While most students across the country have spent their holidays with their feet up, hanging out with friends and reading anything but school-related text books, the kids from the band Tom Ugly are on the road. The 2008 winners of Triple J’s Unearthed High are actually spending their term break performing their songs on the Tom Ugly National Tour.
Last Thursday night saw Tom Ugly revisit the ACT for the second time this year, after supporting The Grates a few months ago. Tom Ugly headlined the Transit Bar’s popular indie music night Pyramid with special Canberra guests, The Hancock Basement.
The Hancock Basement really know how to please an audience and seem to get bigger and better every time they play a gig. They opened the night with tracks from their 7” Vinyl EP. Guitarist and vocalist Nick Craven particularly impressive with his vocals and ability to grab the audience from their seats and up onto the floor. You also can’t ditch a rock and roll outfit with a guitar-playing-sax- man.
At the start of Tom Ugly’s set, the audience were made aware that it was Tom Parisi’s eighteenth birthday on the night. ‘Happy birthday’ cheers filled the room. “Instead of buying me a beer for my birthday, buy a shirt!”, Tom asked the audience sweetly. Later throughout the night several people were seen wandering the bar with their ‘Ugly’ shirts on.
Their set was quite impressive, filled with funky rock cross electronic pop. Their signature tracks such as Bad With Love and Roll Again clearly were the favourites. They also featured some songs which are to be released this August on their EP.
“This is our last song,” Tom told the audience. They didn’t seem to respond to that, so then Tom asked, “So do you want to hear Roll Again, again? This guy at the front said he hadn’t heard it yet.” They were apparently skipping another song, but the audience didn’t seem too phased.
Tom Ugly may look like just a pack of teenagers with some instruments, but when they all just play, there really isn’t any way to describe how great these guys sound. Their sound is quite mature. By mature, the music has something which most musicians develop a lot later in their careers.
to listen to their music now on 
