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...
PINKY BEECROFT & THE WHITE RUSSIANS + BOOSTER LIVE @ JIVE / Wednesday September 17th 2008
Nobody ever plays a gig on a Wednesday night, and I mean nobody, especially NOT in Adelaide. In a universe of good ideas a gig on a Wednesday night ranks right up there with the invention of the Jägerbomb, The Atkins Diet, Intelligent Design, The War on Drugs, The War on Terror, Scientology, the Catholic Priesthood, Rove McManus and anyone who's stupid enough to think that the 80s was the best decade ever (it wasn't, I grew up in all that mess, look how I turned out, can we as a society please just get over it already!?). Mixing rock & roll with a Wednesday night is about as awesome as mixing milk with orange juice, socks with sandles and ANY night of heavy drinking with a seafood restaurant. It's bad news, it's bad ju-ju, it's you coming home in a few ziplock freezer bags with an accompanying xmas card and nobody can find your head kind of butt ugly. Still, I know you're thinking. I bet you're reading this right NOW and I bet you've got a million and one awesome examples to the contrary. I bet you and your fuckup friends always go out partying hard on a Wednesday night don't you!? (and I bet your mother breastfed you up until the age of 12 too!). No, no and no! You're dead wrong. It never happened. Every other gig you've ever read about that was awesome on a Wednesday night was an outright lie (especially this one), duuuude what the FUCK were we all thinking when we left the house tonight!?
Yeah we all know that feeling. Wednesday night. It's been a FUCK of a week and it's been hitting us all at once, from all angles and burying us upto our necks in one great big honking avalanche of "it". Whatever the fuck that "it" may be. My "it" was last seen swatting F-22 raptors out of the air and destroying most of lower Manhattan. Yours may differ. Yours may simply be known as "Geoffrey", kept in a hamster cage, fed on a daily diet of carrots and cuddles and be "patient zero" for the worst airborne viral pandemic the 21st century has ever seen. Or maybe you like collecting stamps. Either way, the last thing we'd all want to do on a Wednesday night is leave "it" unattended. Especially for a gig HERE at Jive. Here photographing yet ANOTHER drumkit (I like to call this one "peppermint twist"). Here where there'll be drinking, loud rock and roll and oh did I mention there'll be girls too? Yup, there's NO way this shit's going to end well!
BOOSTER (***1/2) myspace :: Opening act to this one-two uppercut to the midweek hump, sums up all this awesomness (and more) when Sean Kemp their drummer and lead singer is heard to remark "Aaaaah Wednesday night: the PERFECT night for rock & roll!!!!" to which the crowd responds enthusiastically to with deafening silence (while everyone collectively wonders if he's simply taking the piss or not), followed by nervous laughter and then mute applause. Yup this is Adelaide, you're standing in it (and you may need to hose it all off afterwards). Still if you're a band as seasoned, salted, pickled and damn near floating face down in it as this band is, then this is just the sort of insane challenge you damn near LIVE for. This is Booster, and this is them winning the crowd over one apathetic punter at a time. You may remember them as the support act to other such brilliant live acts as Spiderbait, TISM, Machine Gun Fellatio, Airbourne, Skybombers, Goodshirt, The Checks, The Casanovas, The D4, The Devilrock Four and Peabody. Or likely you don't. They're sneaky as fuck like that. They're a hit and run. They'll do all the rocking supports. They'll run through an entire set in less than half an hour. Sean will crack some off colour jokes. Josh on bass will make a sound on vocals rather akin to a smoke alarm being hit high velocity in the nuts by a cricket ball, whilst Craig on guitar (aka: the grumpy old man) will display the gobsmacking ability to thrash out the most mindfuckingly awesome cock rock riffage whilst simultaneously looking like all the excitement of someone filling out a tax return. They'll double the crowd, flood the bar in drunks and get everyone cheering, only for everyone to collectively wonder moments after the dust has cleared: "who the FUCK were these idiots, and why have both my kidneys gone missing!?".
Booster's set tonight: according to the Spoz's Rant Thesaurus of Lazyarse Band Comparisons (coming soon in softcover, CD-Rom and R-rated pop-up book), could be considered a loose mix between Eagles Of Death Metal, The Holdsteady, Led Zeppelin IV, Black Sabbath and one of those bands you find performing behind chicken wire fences in hillbilly bars whilst bikers, pill-popping truckers and survivalist psychos clad in flak jackets hurl flaming molotovs, chairs, tables and other bar patrons at them (or rather like Enigma Bar on any given Thursday!). Of course none of THAT shit happening here tonight but it's still nice to dream, and every night Booster with their hammering odes to bygone cockrock, caravan parks, wife beaters, mud flaps, monster trucks and the diminishing faculty to do simple multiplication or long division is ever closer to bringing THAT dream to a reality. Or in other words they're everything you could ever want from a support band and everything the Rudd government's "War on Binge Drinking" is so vehemently against. Or in other words, "who cares!? I'm drunk right now.. weeeeeee! :)"
PINKY BEECROFT & THE WHITE RUSSIANS (****1/2) myspace :: Which is probably the "so far over the legal limit that you start to find barnyard animals and stobie poles attractive" that you may want to be to appreciate the finer points of this headlining act and by "finer points" I clearly mean there AREN'T any (but that's why we have bands like Booster to inspire you to get THIS retardingly twatted on a Wednesday night in the first place.. YEAAAS!). Pinky Beecroft & The White Russians. You may remember their lead singer in the insane check jacket "Pinky Beecroft" as the former frontman for the equally inebriated Machine Gun Fellatio (as clearly ANY band featuring a female vocalist by the name of "KK Juggy" who wore nothing on stage but nipple tassles, a fake moustache and a strategically placed toy animal is REALLY going to inspire a dramatic downturn in alcohol consumption). And even if you don't remember him, there is ONE good reason why you'd want to, as Pinky Beecroft is one of a dying breed, or to be more precise an increasingly rare Australian breed, that damn near refuses to die (but becomes increasingly incoherent in polite conversation): the alcoholic singer/songwriter. Tim Rogers is one of them. Tex Perkins is another. They're everything that is awesome about Australian's love affair with drinking themselves to an early grave, they only get better with age: rather like a fine wine (or perhaps a not so fine wine, but one no less appreciated in a foil bag in the parklands and in any number of our city squares) and in an age of pill munching nu-rave, electro, fluoro and straight-edge emo they're becoming an increasingly hard act to find.
Pinky Beecroft & The White Russians are all about THAT moment; approximately 3-4 drinks into a night where you think every single thing you say is the most witty, whimsical, charming, charismatic and classyarse shit anyone's ever uttered in the history of small talk. Blitheringly off topic, playfully erratic, disarming with a glassy eyed swagger. They're Dylan Moran playing the piano at a cocktail lounge at 3AM. They're a smoke filled, whiskey swilling, low lit room full of slinky dresses, dinner jackets and a "world of possibilities". They're Hugh Hefner looking like Woody Allen and partying hard like Frank Sinatra. They're everything you remember the next morning and NOTHING you don't remember from the night before. Everything's coming up roses, rose coloured and beer goggled, you're the singularly most badass dude in the entire room and OOOOOH FUCK are you going to regret it in the morning! and yet Pinky Beecroft & The White Russians are every reason why you'd want to keep coming back for more.
As such most of the appeal of this band boils down to their lead singer Pinky Beecroft and his endlessly witty anecdotes and between song blithering banter; it may also have something to do with their drummer Christian McBride looking like Elvis Costello celebrating all his xmases at once (aka: the scariest shit you'd ever see behind a drumkit in a dark alley), what appears to be Anthony Kiedis' brother (aka: Ben T) on guitar and James Hetfield (aka: Nick Stewart) on bass, but mostly it's simply Pinky Beecroft and his innate ability to talk utter rubbish between songs. One song's devoted to his brief infatuation with Scarlett Johansson "before she went all insane and murdered Tom Waits". Another is "just another one of those boy meets.. wait.. boy doesn't meet girl, boy gets hit by a car, boy finds true love.. y'know, it's another one of those songs, The Beatles did heaps of them". While another is a rendition of Duran Duran's "Girls On Film" done so blitheringly and shambolically offkey, yet so wittily rendered, you couldn't help grin from ear to ear at every bung note. Sure it's a little odd to be experiencing this all on a Wednesday, but no less welcome. Pinky Beecroft & The White Russians are the decadent drunk in all of us begging to cut loose no matter the day of week, the weight on our minds, or where we'll find ourselves the following morning laughing hysterically, with absolutely no clue how we got there.
And thus in closing here's Mel (The Midget) who got her arm signed by Pinky Beecroft, whom I snuck in on the doorlist tonight, after Booster snuck ME on the door tonight, after Booster snuck Pinky Beecroft & The White Russians into the VENUE tonight, after they snuck into the state tonight, for a gig celebrating all that is awesome about living life ever so poetically in an altered state, all on a Wednesday night, all in the middle of the week, all in the middle of nowhere, all for next to no-one but a hundred chance souls who came to see them tonight? Awesome!
Yup that's a gig on a Wednesday night for ya! It doesn't make a fuck of a lot of sense, but we're doing one anyways! Why? shit.. can't remember why!? Just like I can't remember why I'm wearing these glasses, who's glasses they are, or why Mel is trying to pick my nose.. wait what was the question again!? who am I? where am I? and why do I smell something burning!?
And to think this is what the "quietest night of the week" (short of a Monday night) had to offer us!? and the weekend is still two nights away!? oooooh sweet Jebus we're all going to die!
