Ships Piano, The Breadmakers and a somewhat understated display from buzz band The UV Race provide an interesting precursor to main event Kelley Stoltz on this the first show of his Australian tour.

The Breadmakers belt out a brand of 50s rock n roll, 60s garage and 70s surf psyche – all the time the swampy pop aesthetic prevalent with Blacktop Brierley’s Louisiana jangly guitars the highlight, and hence making them the pick of the undercards this evening. The honourable mention goes out to The UV Race’s ‘Wodongan Highland Dancer’ who appears on stage and breaks into a spastic – œkick up your heels’ hoedown the likes that have never been seen before! But it’s not enough to save the uncharacteristically timid performance from the band.

Kelley Stoltz appears along with his – œAustralian’ entourage of serial gig man Julian Wu and Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s Mikey Young who performs a little electric splash on Your Reverie but it’s mostly solo Stoltz who entertains the minimal showing of punters. The witty San Franciscan crafts one clever narrative after the other. Whilst the West Coast sprawl and bouncy, swirling Brian Wilson type shenanigans that he pulls out with full band are missing in favour of more of this slow burn folk and spoken word, tonight is a loose warm up for Stoltz to open his tour and incidentally close out the Workers Club Sundae Workers Series.

It’s evident that Stoltz knows how to control a room. Even a dark, dungeon-esque one like the Workers Club, but the sound is spot on and cuts right through your being. There’s no us and them mentality. He engages the crowd and we respond, eating the words, stories and general tomfoolery out of the palms of his hands. Playing Ever Thought Of Coming Back, taken from his 2006 Below the Branches record, Stoltz remarks how he hasn’t played the – œJesus song’ in quite a while as he’d grown tired of it, what with all the – œJesus shit going down and releasing it during the GW time’. “It’s a dangerous song to play in that era,” he confesses. “Shit, folks might have gone out and bought my records thinking I was religious!”

It’s apt that he further quashes any serious attachment to being a man of the cloth, when he delivers a disturbing parable, played in his lo-fidelity psych fuzz mode, about a mate of his who had an in-grown hair on his Johnson. The men in the room put out a collective wince and feel Stoltz’ mates pain. Loose as a goose with his demeanour tonight, the jet lag refusing to subside he then muses about what time fellow San Franciscans and Stoltz produced manic rockers Thee Oh Sees are playing at their secret Empress gig up the road and around the corner. (10pm… in the sweat box and it was phenomenal!)

Pulling out some sweet and tender back catalogue from his Antique Glow and Crockodials releases, Stoltz breezes through Underwater’s Where the Action Is, Are You Electric and covers XTC’s Grass in splendidly summery fashion. Taking it up a few notches with Prank Calls and Morning Sun, Stoltz again breaks into a crazy tale about a pal living in Detroit – his backyard spilling onto the Detroit Zoo. “We’d sit out there in the night eating chilli dogs and listening to the animals… it was wonderful… but I’ve gone and turned this experience, along with many others into these sad tales of woe,” he laughs.