By nine pm the Amplifier Bar was sold out and Dead Letter Circus fans had given up waiting at the bar for a drink in favour of finding a place in front of the stage. It was a mixed crowd, with no particular stereotype overrepresented, although there were an unexpected number of forlorn looking men sitting alone in the beer garden, presumably having been dragged along by girlfriends who had abandoned them in favour of the band for the duration of the set.
This tour is in support of their current single, Reaction which is enjoying regular radio play around the country. Of the eleven songs they performed, six of them were new material, including the current radio single, a brave move, but one that paid off, since the crowd continued to give their mostly undivided attention to the band, regardless of whether they could sing along. Of course, they loved it more when they could join in; and frontman Kim Benzie made certain to offer the Mic to the crowd a couple of times, putting one hand on the overhead speaker, and leaning an impressively long way (he is very tall) into the audience, until it looked like he was going to get pulled in.
After the audience’s excitement during This Life Awake, it may have seemed to the band that they had lost it after only half the set. What actually happened was that they finished one new song, Anchor which went off well, but then as they started a second new song immediately afterwards, One Step, a brawl broke out and the combatants, security and their friends scuffled their way outside to settle their differences where they had more room to pull hair. Possibly this audience didn’t have much of an attention span, or maybe some of the forsaken boys from the courtyard had decided to go inside and make trouble. The brawl and sudden loss of a chunk of the audience should not reflect badly on either of the new songs, both of which were catchy and intense with the kind of honesty fans have come to expect from Dead Letter Circus. For their part, rather than worry about where the crowd had gone, the band simply threw even more energy into the rest of the song. Incredible, considering the litres of sweat they were already soaked in. Bezerker bassist Stewart Hill went close to stealing the show from his band mates by going head-bangingly wild on his little corner of the stage for the entire set.
Dead Letter Circus toured Perth a couple of times before they even had an EP to sell, on the strength of their first radio single which was a Triple J favourite for many months. The high rotation doesn’t seem to have done them any harm; the crowd became positively rabid as the opening beats of Disconnect and Apply were recognised. The people still inside, who had just begun to appreciate the extra room for waving their horns about, had to relinquish it again as the people outside forgot about bitch slapping each other and pushed back inside to join the mob again.
As Benzie commented later, he thought it would be difficult for a crowd to maintain its excitement level when they had never had a chance to hear the songs before. Not this crowd however; aside from the lack of singing, there was no real drop-off in the excitement level, which indicates that the new material surpasses expectations. We can expect to see at least two of the new songs on the Reaction single when it’s released later this year, hopefully in time for the November tour.
