On The Road With The UV Race

TIM SCOTT learns a new catchphrase as Melbourne’s The UV Race make their way up the Hume for Sydney’s inaugural Flip Out. Photos by GEORGIA ROSE.

The UV Race listen to their own CDs in the car. Though not quite as self-aggrandising as wearing your own band T-shirt on stage it still ranks as a punk-rock faux pas. But the UV Race don’t give a shit about pas – faux or otherwise.

We are driving up the Hume Highway. Our destination is Sydney where the band will perform at the Manning Bar as part of the inaugural Sydney Flip Out festival.

Guitarist Al has yet to hear a recording of the band playing at Melbourne’s Great Britain Hotel from a few weeks earlier, so we listen while people take it in turns to label a stack of CD-Rs with sharpie pens. What starts out as, “UV Race Live at the Great Britain”, quickly escalates to crude drawings of genitalia. Needless to say this only makes the CD more awesome.

While travelling with the UV Race you realise they are not so much a band as a gang. A gang of young guys and gals who enjoy each other’s company and goofing around as much as making the kind of loud rock’n’roll music you can dance and hopefully fall in love to.

Unfortunately only half the gang are in the car at the moment. Bassist Moses and drummer Daniel will fly up Sydney later in the day due to study and work, respectively, while keyboardist Emily is unable to make the trip altogether as she has a university presentation over the weekend. Instead, Al, singer Marcus and saxophonist/harmonica wiz Georgia are joined in the van today by friends Ally from the Spazzys, Monty from Your Animal and former Perth native James Vinciguerra.

The drive up the Hume is a rite of passage for any young Melbourne band who wish to move beyond the inner-north venues of Fitzroy and Brunswick. To pull into the highway’s three “G spots” – Glenrowan, Gundagai and Goulburn – is to experience Australian rock’n’roll history. Actually we just want to stop and take a piss and change drivers, but everyone still gets excited in Goulburn when we realise the creator of the “Big Merino” has included the scrotum.

“Every tour has a catchphrase; a word that comes to encapsulate the experience and a general feeling of hangovers and sleep deprivation. Without going into too much detail, the catchphrase for this tour was spoof.”

Besides their own recording, the soundtrack for the journey includes the Cramps, Neil Young, Jay Reatard, Suicide and a couple of CD-Rs with names such as “NYE 2008” and “Party Mix 4”. People sing along to the Only Ones’ ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ and a discussion starts about how the Flamin’ Groovies got the guitar solo to sound the way it does on ‘Shake Some Action’. Surprisingly, there is very little bickering about music selection. “Can you turn it up in the back?”, or, “What’s this? It sounds sick!”, is more common.

Every tour has a catchphrase; a word that comes to encapsulate the general feeling of hangovers and sleep deprivation. Without going into too much detail, the catchphrase for this tour was spoof. For those not travelling in the Kia Carnival, it may seem quite juvenile, but for us it was freaking hilarious. As a noun, adjective, verb and physical gesture it was used to harangue those who didn’t exhibit the requisite Flip Out spirit: McDonald’s employees, other motorists, hotels and innocent passersby.

Ten hours sitting next to someone in a cramped tour van, you learn things about them that you wouldn’t normally get to know through Facebook. Al’s secret dream in life is to one day “ghostie” a bicycle into a moving freight train. Georgia and Ally steal New Weekly magazines from service stations and Marcus once got punched in the head at Dandenong station after an all-ages 28 Days show by a dude who thought he had a “fucking staring problem”.

Burnouts become more frequent as the trip progresses, to the point where “do a chirpy!” becomes synonymous with anyone inserting the keys into the ignition. Food stops include the ubiquitous McDonald’s and dubious roadhouses where Marcus eats Chien Wah dim sims that have been sitting in the bain-marie longer than they’re supposed to. Al eats homemade tomato sandwiches, while Georgia’s include cheese and onion potato chips. Somebody buys/steals a pack of Clinkers.

By the time we finally arrive in Sydney, it’s close to 7:30pm. We’re tired but excited about attending Flip Out the following day. Driving through the upwardly mobile area of Surry Hills we yell, “Fuck the suits”, at people heading to restaurants and bars. The tour catchphras is also used.

We check into our hotel, which is in a sweet spot on Oxford Street, and later reconvene about an hour later to go to Dirty Shirlows to catch Zond and Pink Reason. Here we catch up with Daniel and Moses, Melbourne music identity Bugsy and Brace, the singer from infamous San Francisco agit-punk shit-stirrers Warkrime. He’s in town this weekend for “a crash course in Aussie rock, and to meet sheilas”.

The warehouse gig is fun and drunken. There are a lot of Melbourne people in attendance, which Marcus describes as a good thing. “Sydney is a lot more fun when it’s full of Melbourne people,” he exclaims. Later some of us stumble off to Louie’s to catch Pee Wee, James Arthur’s Manhunt and Slug Guts, while others stumble back to the hotel.

The next morning we wake for breakfast at Château UV Race. Marcus was cooking up a storm: eggs, tomato, avocado, hash browns and toast with International Roast instant coffee and OJ. Truly delicious after a night of beer. While the Velvet Underground blasted through a shitty tape player, Brace regaled us with stories of escaping a boys’ home in Montana.

Monty and Mikey from Eddy Current Suppression Ring drop by and we maxi cab it to the Manning Bar where we all have one of the best musical days of our lives. The UV Race play on the small stage at 8.30pm and kill it. The crowd is going bat-shit with many sharing the makeshift stage with Marcus. After Eddy Current prove why they remain the best band in Australia, we all load into the Oxford Art Factory for some drunken good times.

Next day. Sleep. Checkout. Back in the van. Long ass drive.

Halfway into our return trip the van gets all “Christine” on us and starts losing power in front of service stations only to miraculously start again once we have coasted into said gas station. By this stage of the weekend the conversations start to reflect the delirious state of our minds. Topics include: the social infrastructure of Warragul, how the Kia Carnival is an inferior imitation of the Toyota Tarago and what UV Race would sound like if Marcus had a voice similar to Jimi from Slug Guts. Bugsy is adamant that the trip can be done faster if we score some speed or “goey” from one of the numerous truck stops we pass.

People start dozing off. It gets darker and later. We arrive back in Melbourne just after midnight, unload the van, marvel at how rad yesterday’s show was and agree to all meet up next Saturday at the Corner and rock out again.

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The Melbourne leg of Flip Out will be held at the Corner Hotel on Saturday, September 5, from 2pm. Tickets here.