Eskimo Joe, Frankie & TheHeartstrings @ Forum Theatre,Melbourne (29/09/2011)

Sun 2nd Oct, 2011 in Gig Reviews

Frankie & The Heartstrings are all about attention grabbing, or at least front man Frankie Francis is. Proving to be an intriguing choice of support for the evening, the international card is still often a worthwhile gamble; and if Francis’ antics were anything to go by, the gamble paid off in terms of entertainment. Flouncing around the stage, Francis wasn’t deterred by the crowd’s reluctance to clap along or join his (often baffling) dance moves, and instead he kept up his own good share of shout outs and jolly quips about our chips, trams (they’d played a few songs on one earlier that day) and weather: “We come from a town called Sunderland and even we have better weather than this.” Some songs would have worked a lot better had the crowd known them – an example being the obvious placement for call and response on Tender – and the band’s ridiculously upbeat attitude would have benefitted from a headliner lighting setup, but Francis and his more subdued band still managed a memorable introduction of themselves.

No strangers to the Forum stage, Eskimo Joe also appeared with confidence; only theirs wasn’t to chase the foreign crowd, even if they do call their home state “exotic” Western Australia. Taking their stance across the front of stage, with dangling light bulbs overhead and the room’s starry sky above those, Eskimo Joe looked entirely comfortable leading into their set with Sarah. The Black Fingernails, Red Wine single wasn’t alone in the bands immediate look back on 2006 either, with five of the first six songs played being a look back on the band’s earlier work. These included New York, Breaking Up, This Room and a favourite of the band and the crowd, Older Than You, which Kav Temperley reminisced about as a “tried and true” staple of the band’s sets since 2004.

While performing his songs, Temperley was quite the poser, taking a stance and holding it as guitarists *Stuart MacLeod*and Joel Quartermain brushed around the stage behind him. Between tracks though, the front man enjoyed a bit of a chat and levelling with the crowd, admitting the band had just come from a Footy Show performance that was very surreal, if only for having to see Sam Newman’s face. He introduced everything in good humour, never taking himself too seriously – which was certainly heartening alongside much of the material. “This could be a massive hit one day,” he introduced for Speeding Car before quoting the future crowd, “We loved it, now we hate it cause we kept hearing it on the radio.”

The track – a soft acoustic number that didn’t seem as hit worthy as the intro jovially implied it would be – marked the second half of the set, with the bevy of older tracks now played and Temperley eagerly announcing, “This is when we take it to another level.” They hit the right stride for that remark with a big performance of Foreign Land, but quickly retreated into settled territory with a couple of sob stories – their own Childhood Behaviour and Roy Orbison’s Crying.

It took Don’t Let Me Down to get a buzz back into the room, with the song taking a likeable acoustic approach as MacLeod and Quartermain hit tambourine and drums respectively, instead of their usual guitars. Then the trio were all smiles as they brought the set around to its conclusion with another old favourite, From The Sea – finishing things on a high as the crowd took over the final “whoa-oh-o’s” and the band bowed out.

The band’s encore was another look back on their commercial breakthrough, with singles London Bombs and Black Fingernails, Red Wine. The amount of older material that still slotted into this relatively short set (75 minutes for a band with five albums) was not a bad thing, but was surprising, as was the seemingly small amount of material from Ghosts of the Past, given it was that album’s launch show. Maybe the band was playing up on the new album’s title; although most of their old tracks could hardly be considered “ghosts” given they’d made up the majority of the set’s stand out moments.
Eskimo Joe did end with a new track though, Sky’s On Fire, which with its solo beginning and ending and long jam out in the middle, did seem like a kind of sign the band were pleasing themselves having just given the crowd the bigger hits. It wasn’t the most predictable way to end, which made it all the better.