I awoke on Saturday and put my newly discovered feelings of
mortality on hold as I contemplated the pleasures that the day promised. I was going to spend it at the second All
Tomorrow’s Parties Festival to be held
in Melbourne during the same year. The
first festival was held earlier in the year in a wedding reception and bingo
centre in Altona. This was the two day
affair featured My Bloody Valentine, Swans, etc and was judged to be an
artistic and financial success.
Today’s show was always conceived as a one day Halloween
themed affair at the same venue.
However, about 3 weeks ago the event was down sized to St. Kilda
specifically The Palais Theatre and the band room at the Prince of Wales
Hotel. As the Palais holds less than
3000 people it’s probably safe to say that this occurred due to poor ticket
sales.
This was both good and bad news for me. The good news was that start times were
rearranged so that the entire event would be done and dusted by 11pm. Very civilised. It also meant that all of the major acts
could be viewed from the largely comfy seats of the Palais. Double tick.
Not only that, but the venue was divided into seating zones rewarding
those punters (like me) who purchased tickets early received the best seats.
Woo Hoo!
The downside though was significant. The Prince of Wales Hotel is about a 5-10
minute walk away from the Palais so I would need to really commit to seeing any
of the bands programmed to play there.
As some of the bands playing times overlapped that at the Palais, any
decision to commute would inevitably mean missing a fair chunk of the one or
two sets without any guarantee of getting into the much smaller venue if it was
full. Reluctantly, I decided not to risk
this, thus missing out on seeing parts of the sets by Geelong’s mighty Hoss and
US stoner rock gods Sleep among others.
And then a couple of weeks beforehand, one of the acts I was
most looking forward to seeing again, the reformed Jesus Lizard, pulled out of
the festival and their Australian tour. Watching David Yow and company take on
the ornate Palais venue had threatened to be the day’s highlight. But I wasn’t going to let any of this get me
down. After attending to shopping and
sundry other duties with “M”, I headed off to the Palais intent on catching the
“mystery act” occupying the 2.45 pm slot at the Palais assigned to the Lizard.
The mystery act turned out to be local indie darlings The Twerps. They are a four piece band
with a compact sound not all that dissimilar to the first recordings made by
The Go-Betweens with Lindy Morrison. All
of their tracks were relatively short, usually catchy, and full of youthful
enthusiasm which will probably evolve into something extraordinary. They are definitely one act to watch.
Next up was the one off act Pop Crimes performing their tribute to the songs of the sadly
departed Rowland S Howard. The early
part of the set was given to tracks recorded by These Immortal Souls and
performed by former members Genevieve McGuckin, Harry Howard and Craig
Williamson with J.P Shiloh recreating Howard’s signature guitar work with
uncanny accuracy. The remainder of the
set was taken up by tracks from his two solo albums with Shiloh again starring
alongside other luminaries including Mick Harvey and Brian Hooper. It was a deeply felt and appropriate tribute
to the musician in, appropriately, the suburb where he originally made his name
with The Birthday Party, performed his final gig and where a street is to be
named after him.
The Palais was about two thirds full for Pop Crimes but
reached just about full capacity for the next act, the debut Australian
appearance of legendary American act Television,
and playing their revered debut album Marquee Moon no less. The band line up was that which recorded that
album except for Jimmy Rip who replaced Richard Lloyd and the album was
recreated with a great degree of love and passion, albeit without the wild
abandon that characterised live releases from the original era such that
documented on The Blow Up. Despite
this, Tom Verlaine’s guitar work is as sharp as ever (although the same can’t
be said of his vocals) as is the Fred Smith/Billy Ficca rhythm section. The set consisted of the Marquee Moon album
and wisely, the band did not play the tracks in the order they appeared on the record. This allowed for tracks to be better arranged
for the concert setting, keeping See No Evil as the opener and bringing the
slower numbers together to create mood, light and shade. However, the revelatory aspect of the
performance was in (finally) determining which guitarist played which part on
the tracks. I was amazing to discover,
for example, that the wonderful embellishments at the end of Guiding Light were
the work of Lloyd/Rip rather than Verlaine as I had assumed for decades. In the end the highlight was the set closer
which was predictably Marquee Moon itself, spun out to 15 minutes and which had
the entire audience enthralled. The standing
ovation they received at its end was a deserved testament to one of rock’s
finest works and a damned fine performance than many in the audience never
thought they would ever see live.
The nostalgic feel that Pop Crimes and Television engendered
was simultaneously reaffirmed and yet comprehensively blown away by the next
act, Australian legends The Scientists. After a surprise cover of the theme to the
James Bond film You Only Live Twice early on, they proceeded to blast through
the cream of their catalogue, including Blood Red River, that has led to many a
music critic claiming that they were the true inventors of grunge.
The FxxK Buttons who
followed then demonstrated that it was possible to blow away a crowd using
keyboards and electronics. They are an
English duo who have a set up not that dissimilar to The Chemical Brothers but
with the capacity to play live keyboards alongside the electronic attack. Facing each other at right angles to the
audience, the early numbers were astonishingly heavy with the keyboards
emitting a droning quality that ultimately made them sound closer to bands like
Ministry than anyone else. The tracks
appeared to suffer whenever the keyboard was taken out of the equation with the
band then sounding like any number of Chemical Brothers clones. For the most part, however, they were hugely
impressive aided by their giant glitter ball and massive visuals on a specially
erected screen.
The night culminated with headliners The Breeders playing their Last Splash album in sequence. To my mind The Breeders are not a headline
act and this is where I suspect this might have been one of the factors
resulting in the poor ticket sales. Not
only that, the albums best track, the infectious Cannonball, is the second
track on the album positioned a long way from the albums other signature track
Divine Hammer. In other words, however
well sequenced the album may be it didn’t lend itself to live performance and
perhaps they should have taken liberties with the running order as had Television. Still they attacked the album with vim and
vigour and Kim Deal was her usual engaging self with the audience.
The Breeders set made for an odd end to what had been a
tremendous day. Hopefully the organisers
have stumbled onto an alternative way of presenting a one day festival by
utilising two indoor venues but hopefully closer to each than this. Of course to turn a profit given the number
of acts involved the main venue needs to seat more than The Palais. I suspect that when the construction of the
roof on Margaret Court Arena at the National Tennis Centre is complete,
promoters will be able to do just that utilising it and the next door Rod Laver
Arena. Let’s hope they do, this festival
was just too damn enjoyable an experience to let it go to waste.
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