Concerts and Comedy
Last night marked the end of what has been a very social period in my life. I probably should have commented on these things earlier but the whole being very social thing got in the way.
Before I comment on the events I feel the need to mention the strangeness of going to these things post the January floods. Everyone brought them up on them, some more successfully than others (my personal favourite being Steve Hughes - “good to see you guys are all still here, I heard you were collecting two of every animal”), but it was the response of the audience that interested me. Some of the artists mentioned supporing victims of other disasters (ie New Zealand and Japan) and got no response but then when they said they wanted to support the people of Queensland the audience went mad - sometimes I am embarrassed to be Australian. Whilst what happened here was bad, and many people are still feeling the impact, it was minor compared to what has happened elsewhere. You would think the people of Brisbane would have compassion for others who have been ravaged by Mother Nature but apparently you would think wrong.
Ok so on with the show (or shows)…
I saw more than I ever have this year but apparently none of the big names as I was only in the small theatres (I will stick with lesser name options in the future as I’ve seen the headliners in the past and this is the year I’ve most enjoyed the festival). In order of attendance I saw -
Denise Scott - I have long loved Denise. She is always a favourite of mine on Spicks and Specks but my love of her pre-dates that. I will forever remember her performance of Afternoon Delight on the Big Gig complete with extending whistles. Her Regrets show may have informed me far more about her bodily functions than is considered acceptable but I laughed so much I cried. I am looking forward to reaching menopause and being able to tell people what I think of them but thanks to Denise I will make sure that they are not intellectually impaired before I speak.
Josh Earl - I know he is meant to come from Tasmania but I remain convinced that Josh and I have the same mother. We certainly seem to have had the same upbringing. I will be forever sad that I never saw his Australian Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Cookbook show but I still enjoyed Lovesongs. It was quite complicated for a stand up show - it involved calls into a request line and the pretaped calls where interspersed with straight stand up and also the various ‘love’songs’ that Josh had written - but it was definitely v v v funny. Highlights were Josh gyrating to R Kelly singing ‘girl I want to get you pregnant’, his attempts to describe Insception to his wife - ‘yes you have seen it. It had Juno and the kid for Third Rock from the Sun in it. You watched it with me. You told me it didn’t make sense’ and contemplating reasons why someone ‘can’t’ have a yacht.
Mel Buttle - I went to this to fill a gap around the other acts I was going to that night and chose this particular act based on the program description which informed me that all the great men where called Barry - White, Manilow, McKenzie. It was really good and I think Mel and I should go drinking. I loved the important distinction between intra and inter school swimming carnivals and the fact that her father made her pretend to be a boy to win a race. I also loved her father’s email about the ant infestation “I place dead ones on the nest every morning so they can wake up and see what has happened to their friends and know that this shit is serious.”
Geraldine Quinn - This was the thing that interested me most in the program. It was described as a cabaret act about how to create the perfect pop song. It really should have been my favourite thing but it was a bit hit and miss. There were some awesome moments like the tween country genre where your song had to display your borderline personality disorder and had great lines like “I’ve carved your name into my chest” and “you look so handsome with my daddy’s gun pressed against you head” and also the section on dance moves - my favourite being ‘is this my right foot? Yes it is. Is this my left foot? Yes it is?’ where you basically sweep you leg in from of you and then nod twice. Other bits didn’t really work at all. The ‘Camel Toe’ song appealed to the audience (well other than me) but I would argue that whilst their outfits may risk that particular wardrobe malfunction this is not really what R&B artists are writing songs about. This was a problem with a few of the songs. Whilst they were making commentary they weren’t actually a believable pop song for that genre (which after all was the premise of the show). However the ending the show with her Eurovision based number entitled Gallipoli completely won me over - “Gallipoli, why won’t you fight through the scrub for me” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Steve Hughes - I would not have picked him from the program but I saw him at Chalkboard where he asked me if I was on drugs and decided to see his show. BTW Steve I was not on drugs, in fact I was probably the last person in the audience who would have been, I just have a brain that works faster than others and hence I am always the first one laughing (well that’s what I like to tell myself - I suspect the real answer is that my mind is often in the gutter and hence I get the ribald stuff quicker than others do). I may not agree with all of Steve’s politics but he certainly raises some interesting points. I’m glad we saw him at Chalkboard because in his actual show he did very little of the Metallica stuff and that was my favourite thing. the_girl_20 you and Steve should bond over being accused of being antisemitics - he was written up as such after talking about the fact that as children we play cowboys and Indians and no one thinks that’s wrong but that they wouldn’t be so happy if children played Nazis and Jews.
Hannah Gadsby - Oh Hannah I love you. Anyone who aims to come out staring at around 50% and hopes to have managed to hype themselves up to 70 by the end of the show has my vote. Your response to “We’ll start you off with a riding crop” was one of my favourite things of the festival “There are many things wrong with that statement - we, start, riding crop and off. Off is also a problem in that sentence”. I am going to try everything in my power to get the word Jacuzzi on a scrabble board. However I was mainly impressed with how well you handled the drunk guy in the audience. Kudos to you and kudos again.
Dead Cat Bounce - I don’t listen to the ‘cool’ radio stations so I had never heard of them before but I did have fun at this. The drummer was troubling to me. Sometimes I found him hilarious and sometimes I hated him. As a result I probably enjoyed ‘The Day we Fired the Drummer’ more than most people. I didn’t buy a CD on the night and now I wish I had - rookie error.
In addition I only saw Stevel Shefn and his translator Fatima at Chalkboard (where you basically get a small taste of a few acts) but the act deserves a mention for a line a will be quoting forever “I found a harpoon in my yard and I thought fuck it I’ll go whaling”.
Neil Diamond
I’m not sure that anyone will get the Late Show (Australian Late Show that is which is something v different to Letterman and dominated my senior years of high school) reference re the price but in case you do I will tell you that he did sing Crunchy Granola and he did do the Good Lord bit so it really was a good investment. I had a great time and he sang all that I wanted him to sing but he repeated a few things over and over and over - mainly parts of Sweet Caroline and I’m a Believer and it did get a tad tedious and repetitive. I personally suspect that he has to do this cause he can only remember so many songs at this point in his life.
Best bit about going to this concert was the fact that the ambulance had to be called to someone before it even started. Apparently the Neil Diamond crowd can’t climb a lot of steps.
Lionel Richie
Moving to a slightly younger audience set now. I am the first to admit that the reason I agreed to go to this is because when I was asked my mind immediately went to the Family Guy episode where Peter wants to know who has hurt Lionel. There might be something wrong with me that I was willing to go to a concert for that alone - well that and the line in Rush Hour 2 where it is pointed out that “Lionel Richie hasn’t been black since the Commodores”. Even I was thinking that there was something wrong with me when I was having to miss BCR’s leaving drinks in order to attend. Turns out that Lionel puts on a hell of a show and I was singing and dancing up a storm. My version of Endless Love may well have outdone my version of You Don’t Bring me Flowers at Neil.
Memphis Blues Tour
All I really want to say about this concert is - fuck yeah!!!!!!!!!!!! It was so, so awesome. She is amazingly fit for her age and she really works a stage. In addition she told cool little snippets about her life - I love that she admitted she would also have bitten the woman that her son did. Also when she when into the crowd she was slapping people’s hands - including mine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Never been so happy to be sitting on the end of a row before. She also did a whole song standing on the chairs in the row behind me. Best seats ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can’t say enough good things about her but apparently others did not have the same opinion. When we were leaving so many people were bitching that she didn’t do enough of her old stuff. One of them said “If I’d wanted to listen to blues music I could have just gone to the valley” and another said “I haven’t listened to her stuff since I was a teenager and that was the stuff that I wanted to hear.” To these people I have two things to say - Firstly she sang plenty of her old stuff. Namely She Bop, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,
Time after Time, True Colors, Change of Heart and the encore was pretty much full of old stuff. Now I am not going to pretend that my friends and I weren’t reliving our youth during The Goonies ‘r’ Good Enough or that I wouldn’t have loved to hear When You Were Mine but I accept that she can’t play everything. Secondly - don’t go to the Memphis Blues Tour if you don’t want to hear her play blues songs. The idea that she is only going to play decades old songs because you are such a fan that you haven’t bothered to follow her career makes me want to punch you in the throat.
Before I comment on the events I feel the need to mention the strangeness of going to these things post the January floods. Everyone brought them up on them, some more successfully than others (my personal favourite being Steve Hughes - “good to see you guys are all still here, I heard you were collecting two of every animal”), but it was the response of the audience that interested me. Some of the artists mentioned supporing victims of other disasters (ie New Zealand and Japan) and got no response but then when they said they wanted to support the people of Queensland the audience went mad - sometimes I am embarrassed to be Australian. Whilst what happened here was bad, and many people are still feeling the impact, it was minor compared to what has happened elsewhere. You would think the people of Brisbane would have compassion for others who have been ravaged by Mother Nature but apparently you would think wrong.
Ok so on with the show (or shows)…
I saw more than I ever have this year but apparently none of the big names as I was only in the small theatres (I will stick with lesser name options in the future as I’ve seen the headliners in the past and this is the year I’ve most enjoyed the festival). In order of attendance I saw -
Denise Scott - I have long loved Denise. She is always a favourite of mine on Spicks and Specks but my love of her pre-dates that. I will forever remember her performance of Afternoon Delight on the Big Gig complete with extending whistles. Her Regrets show may have informed me far more about her bodily functions than is considered acceptable but I laughed so much I cried. I am looking forward to reaching menopause and being able to tell people what I think of them but thanks to Denise I will make sure that they are not intellectually impaired before I speak.
Josh Earl - I know he is meant to come from Tasmania but I remain convinced that Josh and I have the same mother. We certainly seem to have had the same upbringing. I will be forever sad that I never saw his Australian Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Cookbook show but I still enjoyed Lovesongs. It was quite complicated for a stand up show - it involved calls into a request line and the pretaped calls where interspersed with straight stand up and also the various ‘love’songs’ that Josh had written - but it was definitely v v v funny. Highlights were Josh gyrating to R Kelly singing ‘girl I want to get you pregnant’, his attempts to describe Insception to his wife - ‘yes you have seen it. It had Juno and the kid for Third Rock from the Sun in it. You watched it with me. You told me it didn’t make sense’ and contemplating reasons why someone ‘can’t’ have a yacht.
Mel Buttle - I went to this to fill a gap around the other acts I was going to that night and chose this particular act based on the program description which informed me that all the great men where called Barry - White, Manilow, McKenzie. It was really good and I think Mel and I should go drinking. I loved the important distinction between intra and inter school swimming carnivals and the fact that her father made her pretend to be a boy to win a race. I also loved her father’s email about the ant infestation “I place dead ones on the nest every morning so they can wake up and see what has happened to their friends and know that this shit is serious.”
Geraldine Quinn - This was the thing that interested me most in the program. It was described as a cabaret act about how to create the perfect pop song. It really should have been my favourite thing but it was a bit hit and miss. There were some awesome moments like the tween country genre where your song had to display your borderline personality disorder and had great lines like “I’ve carved your name into my chest” and “you look so handsome with my daddy’s gun pressed against you head” and also the section on dance moves - my favourite being ‘is this my right foot? Yes it is. Is this my left foot? Yes it is?’ where you basically sweep you leg in from of you and then nod twice. Other bits didn’t really work at all. The ‘Camel Toe’ song appealed to the audience (well other than me) but I would argue that whilst their outfits may risk that particular wardrobe malfunction this is not really what R&B artists are writing songs about. This was a problem with a few of the songs. Whilst they were making commentary they weren’t actually a believable pop song for that genre (which after all was the premise of the show). However the ending the show with her Eurovision based number entitled Gallipoli completely won me over - “Gallipoli, why won’t you fight through the scrub for me” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Steve Hughes - I would not have picked him from the program but I saw him at Chalkboard where he asked me if I was on drugs and decided to see his show. BTW Steve I was not on drugs, in fact I was probably the last person in the audience who would have been, I just have a brain that works faster than others and hence I am always the first one laughing (well that’s what I like to tell myself - I suspect the real answer is that my mind is often in the gutter and hence I get the ribald stuff quicker than others do). I may not agree with all of Steve’s politics but he certainly raises some interesting points. I’m glad we saw him at Chalkboard because in his actual show he did very little of the Metallica stuff and that was my favourite thing. the_girl_20 you and Steve should bond over being accused of being antisemitics - he was written up as such after talking about the fact that as children we play cowboys and Indians and no one thinks that’s wrong but that they wouldn’t be so happy if children played Nazis and Jews.
Hannah Gadsby - Oh Hannah I love you. Anyone who aims to come out staring at around 50% and hopes to have managed to hype themselves up to 70 by the end of the show has my vote. Your response to “We’ll start you off with a riding crop” was one of my favourite things of the festival “There are many things wrong with that statement - we, start, riding crop and off. Off is also a problem in that sentence”. I am going to try everything in my power to get the word Jacuzzi on a scrabble board. However I was mainly impressed with how well you handled the drunk guy in the audience. Kudos to you and kudos again.
Dead Cat Bounce - I don’t listen to the ‘cool’ radio stations so I had never heard of them before but I did have fun at this. The drummer was troubling to me. Sometimes I found him hilarious and sometimes I hated him. As a result I probably enjoyed ‘The Day we Fired the Drummer’ more than most people. I didn’t buy a CD on the night and now I wish I had - rookie error.
In addition I only saw Stevel Shefn and his translator Fatima at Chalkboard (where you basically get a small taste of a few acts) but the act deserves a mention for a line a will be quoting forever “I found a harpoon in my yard and I thought fuck it I’ll go whaling”.
Neil Diamond
I’m not sure that anyone will get the Late Show (Australian Late Show that is which is something v different to Letterman and dominated my senior years of high school) reference re the price but in case you do I will tell you that he did sing Crunchy Granola and he did do the Good Lord bit so it really was a good investment. I had a great time and he sang all that I wanted him to sing but he repeated a few things over and over and over - mainly parts of Sweet Caroline and I’m a Believer and it did get a tad tedious and repetitive. I personally suspect that he has to do this cause he can only remember so many songs at this point in his life.
Best bit about going to this concert was the fact that the ambulance had to be called to someone before it even started. Apparently the Neil Diamond crowd can’t climb a lot of steps.
Lionel Richie
Moving to a slightly younger audience set now. I am the first to admit that the reason I agreed to go to this is because when I was asked my mind immediately went to the Family Guy episode where Peter wants to know who has hurt Lionel. There might be something wrong with me that I was willing to go to a concert for that alone - well that and the line in Rush Hour 2 where it is pointed out that “Lionel Richie hasn’t been black since the Commodores”. Even I was thinking that there was something wrong with me when I was having to miss BCR’s leaving drinks in order to attend. Turns out that Lionel puts on a hell of a show and I was singing and dancing up a storm. My version of Endless Love may well have outdone my version of You Don’t Bring me Flowers at Neil.
Memphis Blues Tour
All I really want to say about this concert is - fuck yeah!!!!!!!!!!!! It was so, so awesome. She is amazingly fit for her age and she really works a stage. In addition she told cool little snippets about her life - I love that she admitted she would also have bitten the woman that her son did. Also when she when into the crowd she was slapping people’s hands - including mine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Never been so happy to be sitting on the end of a row before. She also did a whole song standing on the chairs in the row behind me. Best seats ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can’t say enough good things about her but apparently others did not have the same opinion. When we were leaving so many people were bitching that she didn’t do enough of her old stuff. One of them said “If I’d wanted to listen to blues music I could have just gone to the valley” and another said “I haven’t listened to her stuff since I was a teenager and that was the stuff that I wanted to hear.” To these people I have two things to say - Firstly she sang plenty of her old stuff. Namely She Bop, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,
Time after Time, True Colors, Change of Heart and the encore was pretty much full of old stuff. Now I am not going to pretend that my friends and I weren’t reliving our youth during The Goonies ‘r’ Good Enough or that I wouldn’t have loved to hear When You Were Mine but I accept that she can’t play everything. Secondly - don’t go to the Memphis Blues Tour if you don’t want to hear her play blues songs. The idea that she is only going to play decades old songs because you are such a fan that you haven’t bothered to follow her career makes me want to punch you in the throat.