What happens when you put a sludgy garage band who’s tapped a secret source of sonic gold into a tiny venue?
You get sweat-drenched pink cowboy shirts, fringe trims jumping to the head-banging beat. You get the physical representation of the YouTube comment section: “I’m 60 and this makes me feel 23 again,” just as valid as, “I’m 20 and this makes me feel like a teenager.” Or the more elusive, “This takes me back to 1420, jousting with my friends”. You also get a rock n roll show with a potency to make Mick Jagger jealous.
Starcrawler are on the edge of seventeen, so to speak. On the 20th of July in the intimate space of Oxford Art Factory, they were loud – almost too loud – the vocal minutiae which sets them apart from other rock bands lost to the fuzzy throttle of two guitars projected from speakers five metres apart. Since releasing their debut album in 2018, Starcrawler have honed an innate talent for good music and taken it to great heights, receiving praise from the likes of Dave Grohl and Elton John. But they currently tread the line between being rock’s best kept secret and headlining shows across the world, collaborating with the late Taylor Hawkins, and opening for My Chemical Romance and Jack White. On the precipice of small garage band and celebrity, while their music feels made for an intimate audience, a larger venue could better handle the breadth of their sound and energy.
And now that they’ve headlined in Australia for the first time, fans are ready to see some bigger shows from Starcrawler; longer stage dives, increasingly feral crowds, more stray sequins, feathers, and stage blood…
Frontwoman, Arrow De Wilde, took to the stage embracing skunk glam; an alluring mesh of white and sequins, bleach blonde shag cut and smudged racoon eyes. Opening with “Good Time Girl”, the drumbeat hammering an urgent pace against your chest like an external heartbeat, the precedent was set for the rest of the show. And girl, did we have a good time.
To her right was lead guitarist Henri Cash, to her left bassist, Tim Franco, and pedal guitarist Bill Cash. In the shadows of the stage but impossible to ignore with drum fills that demand due consideration, Seth Carolina.
Nothing really compares to hearing De Wilde’s growls and banshee screeches in real life, except for maybe hearing actual growls and banshee screeches in your nightmares. But it’s this twisting of the grotesque into something energetic that makes them a live band – one that you have to see move in front of you, in real time.
The band played their new single, “Roadkill”, which proved to be one of the most powerful performances of the set, followed closely by favourites, “Bet My Brains”, “No More Pennies”, “Chicken Woman”, and “You Dig Yours”. Before it was officially released, they also previewed “Stranded”, their new single which acted as a sort of post-grunge lubricant, the audience descending into the familiar and heart-warming chaos and absurdity of a punk club thereafter.
Was it dumb to go to a concert during our biggest wave of COVID yet? Probably. Already hanging on by a thread, the live music scene in Sydney may sustain another blow as ticket holders back out of concerts that were booked years ago. Looking out into the motley crew of returned concert goers, Starcrawler attracts people of all ages, with all manner of hairstyles (which, let’s be real, is the most sure-fire way to identify someone’s subcultural tendencies). It was the kind of trepidatious gathering that results from years of a deadly disease on the loose, combined with little opportunity to see live rock music in Sydney. On the occasions that musicians acknowledge that there are cities in Australia apart from Melbourne, a good rock show is a lifeline too precious to waste.
And I got the feeling that, like me, people were happy to be there, scared, relieved, worried about breathing in too hard, wanting to let loose, unsure about blasting their particles onto fellow attendees, (is it a given that we’re all going to infect each other right now?), and silently praying the band would bring something – some unspoken permission – to be as we were before, to mosh like we haven’t moshed in almost three years.
The only indication of the pandemic world order was the absence of Starcrawler’s sacred tradition of spitting fake blood into the faces of audience members (willing and unwilling). The lead guitarist still descended into the pit to play the outro, fans urging him on with enough headbanging to register as whiplash. From there, he jumped onto the bar to finish the solo amongst shot glasses and beer cans.
Starcrawler is an L.A. band through and through, with a proximity to Hollywood celebrated in their song “Hollywood Ending”, as well as their cover of “Pet Semetary” for the 2019 remake of Stephen King’s bestselling novel. It was to this song that the pit opened up for the first time that night, fans losing themselves to the story of twisted resurrection. Later, De Wilde asked the audience, “Do Australians like Jackass?” Uh, yes, we do. Have you seen our version of Funniest Home Videos? It’s basically an hour-long compilation of children sustaining blunt force trauma set to a laugh track. The band descended into a rowdy cover of “If You’re Gonna Be Dumb, You Gotta Be Tough”, recorded for the latest installation of Jackass. If you could mosh to the ancient proverb, “talk shit get hit”, it would look something like the long hair and mullets ricocheting off each other in the pit and reverentially parroting the chorus.
While Australians are past the point of being enamoured with America, they are still intrigued with the glamour and seedy excess of the U.S of A. Known to blur the lines between what is ethereal and gross, and beautiful and bloodied, Starcrawler’s material and performance exaggerate both sides until audiences can no longer distinguish the two. And so, a crowd of Aussies enchanted by the duality of all things will ecstatically scream along to “I Love L.A”, despite many having never seen the city.
This is the voodoo shit I’m talking about. It’s the Starcrawler Factor. Anyone can become a rockstar with a band and an instrument in hand, but very few can forge the lightning to do it like they do. De Wilde merges familiar notes of classic rock and sweaty punk clubs, while Henri Cash brings a honky tonk twang. On first glance, it seems pastiche or shambolic but actually has more in common with the fine-tuned ingenuity of Bowie or Lou Reed. Starcrawler is perhaps the closest modern equivalent of discovering something madcap and purified in the 1970s, and then slamming it out over an ill-equipped speaker.
To continue with my theory that they are performing live voodoo unbeknownst to us, consider this: There are few bands that are exceptional at both writing music and performing, and fewer still who are also exceptional at harnessing an audience’s energy. Starcrawler are able to do all of the above, taking in audiences who can be brash, rude, inappropriate, handling them with dexterity (sometimes returning the sentiment), and turning each exchange into raw potential energy that could power the audio equipment. If the dry ice wasn’t so thick, you’d be able to see smoke coming off the stage. Stray fans made their home on stage throughout the night, one person finding her way up there twice and helicoptering her hair for an extended period (it somehow still looked neat at the end, it could never be me). “Do whatever you want, it’s your world, baby”, with one sentence De Wilde set us free. The band closed with Cash picking a fan from the crowd and letting him play us out with some final fuzzy strums of his three-string guitar.
Starcrawler seem to take everyone by surprise. Nobody really knows what to make of them which feels intentional, and also like what’s best for the audience’s health. Why exert effort trying to label a group of musicians who so deftly avoid classification? After the freight-train speed of their hour and twenty set, a boomer behind me, probably dragged to the concert by his companions exclaimed, “THAT was Starcrawler?” Yes Graham, and they defy all your preconceived notions and expectations.
Halfway through the set, Cash thanked the audience, “You’ve made it worth the 16-hour flight.”
I hope we did, Henri. I hope we did.