it Jack Black from Tenacious D being repetively punched in the balls by Mohammed Ali? Was it a screaming toddler the size of a bus beating a path of destruction through Tokyo's central business district? Who really can say for sure?
Suffice to say (as is often the case when the Booster circus rolls into town) everything goes just a little bit pear shaped at the end. One moment I'm taking photos in a bleary alcoholic haze, next minute I'm on stage with Dan from Kasavett singing backup to "She's a Live One" (weird how I always seem to find myself in these situations) and then THIS shit happens..
as much as I would like to elaborate upon any of these following frames, attempting to explain ANYTHING that lead singer / drummer Sean Kemp cooks up will leave you with nothing but a sore head, a puddle of drool and no recollection over how you ended up there in the first place..
of course no humans were dismembered, disembodied or otherwise disemboweled in the making of tonight's live gig. Sure, we sacrificed a few chickens and quite possible a few million braincells in the process but hey what else is new in one of my Friday night out on the piss?
and as always, under no circumstances should you EVER try this shit at home! Why would you when you could come out to a live venue and join us instead!? we're trained professionals! :)
