If you live in Brisbane and love live music, I think it’d be very hard to not have a wealth of fond gig memories at The Triffid. The brainchild of Powderfinger’s John Collins, the former commercial aircraft hangar is now one of this city’s most beloved venues. In my time going to gigs there, I’ve seen my boys Dune Rats and DZ Deathrays both sell it out three back-to-back nights in a row, gotten to jump up on stage and sing Wild and Weak during (what was at the time) the final WAAX show, and managed witness Norway’s most infamous sons Mayhem turn the place into their thalassic ritual site.
My gaps between visits to The Triffid have started to get longer and longer over the years, which is a shame because there’s never any shortage of amazing acts to see there. This is exactly the reason why I absolutely leapt at the chance to spend two nights back-to-back nights at The Triffid last weekend, watching both some old favorites of mine and plenty of new acts that I’ll definitely be keeping on my radar.
Some of the gigs I go to I expect to be pretty wild, while other gigs I expect to be pretty tame. But music has a way of proving me wrong and it did so once again. Some places take a bit of riling up from the performer to get the audience going but Brisbane crowds never fail to bring the energy. Far from just watching from the back like I expected to, I once again got sucked into a vortex of chaos and spat out the other side, a little worse for wear and itching for another chance to do it all over.
Cometh The Storm (Night 1: Tropical Fuck Storm, C.O.F.F.I.N, Cool Sounds, Mod Con)
It was half past seven when I first entered the band room last Friday night to catch Mod Con kick off both my weekend and the Cellophane Honeymoon tour. I thought that their frontwoman Erica Dunn looked a bit familiar at the start and swiftly realised that she’s also in Tropical Fuck Storm once she started singing. I think I’ve also seen her play as Palm Springs before. It’s been that long since I’ve seen her on stage that it took me a bit to put two and two together!
Mod Con hail from the frigid land of so-called Victoria to paraphrase their words. They play a very groovy take on garage rock and punk, with a heavy emphasis on bass and some excellent vocal harmonies. Their set is short and sweet and they turn the crowd of unfamiliar punters into fast fans. Their rhythm section is incredibly tight, bassist Isobel D’Cruz and drummer Racquel Solier can practically read each other’s minds and play off of each other so well. Erica has the sort of voice that just fills the room and she plays some impressively intricate guitar parts while singing as well.
I’ve noticed a lot of openers don’t really expect people to buy their merch and they mention at one point that all they did was bring six of their remaining records up here in a suitcase and that a few lucky people might be able to snatch one up after the set. Only a few songs in, they’d already made a fast fan of a very enthusiastic (and probably intoxicated) punter who sprinted out of the band room to the merch desk to snap one up and then came back just as quickly waving around his new vinyl like the World Cup Trophy! Let this be lesson to all bands out there, you can sell a sense of FOMO with your merch too ha-ha-ha.
Next up were Melbourne indie-pop six-piece Cool Sounds, who more than live up to their name with their jangly, twangy psychedelic jams that incorporate elements of genres from disco to funk to country. Their percussionist/saxophonist at the back seems to switch over to a new instrument every song! While it’s technically a solo project from their frontman Dainis Lacey, like many bands in their vein, they end up trading vocals throughout their songs more often than not.
While Cool Sounds have been around for a while now, if memory serves me right, according to Dainis its current incarnation was formed when all the members were living in a sharehouse and stuck in lockdown together. They had nothing to do but jam all day and experiment with their music which led to them to where they are now. Certain illicit substances may have also been consumed in the process unless I was mishearing him tell the story ha-ha-ha.
Their origins as a jam band definitely shows in their live act. They barely steal a glance at one another up there on stage and there’s so many little instrumental parts happening at once, but they’re impressively in tune with each other. When one of their members otherwise wouldn’t have such to play during a certain part or song, they break out a motely of percussion instruments from tambourines, to shakers, to agogo bells, which you get to hear a lot of on the track 6 or 7 More. It gives me Paul Simon Graceland worldbeat vibes at points.
During the Cool Sounds set, I remember hearing some audience members behind me who were dressed in all black say that they came here for hardcore and had clearly shown up a bit early for that. When the next band C.O.F.F.I.N took to the stage at half past nine, they definitely got their wish. C.O.F.F.I.N (which stands for Children of Finland Fighting in Norway), are a band I’ve heard about a lot recently but never quite got around to listening to. After seeing them live, I can definitely see why people are seriously getting around them. Fusing the riffs of old school rock n’ roll with the riotous energy of early hardcore punk, C.O.F.F.I.N immediately struck me as a hard act to follow.
From the moment they launched into their first song, the crowd went absolutely wild. They had such a different energy and vibe from the rest of the lineup and some of the people I talked to that night thought they’d bought tickets for a C.O.F.F.I.N headline show. They’ve been kicking around since 2005 (apparently, they opened for the Hard-Ons at the age of twelve!) but their fifth album Australia Stops and the recent resurgence in the heavier side of punk seems to have really gotten their engine going.
I’m dodging an absolute flurry of fists and elbows as the center of the crowd explodes into a sea of colliding bodies. The Triffid floor swiftly becomes a slip and slide as the band hammer away through their truly ferocious set. Drummer and lead vocalist Ben Portnoy has a voice like the growl of a rabid dog and all the energy of a caffeinated cheetah. It’s truly impressive how he manages to roar like Lemmy while pounding away at the kit like Philthy Phil Taylor.
The band make good use of having two guitarists, Abijah Rado and Aaron Loss are always shredding away, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in discord. They let each note ring out and certainly don’t mind a bit of feedback. Meanwhile bassist Laurence Adams maintains a relentless rhythm with a gnarled, overdriven tone that cuts right through the wall of noise roaring across the band room.
The C.O.F.F.I.N set feels way shorter than it actually was, partially owing to the lightning pace of their songs. They closed their set by reminding of us a few important matters. Firstly, that we live on what is and will always be Aboriginal land. Secondly that Indigenous people are disproportionately incarcerated despite being only a small percentage of our population. Thirdly, to free the Palestinian people. And finally, that all occupation is oppression. Some very wise words on that last count. I feel like we often get caught up in semantics whenever we talk about politics in this country so it’s refreshing to hear someone call a spade a spade and leave it at that.
After the C.O.F.F.I.N set, I wonder to myself how the Tropical Fuck Storm set will go. I’ve seen them play before and I loved them but the crowd are clearly looking to get rowdy tonight after what they just saw and I wouldn’t say that Tropical Fuck Storm’s music is particularly conducive to moshing. As I said at the start of this however, music has a way of always proving me wrong, and boy did it do that in spades.
Tropical Fuck Storm (TFS) have a name that’s fitting for the music that they make. I’ve compared them to Death Grips before but that might only be because I’m not so into noise so that’s the only frame of reference that I have. The band’s recorded discography, while great and well produced, simply doesn’t do them justice. This is very much a band that needs to be seen live, loud, and in your face with the speakers turned up so high that they start to clip. That’s more or less what happened at The Tivoli when I saw them open for King Gizzard few years ago.
Tonight is their first show back in a bit under a year as their bassist Fiona Kitschin had to take some time off the road to due to some serious health issues. She’s been given a clean bill of health now, so TFS are back in full swing and loving it. As they hit the stage, frontman Gareth Liddiard remarks that they might be a bit rusty after their live show hiatus but it’ll still be the best show that we’ve ever seen and even if they are bit rusty, it’ll still be the second or third best show they’ve ever seen. Nice to see that he’s so humble.
The band were definitely not rusty.
They launch into Paradise, the opener to their sophomore album Braindrops, and it’s like they’d never left the stage. The track starts out slow and jangly but begins to build in energy, with many erratic peaks in intensity followed by abrupt returns to the original tempo. Eventually there’s a point where they drop all pretense of restraint. Gareth starts to roar his vocals skywards, backed by Erica and Fiona, as he strains and strangles every bit of noise out of each string on his guitar. The song swiftly begins to fall off its tracks, sounding more like knives against a glass pane window or hitting the brakes on a speeding bullet train, before ending without warning.
You know a little bit of what to expect with TFS but never know exactly how they’re gonna get there. It’ll be bizarre, cacophonous, and ear drum burstingly loud but it’ll veer off into a multitude of chaotic twists and turns before coming to a grinding halt. When you see them live, it’s not really about what notes they play. It’s more about the ones they don’t and what follows after those that they do. Every bit of static, hum, hiss, and screeching feedback is dived right into rather than shied away from. They absolutely revel in the chaos and more or less tease us by slamming our faces with a wall of noise, wrenching our heads back just when we’re starting to get used to it, and then slamming us right into another one.
Gareth is the face of the band, his gruff vocals defining both TFS and his old band The Drones, but Erica (who plays guitar and keys in TFS) and Fiona do a fair bit of singing too, their voices providing quite the contrast to his. Drummer Lauren Hammel at the back has the hard role of keeping everyone in time amidst the chaos and I have to say she does a bloody good job of it considering how unpredictable the songs can be.
I wasn’t excepting a mosh at all tonight but some very enthusiastic (and definitely intoxicated) punters start one when Chameleon Paint begins to crest. I quickly join and it doesn’t take much further prodding for everyone else to pile in either. It certainly wasn’t a speedy punk mosh. Instead, it was as erratic as the music itself. We’d almost get fast at certain points only to suddenly stop in our tracks, some of us tumbling over down onto the floor as we hit the skids. At other times, we were sluggishly but forcefully battering each other as the band plunged into some punishingly heavy lows worthy of a drone metal album.
At one point in between songs, Gareth returns to his earlier joke about getting rusty and points out that Rusty is also Russell Crowe’s nickname. The band ask for the house lights on and Gareth says that he’s his favourite actor. He then asks us if anyone here likes him only to receive some boos the very mention of dear old Rusty. Fiona’s calls for her favourite actors don’t do much better either. Not a fan of the rich and famous this crowd tonight ha-ha-ha.
The show only gets wilder as the set goes on and the band are really starting to revel in it. Right before the last song, perhaps bemused at our enthusiasm, Gareth tells us that we should try and set the world record for more people crowd surfing than there are standing up. I remember thinking to myself, “Be careful what you wish for mate!”. We obviously didn’t manage that but after C.O.F.F.I.N set, we were all keen to cause some chaos and with the band’s blessing, God were we gonna do it.
The band launch right into Paradise and as the song swerves into its first sudden surge, we’re up! Those of you who know me personally are probably assuming that I was the first one up and you’d be right ha-ha-ha. But I’m not the only one. I come down fairly quick but more and more people are going up as the song begins to crescendo while those of us on the ground start with the slam dancing again.
Gareth’s vocals become increasingly hoarser and more frenzied as he begins to wring the very life out of his guitar. Even Lauren who usually keeps a fairly steady beat is cutting loose now, showing off some of her metal roots. Just when you think it can’t get any more deafening, the song stops with a few final deafening shrieks out of Gareth’s guitar, leaving us only with the whine of feedback as the band drop their instruments and bid us a goodbye and a good night. Not too shabby for a first show back!
Flowers in Bloom (Night 2: Full Flower Moon Band, Sunfruits, Radium Dolls)
This is night two of the article, but at this point, it was actually my fourth night out in a row. On the preceding Wednesday, I went to see Lurid Orb and Reverend Kris Hades (formerly of Sadistik Execution) open for Mortiis at the Stranded Bar. But that was such a weird gig that it could hardly be described. Lurid Orb, a local dungeon synth artist dressed up as a wizard and played synths with a glowing staff that kept changing colour next to him.
Kris Hades’ performance probably exceeded even TFS’s in noise, which is impressive considering he didn’t actually play an instrument and instead spent the whole set hacking away at the pickups of his fucked-up guitar with a box cutter. Mortiis, the former bassist for seminal black metal band Emperor, dressed up as a goblin and played his album Født til å Herske in full which consists of two tracks both over twenty minutes in length all played on a synth that looks like a hunk of rusted scrap metal.
Very bizarre gig, had a million tequila shots that night, stumbled home and passed out.
On the Thursday I went to see the Radium Dolls do a small acoustic set for their album launch in The Triffid beer garden so technically I had a three-night tango at The Triffid but that wasn’t super wild. It does however bring me to tonight. First cab off the rank for the Saturday were the Radium Dolls themselves, fresh off the release of their debut record Legal Speed. I’ve been following them around for a while and it’s more or less been up, up, up for them the whole time. Will, their frontman, drums in Perve Endings but this band has gradually become his main focus.
When I get to The Triffid it’s fucking packed and I’ll later realise that most of the crowd are there for them! Being local boys, they’ve invited all their friends and family tonight to watch them up on the big boy stage. The front of the room is probably the most packed I’ve seen for an opener band in a long time. While they have a tour for the album coming up, tonight was definitely their unofficial plugged-in album debut. Striding out with enviable bravado, they rip into the title track of their album. Cigarettes and legal speed are all they need apparently. Word to live by ha-ha-ha.
It doesn’t take Will very long to take his shirt off and if you’ve seen the Dolls before, that’s when you know he really gets serious. He’s a great frontman, full of energy but keeping his cool at the same time despite how sweaty he ends up getting. I think the secret is the sunglasses, you see less of the crowd when you’re in a dark room and can really get in the zone.
His brother Tom on guitar is similarly bursting with energy, he always looks like he’s just about to take a running leap off the stage. They rip through all the crowd favorites from the album tonight with a good mix of punky thrashers and slow burners. Their style of music is like pub punk poetry, similar to Bad Dreems in that regard, but that might also be because they’re the only frame of reference I have. Will alternates between screaming, singing, and rambling on in a spoken word style. The crowd are clearly loving them and the Dolls are great at slowing their songs down a bit before ripping right into the final chorus.
There were two random bits of stage banter that I remember finding hilarious at the time. At one point. someone yells at Will to put his shirt back on, ribbing him a bit over his propensity to spend most of the set shirtless, to which Will replies “Fuck off!”. Right before they launch into their final song Tractor Parts, Will goes on rant about how some many bands up here think they’ll make it in Aus music if they move to Melbourne but he proudly proclaims that Brisbane is where it’s at. This of course causes everyone to start screaming “Fuck Melbourne!” as we all love to do up here, a saying which is eclipsed in popularity only by “Fuck Sydney!”.
Funnily enough, the next band up were Melbourne psych-pop five-piece Sunfruits. They sorta look like what would happen if you’d fused C.O.F.F.I.N and Cool Sounds from the previous night together ha-ha. They’re technically the same genre as Cool Sounds but take it far in the other logical direction. Energy, there’s so much of it!
They absolutely own the stage and make good use of all the space. Guitarist Winter McQuinn spends a lot of his time leaping up as high as he can into the air, his long hair thrashing up and down as he does so. Their other guitarist Evie Vlah really knows how to work the crowd whenever she takes over on the mic, she struts her stuff with so much confidence and the crowd are definitely feeding off her energy.
It definitely suits the slick psychedelic soundscapes that they create with their music. The songs usually start out slow and sparse but then they explode out into these fuzzed out, blissful, psychedelic jams that give all the members a chance to show off their chops. They trade vocals from song to song a lot too, everyone gets a chance to sing which is just as well because they all have amazing voices.
It was half past ten when Brisbane’s new rockets hit the stage to play their biggest headline show yet. I haven’t seen Full Flower play since August of last year so I’m hoping to make it count. With the thudding bass line of NY-LA echoing across the band room, the crowd went wild as the Full Flower Moon Band launched into one of their many iconic tracks. A tongue-in-cheek ode to the perils of life on the road and how a band can run themselves ragged while living it, this one is a crowd favourite and a very choice good to open with. There’s a line in the song that’s very Brisbane and stuck out to me the moment I ever heard it, in which frontwoman Kate Dillon cries out “If everyone buys a ticket, we can play The Tivoli!”.
The Tivoli tends to be next venue a band plays after their crowds get too big for The Triffid, and looking at the turn out tonight, I reckon they’re well on their way to making that line a reality. Their next track Power opens with a very groovy bass line and the crowd are all feeling it. Come the chorus though, things start to get wild. Last time I saw them at the Princess Theatre, it took until their last two songs for a mosh to form, but now their crowds are cutting loose from the get go and it’s beautiful.
By the time they play their third track Meet Ya, the crowd surfing starts and it just doesn’t stop. Down in the pit, things are getting slipperier and people are starting to eat shit on the floor but we pick them up and put them back in the game in short order. I wasn’t the first to go up this time nor did I do it the most, two far stauncher long haired yahoos had me easily beat over the course of the set, but when the chorus of West Side kicks in, I’m up as well. I get a fair bit of air time but end up landing pretty hard and smacking my head on the floor when I get dropped, but no harm done and it only made me even keener to get back into it.
They keep on pounding through the heavier songs until about mid-way through the set, where Kate pauses for a moment to thank us for treating every song like a number one hit. She definitely wasn’t expecting all this energy from the crowd either. Considering the strength of the band’s songwriting, I think the response is well deserved! If you haven’t seen Full Flower live before, Kate is easily one of the most captivating performers you’ll ever see. She cavorts about on stage, absolutely possessed by the music itself. I remember at one point she asked all the reviewers in the room to describe the audience as “eruptive”, which is fitting but quite doesn’t capture what was really happening. That night, we were reflecting all the energy that she always gives us right back at her.
After Trainspotting, she tells us they’re gonna play some quieter songs and things become a bit more of a slow dance. As a part of this we get a smattering of unreleased tracks like Illegal Things, Kiss Him, and Come and Be, as well as an old favourite of mine, Highway, which contains a very clever interpolation of one of the lyrics from It’s a Long Way to The Top if You Wanna Rock n’ Roll by ACDC.
The energy picks up again when they Hurt Nobody starts and the crowd goes absolutely mental when they play Roadie. They all clearly want Rode back in their lives as much as Kate does ha-ha-ha. I thought this was gonna be the closer but Kate remarks that that would be a “ridiculous” way to end the show. Maybe because of the lyrics or the fact that they definitely gave it a big old rock n’ roll climax? I’m not quite sure but we get the much softer, sparser Man Hands as the encore which ends the night more of a tender note.
Aftermath
What a weekend! After a two-night tango at The Triffid combined with my previous outings, even I have to tap out at this point despite the Sunday night still being ripe for misbehavior. It was like having a long overdue dance once again with an old flame. Warm and familiar in some respects, but still so fiery and passionate in others. The shows were unexpectedly intense and remind me of why I love this stuff so much.
I remember reading an article in The Guardian about how Gareth from TFS was dealing with being off the road for the better part of a year. Not well is probably the way to put it in summary. He went from sort of supporting himself by playing over a hundred gigs a year to not a whole lot. He’s put so much of his life into music and has played to thousands upon thousands of people but it’s still been very patchy when it comes to paying the bills.
Which is exactly why this weekend I feel was so important, not just because TFS are playing shows again, but because of what the crowd did in response to all the acts. Artists put so much time and effort into teeing up shows and playing for all of us up there on stage. It’s nerve-wracking even after you’ve been doing it for years. And it absolutely kills me when I see incredibly talented artists play to people who don’t much care for them. That was absolutely not the case with my weekend however. The crowd gave the artists absolutely everything that they had, feeding all the energy they were receiving from the performers right back at them, which is exactly how it should be.
By the time that this article hits the internet, the news will have spread of Splendour 2024’s cancellation. It’s hard out there for the music industry at the moment and there doesn’t seem to be an end to our woes in sight. The cancellation sparked a lot of discussion about whether people still connect with live music like they used to. The cancellation is devastating for everyone involved but for me, with what I witnessed over my weekend, I can take some comfort that I’ve seen with my own eyes that people absolutely do still connect with it. They just have to be ready to commit to it even a fraction as much as the artists do.
Thank you to Justin Edwards from Collapse Board for all the Night 1 photos! You can check out more of his work here.
A big thanks to James Griffin for all of his Night 2 Photos as well, you can see more of his work here and here. Not only does he do gigs, but he does weddings too!
Massive shoutout to The Triffid as well for putting up with everyone’s antics over the weekend!