Three Gigs

Memorable moments for bad reasons

Badly Drawn Boy. Pic credit: Jake Dinsdale

Badly Drawn Boy – King’s Park, Perth, 2003

The day itself was kind of magical: a festival on a hill in our botanical gardens, and behind the stage, just beyond the cliff, the Swan River. Teenage Fanclub played, flawlessly, and so did Machine Translations, and between sets The Avalanches’ DJ Dexta spun records. “Tomorrow Never Knows” set me off.

It was also between sets that we left the gates for Westy’s car, where an esky of homebrew sat and which helped to wash down our dexies. The headline that day was Badly Drawn Boy, who at the time had released three albums: his wonderful debut The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, the soundtrack for About a Boy, and the mostly goofy Have You Fed the Fish?

We caught him at a time when his prospects were still lively: to the still-influential British music press he was the melodious, folksy, vaguely eccentric talent who had won the 2000 Mercury Prize with his first album. He was yet to slide into reputational injury (and then obscurity) via addiction, erratic live shows and increasingly dull music made lame by lazy sentimentality. In fact, to plot Badly Drawn Boy’s talent might be to describe a severely descending slope from the peak of his debut. I say “might” because I stopped listening some albums ago. (And he almost stopped making them: between 2000 and 2010, Damon Gough released seven albums. He’s released just one since.)   

But at the time, I was enchanted. Bewilderbeast still strikes me as an excellent record, distinctive in its magpie enthusiasms, and with “Once Around the Block” it boasts one of the great indie pop songs of the last 25 years. About a Boy was sweet, very sweet, and had the gorgeous single “Something to Talk About” which stirs me less these days, but which I still admire. Its final track, “Donna and Blitzen”, slides into my top 20 Christmas songs of all time.   

Anyway, I knew then very little about the man beyond his music and had naively assumed – solely through his records – that we’d encounter a tender anorak who shyly retreats into his music.  

Oh, no. We found that night a petulant drunk who forgot how to play and whose only stage banter was abuse. It was his young son’s birthday, you see, who was back in Manchester, and us “cunts” were keeping him from being there. We were called “cunts” a lot that evening, and even if his bitter tirades became increasingly incoherent, he reserved careful emphasis for that word.

The abuse was surprising, then bemusing, then sad. It belittled him, and so embarrassed us. What was insulting, though, was the fact that he was so pissed that it took him three or four tries just to start “Once Around the Block” – even the presence of The Smiths’ Andy Rourke on bass could not sharpen his sense of professionalism. The song was finally launched, and played through, while suffering several hiccups of drunken ineptitude – fluffed chords, forgotten lyrics, bitter curses.  

The whole set was an awful mess, and we saw that night a man who cared as little for his music as he did for his audience. The band played on stoically, or tried to, but they were stuck with their self-destructive lead. And as much as Mr. Gough told us how much he missed his family, a friend of mine, who was working backstage, would later tell me that he drunkenly groped her.   

I’ve seen some badly impaired artists perform, but perhaps none so bad as Damon Gough that evening. The exception might be Evan Dando, who I’d seen about a year before, and whose gig was delayed when the steep stairs from the basement greenroom proved, for a time, insurmountable. After the performance we wondered if he should have climbed them at all.  

Royal Headache – Gasometer, Melbourne, 2013

They were late. Real late. By how much I can’t recall, but sufficiently late that the crowd – already whipped into aggressive delirium by the previous hardcore band – were ripe to torch the place.

In fact, it began to seem that they wouldn’t show at all. And when they did, it was immediately obvious that they didn’t want to be there. I think they mentioned a delayed flight, as they bitterly mentioned other obstacles fate had thrown before them – mostly in the form of the behaviour of other bandmates.

Just a few years before, with their self-titled debut, the Sydney soul-punks had released one of this country’s best ever albums – and they hated each other. Or, at least, on any given night they could. This was such a night.

Singer/songwriter Shogun’s voice is both raucous and resonant, raw and golden, a voice that practically begs me to embarrass myself trying to describe it. But if his voice gave their songs a rare gravity, they themselves were often spinning out of orbit.

Which their crowds loved. They promised meltdown, and audiences obliged – they played before wild, shirtless and gobbing masses encouraged by the wobbly psychic mass on-stage. Even the honoured venue of the Sydney Opera House could not tame the anarchic excitement, and dozens of fans rushed the stage. They gave wild energy, and it was reciprocated. It was rarely pretty, which I guess was the point.

My god, they were good. But not that night. That night they bickered and sulked. That night they were not the sum of their parts. Not that it mattered to the crowd. They went batshit.

The band dissolved after just two albums – each of which had claimed global attention and critical praise. Shogun wasn’t terribly stable, and nor was he the best pin-up boy for hardcore bravado. He was too ambivalent about too much. “Everyone just sort of despised me for singing melodies or something, instead of doing a fake tough guy hardcore thing or an esoteric electronic thing,” he told Vice in 2018. “There’s a lot of rules in underground music that I don’t miss. It’s not very creative.”

Teenage Fanclub – Croxton Band Room, Melbourne, 2024

It was a curious thing, watching Teenage Fanclub while in the grip of a breakdown. But “breakdown” is hopelessly imprecise, and it suggests a local incident, something easily defined in time. Let me say that my psychic collapse, or at least severe diminishment, did not happen instantly: it was incremental, and the “breakdown” was simply the moment that it became intolerable and I sought help rather than privately blundering through. The diagnosis was PTSD, as I had long assumed, and medication was immediately prescribed. Therapy commenced. It had taken me too long.

As it happened, in this moment I saw one of my most cherished bands. A group I’d first heard at 12, bought an EP from at 15 – when a newspaper round provided my first disposable income – and have adored ever since.

That adoration, though, is unfortunately qualified: canonical Fanclub, as I see it, is comprised of their four albums released in the 1990s as well as their first single, “Everything Flows”, from ‘90. That is, while the group are still releasing albums – they have 12 now – there is a terribly stark decline in everything released after the new millennium.

The thing is, that as time has passed, and the albums were made, the post-canon work – the often grey, undistinguished, soporific stuff – has come to eclipse, in sheer number at least, the great stuff. The whole discography is now comprised of more mediocrity than brilliance.

And there’s another thing: in 2018, one of the group’s three songwriters, Gerard Love, left the group. As such, the tunes he wrote have now been retired from gigs. This leaves a profound hole in their live sets: no “Star Sign”, “Sparky’s Dream”, “Radio”, or “Ain’t That Enough”. (Love also wrote one of my favourites of theirs, “Gene Clark”, though, for reasons I’ve never learned, is almost never played live.)

And so this gig could never compare with 2016’s, when each of those Love songs were played and there was much less new stuff. On this night, though, there was a proud insistence upon the later records and I’ll tell you something: I was almost grateful for it. Not only because their new songs sounded much better live, but because my nervous system simply couldn’t bear hearing the old ones.

I’m sure I’ve cried in gigs before – certainly, I’ve fought tears off. But not like this. I counted six songs from the canon that night, and each one left me trembling, puddle-eyed, in frightened awe of the music’s power to collapse decades of my memories upon each other.  

I vaguely wondered if I looked strange, unhinged even, but was comforted by the anonymity offered by a gig’s size and darkness. But I was melting. How else to describe it? I was melting, and it wasn’t all unpleasant – there was joy alongside the tears and my bafflement with this weird psychic electrocution.

I cheered and clapped almost as effusively for their new stuff as the old. To do otherwise would have been churlish, and I was also sensitive to the fact that they could obviously see and hear that the crowd’s response was conspicuously duller with the new stuff. I did the very least I could: I rose above my indifference and offered cheer to these harmonic legends.

But really, above all, there was my perverse gratitude for the new stuff. For the safety of watching a great band play bland songs. My inflamed nervous system just couldn’t handle it otherwise. That they leaned into their new gear just might have saved me from falling to my knees. There was a secret riot that night, and only so much physic convulsion and tearful submission I could take. So, three cheers for the dull stuff — and infinite thanks for the rest.