Chicks on Speed were headlining Home nightclub’s first Access All Areas night. In a nutshell, Home nightclub is Sydney’s quintessential dance music venue, and in April they started booking bands on Saturday nights. It was hard to get Sydney’s cynical indie music fans into the tourist central that is Cockle Bay, so they’ve decided to open up the four areas of the club and cater to a wide variety of music tastes. Chicks on Speed were on the main stage, Batrider and Toydeath were on the ‘Rebel Rebel’ stage, and there were hard-core dance DJs in the other two areas.
Before the headliners came on stage, Dan de Caires spun the decks to an eclectic crowd that included kasubi wearers, bogans, drag queens and a break-dancing midget. Everyone was getting down when a monotonous, robotic drone chanted CHICKS ON SPEED, CHICKS ON SPEED. Sydney-born Alex Murray-Leslie, New Yorker Melissa Logan and Kiki Moorse from Munich exploded onto the stage wearing insane monochromatic costumes, embellished with florescent face paint and oversized props. Their whole performance was synchronised with a film projected onto a screen behind them.
They burst into their song Girl Monster and demonstrated their performance style, somewhere between Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne.
All their songs are raw, dirty, electroclash, which uses poppy melodies to comment on popular culture. They have a songs devoted to plastic surgery and My Space. The chorus goes ‘My space, your space, whose space is it? Let’s switch on, drag and drop.’ Researching further, there are some clever phrases in the song that were a bit distorted on the night, such as ‘Watch yourself, watching yourself…do you exist on the internet’. Become their ‘friend’ to hear the whole tune.
Everyone there was lapping it up, there were lots of smiles on faces and when COS called for three ‘fashion victims’ to come on stage they had plenty to choose from. Two fans were dressed up and got to dance while their photos were taken to a song about fashion. The less lucky ‘fashion victim’ held up a piece of neon pink cloth for the whole song, but got a big hug for his effort.
The girls kept the excite-o-metre on eleven the entire set, save for one costume change. They vacated the stage to show a film clip of one of their songs about musical authenticity. They were singing lyrics like ‘Did you write that song, did you make those clothes’ in falsetto voices while dancing around on a rooftop completely naked. A guy remarked, ‘this is the art house part of the show’, and we all got to watch it twice because the sound stuffed up the first go.
They came back in costumes consisting of shredded neon fabric and proved that they could play guitars, while singing about not playing guitars. Well, they didn’t demonstrate tremendous virtuosity with the whole guitar playing thing, and the best part of the song is when they did a ‘stacks-on’ the guitar at the end. They did play the saxophone and sampled scissors and a sewing machine through their set.
Even though they’re not a political band, Australian born Alex Murray Leslie spoke out against John Howard’s move to nuclear energy in Australia, suggesting that solar power would be more appropriate in our sun drenched land. This comment was applauded wildly, only slightly less enthusiastically than Chicks On Speed’s final encore.
Afterwards, NZ band Batrider played in the glasshouse, on the ‘Rebel Rebel’ stage. On Saturday night they struggled against the sound gear, but if you ever see them on a bill you should check it out. They make a really tight rock sound, and have quite catchy songs.
Toydeath rounded out the evening. This act is an experimental group from Newcastle that use toys to create songs. They’ll put a kid’s Casio drum machine in the back ground and then sample a toy guitar, a noisy toy donkey and a George Bush doll. Their performance really created a night devoted to experimental instrumentation and avant garde performance.
Check out the photos from the gig here
