'hard hitting journalist, says he's a communist, says he believes in WW3!'

Republished from butterboxmedia.com

Rule 303: The Annandale Hotel. Saturday 30th October, 2004.

Malcolm McLaren’s famous line from his art school days, “Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing”, looped around my dirty ashtray of a mind during this night of hard core Aussie punk rock. Billed as: Bring Out Your Dead - Rock’n'Roll Resurrection, the gig saw four excellent bands funnel their deep mistrust for social progress into a crowd as approving and welcoming as the bulky white cliffs of Dover. The once potent symbols of brazen effrontery were proudly displayed with sheer exagerrated fun as freshly shorn Travis Bickle mohicans and leopardskin jackets merged with the occasional sightings of dentally challenged statesmen who were repeatedly toasting the faith with ample and salutary beers.

Emerging from the bottled up chrysalis of the now defunct Cruified Venus, Rule 303 boldly held the ground for the early arrivals with thirteen of their explosive songs. Opening with “Ross River”, the Rule’s driving gits of Nigel Maggot and Jimmy Fliptop effected a furiously tight clamp on the audience and quickly gained favour with a pair of pre-mosh ladies who replied to Garry Campbell’s invitation:

“Come closer, we won’t spit on you.”

With a, “Awright, we won’t spit on you, either…”

“Mad Man” followed, and Campbell’s shrieks of outright hostility multiplied the song’s implicit anger one hundred fold with an all-cards-on-the-table sincerity.

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Hindsight creates questions giving us perspective and knowledge.

In considering the comparison between the following ideas of:

# 1 - the bedrock pop psychology: kids might see Punk for the first time and not be sure about it, but then they’d hear their parents whining about, those animals, those filthy violent animals, and suddenly be converted, they’d identify like mad.

Versus:

# 2 - the original commitment of Punk to attack the generation of World War Two, and to flaunt in the face of that generation all it could not express.

One certainty comes to mind:

Punk is responsible for much of the present vigour in the music industry; the same industry that actively discouraged and actually banned it in some areas during the mid 1970s. It helped turn necessity into a virtue through its underground distribution and production network establishing the platform of D.I.Y for today’s indy, pop and mainstream acts. Even those self-conscious handjobs consigned to idol Squaresville benefit enormously from this early genre that basically said: 'It’s easy and cheap, go and do it.' To which the later group obviously added 'All that now remains is for the media to diffuse it…'

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A litany of worthy lyrical subjects - both onstage and in front of it - was paraded next with the songs “ICD”, “Gates of Hell” & “Loud and Proud”. The band remained true with an immediate physical and personal impact of ground-level directness and honesty. Concise and distinctly nonfrivolous, Garry’s gymnastic thunderbolts connected with the audience like jolts of shock treatment (definitely guessing here…) And a stark cover of The Angels’ “I Ain’t The One” was the perfect foil to describe the speed once required to extract rock ‘n’ roll from the moth-eaten, hippified grave it fell into back in the day. As the band tore into “War Pigs”, dedicated to the US Government god love ‘em (it’s His nation apparently), the hysteria of America’s continued psychodrama with hate and Punk’s sudden, bitter demise emerged with a sharp self-mocking relish.

Rule 303 explode the politics of rock ‘n’ roll by replacing its second-rate greyness with a pure outside-of-self-frenzy.

The Meatbeaters and The Aampirellas both played brilliant sets. Bassist for Rule 303, Kenny Archibald undertook service with The Kelpies during that band’s phenomenal set.

In memory of The Kelpies longstanding bassist: Con Murphy, who passed away this week.

- Peter Thornton October, 2004