I've been waiting for this one for a while. I've had tickets for weeks. I still have regrets for not seeing Flipper way back in like 1984 and then there were years of not seeing much to make up for as well. Again though, I get there way too early. The tram is fairly quick and it only takes about 20 minutes or so to get there.
The Espy is one of the multitude of hotels (and pubs) around Melbourne. The front steps are dominated by smokers. The front room on the bottom level has some pretty lame band playing, background music for drinking. I head upstairs to pick up my ticket and get to the ballroom. It is a nice venue, lots of strange accents on the wall like antlers and Moroccan looking curvy fake doorways.
Nation Blue is up first. I had listened to a few of their songs on Myspace and wasn't so excited about seeing them. I couldn't get much from them, quite get a handle on what they were from those. I'm still not sure I have much of a handle on them but I did enjoy their set. Their drummer was great, quite powerful. It made their songs a strange mix of slower guitar stuff, chunka-chunka-rest chunka-chunka-rest, while the drummer was off doing double time thrash drumming. Somehow it all fit together and made a nice wall of noise. Probably helped that it didn't seem to be so important what the guitar guy was playing, he was fond of flipping his guitar around and sometimes playing it by rubbing it on his back, so it didn't seem to matter so much about notes and rhythm, it still fit in with the rest of the sound. And I like a band who runs around on stage, running into things, kicking amps, and the rest of that. I can't remember any of the songs now but I did like them.
I was really excited to see X at this show. It is a lot of why I wanted to come to the show in the first place. There is the X from LA that everybody has heard of, this is the other X, from Australia. Back in my youth, I was quite excited about obscure stuff from the other side of the world. Maybe they were not so obscure in Australia, but in America they were pretty much unknown. My trips to Wax Trax would yield me nice gems that no many others in the US were listening to, Celibate Rifles, Triffids, Go-Betweens, etc and when I really splurged (way expensive imports, something on Flying Nun Records from NZ. But I had At Home With You back then and really liked it.
X lost their original bass player a few years ago (cancer, I believe) but their lineup now is substantially the same as back in the At Home With You days. But when it comes down to it, X is mostly about (Steve) and his guitar and pretty distinctive gravelly voice. The sound at the show was mixed pretty much so that dominated the sound and it worked fine. The bass player had a five stringed bass and seemed to fit in fine. The drumming is laid back and certainly not the powerhouse that Nation Blue has, but she kept good time and filled out the sound a little bit. But like I said, the sound and rhythm all came from the guitar. He has a cool stripped down sound on his guitar, back from like old school punk, New York Dolls sort of rawness. They played a good set of all their old songs, All Over Now is really a magnificent song, and it was so cool to finally see them.
Ahh, Flipper. It is strange to see the crowd at the show. Probably about 1/3 is older people, kind of my age, who grew up in the 80s and for who punk was still something fairly new. I was a bit too young and musically unaware to really engage with the original punk scene, but by the early to mid 80s, when New Wave was totally in and the 2nd wave of punk was coming out, I was totally in with that. Flipper then was slightly old school but still coming up with new things. The other 2/3 of the audience looked to be in their early 20s, probably first heard Flipper on iTunes, but a lot of them sing along with everything.
Ted comes on, looks a bit like a dirty crusty hippie, long dreadlock, although it is greying. Steve reminds me a lot of Bobby from the Sopranos (the one married to Janice). He comes on stage and takes pictures of everything, the stage, the hall, and the audience. Rachel, the new bass player has harlequin stockings, a skirt, and saddle shoes. Bruce really surprises me, he comes on looking like he is just headed to the office, at least a business casual one, sort of nice trousers and shirt. They fuss around getting themselves ready. Bruce admits that even after 30 years, he still gets butterflies before going on. It is his 50th birthday today too. Wow.
So, it is basically the old Flipper but Will died years ago, and they have tried an assortment of bass players since then. Kriss Novelasek (of Nirvana fame) was the most recent one and was instrumental in getting them back together recently for an All Tomorrow's Parties and their most recent album. But he decided he didn't want to tour, so Rachel (formerly in Frightwig) joined just a month or so ago. She starts and she has the Flipper bass sound, super distorted, slow deliberate bass lines. Seems perfect and she seems to fit in with the rest of them pretty well. Ted makes a blizzard of noise on guitar (playing mostly bar chords and lots of notes in between to fill it all). He has a cool airline seat belt guitar strap too. Steve keeps pace and hits hard and Bruce screams. It is good.
They seem quite happy tonight. There is a big crowd, a few hundred, and they are thrilled. Apparently in Perth and Adelaide the few nights before, there were only a dozen or so at the show. But Melbourne is a lot cooler than those places. So, they play a long set and even play Sex Bomb, which I hear has been left out of a lot of recent shows. For that one, Bruce takes the bass and Rachel stands by and takes pictures. Random audience members wander up onto stage and sing. Another mic wanders around the front of the crowd near the stage and people scream into that. I'm front and center, right up to the stage and it is great there being close, except for the annoying slam dancers who keep running into me. That and the few people with cameras with huge lenses that take about 600 photographs. But slam dancing, you know, that annoyed me even in the 80s and I haven't enjoyed it much since then. It reminds me of seeing the Cro-mags at CGBGs a few years ago and having to wedge a table between me and the drunken idiots running around trying to smash into people. You know, if you want to dance and run into each other, yeah fine, but aiming at people who don't really want to is annoying. This was just like 5 people too, so not all that many.
They play lots of songs, Ha Ha Ha, Life, Sacrifice, well, a mix of old and new. It is everything I expected it would be. The new stuff sounds like the old stuff, which is just fine with me. They go late and I miss the last tram at 145 by a few minutes and have to walk the 20 minutes home instead, but it feels good to be out and stretching after standing for that long. Seen Flipper and X, can tick that off my life list now.
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