LIVE REVIEW: Peggy Frew, Sweet Whirl

Bergy Bandroom, November 9, 2024

 

Outside the Bergy Bandroom, the singer-songwriter Peggy Frew is perhaps best known as an award-winning novelist, or amongst TheMusic readers, as the bassist for award-winning indie band Art of Fighting. Tonight, inside the Bergy Bandroom, she is just Peggy. Here to launch her debut album Dial Up, released several days earlier, the room is a cocoon of family, friends and fans. Her daughter runs the merch table, selling vinyl and tshirts. Her son, Fraser Turner, plays guitar in her band. Numerous people sharing Frew’s angular visage are in the crowd, some in t-shirts that read “Peggy Frew” in a large handwritten font. This is not the kind of environment in which an album launch can fall flat. But, even without the intimate familiarity, Frew’s songs, delivery and stage presence would have made this a very special night. The album, a low-key blend of atmospheric indie rock and muted orchestral pop, is made for headphones and small rooms. As is the music of her support act, Sweet Whirl, Esther Edquist. 

 

“I’m a bookseller,” says Edquist. “So, quite often I will see Peggy in some textual way. It’s nice to see her in real life.” Seated on a tall stool, head cocked slightly toward the microphone, thick fringe over her brow, Edquist cradles her bass guitar on which she begins to gently pluck arpeggios. With a warm, expressive voice that sounds as though it could have come from a sunlit living room in Laurel Canyon, Edquist thrums and picks her bass, moving air around the room as she sings songs about quiet defiance, the ending of relationships and feeling “damned to be a loser and a weirdo”. A swooning, artfully crafted new song that she seems to name Station on the spot, is perhaps the strongest of the set. A majestic in miniature, it is another song strong enough to work with a band, an orchestra or, as it is, just bass guitar and voice. That we see them in such a close environment feels special. “If you’d like to find me in your spam folder,” she tells us, “sign up to my mailing list”. 

 

In the late 1990s, when Art of Fighting were moving from being a camera-shy indie band that only Punters Club Form Guide readers had heard of, to ARIA award-winning, chart-crashing camera-shy indie band that Triple J listeners had heard of, they became known for their ability to transfix a noisy pub with a few spacious chords and the whisper of vocalist Ollie Browne. Twenty years on, and to full throated cheering and applause, Frew finally takes centre stage. Backed by her longtime collaborator Marty Brown, her son on guitar and occasional clarinet, and bassist and backing vocalist Jessie Warren, she opens her set with album highlight Landslide. Frew sings with such delicacy and hesitancy that, as with her former band, you have to lean in to really hear the song. At times it feels as though Frew is singing for herself or the band. Words begin and are swallowed, her eyes closed, or gaze trained on the keys of her synthesiser. Yet, with this setting, the care placed onto the words and the arrangements, everything feels important, like a first confession. Turner’s guitar is so minimal it is almost gestural at times, but those parts he does play are vital and loaded with intent. The set is so quiet at times that the hum of amplifiers almost becomes another instrument.

 

Moving through the album, the single Country House is a standout, as is Off Season, the gently epic Newtown and album closer Whereabouts. Frew’s songs sound like home videos of pivotal moments in her life: Sitting next to an empty dancefloor in a Sydney bar in “August ‘97”, the care given by a friend in the wake of a relationship ending, “$15 in my bank account” ... “We were just kids then.” At times it is almost like sung memoir. Frew ends her set with an unrecorded Art of Fighting song she wrote with the band, a song from the band’s Second Storey album, Where Trouble Lived, and a sparse and moody cover of Roy Orbison’s Blue Bayou before closing with her former band’s I Don’t Keep a Record.

“When I played in Art of Fighting, I would have one song per album,” she tells us midway through the set. “I realised there were more songs than would go on them, so I had to do something else. I didn’t want to sing, but Marty was quietly firm about how things were done,” she says looking back at her collaborator behind the drum kit with a smile. She talks about how personal the songs are, but it is also clear how important they are too. With the pictures she draws across the album and tonight’s songs, the power of writing your own story is at the core of her performance. Hopefully it is also an inspiring one.

 

Live Review: Buzzcocks, Modern English

Northcote Theatre, November 2, 2024

 

Outside, it feels like summer is finally here. It is a balmy Saturday night and music spills from busy bars and restaurants onto the tumult of High Street. Inside the Northcote Theatre, around one thousand people eagerly wait to be taken back to the London winter of 1982. On stage, is Modern English. The British post punk quintet, who formed in 1979, are playing their first ever show in Melbourne and at least the first three rows of the crowd are in thrall to the men dressed in flattering black. As the band work their way through tracks from their new album, 1,2,3,4, ("we couldn't believe no one had used that title before", singer Robbie Grey tells the crowd), song after song leans in to the icy melodic punk rock they helped invent in the early 1980s. And if you had played a part in inventing this sound, as Modern English did, why would you? It's spellbinding stuff. The band gel, the sound is powerful and the audience, many of whom are here for nostalgic reasons, welcome the surprise in new songs like Long in the Tooth and Not My Leader. Many of these are driven by the work of bassist Mick Conroy whose blend of Peter Hook-style strumming and melodic is an asset. Older songs like Carry Me Down, Tables Turning and Swans on Glass – "our first single on 4AD", Grey informs us – sound excitingly fresh. "There are so many Joy Division t-shirts," he observes, as the room, now almost at capacity, awaits the band's last track. “We’re going to finish with this song that I think you might know,” Grey says. We cheer, and the band dive into the titanic eighties classic, I Melt with You, a song about having sex during an atomic bomb blast, and one not fully appreciated until its inevitable inclusion in the series Stranger Things. A song with a chorus so good, it can sustain a career and bring a band to the other side of the world 42 years after its release.  As the closing chords fade and the band raise their arms to the roof, the guy next to me leans over to share his thoughts: “It really is a banger.” 

 

Arriving to the strains of Thus Spake Zarathustra, best known for announcing the dawn of life in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Buzzcocks arrive on stage one by one, similarly raising their arms to the sky. Partway through the previous set, Modern English singer Robbie Grey warned us, "The Buzzcocks set will hit you like a train." Opening with punk classic What Do I Get? The headliners set about living up to that introduction. Unbridled enthusiasm is what the band is best known for and Steve Diggle, the only member of the band's original lineup, inhabits it like few others. Backed by the impassive precision of bassist Chris Remington, the flawless drumming of Danny Farrant and the notably younger guitarist Mani Perazzoli, the band charge through a brace of short punk classics: I Don't Mind, Everybody's Happy Nowadays and Promises. The songs work, Diggle sells them beautifully, even if one of their greatest qualities, the delivery of sadly deceased singer-songwriter Pete Shelley, is missing. Watching the band prompts some big questions. How do you be a punk at 69? Do you faithfully invoke the past, trust the audience to bring their personal associations to your music and let them complete the performance? Do you fake the emotions that inspired these songs you wrote and played when you were a teenager? Do you find new sources of anger? Do you use the songs as a time travel machine and make it a purely personal experience? Buzzcocks are spared from this conundrum with qualities shared by few of their contemporaries: Pop nous and a sense of humour. Shelley's wry, queer outsider takes on northern English adolescent lives are still so joyous, declarative and honest that the collective act of their performance becomes the answer.  

 

"This next song is for the people of Gaza," Diggle says, now deep into the set and without a hint of exhaustion. As the band begin Autonomy, a song whose title he used for his autobiography, cries of "Free Palestine" and loud cheers echo around the room. The fist we saw raised in welcome when he arrived on the stage takes on a new meaning when he punches the air now. It's a reminder of what other bands on the series of Rock Against Racism concerts of the late 1970s did best: used their profile to highlight struggles faced by others and ensured the door was left open for post-punk to become a far more diverse style of music. 

 

By the end of Autonomy, we are treated to perhaps the biggest singalong of the night and one of the greatest odes to sustaining sexual tension ever written: Why Can't I Touch It? It's a perfect example of how the band capture the frailties of adolescence and elevate them with songwriting for three minutes. Swathes of pop punk enthusiasts have followed in their wake, but none have captured the power inherent in the naive simplicity of a song like this. “It’s Friday night in Melbourne, is everyone having fun?” asks Diggle as another of their hits, Love You More, fades away. The first part of his statement may be wrong, but the second part is spot on. When you can follow any statement with Orgasm Addict and Boredom – two of the greatest punk songs ever written – all will be forgiven. 

 

Why Diggle is wearing an Australian sporting tshirt for the encore and has an Australian flag over his amplifier is never addressed. Perhaps it was, but his Mancunian accent is so strong and enthusiasm so great that most of his banter was reduced to enthusiastic gestures and endorsements of whatever is going on around him. Which is kind of what punk shows were all about anyway. As the band careen toward the end of their six-song encore with the unfailingly great Ever Fallen in Love and Harmony in My Head, a small moshpit bursts to life in front of Diggle, arresting the attention of the security guards who let it play out. Even as he leaves the stage, Diggle is leaping, bounding, full of life, the perfect vehicle for what punk did best, genuine life-affirming music that found a virtue in simplicity and the songs to match it.

 

 

Live Review: Teeny Tiny Stevies

Northcote Theatre, Melbourne, September 22, 2024

 

Despite being a fixture in the daily lives of millions of Australians, children’s music has always had a difficult path to being taken seriously. Even its famously fickle target audience rarely maintains an allegiance to a band for long as playlists rather than albums remain the medium of choice. So, when something inventive, well written, thoughtfully crafted comes along, like an episode of Bluey or a Studio Ghibli film, it feels like a minor miracle. The sororal harmonies of Teeny Tiny Stevies' Beth and Byll Stephen are one of these. Today’s sold-out hometown concert is to promote the band's most recent release, The Green Album, a collection of songs thoughtfully released back in April to allow its fans to learn the choruses. With a start time of 10am Sunday, (presumably strategically situated between breakfast and naptime), Northcote's High Street is quickly taken over by a long line of families threading away from a slightly bemused security. 

 

After a Welcome to Country that extended to include a welcome to anyone who made it out of the house this morning, Beth opens the show with The Green Album's lead single, Climate Change. Her sister joins for the second verse and by the time the song arrives at its chorus, bassist Cliff Bowden and drummer Benjamin Graham have joined. By the second chorus, much of the audience is on its feet clapping, gazing and slightly stunned at the sight of music coming not from a Bluetooth speaker, but a stage adorned with oversized sunflowers and green fairy lights all beneath a giant mirrorball. The warmly intimate Light as a Bubble and kinetically exuberant Energy follow and the band hits their stride. Fans swarm up to the barrier to pull shapes and leap into the air. With younger members of the audience finding each other as interesting as the band, it transpires that a Teeny Tiny Stevies show is as much about the atmosphere as the music. Songs move between indie folk (Had You to Teach Me), country swing (Baby In Mum's Tummy), 70s sunshine pop (Pre-Loved) and slippery funk (How Am I Different?), all driven by the sisters' imaginatively arranged harmonies. With so many songs about accepting yourself and others, managing anxiety and expectations around milestones such as a new sibling and bodily autonomy, the children respond with an equivalent openness. New songs are warmly received and requests to sing, dance, wear sunglasses and show off second clothes are enthusiastically fulfilled. 

 

Many of the band's songs are sung from the perspective of a kid and hearing young people's concerns filtered through the Stephen's songwriting chops is a powerful tool to create empathy in adults and instant familiarity in children. As Byll Stephen told the ABC in an interview in 2020, “it’s not, ‘Let’s think of a shitter musical idea because it’s a kids song,’ that is not our intention at all. We want to be putting good stuff out there that’s just as good as any adult stuff you’ll listen to.” The complex Wilson-esque harmonies of Pre-Loved, the Talking Heads-style groove underpinning Boss of My Own Body and the verbal dexterity of Babyccino are underserved by the tag "children's music".

 

“Put your hands up if you’ve seen this on ABC Kids,” says Beth as hands shoot into the air. “Put your hands up if you’ve heard this on the radio,” says Byll to more hands. “Unlikely," she frowns, "but OK.” On the Toilet is the song that took the sisters from being a respected folk pop duo, The Little Stevies, to ARIA Award-winning giants of kids’ music with an Amazon television series. Almost the entire room knows the words, everyone who came here to dance is dancing and the collective joy is hard to resist.

 

For many here, born just before or during the Covid pandemic lockdowns, this is their first ever concert. For it to be such a positive experience has an incalculable impact on not only the future of the live music scene that so many people proclaim to care about, but for creativity and the arts in general. The awestruck faces trained on the band as they bring their audience on a journey of boundless goodwill and educative singalongs is, in many ways, the pinnacle of what a live music experience can be. Finishing with the musical equivalent of the cafe sign that reads "unsupervised children will be given an espresso and a puppy", the band close with Babyccino, firing up the crowd all over again. After the band pose for photos in the lobby and their merch table does business that would thrill a major label act, 1400 people swarm back onto High Street in various states of excitement and tiredness. Unlike Bluey or a Studio Ghibli film, a five-year-old fan explains to me, “Teeny Tiny Stevies are real life".

 

 

Live Review: Quivers, Juice Webster

Northcote Social Club, June 30, 2024

 

By the time Juice Webster and her band arrive on stage, the room is three-quarters full and at least ten degrees warmer than Northcote's crowded High Street. As the applause dies down, I hear one woman standing near me whisper, “I love her look, I love her music, I love everything about her.” Since Webster’s arrival on the Melbourne music scene in 2018 as a quietly observant folk pop singer-songwriter, and long before the release of her glowingly reviewed debut album Julia late last year, the Melbourne-based singer songwriter has been growing used to sentiments like these. The audience go from raucous appreciation to a hushed reverence as her band ease into the album's opening track, Returning. Quietly insistent shallow guitar strums are underpinned by a warm rhythm section that moves at the pace of a sleeper’s heartbeat. Last year, Webster featured on Victoria Kozbanis’s podcast Beers & Tears, where the Kozbanis described her music as "a kind of summoning – soft echoes of connectedness and courage; lightweight and all-encompassing", and I'm not sure anyone is going to beat that. There is a virtue in Webster's choice not to lean on dynamic shifts and instead favour a soothing circuitous jangle. Standouts from tonight's set include the quietly incandescent Black Coat, Black Skirt and Headaches, both of which appear on Julia and the almighty, time-shifting closer Wanna Be Held, a song just waiting to make a music supervisor look like a complete genius when they use it to transform the climax of a romantic drama into a wrenching tear-jerking masterpiece. Webster won fans with her support slots for The Beths and her recent free Northcote Social Club show, it's a safe bet she's added to that number tonight.

 

There are few fans a band would want more than Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance. The duo behind the nineties indie titans Superchunk and founders of Merge Records, McCaughan and Ballance discovered bands like Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon and Caribou and the act they want to work their savvy magic with next is the quartet ambling onto stage right now. Quivers mumble bashful hellos to the buoyant room, now packed, spilling into the hallway and bellowing back their appreciation, the four-piece share a nod and launch into Gutters of Love. This turns out to be one of few songs played from Golden Doubt, their 2021 album they toured to great response overseas. Golden Doubt could be mined for a dynamite crowd-pleasing set. Instead, in what seems a bold sign of confidence, the band perform their forthcoming album in its entirety. Anyone wondering why Quivers, whose local profile sits somewhere between the equally excellent The Maggie Pills and Gut Health, were selected by Merge Records, need only listen to the title track and first single from this album, Oyster Cuts. Sung by bassist Bella Quinlan who, along with drummer Holly Thomas, takes a far more prominent role on the new album, the song epitomises many of the album's strengths. Guitars are muted and chug with an authority that allows the melodies to layer and float with a sense of freedom. It's as much a vibe as it is a pop song.

 

Unlike a lot of music that has writers and reviewers reaching to bands like The Go-Betweens and REM to describe their music, Quivers are unabashedly unpretentious. From their music to their between-song chat to the way that singer and guitarist Sam Nicholson seems surprised whenever his sequencer works, you don't get the impression they're doing this on a gap year or to blow off steam until they get through their MBA. You do get the impression they'll be doing this at 60. Songs are built around a sincere confession, some deft yet unpretentious wordplay and a chorus that ends in a singalong that isn't the least bit church-y. Whether it's the regional Tasmanian roots, that they have spent countless evenings eking out a living in what feels like the dying days of the live music scene or that they have a devotion to guitar pop music, they feel unaffected and wholly themselves. There is also a pure sense of joy that comes from the stage when Quivers play. It's there when Quinlan and Thomas share a glance while hitting harmonies on the chorus of new songs Screensaver or Never Be Lonely, in their euphoric cover of Lucinda Williams' I Just Wanted to See You So Bad and when they lock in to anchor three of the greatest pop songs of recent years When it Breaks, Hold You Back and You're Not Always on My Mind. It's also there in Nicholson's dorky enthusiastic one-foot dancing and when guitarist and backing vocalist Michael Panton peels off another guitar break that ends with his right hand a blur and his left hand slipping up and down the neck of his guitar. "This next song is our last," says Nicholson. "It's a song that could fall apart… or it could fly," Of course, it flies. While they close with Reckless, the last song from Oyster Cuts, Nicholson reminds us that this isn't the album's launch. “That'll be in November,” he says. Between now and then the band will be touring the US. That these songs could sound even better for that show is a pretty exciting thought. 

 

 

Live Review: Dirty Three

Hamer Hall, June 14, 2024

Photographs: Rick Clifford

Judging by the lack of people who look under 40, tonight’s audience will be hoping for rowdily-invoked memories of the 1990s, when the trio we are all here to see would pack bar after bar with what felt like a brand new style of music. First here in Melbourne, later other cities across the country, then across the world. That intimate sense of being seduced, transfixed then overwhelmed is difficult to replicate in the sold-out Hamer Hall, but it is also a natural response, shared by hundreds of thousands of people who have heard the music of Jim White, Mick Turner and Warren Ellis. Two and a half thousand of those people are here tonight, plastic cups of booze in hand, layered up against the cold, filling the seats. As the houselights dim and the cheers subside, Boz Scaggs' seventies rock classic Lido Shuffle bursts from the speakers. With the arrival of its anthemic chorus, familiar to anyone who has ever seen a film at Hawthorn's Lido Cinemas, the three men arrive on stage, the ever stolid White and Turner looking as if they've come to conduct a tax assessment, Ellis as if he has just won the lottery. "Fucken Melbourne!" he shouts at us. "Fucken MELBOURNE! Well, this is a bit better than The Great Britain," he says referring to their first ever show. "No, hang on, what the fuck was that venue on Commercial Road?" "Bakers Arms!" shouts a guy from the stalls. "That's it," replies Warren. "Were you there?" Nathan from the crowd replies in the affirmative. Nathan is promised a t-shirt from the merch desk for helping Warren measure just how far his band have come, a journey that often seems to confound him. This interaction sets the dynamic for the rest of the night. Maybe around a quarter of tonight's two and a half hour, ten song set, consists of Warren chatting to the crowd and the gig is no poorer for it.

 

The band open with Love Changes Everything I, the first song from their new album and one that sounds like the Dirty Three clearing their collective throats – all squalling feedback, loops of violin noise, scattering drums, gestural piano and warm fragments of distorted guitar chords. Ellis paces the stage, kicking the air and shouting to the rafters, horsehair flying off his bow, white hair and beard flung outward. Like a mustang loosed from a stable, Ellis embodies the spirit of the song and the band with every fibre of his being. Long before the song devolves into squelching feedback, I can't be the only one thinking, "where can he go from here?" The answer is more, and harder. The band ease into another, longer and more melodic track from their new album, Love Changes Everything II, which promises that the orchestral qualities that made their late 1990s recordings favourites among so many of their fans is still very much part of the trio's DNA.

 

"The new album’s out today, the vinyl," says Ellis. "That was a couple of tracks off it. Please buy a copy and send Dirty Three to the top of the charts. When we started out, we were trying to write hit singles," he waits for the laughter to die down. "That never happened." Turner and White wait while Ellis takes a seat at the front of the stage to continue the conversation. “My people! My people! What’s been going on?” He's up for a chat, and it sounds like everyone wants to get some Waz-time. People shout back and Ellis either wilfully or mistakenly misinterprets almost everything anyone says. "Taking heroin!" shouts one guy. "Go to Adelaide?" says Ellis. "Is Justin Kurzel here?" Undaunted by the acoustic assault that accompanies every question or observation, the long-time resident of Paris welcomes the chance to be back. “We were told we couldn’t come on at eight o'clock because our audience was still at the bar," says Ellis. "This is such a fucking nineties crowd.”

 

Eventually the getting-to-know-the-audience section of the show ends, and we are treated to a journey through what is by any measure a phenomenal batch of albums. "This is one of the first songs we wrote in St Kilda," says Ellis, getting to his feet and returning the microphone to its stand. "St Kilda is a suburb in Melbourne. It used to be a lot of fun. This is called Indian Love Song." A swaggering, chaotic, euphoric version of the opening track from their self-titled album – 30 years old this year – erupts. It finds room for audience participation and one of White's more notable drum solos of the night. We are now three songs and one hour into the show. Hope, from their album Horse Stories, follows, a gorgeous languid moment amid the chaos. Sea Above Sky Below is dedicated to the memory of its recently passed producer, Steve Albini. Throughout the night, hundreds of people call for one of the band's most renown tracks, Everything's Fucked. Finally, they oblige with a titanic version that sounds like it could have been the culmination of a long summer's Saturday night at the Tote in the mid 1990s. The cacophonous drawn-out tension, the near silent release of the melodic hook as Turner slides his hand up the neck of his guitar to pluck the bell like arpeggio, Ellis following with restraint and subtle vibrato. These dynamic qualities are also on show for the stunning songs that follow, Some Summers They Drop Like Flys, and Authentic Celestial Music.

 

As we move chronologically through the band's repertoire, tempos slow and songs stretch out. Looped violins become more frequent and White, always a figure of calm as he flings his arms outward and upward, increasingly acts as a magnet for the other two. Ellis plays most of his parts facing the drummer, Turner never looks away and White rarely looks up. The dynamic, baked in from day one, seems to make the venue smaller, as if we could in fact be watching a show in a pub in the 1990s. "Do we have a curfew?" Ellis asks someone offstage. The audience, naturally, bay for the show not to end. After an effort to reopen Hamer Hall's bar fails, and the house lights come on, then off again, the band reluctantly ease to a close with another track from their new album, the delicate and surging Love Changes Everything VI before returning for an encore of Sue's Last Ride. A stunning end to a show that was a lot more than, as Ellis facetiously referred to it earlier in the night, "the best show we've played in Melbourne for 12 years". It’s maybe the best show they’ll play anywhere for the next 12 too.

Live Review: Good Morning, Cool Sounds

Photo: Danysha Harriott

Melbourne Recital Centre, June 6, 2024

 

One of the great coups of this year's Rising Festival was luring Australia’s most internationally hyped indie band of 2024 back home for a one-off performance. Fresh off a 26-date North American tour with Waxahatchee, Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons' "lil band/recording thing", Good Morning, is now ten years into its amiable and quietly impressive existence. The duo's fourth album, Good Morning Seven, was released in March and showcased imaginative and intricate arrangements that, for a band best known for its jangly guitars and afterthought lyrics, was going to land either on revelation or ambitious mess.

 

But before we can learn how the band translate their latest and greatest album live, early-comers are treated to a deft set from Cool Sounds. For some bands, playing a venue like the Melbourne Recital Centre is the gig equivalent of being thrust under a microscope. The fidelity and separation of the sounds here are so profound they can reveal sloppy playing, slapdash songwriting, an over-reliance on effects and lazy arrangements. Cool Sounds are guilty of none of these things. The range of sounds, the respectful instrumentation, sense of humour and sheer musicianship that runs throughout the sextet's beachy funk makes tonight’s set a revelation. Each member seems to be thinking of the combined sound of the band, so they play quietly, actively listening to each other as they slip into a sweet, exsanguinated funk, reminiscent of Chic or Talking Heads. Instead of any sense of urgency or demands to get up and dance, Cool Sounds simmer away like an inviting spa bath. 

 

“The rumour going round is that Good Morning spent all the money they were being paid for this concert," says singer and guitarist Dainis Lacey. "So instead of getting paid, the support band got ten of these." Lacey jokes, lifting the cap off his head and reading the words across its front. “Shut up and fish,” he frowns. “So, if anyone wants one…”

 

Following the first song, as the applause is still dying down, a roadie wanders onto the stage, holding a recorder. He offers it to several members in turn who shake their head before the roadie returns backstage. We're later told this is "our first show with our new tech, Borichek." As the band peel through a series of steady, appealing grooves built around percussion-heavy rhythms and simple backbeats, Borichek returns holding a trumpet. "I just know I am going to use that trumpet," says Lacey. "But not right now." Borichek wanders off again and the band launch into their closing song, 6 or 7 More, another that is easy to love. Musically, Cool Sounds sound like they could be from anywhere and anytime in the last 40 years, but the personality of and around their songs couldn't come from anyone else.

 

With seats filled and lights dimmer, the strains of Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman eke out of the speakers. The stage lights ignite, and the ten members of Good Morning arrive. Opening with Arcade, the first song from Good Morning Seven, it immediately becomes apparent that there are no cut corners here. The arrangements that helped make that album one of the best of the year so far, will be brought to life in all their rich intricacies. Dual backing vocals, saxophones, clarinet, viola, percussion, layers of keyboard and two, sometimes three guitars; whatever the song needs. It is all wonderful stuff. As the Rising program promised, "Think Dick Diver, Liz Phair and Brian Wilson soundtracking a black-and-white musical about drifting into your thirties."

 

Stretched in an arc across the stage with Blair and Parsons at either end facing each other from across the stage, Good Morning is another band that benefits from the audio microscope of the Melbourne Recital Centre. Even as the same sounds anchor many songs (the trebly twang of a Gibson SG guitar, the muted thud of a hollow-body bass and the drumming of Dylan Young – so solid he seems to invert time), each shift in the context of the song's arrangement and the attentive live mixing of Lara Soulio. It is a mesmerising immersive experience for a band who have always been the aural equivalent of a good hang.

 

 "It’s really nice to be here to play a hometown show in a fancy fucking venue," says Parsons with a grin. Full of nervous energy that he channels into his vocal performance, Parsons leads the band into highlights from the new album, Ahh (This Isn't Ideal) and Excalibur before handing vocal duties over to the rich expressive baritone of Blair for Diane Said and Monster of the Week. The way Blair and Parsons work together, in what seems to be an ego-free example of respect and making space for each other. In a concert, it is wonderful to watch. A subtly compelling Real I'm Told, a triumphant Just in Time and the closing trio of Escalator, Baby Steps and the closing low fi pop of $10 are all highlights from a set that never disappoints. That the band didn't play, and no one requested the song that has 109 million plays on Spotify, Warned You, speaks to how far they've come and their (and the audience's) love of what Blair and Parsons are writing now. The duo's very strange path to success is too long to relay here and would seem ludicrous if ever adapted into a biopic, but tonight it feels like we've taken a tiny part of that journey with them. Tonight, before a near sold-out Melbourne Recital Centre, that felt like a very fortunate place to be.

REVIEW: The 77th Cannes Film Festival

FRENCH CONNECTION

 

The 77^th Cannes Film Festival was marked by the arrival of the MeToo movement in France and defined by stories that focused on the experiences of women.

"Carn. Cans. Can." Meryl Streep takes a moment at the podium and gazes out at the formally dressed audience. It is the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival and all 2300 pairs of eyes rest on her. "We Americans think it's fancy to say Carrrn," she deepens her voice, softens her Rs and arches her brow until it frames a knowing look. "But it's wrong. Cannes," she says, now softening the A and crisply exorcising the final three letters. Streep, recipient of over 200 awards for acting and maybe the last woman on Earth who needs to receive another, is in the process of doing just that. Holding her honorary Palme d'Or, presented moments earlier by fellow acting legend Juliette Binoche, she beams. "This prize is unique in the world of cinema, and I am very, very honoured to receive it."

 

For 77 years, Cannes has endured wars, financial and political crises, labour revolts and a totemic shift in film production and distribution (and that’s just in the last 12 months) to remain unique in the world of cinema. The place best known to some film fans as the destination of Mr Bean’s Holiday remains the global capital of theatrical filmmaking and solemnly reverential toward those who create it. The pride with which the festival takes in tradition is routinely mocked and quietly remarkable. 

However, systemic change is afoot. Days before Streep’s speech, the French government launched an inquiry into sexual and gender-based violence in cinema which comes in the wake of charges of rape and sexual assault levelled against acting icon Gérard Depardieu. Over the last year, the introduction of chaperones for minors on film sets and intimacy coordinators – once inconceivable for an industry in thrall to the vision of the “auteur” – have become commonplace. If there is a face of this change it is actress and director Judith Godrèche. Best known for starring in Ridicule and alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, Godrèche was one of the first to bring charges of attempted rape against Harvey Weinstein, a crime she alleges took place during the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. In February this year, she filed charges of rape against directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon. All three men have denied her allegations.

Last year, the festival opened with the Johnny Depp-starring French period drama Jeanne Du Barry. This year, the Un Certain Regard sidebar opened with Godrèche's Moi aussi, a short documentary that features personal testimony from hundreds of women in the industry who have experienced sexual abuse. “I am a whistle,” Godrèche said at the premiere. “What we need is a fanfare.”

The festival’s version of a fanfare is the standing ovation. A fixture of every premiere, applause is not an effective measure of quality, but it can be a mark of the film’s first tentative steps into the world, as is booing. The only film at which I heard both was the festival's most expensive and ambitious, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Coppola nodded, bowed and occasionally wept for eight minutes as the Grand Cinema Lumiere expressed its appreciation (though for those keeping score, there was another full minute of applause mid-film in response to a moment of metatextual interactivity that I won’t spoil). The director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now describes his absolutely unhinged $120 million self-funded science fiction opus as “A Roman epic in an imaginary decadent modern America.” In it, Adam Driver plays Cesar, a visionary architect with soaring plans for New Rome, a dystopian analogue of New York City. Cesar has fallen in love with Nathalie Emmanuel’s Julia, daughter of the city’s corrupt mayor, Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito. Cicero doesn’t want to lose the world over which he rules, and plots Cesar’s downfall. While one dreams and the other schemes, Aubrey Plaza’s ambitious journalist Wow Platinum begins a relationship with Cesar’s billionaire uncle Hamilton Crassus III, played by Jon Voight, and Shia LeBeouf’s cross-dressing spy Clodio stalks marbled halls, hissing lines like, “Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress.” Even Coppola, who admitted to rewriting the script 300 times over 40 years, professed not to fully comprehend his creation. As I heard one critic say, while queuing for Andrea Arnold’s Bird the following morning, “Anyone who claims to understand it after a single viewing is lying, and no-one will ever watch it twice.” 

Bird is a much easier film to love. Arnold’s gritty, vibrant ode to girlhood follows 12-year-old Bailey, who lives in a liberally graffitied London housing estate with her equally liberally tattooed father, Bug, played by Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan. Bug is breeding a toad that sweats a hallucinogenic slime he is hoping to sell to fund his imminent wedding. Outside, London is all housing estates, green fields, and free roaming children and animals. While on one of her frequent ventures, Bailey meets the elfin Bird, played by Franz Ragowski, who is trying to find his parents. Arnold's film is warm, frequently hilarious, often wincingly violent and tinged with a magical realism that proved divisive among critics. 

Coming of age films, such as those in which Godrèche was cast when she was a child, have been a fixture at Cannes since its inception. The difference today is that they tend to be written and directed by women. Alongside Bird, this year’s selection features Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond, a French film about an influencer and hustler whose life is upended when she successfully auditions to be on a reality television show and India Donaldson’s Sundance triumph Good One, a minimalist, slow-burn story about a hiking trip taken by a father and daughter and a reminder that the 90-minute movie is not dead.

Emilia Perez is Jacques Audiard’s musical about the head of a Mexican drug cartel who hires a lawyer to help fake his death and arrange gender-affirming surgery for his transition. Bought by Netflix, Winner of both the Jury Prize and the Best Actress award for its female leads Selena Gomez, Zoe Soldana, Adriana Paz and trans Argentinean actor Karla Sofía Gascón, Audiard’s audacious film is a compulsively engaging character study overflowing with brio. If the synth-heavy songs like La Vaginoplastia don’t linger in the memory, their context and performance certainly does.

Also not leaving the memory any time soon is The Substance. Coralie Fargeat’s Best Screenplay-winning feminist body horror charts the psychological and physical disintegration of Demi Moore's fitness celebrity, Elizabeth Sparkle, who engages the services of a mysterious company that allows her to create “the best version of herself”. This version is played by the younger Margot Qualley, who emerges through a gaping wound in Moore’s back, the first of many exercises in grotesque excess, all in service of Fargeat's commentary about beauty, youth, women’s bodies and the pressures of the entertainment industry, inspired by Moore’s memoir, Inside Out.

 

Only one film at Cannes this year features a dehydrated and screaming Nicholas Cage in the foam of a West Australian beach, forcing a dead rat into the mouth of a surfer called Pitbull, and it wasn’t Yorgos Lanthimos's follow up to Poor Things, the darkly funny Kinds of Kindness. Lorcan Finnegan’s equally entertaining The Surfer, the sole Australian contribution to this year's program, sees Cage returning from thirty years in California to the town he grew up in with dreams of buying his father’s house and taking his son for a surf. Instead, he encounters violent localism from a surf posse headed by Julian McMahon’s Scally: “Don’t live here? Don’t surf here.” Inspired by Australian new wave cinema, The Surfer is buoyed by Finnegan’s potent visual style and Cage’s brand of sympathetic intensity which was on powerful form at the film’s premiere as his cries of “mangez le rat!” ("eat the rat!") from the stage of the Grand Theatre Lumière echoed throughout its standing ovation.

The festival’s most consistently funny and original title was Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. In Rankin's world, a wintry Canada has adopted Farsi as its official language. Two schoolgirls find a 500 Rial banknote frozen in a block of ice with which they hope to buy a pair of glasses for their friend after they were taken by an errant turkey. Rankin harnesses the dry wit of Garrison Keillor, the precise framing of Wes Anderson and the colour palette of an Soviet industrial estate to create a film full of sweetly weird situations and sight gags.

 

Another out of competition highlight was the 67-minute documentary La Belle de Gaza. Director Yolande Zauberman hears of a trans woman who walked from Gaza to join Tel Aviv's queer community. In the backstreets of the Israeli capital, Zauberman earns the trust of a tightknit group who share their stories and talk about their bodies, religion, sex work and families (some of whom will kill them if they return to their home countries) as Zauberman’s camera watches them pray, sing, dance and hustle. In 2024, La Belle de Gaza feels like a minor miracle.

 

Sean Baker's Anora was another story of sex work. One of the few American films in competition, Baker's film was purchased by Neon, the distributor responsible for the last four Palme d’Or winners. Anora moves with the riotous energy of a 1930s screwball comedy as it trails the romance between Mikey Madison’s Anora and Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch. With dreams of escaping his family and becoming American, Ivan pays Anora $15,000 to be his “very horny girlfriend” for a week, during which they party in Las Vegas, and marry. With echoes of Martin Scorsese's After Hours and the Safdie brothers' unrelenting Uncut Gems, Anora proved irrepressible to the festival's judges – a group led by Barbie director Greta Gerwig that included Lily Gladstone, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Eva Green – who awarded it the festivals' top prize, the Palme d'Or.

About as far from the heightened energy of Anora as it is possible to be is the film that took the runner up prize, the Grand Prix. All We Imagine as Light is Payal Kapardia’s intimate account of the lives and struggles of two Indian nurses working in a hospital and sharing a small apartment in Mumbai. The first Indian film in competition for 30 years, and the first ever directed by an Indian woman, Kapadia’s film glows warmly, framing its protagonists with deep empathy as they move through the metropolis, beginning and ending relationships in a story that lingered long after its twilit beachside ending.

Another film likely to recur in conversations throughout 2024 is The Apprentice. Among all the possible subjects for that most leaden of genres, the biopic, Donald Trump is likely to be among the least desired. Yet, Iranian director Ali Abbasi has crafted a sharp crime saga that focuses on the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong, and his mentorship of Sebastian Stan’s aspiring real estate mogul from the early 1970s until the mid 1980s. Already the subject of a lawsuit from both Trump and a financier who thought The Apprentice would be more flattering to the former president, Abbasi's character-driven approach allows the many criminal and unethical acts portrayed to speak for themselves, though whether people want to spend time with these characters is another matter.

Last month, another Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof, was sentenced to public flogging and eight years imprisonment for making films that Iran's revolutionary court deemed “examples of collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security.” Mid-way into the festival, word spread that Rasoulof had defied authorities to flee Iran and attend Cannes. As Rasoulof walked the red carpet, up the stairs and into the film's premiere, to applause that felt celebratory, he held photos of two of his film’s lead actors, currently detained for their involvement in the film. Filmed in secret, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a domestic thriller in which Misagh Zare plays Iman, a newly appointed investigator to the revolutionary court. The promise of a new house and status is undone when loses his gun, a crime that could see him jailed. Iman accuses his law-abiding wife and two teenage daughters, participants in "Women. Life. Freedom" protest movement, of stealing it. As pressure grows both inside and outside the family's cramped apartment, Rasoulof intercuts real social media footage of police brutality, making for a powerful film that topped critics polls and offered a searing insight into the impossibility of being a "good" citizen.

"It is so much quieter this year," an Uber driver told me, toward the end of the festival. "It's no good." Due to last year's screenwriters and actors' strikes, this year's festival featured fewer American films. Instead, more focus has been put on female-fronted events and the festival's unofficial awards. The competition for the Queer Palm – awarded to the film that best deals with LGBT+, feminist characters and topics or challenging gender norms – was fierce, with the award going to Three Kilometers to the End of the World, Emanuel Parvu’s claustrophobic account of virulent homophobia in a small Romanian town. Last year the Palm Dog, the award given to the best canine performance in a film, went to Messi, the border collie from Anatomy of a Fall. This year a griffon mix called Kodi, star of the lightweight legal comedy Dog on Trial, a film about the judging of a mordacious dog, took home the prize.

 

“It was an embarrassment of riches this year in terms of cinema,” said Gerwig during the closing ceremony. “We really led with our hearts for everything we watched.” As the films make their way into Australian cinemas and onto streaming platforms over the next 12 months, cinephiles can be sure of finding films to love.