Sunday. The recovery lounge. The final resting point of my swiss cheese soul: since grated, dessicated and sprinkled into a teeny tiny shot glass and set on fire.. mmmmm zesty! If hair-of-the-dog ever had a name and a place to call its own, it would be right here at The Grace Emily. No more a perfect venue could ever have been invented to host your fullblown psychotic breakdown. Are you a shut-in? growing your hair and fingernails long? peeing into milk bottles? come to the Grace Emily! It’s all in the details: this veritable shitstorm of oddball memorabilia, walls to ceiling festooned and festive, an endless array of spastic knick-knacks! YES!
Which becomes all the more befitting for tonight’s wild and wacky entertainment as the live stage becomes equally festooned with its own endless array of the spastically knick-knackered. Who knew it was actually physically possible to have just THAT much junk stuffed onto the ONE tiny live stage and ever hope to fit people on it too!? and who knew it was also possible to use the word “festooned” three times in the one live music blog? The Grace Emily, that’s what!
The Sea Thieves
The ukelele of course could only be the work of these two fine fools: The Sea Thieves. Maybe you recognise them as the two faceless drones who serve you all that rat poison behind the bar at the Jade Monkey every night: Zac the laughable imp and part time psychic, Naomi the mild mannered librarian of liquors and assassin of accordians. Maybe you recognise them from their many on screen appearances from Lord Of The Rings. Maybe you recognise them as those two mysterious midgets who craft you new pairs of shoes every day in the dead of night? Or maybe you don’t recognise them all, thanks to all their hard work every night tending to your alcoholic amnesia. Indeed it IS a rare sight to see them outside of their faerie lit cages to prove they even exist outside the realm of myth and magic. Bigfoot? The Loch Ness Monster? UFOs? Osama Bin Laden? how else could we hope to explain Zac’s unnerving ability to predict your drinking habits even before YOU do? or Naomi’s telekinetic ability to speak without words? They’re The Sea Thieves that’s what, and oh yes they are very real! and tonight they bless us with a ridiculous array of magical musical toys and lightly dappled acoustics that only a Sunday night at the tail end of a four day piss bender and a class five hangover could possibly ever accomodate.
The Sea Thieves. In layman’s terms they could be loosely described as Beck’s “Sea Change”, Tom Waits on prozac, The Shins on valium, Radiohead on morphine and one of those dusty old wood panelled radios from the 1930’s crackling out a sweetly soothing lullaby moments before the Nazi’s invade your motherland. Or better yet pick up a copy of their album “Hiding In The Shade” load it onto your ipod, have yourself an absolute blinder of a Saturday night, get thrown out by security, pick a fight with the taxi driver, spend five hours walking home instead only to misplace the house keys, break a window to get in, find out you’re in the WRONG house, throw up everywhere except IN the bowl, collapse dead, crawl out’ve bed, reach for the headphones, reach for the panadol, collapse on the couch, tune the tv to static and space out to THIS with your eyelids flickering! It’s all there in the sweetly muffled acoustics, the squeak, the groan, the crackle, the swoon, and the total look of confusion when you attempt to piece together just WHAT the fuck you did last night (followed by a broad smile when you realise the cops never DID find out where you buried all those bodies). Oh yes! right here, spread eagled on the carpet, eyes rolling back into your skull and listening to this shit is the ONLY place to be!
If you can’t see this video window click HERE
Mr Wednesday
Which makes it all the more perfect the prelude to act two: Mr Wednesday. Here in on a cold winter’s night in July. The clinking of pint glasses, the chatter of conversation, small, whimsical, yet bordering on the meaningful, broken intermidently by the shout of “two shots!” from the pool table behind. Five lost souls swimming in a fish bowl: awkward and academically unkempt find themselves onto a live stage. One imagines the Grace Emily simply picked them up living homeless off the street, hoisted them in here using one of those retractable claws you use find in novelty skill testers, dropped into place amongst the crawl spaces between the clusterfuck of drums, keyboards and guitar amps, drugged upto their eyeballs and then told that THEY would be playing the part of Mr Wednesday tonight. For as we all know, the REAL “Mr Wednesday” were kidnapped years ago by some vast Orwellian organisation (or quite possibly Telstra) and are currently being re-educated into believing that 2+2=5, free will is a myth, and there is no such thing as Santa Claus, evolution or global warming. Oddly enough though the crowd here doesn’t seem to mind, as every available space on the carpet before them responds in kind with the vacuous smiles of countless refugees fled from the same torture chambers: sprawled, seated, sedated and blissfully bleery eyed. The perfect setting for a night of Mr Wednesday.
For Mr Wednesday are not just five barely conscious musicians and a 45 minute set (with an optional encore) of the blissfully narcoleptic and meticulously melancholic; but an ideal! A quiet riot raging against the corporate machine! A constant struggle against a white noise world of systemic compliance, 9-5 forced labour divisions, territorial pissings and 30 second sound bites! They represent the silent strength and solidarity to be found in passive resistance, of becoming educated and socially aware! of become more than just processed meat, but a people’s revolution for autonomy and actuality! (and I’m also told they make an awesome frozen yoghurt too!)
Mr Wednesday. It’s all there in the genius of their slow cooked arrangements, how they shuffle their feet about on stage: like lost children, idiot savants, autistic architects to the grand design. How they weave in those layers of articulate guitars, bass and keys like dappled sunlight sifting through autumn leaves, singing a song for the fallen, blown about in a mad cacophany of drums as one lone plastic bag does its dance amongst it and Ricky Fitts from American Beauty lights another joint, breathes in, bursts into tears and collapses dead unable to cope with it all.
If you can’t see this video window click HERE
Aaaaaah I ask you, what better way is there to spend a Sunday night after you’ve lived through a weekend quite as ridiculous as mine? Where else but here at the Grace Emily!? Here’s to you Mr Wednesday and The Sea Thieves! you’ve damn near made my insane journey complete!
And so as I collapse on the pavement outside for the last time with a smile on my face and not a single coherent thought left buzzing in my brain; we bid fond farewell to episode four and all the other episodes the fell before it. Knowing full well that even in it’s entirety this story was only ever ONE story to tell, one story of many, one for every every single pub, club, live venue and mad fool living it up amongst this Adelaide scene. This as always, I give to you!
DougieAndJayney
said on the 8th Aug, 2008