Canberra, Sydney, Port Macquarie – Day 2

Onward to Sydney five hours earlier than we needed to for a meeting that also turned out to be cancelled.  Wicked, are we too hot a pie?  No one wants a taste or poke.

Oxford Art Factory were nice enough to let us in for a mosey around.  Wow!  I freaking love this place.  When the mixer showed up it turned out to be a member of Dappled Cities, one of our favourite Australian bands.  This superstar had a fine ear, and was a great guy, what a band!  Soundcheck was a treat.

After a truly crap pub dinner we returned to find the venue full of really cool people.  What an amazing venue.  The support band were sounding good and had rad visuals behind them, and there was a really nice vibe in the room.  We got on to play and totally smashed it.  Met a lot of people afterwards and now Oxford Art Factory is my favourite Sydney venue.

We went out to one of Sydney’s many cooky bars for beers and had a good time, in my memory somewhat resembling what half of your Sydney friends’ facebook photos look like.  You know the ones, the wacky night on the town ones.  We forgot we had nowhere to stay again so Luke and I stayed with our mate in his one bedroom studio apartment on the hard floor, which was comfortable, and Spike and Mikey stayed god knows where.  I don’t even remember where we picked them up from.  Oh yes, some random main road.

Kids these days.  I literally shake my head.

Canberra, Sydney, Port Macquarie – Day 1

Well there was quite a nice little tour set up for us this week… Wednesday uni night in Canberra at Transit Bar with Red Riders, Thursday night at Oxford Art Factory in Sydney, and Friday early evening in Port Macquarie at Festival of the Sun.  The first time we’ve ever done 3 back to back shows in 3 days.  So we were very annoyed to discover our venue-crushing dark side has reared it’s ugly black shiny mask again and taken out the Transit Bar.  They announced they would not be having bands on ever again due to noise complaints (LAME), and all shows forthwith are cancelled.  Goodbye bands at Transit Bar.  That leaves only the Pheonix to play in Canberra I think?  And ANU Bar. 

Seeing as we’d arranged the van for that day, we embarked anyway and caught up with a mate for a quiet milkshake and lemonade, and talked eagerly about all of the other excitement that there is on offer in our nation’s capital, now that this venue is down.

Farm Lockdown

It turns out that Club 77 canned live bands after that night we played – as in us, The Ivy’s, and Royal Chant were the final band to play there ever!  Whoopsie!  I didn’t figure we were a deathblow kind of a band, wait no we are pretty brutal… I guess…

Anyhow, we have returned from 5 days on a farm near the Victorian snowfields writing and arranging new songs!  It was a majestic place and we got a lot done.  The trees, cows, horses, ducks, pregnant dog, cats and chickens didn’t seem to mind.  The mosquitoes did – always getting drunk and trying to start a fight.
 
Every morning we ate fresh raspberries, strawberries and silvernberries picked from the vines.  During the day we ate fruits straight of the trees or freshly fallen to the ground.  The only stress we had the whole journey was not being able to find the keys to the rental van for 2 days.  But we eventually found them, they were in the fridge.
 
Definitely experienced delirium working on new music day and night.  The only time off we had was a glorious swim/drift down the river, which started as soon as we got past the electric fence.  Here is the link to the photo album of our trip……

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=136844&id=23574834280&l=f398008bc0

Demoing

So I’ve spent two weeks now recording demos.

The world has completely passed me by – have only completed essential band logistics tasks, my car stopped working, no food in the house, my room looks like a total shithole (although nowhere near as bad as Club 77), and my remaining friends are totes neglected. I’ve completely stopped worrying about applying for jobs or fixing my swifly impending entry into the GFC (global financial crisis) club.

I’ve demoed 65 individual song parts. I don’t know why I did it this way, save wanting to clear out a couple of years of phone recorded ideas. Also home studio recording is a new thing for me, so it’s a great way to get faster and better at it.

It’s a new thing for Luke too, and he’s gotten stuck into it with like a fox in a hen pen.

He’s working on actual real proper songs, and we are about to get them into working playing order when we take a journey out into the countryside for 5 days. We’re going near to Mikey’s birthplace – Mount Beauty, in the Victorian snowfields. There’ll be a river, clean air, amazing trees, and no neighbours for kilometres. We hope to get at least 4 new songs into the live set. Maybe 5!

We’ve got a freaky amount of good shows coming up in early 2010. Today we confirmed an Adelaide Spiegeltent show, which will be our first show in Adelaide, as well as Cool Summer Festival on Mt Hotham.

So we’re off to Mt Beauty tomorrow, and when we return we’ve got a cool run of 3 shows to play – Canberra Transit Bar on the 9th with Red Ink, Sydney Oxford Art Factory Gallery on the 10th, then Festival of the Sun in Port Macquarie on the 11th. A week later is our mighty Toff in Town Melbourne show on the 17th!

After all that I’m gonna spend whatever festive-free time I have continuing to demo, and ignoring the basic responsibilities of life.

Club 77 is a Dirty Hole, November 20

I had two crappy job interviews the day before and spent the night doing a mega-pack of the van.  11am on the morning of our departure drive to Sydney, Luke flew in from attending a funeral in Brisbane, Spike had (failed) a micro-economics exam at Festival Hall, and Mikey had just finished a 10 hour graveyard shift.  High spirits for all!!

Luckily I had burned an ultimate mixtape mp3 disc of 100 songs to keep us company through this dry landscape.

We arrived Thursday night – respect to Navman – and stayed at our friends Le Kingste’s house in (the suburb with cool trees).

Waking up to insane heat was completely awesome.  We had a few simple things to do which took us hours due to embracing our collective heat-inspired incompetence, and by the time we got to the beach ‘errand’ it was getting stormy.  This didn’t faze the sophisticated metro bogans that were at Bronte beach, nor us.  I for one had a glorious time.

Negotiating peak hour Sydney traffic on a Friday, we somehow made it to the venue to discover it was a total dungeon, almost exactly like Dream Nightclub in North Melbourne.  Also of note is that the owner’s full name was the same as Mikey’s!  There’s positive in everything I suppose.

We nicked off on the first band to have a meeting, which turned out well.  I love it when somebody in a meeting drops knowledge like an MC.  Soon we returned to the dingy half-full venue.  After talking to some of the crowd I realised there were only people here from the mailing list, or friends – true supporters in other words.  Which means that nobody else in their right mind would go near this place.  Venue selection FAIL.

We’re more than happy to do our fair share of hard-yards in terms of smaller venues, but a band has to pick places that fans want to go, and that new friends might be more comfortable to check you out.

The performance was fine/okay/ho-hum.  We opted to not play our new songs in case we fucked them up totally – it would be that kind of night.  A couple of times whilst trying to sing I got my hair in my mouth, granting me a re-experience of the ocean water.

Later we went out to a bunch of loud bars full of reckless partying Sydney folk.  So many people head out to party in this town.  And being Kings Cross, journeying between the bars was damn eye-opening.  It feels unsafe, yet nobody actually gives a shit about you or wants to mess with yo’ shit.  Still, it was crazy.  I quite love Sydney in the winter.  Summer however is a different, wilder story.  People let their animal side run free.

The wind really picked up and became insane.  Add that to the list of elements experienced in raw form on this trip.

Heading back the next day we missed our beach meeting in Wollongong.  As we continued, it started pissing down rain really hard around the Victorian border area.  We stopped at Holbrook bakery, which is heaven for the road traveller in need of rest and nutritionment.

We drove through some mad puddles as we came into Melbourne, and unfortunately we weren’t able to splash anybody.  The rain did not stop all night which made our unloading highly romantic.  At least Victoria won’t burn in the next month or so, I was thinking.

In 48 hours we experienced crazy heat, a lightning storm, fierce night winds, and unending bucketing rain.  I think the planet is trying to tell us all something…….

 

Duntroon Military College, October 24

Our mate Pat sneaked us some accommodation in the military campus rooms.  In my head I could hear marching band snare drum and trumpets, and strained to imagine the life of someone totally different to me.

Upon rising from our 1 hour disco nap, we met up with the DJ Ming the Merciless, who hired a PA that was about twice as huge as it needed to be, with a full production team to set it up and soundcheck.  It all looked killer exciting.

The stage was next to a tree and in front of the ‘sacred ground’ which appeared to be where they do army parades and those “sound off, one two” marches.  There were cannons on either side, and I was imagining some Tchaikovsky overture explosion action accompanying our set.

We explored the lush gardens and trees nearby, which included a maze, as night fell.

Guests started to arrive, and it was a full cocktail suit kind of event.  Food and alcohol was free, and I befriended the caterers very fast so we could get first divs on goodies being passed around.  Mwaha.

To our merriment there had been a bouncy castle set up, as well as a blow-up obstacle course.  Spike and Mikey piss-bolted through the obstacle course in a race which ended in a draw, which meant they had to redo it.  Even though Spike lost, they were both through the whole thing in about 10 seconds.  Later when we saw some army dudes doing it, they were taking at least 20.  What the fuck?!??!  Does lifting instrumental gear on a weekly basis make you that much of an immortal warrior?

People were getting pissed very quickly, and there were even a few horrible trashy sluts there hunting for shaven-headed army clones to ram them militantly.  I observed one guy calling his mate trying to give him directions to where him and his wife were.  He was shouting “half left” into the phone, and  his mate would turn way too far, “full left” I presume, not see him, then get shouted new instructions, turn back to where he started, and repeat the idiocy all over again.  Then the guy giving directions started throwing empty beer cans and paper cups to get his mate’s attention, which still did nothing for the moron, and then the mate’s wife eventually spotted them out.  Then they came over and had a retarded conversation.  I started to get VERY concerned for our country’s wellbeing and capability to defend itself.

Time to play our show.  Although there were 350 people there, nobody understood our music except the caterers, the mixer, and the drummer girl from the firetwirler act.  Not even the army wind quintet were into it.   It’s a great feeling, playing to a mob of people who just can’t fight the urge to request ‘Khe San’.

There were some benefits.  It was the first time Luke used in-ear monitoring.  Weird new feel to the sound on stage, the perfect situation to test it out at, and something to get used to.  Vocally he didn’t strain at all, which will be a new chapter in live performance for him and us.  He will join the ranks of professional monitoring with Spike, who arrived there very early in our careers.

I went and stayed with the drummer girl of the fire twirling act’s house, who had a piano, and everyone partied on and got a bit trainwrecked, actually.  Apparently they stayed out till all the wasted military personnel vacated the premises, and threw plastic chairs onto the marquees.  Well I never!

We must thank Pat for having us at the function, paying us, hiring a PA, lights and staging, feeding us and putting us up.  He even gave us 3 cartons of beer to take home!

Sydney Show at the Sando, October 21st

WOW – 12 seater van!  You forever impress, friend Europcar.  This thing has a USB STEREO – I was notified 15 minutes before leaving the office in a debilitated state, having packed for 1 of the 12 hours in Melbourne, slept for 3, and worked the remaining 8.  I dumped a bunch of mp3′s onto a USB stick control-click style, and away we went, tunes in tow.

I love my band social time.  A transitional no-time where farts are the language of kings, where no joke is ever too dark, and where one gets caringly insulted every 5 minutes.

Way beyond nightfall, and carried on the wings of the “Navman”, our intergalactic GPS angel brother, we arrived in Canberra, to stay at Pat’s house, who lives across the road from the hideous vile sespool monstrosity more unnecessarily courteous individuals may describe as “parliament.”

He had set 4 beds up, I don’t know how, in his apartment, and therefore won ‘Super-legend of the day’, a prestigious title granted mentally by all of us.  As a further victory lap, he granted us full access to his shower AND fridge contents for the evening and morning.

Sleeping till 12, one of the few components of the rock-and-roll lifestyle we can actually embody, we set off for Shidney.  Approaching the shitty, we decided we had time to pick up my PEDAL BOARD, freshly made by Reinhold from Kenetic Cases out of polypropolene with the strength and lightness required for airline travel, and fortified in the corners by aliminium; complete with handles and wheels it is one black and silver rectangle of pure sex.  God damn I heart you, new pedal board.

A fuckload of tolls and Navman failures later, we screamed into Newtown just in time for load in and our 5:30 meeting with a couple of important dudes.

Gig time, the nice little room actually filled up more than alright.  Sydney, you are wonderful.  We had one of those vibing shows where there is just happiness around, through no fault of your own, and nobody can do wrong.

We had so much to organise with the promotion of the show and having just flown in from Perth, that we didn’t bother organising a place to stay.  Upon discovering this, a spectator from a record company sorted us a swish hotel for the night!  We vocalised our desperately polite refusal, but the guy wouldn’t have a bar of it, so after packup time Luke and I headed to the hotel whilst Spike and Mikey went partying with their new friends for a few hours.

Waking up come morningtime to many people in the hotel room lounge area, we got our shit together and had a day’s rehearsal.  On the way, I ran into my ex-girlfriend, who six months ago had cut contact and moved here to this city of 5 million people and so with great odds we had to meet and have an epicly awkward conversation.  In other amazing twists of fortune, due to the rehearsal there is a new song in the set!

We had a bunch of meetings to be barely on time for thanks to the stressful Sydney city traffic, but some of them were in Newtown which is a brilliantly groovy place to be in.  One of them went so well that it was like reuniting with an old friend.  Our favourite kind of meeting!  (So far..)

We explored Sydney university, and when I work out how to post photos on here I will.  Anyway we saw a good band and a really sickening one, then got ready to head to Canberra!

One Movement for Music, Perth

Well I’m from Perth so this was really great to come back for the first ever [Me] show here.  Furthermore, the timing coincided with my brother’s wedding, so I was going to be in Perth anyway.  Only problem is it was all on the same night.  And I was best man, and asked to give a speech, which I was most nervous about.  I arranged our set time so we could play at 12:45am and checked if anyone minded my leaving 20 minutes before the end of the wedding!

I arrived in Perth a few days before the band and had already done a bunch of stuff by the time they got here – swum with dolphins, had lunch with my grandmother, and heard my best Perth mate’s 6 year old genius daughter speed-read Roald Dahl like a 10 year old, attended a wedding ceremony rehearsal, and solved every personal dilemma of mine for the last 6 months.

From when they arrived we stayed with JF for the whole time here, a Perth live photographer and friend who took photos of the night which can be seen here: http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=278598693&albumId=1572700.  He took us out to see Fremantle, Northbridge, Scarborough & Cottesloe beaches, and his mountainous live concert DVD collection. 

Also we analysed each item in his monster collection of CDs of Perth bands.  Sugar Army wins.

The wedding day arrived and by 2pm it was 37 degrees.  Pre-ceremony was a frantic mess of every relative I’ve ever had throwing me into the middle of a giant circle and kicking my face in with successive greets and gestures, tormentous and violent with the rapid-fire questioning and squishing the pink rose pinned to my suit.  Cue the ceremony music!

It was a beautiful location and wonderful ceremony, everything you would expect for your sibling.  I conjured my best handwriting for the witness signature column.  As part of the bridal party, we spent 3 hours before the reception with Planet Earth’s foremost fanatic of photography.  2800 photos were taken in that time frame by this insane obsessive-compulsive wedding photographer.  Lucky we looked hot as shit.

That time drew near that I had been worrying about (and preparing for) for 6 weeks.  Speech time.  It seemed to go well, there were laughs arising, and I had written very respectfully with no chance of ovestepping the mark.  But when I got to the touching part containing all the things I really wanted my brother to know, I started to lose my shit and sounded like a whimpering babboon being deported from the jungle.  The message got across but I am still embarrassed.  Can’t wait to see the video footage.  The memory is eating me alive.  I find reassurnace in that the older ladies wept.

The city was 50km away from here, so having borrowed my other brother’s wheels I raced down the freeway in my wedding attire to play the gig.  I was told there would be traffic in the city, but our interpretations are slightly different as it was nothing like Melbourne city traffic at night.  Effectively I got there in half an hour, even saw a couple of songs from Perth band The Chemist, on before us.

The gig was aiiight.  I love backline, I played through a giant mesa-boogie head and quad turned up to 0.1.  Seymour Stein spoke to us afterwards – successful figurehead attention win!  Footage from the night and a brief review can be found here:  http://www.onemovementword.com/2009/10/sonicbids-showcase-me-live-in-wolf-lane/ Courtesy of Andrew McMillen.

The next day was spent in music conference bliss, net-whore-king with the industry and ‘making contact’ with the various lifeforms and ‘delegates’ from loftier realms that had landed here for this event.  I did this non-stop in the conference area, until I discovered there was a festival lounge area, and immediately headed there.  A beautiful setup, two massive stages kicking out non-stop tuneage all day and all night.  Free beer.  People in high spirits.  Man I was happy.

I even ran into an old university friend on the way out.  Apparently he has his own company with 7 employees now.  My the differing decisions we make in life – such maturity abounds me!

Bidding the family and JF farewell, we boarded our plane back to spend 12 hours in Melbourne, before driving to Sydney – 8 hours of which I will need to work.  It will be my only day’s work this fortnight.  No wonder they are actively searching for my replacement.

Espy

My, the power of Facebook.

We wanted to book some quick shows ‘for shits and giggles’, so bless the Espy – they’re always up for it. No soundcheck, running late, equipment crammed next to the stage, just as we remember it being like.

Eclectic lineup mismatch – a pop starlet with funk-based (porno) backing band, dance reggae with organs and female blues vocal, us, and a vintage-rock-meets-Grohl band who drove from Newcastle to smash the room.

I was really tired before the the night began (I am an overworked whore) so I took half an hour to be still and listen to a long lost favourite album from my morbid past. I used to listen to such awesome avant-garde and experimental music when I was in uni, thanks mostly to a radio show called ‘Behind the Mirror’, where the presenter would passionately research and pick the most artistic and underground music he could find from Europe, and read poetry he’d written in between songs.

I’ve never known why I’m not inspired by a lot of music anymore, but I know the feeling is shared by others.

As I lay there semi-drifting to silly-land, I realized that most of the western world gets an abundance of American (record company) music and some from the UK, as those two countries are behind the Western world’s media. We get comparatively very little from continental Europe and Scandinavia, let alone anywhere else. It can be really hard to find emerging and avant-garde bands from Europe because of these monopolies on media, with or without the ise of the internet. Countries like Sweden sometimes act as tastemakers for some styles to be replicated 5 years afterwards by American bands and made huge worldwide, and we still never hear of them.

I remembered a French girl I know who played in a successful medieval folk trio. I remembered the staggeringly musical showcase bands I saw when I went to the Popkomm music conference in Germany as a session guitarist. And I remembered every bizarre artful classical-inspired track that I loved from Behind the Mirror. I had a sudden urge to host a Europe-focused community radio rock show so not only could I make a mixtape a week of killer new styles, I would also get CD’s posted to me of things I wouldn’t otherwise know how to find, and have a way to pass that on.

I wish I’d thought of that when I was kicking around Melbourne starting up the band, because now I strongly doubt I have the time. Searching for music blogs for European music may just have to do.

My new perspective is if you’re bored of the musical options that lay before you at an easy reach of distance – then what you’re missing is the music trapped in Europe, and its creativity-beats-commercialism art culture.

We turned up to a pretty dead Espy, which was a worry. As a showcase, we only did Facebook promoting. Not even texts. Leading up to our timeslot the room really started to pack out and we played a good lively show, thanks to our Facebook page friends.

Meetings and Free Piss

We’ve been having mid-week meetings with industry types.  It has been invaluable to speak with these cats, their perspectives and mindset are extremely sharp, even though the advice and suggestions sometimes contradict each other and clash horribly.  Hearing everyone out is cool, especially because there’s free drinks involved.

We’ve come to this point having to trust our own guesswork and fudge it all out on our own.  We’ve quickly become overloaded with information and ideas, which is strange and exciting. 

So the tour has ended.  In planning we thought now would be time to wind down the live shows and concentrate on writing.  Turns out we need to play more than ever, so we’re frantically trying to book shows in Melbourne and Sydney. 

Help!!!!

All members are writing currently, and there’s some good chop being flung around.  And training Luke to use a computer was the best idea ever!