With special guests the Dandy Warhols and Even. Frontier Touring. Adelaide Entertainment Centre. 20 Sep 2022
Three bands and three amazing stories to tell. This was a night of music for the purists and Hoodoo Guru’s Dave Faulkner knew it.
‘We’re a stadium rock band and this is – uhhhh – almost a stadium,’ he quipped of the reduced circumstances of the Adelaide Entertainment Centre’s Theatre setting. So that meant about 1200 people got a night in a cavernous space which comprised a stage, lots of lights and a big PA system, and lots of standing room.
First, Even. Melbourne’s Even are one of the criminally underrated bands in our history; a vehicle for the musical output of guitarist Ashley Naylor. If you’ve seen Aussie music anytime in the last 25 years you’ve seen Naylor, gun for hire with Rockwiz, Spicks N Specks, The Bull Sisters and pretty much any other Melbourne based music outfit. I got inside as they launched into 1998’s Black Umbrella, a jaunty pop guitar number which evokes the era of The Kinks and The Beatles. It expresses the band’s style perfectly, and shows why the era has such fascination for Naylor and the band; Matthew Cotter on drums and Wally Kempton on bass guitar.
Calling onstage guitarist friend Anton, they launched into Dandy Stomp, a twin guitar attack bringing an enhanced sound which I thought more closely resembled The Smithereens, themselves power pop royalty. By the time they finished an admittedly short set with Chase The Sunset (from their latest album 2021’s Reverse Light Years) and the apocrypha of Rock ‘n Roll Saved My Life – brilliant to the end, they showed their class to all.
I’ve never been utterly convinced by the Dandy Warhols schtick, the slacker stoner sonic equivalent of a racehorse forever held back to the canter. Even so, I’d never deny the upbeat joyfulness of the melody of Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth and Bohemian Like You: more about them to come.
It begins with a mood - a swath of cobalt blue light, washing the stage in a cooling blur of sonic extravaganza, synths and distorted feedback loops from guitars whose pickups have been tweaked to extract every last milliamp of texture. In Godless, the light was the sound, the blue wash became a shrieking mauve, a stab of white, then a muffled roar of blue light returns. This band trade in rumbling psychedelica, less Primal Scream and more Jesus & Mary Chain, though the effect suggests perhaps the opposite… extended passages where all the instrumentation is compressed and gated then fed back across the stage in sheets of reverberation, the bottom end tightly controlled by Zia McCabe at her riser and surrounded by electronics. Courtney Taylor-Taylor works the vocal lines through two different microphones, incidentally.
The mood changes at about song four. McCabe comes to front of stage and takes up the bass guitar, suddenly the tempo changes and there are three vocalists for Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth. Drummer Brent DeBoer astounds, supplying vocal through the most demanding passages. The change in vocal fortunes makes all the difference as the tempo lifts and all the songs become hits. We Used To Be Friends, Get Off and Bohemian Like You all make an appearance. Compelling, and possibly mesmerising.
When the Hoodoo Gurus take the stage it becomes immediately clear they mean business. It would be trite to describe this – their final tour – as a purists gig, largely because it seems difficult to draw a bead on who the average Gurus fan is, depending on what part of their music career is involved. It seems much clearer with other bands; you’re either a Midnight Oil fan or you’re not. Hunters & Collectors, similarly. Ditto Barnes, Farnham… Faulkner…?
Arguably Dave Faulkner has penned more hits than most of the rest of them, and tonight they come tumbling out, one follows another as a series of ‘oh yeah’ moments. This is a band who entered our national psyche with My Girl and stole the soundtrack to summer with the anthemic Like Wow -Wipeout, from 1984. How quickly they became part of the scene.
Emerging from the punk rock swamp of Perth, Le Hoodoo Gurus headed East to Sydney in the early 1980s. By the 1990s and 2000s they had become a power pop act, but tonight, in a surprise to beat all, they have decided to plumb the depths, a more muscular guitar at 11, overdrive pedals on 11 Hoodoo Gurus than I could have imagined.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn… Nik Rieth powers the back end like it’s meant to be, hitting his floor tom with real authority. Bassist Rick Grossman is implacable, squeezing the neck of his instrument. Faulkner and guitarist Brad Shepherd appear gleeful, swapping lines, and the interplay between to two is almost telepathic.
World Of Pain, a single from this year is the opening number before Faulkner chuckles ‘you don’t wanna hear the new stuff’ and launches Tojo (Never Made It To Darwin) from their debut album Stoneage Romeos (1982). A confession. I suspect I’m the only person in the crowd who was at that album launch show at the Strawberry Hills Hotel in Sydney, forty years ago. The ringing Tojo is followed by 1993’s The Right Time and 2022’s Save My Soul and then back to Death Defying (oh-wee) from 1986.
Suddenly, a song I never thought I’d hear them play – Dig It Up – is amazingly powerful, leads to In The Wild and then to I Want You Back. This is a Hoodoo Gurus show for the ages, one to savour. It has the stomp, the swagger, the rough edges of a pub band in full flight such as I thought had been largely lost. And towards the end, Bittersweet, Miss Freelove ’69, 1000 Miles Away and then, as a way of vexing the newcomers, I Was A Kamikaze Pilot, another one from that absurd debut album, Stoneage Romeos. And there was still an encore to come: Be My Guru, What’s My Scene? and then Like Wow – Wipeout provided the perfect close to a really special night. I hope it also seemed that way from the stage.
Alex Wheaton
When: Closed
Where: Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre
Bookings: Closed
