Inner-West girls? Who, Emma Tom?

Republished from butterboxmedia.com

Dave McCormack & The Polaroids: Hopetoun Hotel. Saturday 12th December, 2004.

If I didn’t know any better, (granted, an unpersuasive opener) I’d declare covers the new black. Not cover bands, which whatever colour they come in - and puce immediately springs to mind - are insipid and toothless. But cover versions of mutant translation that tint a set with diversity extending it to the stars and creating an engaging musical mongrel. But then, ain’t that new black thing kinda redundant?

During their set Dave McCormack & The Polaroids covered Iggy Pop’s, “I’m Bored” and, “Sister Golden Hair” by America. Dave also downed tools to harmonize for Miss French during a melancholic rendering of Wham’s, “Last Christmas.” “Living La Vida Loca” closed the night’s bill as Dave fronted Astro Tabasco who had reappeared after a speedy setup following The Polaroids’ encore.

In searching for integrity Dave’s knack of writing graphically about his past in terms of the present blows out to barbwire hilarity on his latest album, The Truth About Love. From which a few songs were incorporated into the night’s set. While the remainder came from the alien-in-paradise miscellany of its predecessor: Candy [DasKong p/l; 2002].

From the blood-on-the-ground stance on gender relations he took on his previous album, Dave’s emerged with a poolside repartee-type of dryness on this latest release. Still, they’re a great bunch of stories, if only crying out for a coherent thesis strong enough to hold them together. He consciously frames obsession around the inevitable fact that he isn’t a wartless paragon in concise and approachable ways without overwriting, but their live auditory interpretation failed to rile up the emotional core like the songs from Candy did. And particularly like the stuff his earlier band Custard once did. Standing against the Hoey’s brickwork, below the sign announcing what feedbag possibilities are available in Tong’s Kitchen, these new songs sounded to me like a 50-something hormonally ‘challenged’ woman of low self-regard, bolstering her self-imposed mediocrity by complaining, unconvincingly, to her equally barren peers about some received (and sought, obviously…) attention from past lovers. Admittedly it’s a role reversal, but still, it’s a narrative and analytical equivalent of crying somewhat incoherently into a beer. Despite this periodic ungainliness, his music, particularly at the top end with its emphasized melody over the steady beat of drum and bass lines unquestionably suits his voice, which hacks its way sentence by sentence through blues, R&B and soul towards pure rock and roll, (where there’s always gonna be a little quasi-noble bitterness anyway). To me though, the earlier girlophobia stuff showed more honesty on the night than The Truth... did.

The song, “The Inner West,” with its implacable bass and sixties-style organ sounded great. Demonstrating many of the details that made (shrewd observers may notice the unfortunate use of the past tense) rock so genuinely powerful. Like when a situation specific to the songwriter is turned into a universal while narrowly avoiding the tag of perpetual (Pop) adolescence. With a credible human understanding - all of his own too - he sang as if the song were new to him when he intoned gravely, “The inner west man, they (sic) got the beautiful girls” and then, in a side-of-the-mouth deference to first person preservation he added “And I wish I’d never seen them.” All the time his Strat’s notes fell forcefully into the air as his innocence curdled into cynicism.

The set’s ducking, weaving and surmounting despair disappointingly gave way to fraudulence as uneven as a failed Vegas lounge act doing folksy shtick at a seaside hotel. In fact, it was so cover band it belonged somewhere else entirely. (At this point I’ll forgo suggesting North Sydney’s Rag & Fanny Late Bloomers Late Night Lonely Hearts Club, but it’d be a likely starting point).

Kurt Cobain once remarked that the difference between Indy music (in the strictly genre sense) and rock music (in The Rock sense) was: Indy bands usually title a song with no reference whatsoever to its subject matter. It’s a manifestly obvious opinion, or at least it was. These days however, especially in the area of performance, it’s a complication. Dividing preconceptions - those of the artist and his or her audience - can overlap into a variety show format tightrope walk that often drags a good rock show down. Anyway, coupled with a vastly annoying and pointless monologue, Dave launched into some kinda Harpo the Hypnotist enterprise hinting to the girls in the audience that nirvana would be found in his eyes if only they’d gaze, longingly, into them. A joke no doubt, but with his complaints about it being, “Too hot to play…” (from someone who proudly announced his BrisBoganVille - that is to say: sub tropical heritage) and a throwaway line about how his fellow band member had, “Wrote this next one in the van on the way over tonight,” (said twice in case the implied piquancy fell on deaf ears) the gig derailed and, erm, shortsightedly, the opaqueness of his conviction acted as a counterforce to the desired continuity of rowdy rock resonance. In a sense it was one of those music-biz betrayals, in my opinion it was more laziness than anything else.

Anyway, backed by Astro Tabasco and taking a stroll through the crowd during the final songs he closed the night. I decided to temporarily abandon the age-old joy of picking who was a fake and who was for real in favour of some real tongue-in-cheek fiction.

- Peter Thornton November, 2004

If Bush's enemy was so powerful, how come it only took 2 weeks to take their country?

Republished from Butterboxmedia.com

Marty Willson-Piper and the Mood Maidens: The Hopetoun Hotel. Wednesday 3rd November, 2004

As the information broke that the extended Wars-R-Us family had negotiated yet another term of office, (it’s back to the business of achieving those sales targets - with extreme prejudice) Marty Willson-Piper took his blast of rage and love to the Hopetoun Hotel for a mesmeric midweek gig.

Picture a girl with flowers in her hair circulating the room offering incence sticks to punters. Or Marty, all Macleans smile and white cat heat, reluctantly interrupting the background muse of Deep Purple (what? No Sgt. Peppers?) to weld the direst cliches of vaudeville onto a few small declamatory non-tunes of his own.

The abiding discontentment created by the Bush mission statement-style of rhetoric - a wretched squawl that has made me most aware that I am alive in hell over the last few years - encouraged the fiendish Manchester wordsmith to wear his hip taste upon a sleeve threadbare with the punk dichotomy of vicarious pain. It’s the only reasonable assumption I can make after listening to him, unless of course I subtitle this with Willson-Piper’s own off-the-cuff aside: “the man who read poetry at The Hopetoun Hotel.”

Breathing life into “The Pest” from John Cooper Clark’s Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt, his razor wrapped in silk delivery cut into both sides of the moral axis with a fluent mix of self-conscious artiness and rich, nimble glee. His throwback style helped garner a few positive mumblings from the crowd with its quasi-noble resurrection of past heroics and wound-up, unbridled passion. Marking the early part of the set with a big, blind enthusiasm for stomping on the self-styled social moralizing of the imbecilic and treacherous la famiglia Bush, Marty’s brazen talent had a presence of such finely exaggerated melodrama he reduced the whole burlesque fiasco of strained relations between Bush Snr. and his loose-screwed (as in an Ikea wardrobe) son down to the self-indulgent pantomime it really is.

During the 80’s, Willson-Piper’s band The Church made a comfortable living with some largely indefinable room spray that had us kids of the day reaching out for the things we didn’t quite understand, but felt as if we’d like to. Their finely honed observations of pompous social sentiment helped turn the prevailing epidemic of dinosaur proportions: punk’s boredom and indifference - back into the icy cave of capitulation where it belonged. Despite classic rock radio stations shamelessly anointing The Church by soundtracking their eye-in-the-sky traffic reports (or some other crap) with the band’s ‘hits’, The Church helped channel Punk’s late 70’s Us v Them derailment from becoming something so mindnumbingly boring that its own narcissistic righteousness threatened to never get off the hypothetical shrink’s couch it had embedded itself upon. I mean, go vomit on yourself for a principle and see how many people it inspires. (I know, ’cause I tried it.) The textured, sonic statements of possibility created by The Church were anathema to much of the pasteurized hedonism of the day.

However to paint a complete picture of the the night, (an abstract one OK) young Marty showed a touch of the recluse revolutionary scribbling subversive pamphlets in a darkened cellar kinda thing. Occasionally, he’d stop strumming his 12-string to wistfully remonstrate the sadness of deleted recordings (his own, of course). Then, to drive home what seemed to be his point (”nobody understands me?”) he urged the theoretically lamebrained crowd (who were closer to 40 years old than 30, and a few were over 50) to, “Listen to the words!” Well, fair enough dude, I thought, as I ‘listened’ to the sheer logic (if not poetry in motion…) of the arse standing in front of me as she enjoyed a glass of Champagne, but remastering those deleted items would soon morph ‘em into headphones CD’s, and ya gotta still have bucks left over from that 55 date world tour The Church played back in 2002.

Throughout his citadel of verbal overthink, accentuated by a lingering flourish of spoken French, Willson-Piper did, to his eternal credit, admit to being pretentious. Which notably contributed to the whole night’s shebang an unrehearsed bit of jive business punctuation that other bands of a similar vintage & body of work try choreographing into their own airtight and ultra-formulaic sets in mostly unsuccessful ways. Its like reaching a point in the creation of something when the trappings and the tinsel and the construction become so important that it doesn’t really matter at all what’s inside. I witnessed as much a while back during a string of INXS gigs when Jon Stevens fronted them. The shows were vacuous, but because Andrew Farriss had welcomed newbie J. Stevens with a staged handshake takes # 1, # 2 & #3 (Newcastle, Shellharbour, Wyong), the crowd went away happy with their intimate little moment. Show biz is funny like that.

Marty paid tribute to the late and wonderous Jeff Buckley with a cover. And, as befitting the news from America, advised all those present to either, “Take lots of drugs” or, “Flee to the country and hoe the ground.” (Presumably, he wasn’t talking to any phantom hookers in the crowd about a 10 day ‘business trip’ to the Gold Coast.) And while the credits are rolling, i’d be goofing off at the keyboard if the beauty of the female form (his words) were not included: the effortlessly on-target Mood Maidens contributed the aforementioned aesthetic plus a gossamer light accompaniment with their intensely moving (according to your mood) piano and cello during songs from the Sparks Lane album and 1992’s Spirit Level. They remain, along with several million others like them, two of the most convincing arguments for not commiting suicide I know.

- Peter Thornton November, 2004