Mesa Cosa wrapped up their east coast tour at The Public Bar on Saturday night, with what can best be described as a garage rock fiesta that, aside from the aforementioned garage rock, included some of the greatest karaoke the world has seen, and half an hour of champagne comedy courtesy of MC Purple Duck.
Jurassic Nark were everything you could want from an emerging garage rock band: their instruments were too loud, their playing was loose and they didn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything. They laid out their influences by playing a Fidlar cover, Cheap Beer, and their final song, Big Kahuna, wasa tribute to their music’s surf rock origins.
Next up were Dumb Punts. This is a high impact garage rock act, but initially, the biggest impact Dumb Punts had was frontman James Gallagher’s new haircut, that had him looking like a member of ‘80s band Slade, and an awful lot like his sister Ciarn, who’s the band’s drummer. Singles Hey You and Chiller were highlights, but the big one for crowd participation was a cover of Fat Boy Slim’s Praise You.
Now that Katie’s Crab Shack has (sadly) left The Public Bar, there was practically no one on the non-band-room side, so it was very easy to chill out in between bands. However, this ‘chilling’ led to me missing the start of MC Purple Duck’s set – something I will regret for the rest of my life. MC Purple Duck is a nerdy looking dude that raps ridiculous anecdotes over basic beats he cues up on his PC. The highlight was the Sex Falcon triptych that popped up at the beginning, middle and end of his set. It told the tale of a falcon that terrorised townsfolk by swooping down and molesting them at random.
When Mighty Boys took to the stage, a buzz enveloped the room. What followed was 35 minutes of rollicking garage rock that had punters rallying around the massive choruses of Sexpo, Daddy’s Back and their epic single Hippy Shakes, which tells the tale of doing too many drugs at a bush doof.
Mesa Cosa, the headline act and curators of this awesome night of mayhem, were the perfect cherry to top this delicious night of entertainment. The band churned through a hurricane of tunes that featured a scorching sweat-drenched setlist of boisterous crowd pleasers; Why Yo, Church Of The Snake and Frozen Eyes drove the audience into a frenzied rapture, while the band roadtested new material with Blood and Brains. Midway through the set, in a move that will surely go down in live music history, tambourine smasher and co-vocalist Chris Penney astounded the audience by presenting a three-foot-tall marijuana plant, which he furiously shoved into the semi-alarmed yet elated faces of the crowd, before leaping onto their flailing arms and crowdsurfing to the back of the room. The peculiar stench of perspiration and pot permeated the entire venue, and once he returned to the stage, Penney handed members of the audience leaves off the plant as though they were delicate flowers, before devouring the rest himself. Following Mesa Cosa, and to close out the night, was Bone Soup Karaoke that went until 4am and featured Mighty Boys members doing Abba’s Dancing Queen, a Mesa Cosa/Mighty Boys collaboration of Cat Stevens’ The First Cut Is The Deepest, Mesa Cosa’s stirring rendition of Limp Bizkit’s Break Stuff and the Drunk Mums boys singing Sheryl Crowe.This was a seriously entertaining event.
BY DENVER MAXX
Photo by Ian Laidlaw
Loved: MC Purple Duck (the best MC in the world).
Hated: Nothing, really.
Drank: Bone Soup.
