hwm

Crowd control - a little account of the first Hot Water Music tour of Australia, the beers I had along the way and the different antics rock shows in the place.

The story is fairly simple: I left my hometown of Frankfurt, Germany, one of the really not to exciting places - unless you are interested in the stock exchange, our glorious second division football team, or strange german techno sounds - to work in live in Canberra, Australia, for 8 months. Without going in too much detail, there is not a lot of excitement for punk and hardcore-related sounds in this shithole, mostly due to the fact that a) half the population in this artificial (capital) city works for the government, while the other half are on one of the numerous uiversities. This usually being quite a breeding ground for pseudo-rebellious behaviour - or what would you like to call punkrock in 2003? - it was fairly embarassing to see that australian students actually study! Quite amazing from a German point of view where a vital percentage of the twenty-something generation you would find at a rock venue at 4 am are enrolled students but rarely see a lecture hall from the inside (unless there is a party, mind you). So besides spending my evenings at the Phoenix, the only decent pub in the whole city (if, by any chance, one of you gets stranded in Canberra, I urge you to spend a night with their fabulous staff and dirt cheap Boag‘s Strongarm Bitter. Then again, you wouldn‘t want to be in Canberra in the first place), I was waiting for good excuses to haul down the 4 hours to Sydney to see some good stuff. Besides doing ‚shit I am old and I don’t care‘-things like witnessing a Radio Birdman or a Dictators reunion show, the latter actually being a harbour cruise with a late guest arriving by Water Taxi and, while being greeted by the audience and band, exclamating ‚this is rock and roll‘ I felt a sudden numb feeling as everybody’s friends and drinking partners Hot Water Music were touring Europe. I wasn’t there while everybody had a lovely summer, and there was a show in Cologne with HWM, Strike Anywhere, As friends rust and some twentythousand bands more you wouldn`t mind seeing once in a while. So I went to the Phoenix again. The next morning I was going through my Emails and Bang!, life got a little funnier as HWM claimed to be touring Australia on the shortest notice ever. It seems that some Australian band named 28 Days who played the Warped Tour in the US had asked the band to open for them on their aussie tour. The deal was something like ´we’ll fly you over and arrange food, drink, and bed, if you want to make money sell merch‘. Given the fact that any flight to Australia is expensive by definition it sounded very appealing to the band and they booked some shit crazy itinerary which included flying from Germany to Florida to California to fuck knows where and then to Sydney. It seems quite a number of Aussie bands have done those offers before, just two months earlier the Melbourne based grunge rocking team called Magic Dirt asked Girls Vs Boys to join them on their ramblings (They actually played Canberra, the only reason I can see for doing so being that it is a nice stopover between Sydney and Melbourne).

The luck on my behalf just did not stop as the professor I was collaborating with went to see his sick granddaughter for a week or so, so nobody would even care whether I would work or not. It got even better as Australia’s hottest band (on my behalf, of course), The Nation Blue - which should hit Europe this summer - were opening as well. Ok, now we take a country the size of Europe with nobody living there - how the fuck is that gonna work. Well - it doesn’t. Instead a tour usually is made up of 3 or 4 shows in Greater Sydney followed by the same in Melbourne. If you really want to push it you might include the other bigger cities, Brisbane (only 12 hours (by car) north of Sydney, Adelaide (some 10 hours from Melbourne, I think) or Perth - 3 days driving from any other given point in Australia. The local bands who don’t have the time or money to the the afore mentioned try to play on weekends so that they can either fly to a show using other band’s backline or drive the minmum 8 hours.

So off I went, cruising to Sydney for the first show to be done at one of the numerous universitites. The campus is green, beautiful, and has fierce traffic wardens who wouldn’t mind selling their mum for a buck or two. Although a Friday night one had to purchase a ticket from a teller, eventually I put mine onto the dashboard upside down and got a nice 60 dollar fine the next day when I went back to pick it up. The place in itself was as clean as it gets, pretty much like any public toilet in this country and while hwm were doing their soundcheck the first people arrived, the classic uni crowd of wanna be intellectuals with existentialist literature on their minds and wine in their hands and all of them h/c kids playing the band-t-shirt-game. This game works (and has always worked) because there’s still enough morons sporting shirts by highly succesful bands whereas the soy-chuckling elite, the men in the know, have badly screened shirts of bands only fanzine writers know about. What happened if there were no SOIA, H2O, NoFx, or Lagwagon Shirts anymore?

Overall, it was the only night were the crowd was of a truly international, unified look i.e. it could have been Berlin, London or New York - it’s Sydney and you cannot tell the difference. From the height of the stage this would have been Stagediver’s Central, but something weird about going to shows in different countries: Well the Aussie doesn’t dive. They tend not to fight either, which is cool and they do drink as much as possible,leaving me with a split decision 1:2 in favour of the smallest continent. Nation Blue took the stage and generated some interest by the approx. 400 people with the awesome moment of the two singers shouting at each other without using mikes (actually they explained that you do need the mikes some 3 feet away so that they pick up a little of the voices) and still being heard throughout the WHOLE fucking venue. An awesome blast of ATDI/Refused fueled mathematically precise Rock with some great catchy choruses. In come HWM and present the songs off Caution for the first time to my clinging ears. It took me two sips of Toohey’s to realise the hit potential of ‚I was on a mountain‘ and another 3 or 4 pints to consider their latest effort their strongest - and don’t tell me any of that ‚oh, it’s gotta be Fuel for the hate game‘ shit just because you were around back then and you still hope to impress that ah-so-emotional girl with the Saves the Day T-shirt. Obviously I was, am, and will be extremely biased when discussing the quality of this band but then again they gave me free beer, offered me a place to stay and I ate their sushi rolls. It was very exciting seeing how they grew into this monster that may perform under any drunken circumstance. Probably because of the lack of errors in the rhythmn unit, thus allowing the two guitars some loose action. Considering that they just fell out of a plane and spent some 48 hours airbone or airport-locked it was a fine set, but one could see how worn out they felt and it had some negative effect on the punching vocals and guitars.

The crowd is very interested in HWM (considering them an opening band), way more interested than the bored surfer jock that somebody introduces to me as the Epitaph head honcho in Australia. Hmm not necessarily the top motivated entrepreneur it might need to sell their products to the masses.

As we tried to leave the place one guitarrist Mr. Ragan and myself got hopelessly lost in a huge stairway, did not know in which direction to go but after severe hopeless attempts found a case of Jim Beam and Coke to compensate for the time spent looking for an exit. It was just parked against a wall in an otherwise empty hallway. Quite disturbing to see that although the Australian beer is mighty fine and the Reds are a blast mostly younger people tend to drink weird premixed supersweet Longsdrinks. If you ask for Queensland’s finest, Bundaberg rum, as a straight shot, the bartender will give you that ‚man, for you it’s the gutter‘ look but if you want to down 4 Bundi&Coke mixes cause the 5^th is free: ‚no worries‘.

Ah the main band, 28 Days. Interesting. There’s a bunch of old punkrock dudes who sit around every day leading their shitty lives like all of us and come up with the idea to hire a 18 year old DJ and try to cash in before all their hair falls out. So they write nice charming melodies and BANG debut on top of the charts – the only Australian band ever to have done so (somebody claims). The music is not bad, don’t get me wrong, the songs seem to have way more potential than the punkrock fucks on US MTV or the latest snowboard DVD have, but it’s not very imaginative either. Something you might have heard a million times before and it’s performed technically speaking in a most professional manner. You know, water bottles on stage. They are very friendly, nice guys with a lot of fun and on this personal level I wouldn’t criticise them the slightest bit. Now being number one in Australia doesn’t really complicate your life, there’s less people than in former East Germany living there, the number of crazy fans to be generated thus is much smaller than in the UK or Germany, and the musicians can live a rather relaxed life.

During sound check they played their latest hit effort which instantly jumped into my ear and hides in there as only Osama could do better. Well, two days later the band taught me the lyrics, and if a goddamn song starts ‚`the beer is ice cold and it’s sold from a supermarket who keeps the price low‘ I cannot but embrace the creators of this fine piece of intellectual truth. Have a beer with Fear.

Ok, a little later we’re in some serviced appartment complex near downtown Sydney and after getting rid of all the stuff the plan is to meet the other bands, drunkards etc. at some pub near Town Hall. Well actually it was the Town Hall hotel which is some 10 miles south of the Town Hall so eventually we end up in some burgeois drinking pit with a far out crazy girl entertaining/torturing Jason, Chuck and myself until we go back and then Hep from 28 days shows up with his acoustic guitar and as the sun’s coming up over the ocean which we can see some 5 miles away I pass out, Mr. Ragan delivering a fine lullaby for me to snore away.

Around noon we’re finally back on track and have to convince the bartender down the street that we are under no circumstance going to drive a car on that day until we finally get our Bloody Marys. Along with a side of chips because under no circumstance are we allowed to have a drink without food! It gives me enough stamina to rescue my car from the uni parking lot. Across the street from the bar a giant Australian hoodlum sleeps on the top of his Land Rover while his faithful dog guards him. The sun’s bright and it’s a very hot day and just seeing this mountain of man on top of his car is killing me. I ran out of money for the second time in two days. On our way to the car, Chuck and Chris buy boomerangs and on a patch of lawn we try them and of course one of them breaks into pieces.

Next show is in a place called Carringbah, and it’s the epic story of Surf City and it’s inhabitants. Muscles, Fists, Waves. I walk down the beach and find a top class boogie board. Picked it up, looked around, couldn’t see a person anywhere and considered it to be mine. Went for a swim, the water was very cold and the sun was too low to warm me up again. Another trip to the ATM. You could tell that Cronulla, the main suburb nearby, is big with Rugby league – so far away from the glamour of inner Sydney and the wealth it’s inhabitants display. Car smash repairers, Pizza joints. Ever read Kem Nunn’s ‘Tapping the source’? Same story, different city (Huntington Beach, USA). One of my favorite books, by the way.

Show is set at a a place called Bizzo’s , yup, the Businessman’s club in another far out Australian abbreviation.

Nation Blue look a little unsafe on stage and don’t get a big response either, I think they cannot adapt to the place (or the sound was just plain shit) – who can tell. During HWM’s set I realise for the first time the song that you people should know by now as ‘Wayfarer’, the closest hommage to the greatest ‘ooo-ooo—ooo-aah-ahh’ sing-a-long of all time, Solider’s requiem by Naked Raygun. Which automatically brings up the idea that the older HWM get, the more down to the bone punkrock they play. Been there done that, now let’s belt it out. That’s why I think they have somuch in common with Pegboy (concerning the attitude the recordings seem to transgress). And guitarris Chris’ offspring The Cro(w)s have just released the finest Pegboy album in years J…

What a diverse crowd! Surfer jocks with their girls sporting high heels at a punkrock show. The emo-elite in the middle of the room, but somewhat out of tune with the locals. And a lot of...regular people, as in normal haircuts, clothes, beer in their hand, and the unavoidable Midnight Oil T-Shirt. In Australia, there is no such thing as a music underground, it’s all about saying ‚no worries‘ and minding your own business, provided the beer is ice-cold. In the corner of a given pub Spike and his two friends might play their little one-chord wonder routine, while dad and his mates are at the bar talking footy.

Although the venue looked badly there is no agression, everybody loads up, rocks and walks home. Chuck points three guys out to me who are reminiscent of you and your best 2 friends or me and my best 2 pals, they are excited about seeing the band and wonder about the lyrics, then one steps out and exclaims: ‚shit what kind of wanna be drinkers are we? Standing around with our drinks and not a single beerstain on our shirts‘ and conseqeuntly pours half of his beer over is shirt, ‚now that’s what you have to look like‘. They happen to be the owners of a surfboard company and out of pure fan-dom show up a night later to present a brand new board to Chuck cause they dug the music so much. That night, although badly mixed, HWM are right in your face and the crowd goes off. It would take a couple of more days and Melbourne to see the people explode. A guy is on his cellphone calling his friend telling him that he will have to stop playing bass because he couldn’t believe what Jason of HWM is doing on his instrument. ‚If he is serious he shouldn’t have picked an instrument up in the first place‘ - talk about professional attitude. Found a case of beer in the adjacent bottleshop, safe travels home guaranteed. On the way out the whole stairway down to the street has blood smeared on the walls, but as the rumours go somebody just cut himself open by eating a beer bottle (or likewise). The guitar player of 28 Days has a German girlfriend who is a nice person and verky keen on spending some more time with him but he doesn’t care and grabs his acoustic guitar, walks down into the hotel room of HWM and starts playing.

Passed out again in the living room.

Next day’s show is in Manly, which is a nothern suburb, conveniently reached by…the ferry! It cost only a portion of your cruise-the-harbour boat, but is a much cooler, older vessel, in a sweet green & yellow combination, and it stinks like a ship should. So we arrive in Manly, were the 28Days crew drags us to a seafood resaurant to have (Balmain Bay) Bugs and wine. Something like lobster, but with a much sweeter taste – very weird. As weird as the Fisherman’s club, yup, Fisho’s (see, Australian made easy) – half the room is for stage and audience, the other half is for the Pokies (one armed bandits), the bar and the regulars (all of whom are retired). By now I am convinced that this is the only country in the world were Punk rock shows go along with gambling.

HWM don’t really get into it that night, there’s only a few people ‘cause it’s Sunday and so on, there was no soundcheck and they have thirty one minutes and two seconds to deliver. Same happens to 28 Days so nobody’s keen on talking ‘bout that one too much. Time to sleep (theory), time to fuck up (practice) again. Slept a couple of hours, bad dreams, got up, left town, on the outskirts of Sydney stopped, slept again…. And so on and on until I hit Canberra, slept for two days and took a flight to Melbourne for the second leg.

Now MELBOURNE! That’s a city. Spent hours walking through small streets with small bric-a-brac stores looking for nothing and finding everything. But first off, the show at a place called Arthouse. Found some info on the web concercing this place under the global hangover guide (I think it was called). Tourmanager Nigel said ‘now that’s the show you shouldn’t miss’ so here’s the deal. It’s Melbourne’s Gilman Street but instead of MRR hippies teaching you about the evil of th world with a soda pop in their hands this has a pool table, a stage, a lot of beer and…. Bunk beds to pass out after the show! It’s one of the backpacker’s places you find the whole continent virtually littered with, god, if I lived in that city I’d sign up for an annual membership so I don’t have to grab a cab to make my way home. As the place is fairly small 28 Days didn’t play, HWM sold it out easily and a bunch of local bands opened. During this stage I was trying to eat something so sorry Think Tank, didn’t catch you. The place got really hot, sweaty, loud, and everyone seemed to love it: It would be a good one. Probably them Florida Boys were reminded of their home country, they seemed overwhelmed by the mass of people. It got to the point (after about 10 seconds into ‘Remedy’) where I felt a little aerial action might be appropriate and asked Nation Blue’s bassplayer and all-around-nice-guy Matt on stagediving Down under and he gave me a look as if I had asked for his best friend’s dog to have it roasted with a honey-beer-marinade. ‘No we don’t do this here’ or something like this with a VERY sincere voice was his reply, I stumbled to the bar and had a couple more beers. After the band had delivered a tight, hard rocking set with the helluva bad sound the after show drinking scheme was – as the place suggests – much better than anywhere else. Mostly the lights go on, people leave. Here we drank until I … ah you guessed that, right?

In the South of Melbourne a huge bay shields off the city from the rough Tasman sea, and on the western coast of that bay the town of Geelong boasts a spankin’ marina, a small park and a lot cheap clothing stores, tattoo parlors and a church turned into a venue. To get there I spent 90 or so minutes on a commuter rail, found the only backpacker’s place in town, just a few blocks down the street from the church and stopped by a bar or two on my way. Professional sound system made 28 Days sound very professional, again the All-Australian-Diverse-Crowd syndrome exhibiting anything from college dropouts to fishermen’s sons to high heeled visagists and drunken german bums. The Melbourne emo-elite also made their way to the show and won the T-shirt contest. One fun thing though – the ‘backstage’ scene. In a country like mine a devoted fan has quite a hard time shaking his or her idols hands, let alone get a cd signed or have a chat on guitar techniques (once more than say 800 people come to see you). In Geelong, you just walk into the unguarded room and ask for a beer, at least that’s what some 50 people were doing and with an adorable notion of friendliness the headlining band did what they had to. Big deal? No, not really but I was fairly impressed by the lack of any 7 foot wrestler type keeping ‘things in order’. HWM played a good set in a place not very welcoming and WAY to bright.

The bands leave fast, nothing really to mention. I walk down the street and find a pub with a DJ who belts out old Aussie rock so I ask for the mighty Birdman and he replies some gibbering bullshit like ‘dude that’s so hard to find and the prices are soo high’, what a shame this man is for his business.

Tried to meet Chuck to go check the ocean, but I slept too long and the ride back was even longer. Being the waste I am I spend a long time browsing in the numerous records stores, Missing Link and Au-go-go being the legends of that city, and they’re (German) walking distance to each other. Time to do something different, so I went to see Nation Blue support the Aussie grunge etc. legends Magic Dirt. They play in Collingwood in a way cool club, but before I am wondering around the neighbourhood which has plenty of small second hand stores and beautiful cafes. In the end I enter the dragon i.e. ‘Melbourne’s oldest greek tavern’, because there are so many Greeks living there that M. qualifies as the third largest Greek city in the world. It’s a big hall with plenty of tables and waiters and huge pieces of lamb on the spit. Waiter comes over and with an exaggerated accent asks me what I want to eat. ‘Well a menu would be fine’ I reply but he returns ‘whatcha need a menu for – you want wine, salad, meat, and bread?’ – I go ok and in the end pay the price of a standard Aussie family dinner for 4, the wine was worse than the shit they are selling at the Phoenix (s.above- my pub in Canberra) for 4 bucks a bottle. Brr. Nation Blue are quite nervous as this show was taped for their mutlimedia extravaganza and they painted their face black/white. Actually so nervous that I take a stroll out onto the patio. A friendly Australian offers me his joint and I think ‘shit, it’s a holiday’ and the weed nearly killed me – good stuff and eternal thanks! Magic Dirt are local superheroes so the whole place sings along to their music, and although it’s not bad…. it is a little to boring for me, at times to depressing. Matt from Nation Blue takes me to his place he is sharing with a guy who records for Earache as ‘the Berzerker’. The guy plays Nintendo and has about 50 books by the same author with title ‘ how to make it to the top’ or ‘you can achieve anything’. How’s that for a little doomy metal-dude?

Final show to watch, HWM at Hastings which is southeast of Melbourne, this time the commuter rails needs 90 minutes plus, and outside gets shabbier by the minute. Empty seaside resorts with little motels, occasional Burger joints but way to cheap for a multinational franchise to open, a diverse ethnic mix of losers on the train, sense of evil. Hastings… empty, quiet, no jobs (I guess). From the little pier you can see a beautiful coastline with small islands to the East, sadly it’s also crude oil refining country (or something equally industrial). I fall asleep in a little park close to the shore but wake up shortly after because a bum has discovered me and tries to get me, the intruder, out of his territory by walking around me (in a circle with a 50 yard diameter) and shouting abuse at me. Hmm Hmm I leave. Besides empty shops and one pizza place the town has little to offer. I stroll around but cannot find any other pub, so I sit down in one of the lounges and watch TV. The three rooms of the bar are split with a strict ‘no drink into the next room’ policy, what the fuck this should be good for. The one closest to the street has elderly men, big, red noses, bad tattoos and a lot of bad breath as well. The second one ist for the young adults who either try to impress their female accompanies by shooting pool or ordering another pitcher, eh, mind you, another jug of beer. The third room is the family place, complete with poker machines and

the patio where I try to kill the hours before the show without drinking too much. The venue in itself is still very crowded…. it’s Sunday (or Saturday? Well…) and they have a little family dining scene going on. In one corner the soundmen and their equipment are waiting while in the other pops chews on a one pound steak. The bands arrive as the place is clearing. The last night was the roughest one so far (and of course I supposedly missed THE show), somehow everybody got lost somewhere in Melbourne, Chuck finding his mates around 11 am. Looking the way my body was feeling the past couple of days he stares at me, barely able to hold his eyes open, and says: ‘Tonite, Daniel, I am straight edge’. I empty my glass in one go. This sounds as if say Ian MacKaye walks up to you and says, gawd I need a drink to stop the shivering!

The others were quite happy with a trip to a wildlife sanctuary to take a close look at the animals you usually spot as roadkill on any Australian road (Although it seems that the majoy tourist highways get cleaned a lot. If you have any interest in seeing dead kangaroos for a couple of hundred miles (!) piled on the side of the road- we’re talking thousands here- try the inland highway from Charleville to Bourke). From some upstairs room with a long balcony that is built over the corner of the main entrance we see two drunken idjits trying to fight each other; first of all they’re barking, later they exachange a couple of blows then one wanders off to the pizza joint, the other walks into the venue. It’s packed and the kids are out in full force, many of them sporting the cheaper xerox copies of brand name clothing. After a couple beers and a greeney I watch the show go off, Chuck’s voice is barely recgonizable thus putting more strain on Chris’ work. For the first time a couple of wild looking kids stagedives, although it’s more like elementary school basic course ‘stage antics’, but the girls are impressed and step back. The set is a little short and I am very positive that you have seen the band perform better. 28 Days in contrast are really big with the crowd and alongside a fine sound manage a very professional show, therefore I relocated to the drinking zone to stop me from yawning. I score a free ride back into Melbourne… a girl who is trying to get to know George (I think) better is somewhat hopeless as he is sleeping and snoring two rows in front of her (in a minibus). I try to cheer her up by offering my beer and guess what – she didn’t want it. After a fast glass of red wine on the balcony I sleep, only to get up 5 hours later, pack my stuff, say goodbye, the band is all up and ready to go to Adelaide for the final leg, stumble into the next park, sleep another 3 hours… and so on. Finally reach the airport and fly back to Canberra. On the way back the wind is so rough that I ask the flight attendant to get me a beer although it’s 2 pm. And on and on and on and on and everytime you hear that song….