I didn’t get to go see Midnight Oil. One of the best Australian bands of the last century doing their final EVER show and I couldn’t go. When they announced the curtain call on their touring career I was so ready to see them – took it as a given, even, that I would be in the audience (maybe even at the barricade) as they played us out to “Beds Are Burning” one last time.
But the tickets cost $150 AUD (that’s about £88). It’s true that artists with less to say about anything that’s worth saying can charge almost double that for a show. But what shits me is that Midnight Oil was always a band for the people (Peter Garett was a politician for chrissakes!) and to get into their farewell show in Sydney I have to pay $150 to stand in a mosh pit and contract COVID. In this economy?
Nope.
Anyway.
When I’m not sobbing over a $10 lettuce in the supermarket, or watching rich overseas investors buy up all the properties in Sydney (all five of them) I’m listening to The Chats.
I don’t know if “listening” is the correct verb for what the body does when The Chats come on. Thursday night or as I like to call it, Saturday eve eve, The Chats were screaming into their mics at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre.
I paid $50 for a ticket to The Chats, meaning that my combo meal deal of a case of COVID, and a couple songs too many about public transport and pingas (which refers to ecstacy pills in the local dialect) was more bang for buck than Midnight Oil. Yes, I went because I needed solace and if I squinted hard enough at my bank balance, I could afford it! The zeros multiplied!
Switching up the fables of the Oils for the rhapsodic tales of The Chats was less of a logical leap than it first seemed. The Chats make music about the kind of Australianisms that are socio-cultural fodder for researchers and rings true to the rest of us without the need for anecdotal evidence. But if science is your jam, here’s a story:
The last time I heard the word “smoko” used seriously I was working on a public farm – the kind where people from the suburbs bring their kids to see herding dogs in action, hear the terrifying resonance of whips being cracked, and create their first traumatic core memory when they are pursued by an emu.
Most of my time was spent pretending not to see said emu chasing the kids, and clearing perfect pearls of excrement from the habitats of farm animals. There would usually be a wallaby or two watching me curiously, keeping a suspicious distance as I shed litres of sweat over their dusty hopping ground. Every morning, I’d move these marbles of digested grass from ground, to wheelbarrow, and onto the scoop of a tractor to be distributed on the fields as fertiliser. Somewhere during this process, I’d ask my nearest colleague where the farm manager was, keen for a different job, such as bathing the kelpie puppies or tending to the petting zoo. “She’s gone on smoko.”
This will sound fake to most Australians.
It will sound fake because most of us are detached from the Australianisms which have receded in the decades past, and everyday, friendly exchanges such as, “Will ya pass us the goon before I crack the shits,” have been replaced with internet lingo and aphorisms. Having lost a taste for, “having a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock” in the cities and suburbs, we’ve strayed from what it means to understand the local language, and it has us scratching our heads at some of the more obscure idiomatic expressions that might confront us. So it’s hard to believe that what happened on the farm, actually happened on the farm. In the cities and suburbs, it’s far from the reality. But it’s the bloody truth.
The Chats seem to give some of that back to us. They give us a place to vent about the everyday mundanities of being Aussie, of trying to get by in “the lucky country” all the while allowing us to mainline dopamine to the brain using nothing but a sick bass line and lyrics to make the vein in your neck pop. Look mum, no needles!!
There’s something a bit ratchet about a weeknight gig when all the best bands decree that it’s the end of the week on their watch. We’ve all got responsibilities the next day – school, work, uni – but those were all bad ideas that came about after the Tiktaalik decided to swim out of the water and struggle onto land 375 million years ago.
Absurdity abounds regardless. Despite the indoor location and the darkness outside, I counted at least 6 bucket hats prior to the show’s start and considerably fewer by the end, lost to the hellfire of the surging mosh pit. The crowd mirrored the age demographic of the band – all around the early 20s mark at an all-ages concert. Before the curtains, a few audience members began a chant of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie”, causing security to prematurely begin perspiring as the crowd became a single-celled organism before the band had even reached the stage.
This rowdy bunch was no doubt attracted by the concise and precise storytelling of The Chats’ discography. The band encapsulates the eternal bummer of being in your 20s and having nothing to do because everything is hard. But rather than being defeatist about it, being angry. Not only is it a lot of fun, it’s a catharsis.
Songs like “Bus Money” which sound like a lark on the surface actually hit upon a fundamental Australian difficulty – the absurdity of spending your bus money on something trivial and it sending your finances spiralling out of control. Let’s not forget that it was an Australian demographer who popularised the dumb-dumb-stupid concept of smashed avo on toast as the reason young Australians can’t break into the housing market. The Chats’ music squares up to the snot-nosed pretension of the privileged classes suggesting that young people shouldn’t enjoy themselves in order to be able to buy a house. I promise you, we’re all miserable, and we still can’t afford the ex-meth lab on struggle street.
The reality of the Australian experience for many is the inverse of the “lucky country”. And the absurdity of edging the poverty line in the land of plenty underlies a lot of what The Chats are about, whether it’s on purpose or not.
Equally, The Chats take on a warm affection for the young and disaffected. It’s seen in songs like “Heatstroke” which is about suffocating on an over forty-degree day, “AC/DC/CD” about wanting to listen to your AC/DC CD, “Mum Stole My Darts”. I mean, it happens to all of us, right? Right??? “I’ve been drunk in every pub in Brisbane”, about being drunk in every pub in Brisbane.
The Chats challenge the usually blind faith Australians place in Australia, the kind of stupid parroting of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” that was happening before the show. “This next song is about the Cronulla Riots.” Lead singer, Eamon Sandwith gives pause to acknowledge the origins of “Emperor of the Beach”. “People say I’m a prejudiced man / But that’s a term I don’t understand.”
This brazen messaging with their “shed punk” sound and powerful identity as a band has also attracted powerful duos – fathers and children – mostly around the age of 10. With a cursory glance around the seats in the venue this pattern repeated, dads with sons and daughters alike sat enraptured by the chaos of the stage and the pit.
The Chats are at the vanguard of the music aesthetic that many older generations have felt was missing and can now be passed down in a lively, non-fossilised format. Importantly, it removes the disdain with which young people often have to put up with older music from dead bands. Maybe pubs will be cool to hang out at again? In the realm of matcha lattes and cold drip coffee where the Enmore Theatre is situated, it’s a testament to the kind of crowd they can draw.
Being in amongst all this family bonding gets me thinking, if the multiverse theory is true, right now somewhere else in the space-time continuum AC/DC are jamming to the very people in this room. Simultaneously, their older selves are here with their kids, breeding a new kind of fun and it’s all happening on the fulcrum of rock n roll. The Chats experienced live make you feel less like something old is being made new again, but rather that something worthwhile and vital in music is being continued by the same stock of genius that started it. Teenage fans pour over the vinyl they’ve just purchased, analysing the track list and the credits on the back cover – just like kids did in the olden days, y’know, before they had an array of devices to keep them distracted from the very human act of sitting on the toilet.
GET FUCKED – the title of their new album hangs above the stage. The use of capitals is noteworthy. The Chats are a band with a distinct identity, a false veneer of assholery covering a genuine, dinky-die, humble Aussie attitude beneath. The Chats are not a get fucked, or a get fucked band. They’re a GET FUCKED band.
This is an important distinction.
It marks a deep-rooted sense of surety about what they are presenting to the audience. Despite appearances, there is nothing sloppy about this band. In stoic triangle formation on the stage, the majesty of Sandwith’s close-cropped ginger mullet does not overshadow the fact that this is a true three-piece band, each member indispensable to the sound and vibe.
What proceeds is a loud, brash and tight show, Sandwith’s broad accent rings clear through the room, despite Queenslanders usually being one dropped diphthong away from an all-out slur. Clean guitar riffs in unexpected places and good use of the wah pedal by Josh Hardy move the genre from punk into rock territory. Matthew Boggis’ tight and precise drumming lends the set a gripping pace. The crowd hollers the lyrics in the accent that God intended. “6L GTR” in particular goes off, as does “Struck By Lightning”, “CCTV”, and “Drunk and Disorderly”, everyone seizuring lightly in their seats.
Only slightly less impressive was Sandwith hocking a loogie at great height above him and catching it again like it was a piece of popcorn. Times two. Very impressive on a stage like the one at the Enmore. And probably not replicable in a festival setting what with freak winds and unpredictable climes.
“This next song is a cover of a band far superior to us. The Wiggles.” In the moment before they erupt into an arresting rendition of “Can You (Point You Fingers and Do the Twist)” enthusiastic yells of, “Yeah The Wiggles!” travel around the room. The security guards edge forward, anticipating carnage.
How many shoes were victim this night? How many spontaneous donations of clothing were made to the band, the stage looking like the dregs of a thrift store at intervals? As the crowd filtered out of the venue to a steady downpour of springtime rain, the casualties were evident. An ambulance sped up the street as patrons limped their way to the train station, gripping the railing on the stairs with two hands, holding onto the good times and flipping off the bad.