One Thursday Night of Ice-Bitten Worry and Wonder

Aleks and The Ramps 7" Launch w/ Halal, How Are You?, No Art & another missed act.
30th April - Hopetoun Hotel, Surry Hills

Me and my man Francis pulled up to the Hopetoun around quarter to nine looking a little worse for wear. The second day of a meth binge is when your eyes look like dry red holes in your face. Our lips were chapped and we bent towards the floor after having spent a very happy hour in a nearby city bar. And things got worse before they could get better. I thought I had a plus one with my Reviewer’s Pass and I told Frank he could have it since he’d spent the last of his dole money on a bottle of scotch, some of which he had hidden in his hip flask. My presumptions were wrong though - it was just me on the door list. Francis didn’t take it well. He flew into a rage, screaming at everyone about all the shit he’d done for FasterLouder in the past, how they owe him at least a night out. I tried to calm him before he could start swinging his fists and wrestling the patrons:

‘Hey, Frank man, just cool down for a bit. Look, you’ve already made me miss the first band. The second one’s about to start. I’m gonna go watch them, take some notes. I’ll buy you a beer and let you have a honk on my pipe if you just chill here for a bit, OK?’

Frank, still shaking, mumbled a terse, ‘Yeah, orright.’

I moved away from him towards the stage to check out No Art who were well into their set. The band comprised two girls up front, drummer dude behind. The girls looked fucking gorgeous. The guitarist was blacked out in leather and was pulling this incredibly dreamy late 80’s wash out of her pink heart guitar while the bass player, swimming in a psychedelic poncho, was making super slow runs down her massive axe. The drummer had it all worked out - he was actually interested in making the songs sound larger by arranging himself around the girls’ tunes. The songs themselves were fully formed and they were lucky enough to get an excellent sound on the night as they roared through their dreamy jams. The bass player stood back during their last - and best - song with a blissed out smile on her face - a smile I’m pretty sure I saw mirrored by most of the audience.

Still clapping as they packed away, I turned round to see if I could spot Francis. He was stood nest to the door bitch, bugging out and making a meal of his fingernails. He looked raw. I moved to the bar, grabbed two beers then took him to the toilets. Locking ourselves in the cubicle closest the window, I pulled out my pipe, dropped a rock in and fired it up.

I was still pretty pissed off that Frank had made me miss the first band, Yae! Tiger, and I told him so.

‘Aw, man. You said you’d already heard them and they sounded like a third rate Ben Lee with a Belle and Sebastian backing band.’

‘Yeah, I know but I still wanted to catch them. Hey, go easy on that.’

Frank was still pretty nervous and I could see getting a little too excited over the pipe, sucking up a little too much smoke. That’s the thing about smoking ice, you never know how much you’ve got in your lungs until its too late. Frank blew a grey cloud of sweet chemical stink towards the window and, by the look of it he was already way, way gone. He started to freak, accusing me of locking him in the cubicle to leave him there the rest of the night. He started bashing at the door, fumbling for the lock. His beer fell from the wall above and smashed all over the toilet floor. Frank found the lock, swung the door and bolted out of the bathroom. I took off after him. He’d made a break for the front door of the pub but by the time I got there all I could see was his lamp-lit, drug-fuelled frame tearing down the darkness of Foveux Street. No one has seen Francis since.

At a loss, all I could think to do was stay out the show and worry about Frank later. I went back to the toilet, grabbed my own, unbroken beer and made my way to the stage where Halal, How Are You? were about to begin.

Every now and again you catch a band who are so hilariously over-the-top, so perfectly, purposefully outrageous they can restore your faith in the Sydney Rock Band. Three guys on stage ripped into some superb garage riffage while a voice appeared in the speakers behind. But I could see no-one singing on stage. Did they have a tape I followed the band’s gaze and turned behind me to see a ferocious looking dude standing on a table at the back, clad in a dark and garish Hawaiian shirt and screaming in Jagger-horror, then in a throaty metal catarrh. I could see parts of the audience staring dumbly, not knowing what to do as the singer tore through them, up onto the stage; as he writhed in his own sweat on the floor, as he dived onto then back off of the bar. All the while the band kept up a tight, staid, fast and furious backing blast. Two well chosen covers from the British charts of 1965 and some solid guitar work kept us all rapt, almost in expectation of the singer’s impending injury. You couldn’t help but dance or scream back into the singer’s face as he we about his crowd-taunting. Something this dangerous, this daring is such a rare, refreshing scene in this usually safe city.

Waiting, waiting for Aleks and the Ramps while the between-band music sounding like some caterwauling Gun Club gone crazy over their warm mexicola; swapping acid stories with your favourite drunk friends . . .

The Melbourne band, touring their brand new 7” release, ’Antique Limb’ arrived onstage at the Hopetoun in glittery fantasy masks, short shorts and sequinned cod-pieces. It was like a glam band had recalled all the fun of their childhood picture books and animal stories and had got together to make music to freak out to in the cutest, most colourful way. Their tunes moved through such strange places, everything based around a twee orgy of florid funk and crazed psych-pop collusion. Its hard to know how to move to a band like this: you start to dance for a bit then have to stop and wonder just what the fuck is going on. They hardly stopped for applause and instead opted for long songs of impeccably arranged freak-pop; everything from screaming at each other like chimps and off-stage choreography to forgetting the words and just singing ’meow’ to pulling the best rock moves with a banjo I’ve seen in quite a while. They closed with their single but not without prefacing it with a bit of Belinda Carlisle, reminding us that heaven indeed is a place on Earth. But as I sung along and looked around me the audience had thinned to the devoted few, all of us having paid witness to a strange melange of skewed tunes by some twisted kids who simply adore the art of performance.