This is not a review of the Damo Suzuki gig and Dale's Fake Birthday Party. Do you want a guitar and a petty job?

Tex Perkins is alive right now because my brother used to deliver pizza for a shop that owned a fleet of race cars. He also used to run fish from the airport but that's another story.

Ben Byrne and Ivan Lisyak opened the night with some laptop noise. It brought back memories of a thousand nights spent sitting on concrete gallery floors watching boys, including those boys, crouched behind laptops making noise and art while my back bent and butt froze. I whispered to Ron & Rita "I had eight years of this stuff". Rita made a face.

I want to be The Captain of Noise is what Tex Perkins must have thought to himself one day and now behold, he is. He stood in front of the Bumhead Orchestra in a tuxedo waving a knitting needle like a madman. The idea is he points at one of them and they make some kind of noise based on the wildness of his gestures and face. The overall effect is somewhat startling if lacking a little something in terms of noise art. Between songs he turned around to address the audience, this is where the swooning happened. Unfortunately it was me doing the swooning.

The Annandale is sticky at the best of times but Friday night they outdid themselves in the sticky department. Every time I wanted to move my feet I had to curl my toes and grip my shoes or one of two disastrous things would happen. Disaster one; my feet do not move but the rest of me does in a swan face plant. Disaster two; my feet come out of my shoes and step unprotected onto the stickiness.

Dear The Annandale,

Get a mop.

Dale

This is the part where my musical knowledge does its own faceplant. What happened was large in a monument to Superman kind of way. Damo Suzuki, Spencer with The Holy Soul (plus Petey-O, Andrew Gaddo and some other guy I don't know) walked onto stage set up their equipment and cracked open my ribs one at a time until the noise broke like the ocean. I hear that the Melbourne gig was a quiet affair but in Sydney the rock escaped and raged round inside the big room at The Annandale until even Spencer was dancing on stage. I was standing in the crowd cracked wide open and pulsing like a bird on a wire.

Tex Perkins was in the crowd right in front of me, luckily for me I was so distracted by what I was witnessing onstage that I only nearly swooned seven times. Not too bad really.

A woman in a white dress came up to me and said she liked my dress. She put her hand on my waist and said something that I didn't hear. I felt odd, it felt odd, it felt like she knew me but I didn't her. She smiled every time she saw me. She was a leitmotif.

Afterwards Gecko came back to The Peach and we sat on The Peach Deck drinking cups of tea. He's a walking cupboard of discombobulation opening and closing his internal drawers and hidden panels sometimes brandishing a shining swatch or an orb of darkness. He seems dangerous and frightening but only after he goes away. When I sit by him with mug in hand it feels like a conversation lifted from my blueprint. I'm not sure what to make of him really.

At the end of the night lying in bed staring at the sticky shoes on my bedroom floor I felt the music come back through me in spectacular waves of noise, light and fury. I just closed my eyes and smiled.

Comments

Anonymous said…
It's Lisyak...
DS said…
Oh thanks. That's what I meant to type.
Anonymous said…
I had a great time.
DS said…
Glad to hear it fake guest.