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...
ANGELIK + COCK + TRIXIE PLAIN LIVE @ THE CROWN & ANCHOR / Friday May 2nd 2008
The Crown & Anchor, aka: the Cranka, Wanker, Clown & Spanker, Crackwhore and the Bug Zapper. Where a symphony of flying barstools and swinging fists accompanied by the gentle crunch of broken glass and chipped teeth greets you every time you walk in through those doors. The Crown & Anchor: where you'll find those same three drunks circling the empty dancefloor, those same three drunks circling the pool tables and those same three drunks circling the drain outside; carted arse backwards past the exit signs three hours later. Where every second person you meet has a shaved head, a goatee, wears black and plays in a metal band. Where nobody dares go upstairs lest they get eaten. Where nobody dares go outside lest they get beaten. The Crown & Anchor: where no one knows you're insane. Too drunk for anywhere else, still too sober for Shotz? The Crown & Anchor. Where drinking yourself to death is not just a spectator sport but a way of life! Come one, come all and join us in the all singing, all dancing crap of the universe! The Crown & Anchor: where hitting rock bottom never looked so good!
Wow! has it really been over two months since last I stepped foot in this hell hole in search of anything OTHER than the means to drink myself retarded!? The tide has turned these last six months, there's no doubt about it now. The pull of the west has been too strong, the pull across the road has been too strong; but just when I think I'm out, The Crown & Anchor pulls me back in! For tonight, not only are they playing host to some of the finest beer swilling trash merchants this Adelaide music scene has to offer: but someone's actually hire some half decent lighting for the stage too!? Oh yes, not since Mayfield back in November or Tony Font Show on New Year's Eve has this shit heap of a live venue ever put on a show quite like this!
Still it wouldn't be The Cranka if they didn't also dig up an accompanying floor show of mental patients, senior citizens and the homeless to rock out front of stage. I don't know where the hell they find them each night (and the jury's still out on whether this particular yoda-like specimen is merely me from 40 years hence) but damn do these freaks know how to party!
TRIXIE PLAIN (****) myspace :: Yup, if you look hard enough you'll find them just about everywhere you go. They're down your street corner pushing those red white and blue hessian shopping carts, they're in your malls collecting your bottles and cans, they're selling copies of "The Big Issue". Huddled in back alleys and under bridges, insane asylums and retirement villages. Playing the pokies, launched into dumpsters, gathering in the parklands, in the gutter, dredlocks and tatters, clutching that foil bag, yelling at the pigeons and chasing you for cigarettes. They're the army of the living dead and they're out here in droves tonight for one good reason; and that reason alone is opening act Trixie Plain. Imagine the sound of a million and one hangovers falling to a domino cascade: so familiar yet so unintelligible; mumbling, shrieking, fleeing from the light, doubled over in pain and reaching for the aspirin. Imagine Ozzy Osbourne reciting Shakespeare. Theirs is a poetry that transcends all English beyond a 3rd grade reading level and speaks to the broken puzzle pieces within us all. Trixie Plain. They're the sublime sound of country punk and grunge hillbilly yokel fuzzed out at its most blissfully disjointed. They're a mix tape of The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Tapes N Tapes and Iggy Pop's "I Wanna Be Your Dog" blasted on full. They're a well worn sofa with suspect stains that you find migrating between share households on alternating hard rubbish days. They're rough as all fuck, yet inviting like a warm piece of toast.. aaaah!
If only we could all drink enough piss and smoke enough weed to sound anywhere near as damaged as this, such a wondrous world we'd live in! Yet do not be fooled, for such a blissful blend of dementia is not wraught through any accident or aneurysm but a careful crafted dysfunction that takes years upon years to master. Such is the slow brewing brilliance that is Trixie Plain. They make pissing your whole life away sound nothing short of poetic!
COCK (****1/2) myspace :: Yes I know, I see it too, staring at me right between the eyes and yes I'm as surprised as you are. "Cock!? four and a half!? surely that's in inches not out've five!" Yet such was the almighty power of the Cock tonight. It was my first time with the Cock, as it was the first time for many of us. Mere acolytes to the full force of the Cock. As such, the Cock caught us all by surprise. The Cock came at us from all angles. From in front and from behind they jammed that Cock, they hammered that Cock, they beat and thrust that Cock with all their full fisted might. One giant instrument of Cock. Oh yes! We got nothing but the very best of that Cock for 45 minutes. A lot of Cock, a throbbing monster of Cock. Not a stiff Cock, or a Cock up but a Cock that banged real hard, rock hard. So hard, that by the end we felt that Cock deep inside each and every one of us. We tasted that Cock tonight and damnit we liked the Cock, we liked it a lot! In fact you could say we were gagging for the Cock. Oh yes! Such was the almighty power of the Cock! Penis.
Aaaaaah with a name like that, this gig review damn near writes itself.. weeeeee! *cough* Still, for those of you who wish to probe deeper with the Cock (I'm so very sorry, I really am!) some further insight may be in order. Cock: besides being the worst dick and balls punchline in the history of the Adelaide music scene (which is already more than rife with band names like the Testeagles, Double Handed or Soft White Machine) are a surprisingly "solid" band (damn see? I've done it again!). Combining the meatiest extremeties of Nick Oliveri's Mondo Generator with the howling vocals of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion; they're the loudest most retarded thing you'll ever damn near hear thrashed out in a dirty suburban pub on a lazy Tuesday and given 4-8 beers probably the best fucking thing you'll ever damn hear too. Which either makes them a proverbial "falafel" (and thus a band you'd never want to hear sober), or the most awesome way to drink yourself into a coma. Either way, out've the million and one infinitely WORSE "Cock" jokes I could've pulled tonight, at least they weren't a "hard act to swallow".. yeeouch!
ANGELIK (****1/2) myspace :: If act two was the Cock, then act three would surely be a righteous.. *cough* huh.. wuh.. what? what am I talking about!? weeee! Yup, if our minds aren't already swimming in the gutter after the last band, then the rest of our bodies would surely be waiting for it to join us here lying in a ditch with a bag of goon thrashing along to this band: Angelik. Already well documented is the triple-digit-proof rocket fuel that's propelled these howling punk rockers over their many years of illbient service to the thrash: simply combine the wall clawing carnage of the Distillers and the trashiest elements of Hole, stir in Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs clocking Gwen Stefani from No Doubt over the head with a whiskey bottle and you'll have more than enough molotov cocktail to splatter any hapless ipod listener over the four walls of a mid morning commute. But, as with many bands of such monkey grunt, the real buzz is in seeing them fuck it all up live. As nothing quite beats watching Sam "The Bullet" Baroudi bust out his lower lip Neanderthal drool on guitar whilst Laken on vocals makes all manner of retarding screw faces, fart faces, bug eyed bullfrogs and asphyxiation fixations whilst flapping her arms about in the insane belief she can fly. Yup, if you weren't completely twatted out've yer skull to the rhythmic chug of both Adrian Hayes on bass and Tom Tombongo on drums; you'd almost forget this Jim Henson muppet theatre thrashing out in front of you was an actual living breathing live band..
Such is the full throttle appeal of Angelik; they may be far from art rock, rocket science or anything you could ever imagine from a "band name" that conjures everything from half baked New Age music, Christian rock, AM adult contemporary to some sadsack goth chick making seal impersonations with a harp; but when they cook up carnage as volatile as this classic cut "Go", Angelik deliver nothing short of spitting teeth and wall to wall grins.. OOOH FUCK YEAH!
Here's how their shit went down with the crowds at the Cranka tonight..
this is where Tom Tombongo collapsed dead at the end of their set..
and here's Todd from Trixie Plain (after consuming nearly enough alcohol to flatline a whole herd of rhinoceros) attempting to reenact the event at the bar afterwards.. weeeeeee!
2:56AM - The celebrations continued well into the night. Of course none of us here could still remember what the hell we were celebrating, but such is the way of this festive hell hole. It mightn't ever make a hell of a lot've sense when you're sober, but once you meeting us eye to eye on the blood alcohol levels? duuude this shit's like the best rollercoaster ride in town..
3:12AM - Or at least it was.. until, as what generally happens when entirely too much alcohol is involved: one minute you're the life of the party and the next (after one ill-timed "Cock" joke) you find The Colonel from Trixie Plain lunging at you with murder in his eyes..
I have little or no memory what the hell happened next. All I remember is these pointy fangs up in my face, one flared nostril fogging up my camera lens, one dull thud to the back of my head, followed by me being dragged away as a human sacrifice to the cannibals upstairs..
3:27AM - Therein my Friday night draws to an all too abrupt and confusing close just like it has countless times before: nothing but a hollowed out skull sitting on the shelf upstairs, whilst my brain forms a fresh foaming puddle on the floor downstairs. A fitting end to a night at the Cranka methinks. How the hell I managed to get out've this predicament is anyone's guess..
Am I alive? am I dead? am I nothing more than a malformed ceramic sculpture that looks more like a deflated dodge ball at this angle than anything that would otherwise resemble the recently deceased flesh picked candy carpace of a Homo Sapiens? stay tuned and find out! :)
