The self-proclaimed ‘Last Festival of Summer’ looked to be anything but, as the masses piled into the Esplanade under a blanket grey April sky. Thankfully the rain gods withheld their spite, though the prior day’s deluge did for a while threaten to turn the venue into a mud bath of Glastonbury proportions.
On its first time in Perth, my initial impression of the festival was more Southbound than Big Day Out: no D barrier, easy movement around the grounds, a relaxed vibe (yes my Southern Cross-tattoo sporting friend, I’m talking to you!), less booze and a conspicuous lack of the fluoro kids attending their first festival show. Oh, and a massive plus for the very central location. Within 15 minutes I’d formed the opinion that hopefully V Fest is here to stay, and I hadn’t even seen a single band yet!
Despite their sophomore record In Ghost Colours debuting at Number 1 on the Australian charts recently, I have remained relatively oblivious to the rise and rise of Cut Copy. And so it was with fresh eyes and ears that I approached their set. Now, I have to say off the bat, these guys owe a seriously massive debt to New Order. So much so that frankly I find it hard to review the former without frequently referring to the latter. While the opening track had a “pretty boys doing not much with synths” vibe about it, the band quickly benefited when multi-instrumentalist Tim Hoey swapped his “button-pusher” (really, what did that thing do?) for the bass. It filled the sound and moved the hips, and as New Order has shown, gave the songs a human touch while shedding none of the dance-ability.
Continuing the Bernard Sumner worship, principal songwriter Dan Whitford has penned some truly atrocious lyrics. Unfortunately, he is yet to cover for this with the consistently water-tight hooks and melodies that his idols were capable of, though he did give a hint of his capabilities in closing with Triple J favourite Hearts On Fire. Now it sounds like I didn’t enjoy the band, which isn’t entirely correct. Their sound is easy to listen to and they do it well enough. I like New Order so it stands to reason I should be able to extract something from Cut Copy. Right? Well, therein lies the problem. While they aren’t exactly Going Nowhere, they do need to take a risk and forge their own unique sound if they don’t want to leave me feeling like I’ve just seen an inferior cover band. The highlight of their set for my mind came when Hoey and Whitford took to the guitars and punched against the polyrhythmic synths with a swathe of feedback and high-stringed melodic tension as the rest of the band rocked along. To me it evoked the logical midpoint of a New Order / My Bloody Valentine jam, and it revealed a lot more scope for originality than what came before.
Do you remember the JAMC? I don’t know about you, but I swear on my name only a small portion of the crowd did, given the relatively subdued response that greeted the recently resurrected Jesus and Mary Chain. Maybe it was the complete and utter lack of stage presence – though stage presence is hardly to be expected from a band that achieved infamy via riot-inducing 15-minute atonal feedback blast “shows”. To pigeonhole the band for their swathes of feedback, however, is to ignore the fact that they wrote some of the best music to come from anywhere in the late ‘80s, let alone the fertile UK scene.
Like fellow noise-merchants My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails and The Dandy Warhols, the JAMC are keenly aware that you cannot use blankets of fuzz as a cover for a lack of pop sensibilities. And so it was that with sheer song writing quality the JAMC gradually won over the masses. Particular highlights included the aching rush of Some Candy Talking, the breathless Snakedriver and the fast-driving rave-up Head On. A Nico -esque leather-clad Roisin Murphy joined the band for the timeless Just Like Honey before they closed with a storming take on the still-thrilling Reverence. They certainly felt less dangerous than in their heyday, but that’s to be expected. What wasn’t to be expected was that they would sound so perfectly spot-on. Welcome back.
After the 2007 Southbound debacle, it was a welcome sight to see Modest Mouse back in Perth. However, from the punk-ish opening of Bury Me With It, the signs were there that today was just not going to be the Mouseketeers’ day. We found frontman Isaac Brock lost in the midst of a truly awful mix, his vocals too low to the point of inaudibility. The band too seemed somewhat agitated, so you have to wonder what sound they were getting. From here the set struggled to lift and for whatever other reasons the band never really clicked into gear.
While it’s hard to deny the class of tracks such as Satin In A Coffin and Dashboard, live they failed to spark, despite the kicking and howling best endeavours of Mr Brock. Still, Float On managed to rightly inspire the day’s first big sing-a-long. Good News For People Who Love Bad News classic The View and Spitting Venom from last year’s We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank closed out the set, and whether it was my ears finally adjusting or the band giving it one last rally before the end of their Australian tour, they suddenly sounded revitalised. It was a relief to see them close on such a positive note, and yes, it’s still impossible not to stare at Johnny Marr for extended periods of time.
From the moment the one and only Mr Josh Homme swaggers on stage with the kind of confidence that comes from knowing the crowd will soon be in the palm of his hand, you just know that Queens of the Stone Age are going to deliver tonight. And deliver they do. Big time. Relishing the crowd and the live atmosphere, the band quickly kicked straight into fifth gear, welcoming the onset of the night to which they belong. The set-list was diverse and through wave upon wave of impeccable stoner blues riffs the highlights were plentiful. Among them, incorporating Amy Winehouse’s Rehab lyrics to put a funny spin on the brutally brilliant Feel Good Hit of the Summer, particularly stood out. As did segueing from that track into The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret, thus completing the one-two sucker punch from 2000’s Rated R.
As evidenced tonight, the current Queens line-up is an incredibly well oiled machine, and neither the band nor Australia’s love affair with them shows any signs of slowing down. The glistening beast that is Joey Castillo sent every beat on the kick drum straight to your chest with the force of a sledgehammer, while bassist Michael Shuman bounded around the stage with ceaseless energy. On stage right, Troy Van Leeuwen handled the guitar like a devilishly dark and handsome Snape as Dean Fertita’s synth drive in Turnin’ On The Screw from last year’s stunning Era Vulgaris gave the track the solid industrial feel that permeated much of that album.
But it was fan-favourite Make It Wit Chu that showed the true beauty of the Queens modus operandi: raw sexual energy permeating a deep sensualism and sense of soul into all that brute muscle and swagger. Josh Homme is the living embodiment of this. A rough and ready amiable showman, he’s like what Dave Grohl would be if he wrote cooler songs and drank harder liquor. He is the Ginger Elvis, and he will kick your arse and serenade your girlfriend afterwards. Unsurprisingly, both this track and Little Sister were dedicated to the women of Perth. Closing with the monster hits Sick, Sick, Sick and No One Knows, the testosterone flew around the beautifully sweaty mosh as we paid our respects for the set of the day. If you follow the weird and wonderful news of the world, you’ll have noticed the recent case of the world’s first pregnant man. Josh, if you need me to bear your children, it seems maybe I now can.
Now, Duran Duran. I don’t know if this was some big in-joke on the part of the organisers, but they lost me here. I thought about giving you a composed informative review, and then I realised Simon Le Bon is a creepy lecherous man. His band was naff then, and they’re naff now. ‘Nuff said.
It had been over ten years since The Smashing Pumpkins last rolled into town as part of their Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness world tour juggernaut. Since then, well, Adore was equally incredible and incredibly misunderstood, and supposedly a three million-selling failure. Machina, despite its vast inconsistency, successfully fused the best elements of Mellon Collie and Adore and had a solid Republic-era New Order (that band again!) feel to it. But it tumbled down the chart in the pop climate of 2000, and Billy Corgan spat the dummy, disowning the Pumpkins name for seven long years. Unfortunately, comeback album Zeitgeist most certainly wasn’t, feeling rather like a desperate lunge at former glories. So, it’s 2008 and the Pumpkins (less James Iha and D’Arcy Wretzky ) are back in town. Onto the Nostalgia Carousel we hop! No Infinite Sadness Express, but a ride nonetheless.
As Jimmy Chamberlin launched into the symphonic glamour of Tonight, Tonight we hurtled back in time, and it took a good few minutes to come to terms with being face-to-face with the band that for a time had meant so much to so many of the crowd. Tarantula, the lead single from Zeitgeist, followed and didn’t sound out of place before we were treated to the classic Mayonnaise off the seminal Siamese Dream. It was an excellent opening triplet, and though Billy hadn’t yet seen fit to smile, it was hardly a cause for concern with the king of gloom merchants. It was at this point that a spot of seemingly divine intervention occurred and we were treated to a truly magical and memorable festival moment. As the band reached the climax of sprawling epic Porcelina of the Vast Oceans, a series of fireworks set off on the Perth foreshore illuminated the skies above and brought a row of beaming smiles to the band. For those few minutes, the crowd was lost in a psychedelic blend of sound and vision, and the communal feeling of pure bliss was tangible. From here the gig had the potential to reach all-time classic status, and it really depends on your personal opinion of the band as to what happened next.
Firstly, new track Superchrist. Billy, tuning your guitar to Drop D and repeatedly hammering away at tired power chords is NOT A GOOD IDEA. You used to be at the forefront of musical creation, yet the track felt like a quickly mashed together drone-fest written for no other purpose than to showcase Chamberlin’s phenomenal drumming power and to give the new band members Ginger Reyes and Jeff Schroeder some sense of ownership in a song. Plus, it sounds exactly like United States, but we’ll come to that track in just a tick.
Secondly, Cash Car Star. Loud and furious? Yes. Rambling rant? Yes. Self-indulgent? Of course. So Classic Billy then. Now, Classic Billy is a distinctly love/hate proposition of which there is simply no middle ground. A cursory glance at my username should reveal which side of the fence I sit on. I loved it – perhaps my highlight of the set even. See, Classic Billy, this is what I paid to see and have waited a long time for. However, I’m all too aware that these moments painfully reveal the dichotomy that exists between the fervent fans who will follow the band through such excursions, and the casual listener, who won’t stand for Billy’s ego and eccentricities. At a festival, the latter will usually outnumber the former. To his credit, though, through sheer imposing presence on guitar and the band remaining phenomenally tight while careening along at breakneck speed, he pulled it off. It helped that he was able to snatch lyrics from Britney Spears’ Piece Of Me, displaying a sense of humour and playing off his own distorted public persona.
Crush, from the 1991 debut album Gish, presented a decent reward for the long-time fans, though a meandering cover of Pink Floyd’s Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun didn’t help where an Adore track or two would have gone down a treat. Predictably, Today brought huge cheers as that riff that launched them into the stratosphere rang out around the grounds. A solo acoustic 1979, though lacking the melodic propulsion that made the original such a cult classic, also captured the crowd’s attention and managed to give the festival a momentary sense of intimacy.
Then came United States. Yep, you’ve read the reviews. Stretching a 20-minute version of this sludgy metal-drone-fest clunker is ALSO NOT A GOOD IDEA, especially when put in context of the band’s earlier indulgences. I shudder to think of the four or five songs they could have played in that time. Maybe this was inevitable. After all, Billy’s metal tendencies have been steadily creeping towards the front since the 1999 Arising! tour. Now they are in full swing. But where has the subtlety and dynamic shift we fell in love with over your first few albums gone? What happened to the swirl of mellotrons blending with walls upon walls of guitars, ballads nestling next to feedback freak-outs, maelstroms of Marshalls making friends with piano pirouettes? On tonight’s showing, the blitzkrieg of sound is the prime focus of their current arsenal, and it doesn’t suit.
Outstanding encore performances of The Everlasting Gaze and Bullet With Butterfly Wings brought the masses back on board, and the roar that farewelled the band suggested that maybe I’d been overly critical. As he stayed on stage to lap up the adulation, you were greeted with the distinct notion that love him or hate him, there is only one Billy Corgan. And (despite Gerard Way and co.’s best efforts) there is only one Smashing Pumpkins. Tonight was certainly proof of that.
