Pour Habit should really invest in wireless guitar leads. The five-piece punk band probably had about a hundred metres worth of guitar and mic wires running haphazardly all across the stage, and it didn’t help that their highly entertaining singer Chuck Green was doing cartwheels and handstands on stage. His onstage repertoire of movements included throwing himself violently on the stage floor and jumping off a two-metre platform, all without hurting himself or disrupting his singing. At one point he even did an incredibly ten-second crab walk from one side of the Palace stage to the other. Pour Habit’s high energy punk songs went down well with the NOFX crowd, but the highlight of their set was their reggae piece. ‘You know if there’s a brother on stage, they’ll be reggae!’ shouted Green, who then sang the entire song balancing on the crowd barriers while holding onto a beefy security guard.

Bad Religion are legends. They turn 30 next year, and are one of the most influential bands in the punk scene. But for such a massively successful band, the Californian act introduced themselves humbly: ‘Hey, we’re opening for NOFX.’ (Later on in their set, Greg Graffin did reveal that they flipped a coin with NOFX and will be headlining one of their other Melbourne shows.) Bad Religion played a set of blistering punk rock, some songs older than most in the crowd. Their performance included classics like Los Angeles is Burning, Punk Rock Song, Them and Us, Social Suicide, Let Them Eat War and Fuck Armageddon… This is Hell!.

The band’s seamless performance was peppered by anecdotes about their adventures around Melbourne, and perfect segways into their songs. A little story about how they ventured into an exhibition at the State Library of Victoria led into Requiem for Dissent: ‘Social commentary starts with books. If you don’t like to read, you can still sing along with us. But you need to know one word: requiem.’ They even changed one of the lines in American Jesus into ‘Australian Jesus’. ‘It’s been two years since we’ve been here! Bad Religion will always have a home here in Australia,’ Graffin told a cheering crowd, and then joked, ‘We’ll try to be back in two years if we can hold out but we’re getting on in years…’

I heard NOFX sucked live, but the Californian punk band’s tongue-in-cheek humour and crazy attitude was so wrong it was right. Watching them at the Palace was like watching a bunch of 16-year-olds playing guitar in a garage somewhere: fun, infectious, tongue-in-cheek and definitely not politically correct. Every time one of them opened mouths, either the C-bomb or a racist joke came out. Fat Mike explained a brief pause in their set with: ‘Sorry, but El Hefe is really tired because Mexicans aren’t used to working. They’re really good at swimming and sitting in trucks though!’ One of their songs was pretty much musical interludes separated by racist jokes, like ‘What did the Mexican get for Christmas? My bike!’

One particular shocker by El Hefe that got a couple of gasps was, ‘Why did Hitler commit suicide? Because he saw the gas bill!’ Fat Mike stopped him, saying ‘Oh no, you know that’s too much. My grandfather died in a concentration camp.’ ‘How did he die?’ ‘He got drunk and fell off the watch tower.’ It was like all the racist jokes you had ever chuckled at to yourself but were too afraid to admit to liking, and with some good ‘ole punk music thrown in. At one stage, El Hefe even randomly blurted out, ‘I’m an Aboriginal.’ Perhaps it was the all the racist jokes, or just the fact that the crowd was rowdy, but a whole assortment of objects got thrown at the band. A collection of hats, shoes (three that this reviewer saw) and cups were hurled at the band – one black sneaker even hit Fat Mike square in the chest.

NOFX also made it really clear that they loved their ‘support act’ Bad Religion. ‘It’s always nice when a younger band gets to play with an older, better band,’ they quipped, an interesting comment because NOFX was formed a mere three years later. They went so far as to play a song called I’m a Huge Fan of Bad Religion. Other songs in their fun set that had punters moshing like mad were Bob, Radio, Linoleum, Mattersville, Fuck the Kids, Glass War and Murder the Government. And NOFX wouldn’t be NOFX if they did something a little bit crazy. Instead of the usual encore that headlining bands feel obligated to do, NOFX simply ended their set with a full skit of Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist, with Pour Habit’s Chuck Green coming back on stage. Their re-enactment of the Avenue Q scene received cheers all round, and their warped sense of humour proved that political correctness is not always for the better.