It’s Friday night in Melbourne and there’s a run on slabs of Melbourne cans in preparation for the weekend’s Golden Plains. At Cherry Bar, Spencer P Jones is playing his weekly Friday evening residency, as innocuous and culturally significant as Richard Hell doing an acoustic set in the Bowery.
Jack Davies’ new project, Gatwick Highlife, were appearing on stage just as I jumped on my bike to head into town, thereby causing my best laid plans of catching them to disappear before my eyes. A friend, whose opinions on rock’n’roll are impeccable, describes them as the best rock’n’roll band in Australia.
HITS is another band to wear the crown of rock’n’roll supremacy. They’re back in Melbourne en route to Golden Plains, taking a pit stop to play alongside The New Christs, the legendary Australian band fronted by Rob Younger, and the producer of HITS’s brilliant album, Hikkimori. Two minutes into the band’s set, and HITS have already torn rock’n’roll a new orifice. The band’s aesthetic is perfect: Tamara Dawn Bell and Stacey Coleman are grinding out dirty riffs with dangerous abandon, flanking the mesmerising Dick Richards. Richard wears a fedora and dark glasses, and brandishes part of the mike stand in the general direction of the crowd with a modicum of sociopathy and a truckload of attitude. Richards is born dedicated to the rock’n’roll cause: if rock’n’roll didn’t exist, someone would need to invent it to give this guy his natural calling. The last song of the set is a Joy Division cover, and Richards jumps off the stage and walks through the crowd, leaving Bell and Coleman to see the track out with some Bowie-Ronson interpretative guitar antics.
Pound for pound, The New Christs probably beat Radio Birdman as a contemporary live proposition. Rob Younger is older, but as important as he always has been. He stares vacantly into the distance, punctuated with his laconic Iggy Pop dance moves and the odd incomprehensible muttering into the microphone between songs.
It’s all good – Distemper will forever be one of the great Australian rock’n’roll albums, Lower Yourself should be essential listening for any aspiring rock pig and the most recent The New Christs album, Incantations, defecates over the vast majority of rock’n’roll albums released last year. Watching the Celibate Rifles’ Paul Larsen on drums causes me to put in a quick call to SportsBet to check the odds of a reunion of the first recording The New Christs’ lineup, which featured Chris Masuak and the Rifles’ Kent Steedman. The response is a mixture of derision and laughter and it’s time to resume focus.
Somewhere appears the sonic image of The Ramones on Sydney’s northern beaches, and so it remains. The band finishes their set and wanders off, before being given the freedom to play another two songs. The last is from Distemper, and buggered if I can remember what it was, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s more fuck off rock’n’roll and we love it. Long live The New Christs, and long live rock’n’roll.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Loved: Rock’n’roll.
Hated: Missing Gatwick Highlife.
Drank: Cooper’s Pale.
