Features
The Thin Kids: On Tour With Kate Nash
By Everett True
EVERETT TRUE reports on The Thin Kids’ three-night stint with Kate Nash earlier this month, during which they bemused a few hipsters and sold eight CDs. Photos of Sydney show by JOHNNY AU.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Here's how this tour happened.
I Tweeted Kate Nash, asking if she needed a support for her Splendour sideshows. I guessed that she might vaguely know who we were: her boyfriend Ryan Jarman of the NME-loved The Cribs had rather oddly named us as his favourite new band on the basis of one abortive support at Brisbane's Zoo. That show was the Thin Kids live debut. I took the opportunity to tell a few Wolfmother jokes (Why did Andrew Stockdale cross the road? To get to the Led Zeppelin concert) and shout at a straggle of bemused punters, and Edward Guglielmino, not a man to miss an opportunity for self-aggrandisement, jumped on stage with fellow Thin Kids Scotty Regan and Maggie Collins to help me shamble through the Thin Kids theme. The local critics, if you'll pardon my misuse of the term, didn't like us. "An in-joke that shouldn't have been let out," ran one memorable line, which I quickly turned into a song.
A few months later, I was trying to gain entry to the same venue, when a security guard espied me. "Wait," he exclaimed. "You're that guy!" And he starts singing me a Thin Kids song ... "You're not on the guest list/YOU'RE NOT COMING IN!"
Back to Kate. A couple of weeks after the Tweet, I heard back from her management. They wanted to know if I'd like to do a phone interview. Ah well. Worth a try.
Tuesday, August 3
East Brunswick Club, Melbourne
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Somehow, we got offered the support anyway, with enough money to cover our flights. Initially, we were offered the opening slot, on the not-unreasonable basis that no one knew who the fuck we were. I hate going on first. If folk are going to hate you, you want it to happen en masse. So I sent an email saying, "Cool and everything, but you might like to know I've supported the following artists...", and listed a dozen world-famous bands. Next thing I know, we're main support. Maggie, thrown by the fact someone's taken us seriously, promptly drops out.
M+N went into minor paroxysms at the idea of a Brisbane band being offered a national support [ed. it was more about your band being offered a national support], but what was the alternative? Another crappy Sydney band slavishly imitating the latest Vampire Weekend album in an attempt to get played on triple j? Some bunch of Melbourne hipsters recreating Daydream Nation as imagined by Placebo (again!) for our benefit? Good on Kate for taking a chance, and wanting to stir her audience up, I say … without any bias whatsoever.
The East Brunswick is an ace club: one of the reasons I fell in love with Melbourne in the first place. You don't get venues like this in the UK, certainly not in Brighton or London. Or Brisbane. Great food, a pop quiz in case you don't fancy taking a chance on the support band, great ambience, an owner who used to play in the xylophone-led, tumultuous ninetynine and has his own vinyl label, a stage with lashings of ... you get the idea. Due to a mix-up over soundchecks I arrive at the venue by myself: useless for the in-house engineer's needs as the main reason I became a singer in the first place was so I wouldn't have to worry myself over such trivialities as sound. I meet Kate Nash. She's lovely. She nicks a Thin Kids set list. I have no idea why. I meet her band. They're lovely. One of them once sat in a couple of lectures I gave about the importance of being Everett True. I meet her road crew. They're lovely as well! Two of them are from Brisbane. Man.
Kate tells me about her favourite piece of hate-mail (online, even the most cowardly are afforded a voice). It begins by informing her that she singlehandedly encapsulates everything that's wrong about music and ends by stating that, "If I ever meet you in person I'm going to shove a bomb up your cunt." Kate says she really wanted to reply, and go, "Listen you dickhead, if you ever got close enough to shove a bomb up my cunt you'd blow yourself up too."
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
The show is ... I was going to write "fine" but I didn't enjoy myself at all. I was embarrassed to be up there, frankly: with Kate standing by the side offering support (she makes a point of watching all her support bands). We start off weird, throwing out the a cappella/noise dynamics of 'Streets Of Brisbane' and the full-on mess of 'Flipper' and Ramones-simple 'I Don't Like What You Like'. The crowd look bemused, not least because Kate introduced us so clearly they're supposed to appreciate us. Bemused and weird is good. I don't mind that. It all too quickly degenerates into a sing along joke, though: crowd participation is fine, but do they have to look so closely at me cutting a sadly shambolic, scary old man figure with my hands fiddling round in my pockets and my bottles of water raised high in the air, and do they have to applaud at the end of every song? We wrote several songs specifically for the tour, including 'When I Moved To Brisbane' with its daring couplet, "Seattle's all rainy/Melbourne's got Dave Graney" and '(You're Not From) Queensland' with its 'Hey Jude'-asinine chorus at the end, which folk really do sing along with ... and I drop all bar 'Queensland' the following night.
My fault. Kate clambers on stage for a shout during 'You're Not On The Guest List', which was rather game of her bearing in mind that a) she'd never heard the song before, and b) she didn't know I was going to ask her. Still. Pop music isn't exactly birth control, you know?
Her set is mesmeric - especially the Riot Grrrl/Crass/slasher-fan fiction bit centred around 'Mansion Song' towards the end. Seriously.
The Thin Kids sell two CDs.
Wednesday 4 August
Corner Hotel, Melbourne
My favourite review of this night comes courtesy of the Things To Do blog.
The supporting act was ridiculous: The Thin Kids, I assume it was some sort of irony cos one of their songs included the lyrics ‘we’re thin and we’re proud and we’re happy, don’t judge us!’ Or something along those lines. And they weren’t thin, and they sure didn’t look happy. The lead singer especially was a creep, he seemed like one of those weird old men who would approach you on a tram and try to tell you all about his day/week/life. Then I wikipedia’d him and turns out he used to be some mega famous music journalist for NME and later MM and stuff, so weird! AND he was the one who introduced Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love, and the three of them used to be good pals and shit. So bizarre that now he’s playing in some crappy little band.Damn straight.
For hours I wander the streets of the CBD in the bitter cold and rain, thinking, "Ah yes, this is PRECISELY why I didn't move to Melbourne". My five-year-old son Isaac phones me up. "Are you going to play [his song] 'Poppycock Is Nonsense' tonight?" He laughs when I tell him it's raining. I eat authentic Italian cuisine with Bruce Milne and Ed G. I visit the Tim Burton exhibition. I eat authentic Melbourne loft food. I sit in a dire coffee dive on Swanston for hours and read my racist John Buchan adventure story. I watch a video of myself from the previous night and resolve never to put my hands in my pockets again on stage. It was one of those days.
On stage, I cut back a little on the jokes about being from Brisbane and the fact we only have two ideas for songs (Brisbane and being thin): "But they're both good solid dependable ideas for songs, much like the good solid dependable plastic playgrounds of Brisbane ... and anyway, that's two more ideas than most bands have." A little. We focus on the “limp-wristed guitar sound” (© Mess+Noise, 2010) instead, and drag an oddly pliable Kate Nash on stage to play piano with us for the final three numbers - 'Courtney', an alcohol-sodden tale of a debauched night in St Louis, which I guess you could call beat poetry if you really wanted to denigrate the form; 'This One Goes Out To...', an endless fairground-type piano refrain matched to sudden bursts of skewed No Wave guitar over which I give numerous shout-outs to my younger selves who were, at varying stages of their lives, "FUCKED UP ON ALCOHOL"; and the ubiquitous '(You're Not On The) Guest List'. The second-mentioned number is becoming alarmingly popular ... the number of blokes who've come up to me afterwards and said, "That's my life you were describing" runs into the, um, fives. Still. Everyone loves a drunk, right?
Four numbers in, I ask the audience if they'd mind taking out their mobiles and filming the next song and then posting it up on YouTube, as it's the one by Isaac. Several girls do, and it's up there now in all its 25-second finery. Ed and Scotty are well made up after our set, the amount of teenage girls who come up to us and start going, "Where are you guys from? I've never heard of you before.”
Kate's set is spellbinding, wicked. Love 'Merry Happy', where she thumps the keyboards all beaming, and the way she goes, "This one's about homophobia.” (Cheers from audience.) "You shouldn't be cheering homophobia".
The Thin Kids sell five CDs.
Thursday, August 5
The Metro, Sydney
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
Sydney rocks.
I'm not even going to attempt to better the description of our set from the AU Review website:
So, a guy who knew Kurt Cobain and two bridezillas walk into a bar… no, really. If it seemed like some kind of joke as Everett True, controversial expatriate U.K. music critic, was shouting lyrics over what sounded like a combination of free-form jazz and a high school battle of the bands, then you were most likely right. This is The Thin Kids, True’s new imitation-of-life project featuring Holiday Sidewinder of Bridezilla playing an array of percussion, as well as her bandmate Millie Hall playing all different kinds of crazy on her saxophone.Couple of points.
Much as we might like them to be, Holiday and Millie aren't actually in The Thin Kids - and neither is Sam Pearton (The Scare), who played thunderous drunken punk drums behind us that left very little room for subtlety from either myself or Ed so we settled for belligerent screaming and the odd scary remark instead. (Our drummer Scotty had earlier opted out of the Sydney show, declaring a distaste for the city.) I threw out all the “joke” songs, aside from '(You're Not From) Queensland' - sample lyric, "If you were from Brisbane, you would have some decent taste/Or at least a decent band to call your own", a line that folk in Sydney found hilarious but was met with stony indifference in Melbourne. And I kept in the loud stuff. Kate had had a big night the night before, so she only played piano on one song, the one where I do a lot of swearing about my former alcohol intake. So I made sure that song extended for around eight minutes.
I was indeed aiming for a cross between free-form jazz and a high school battle of the bands.
Kate's set was stunning, incisive. I love 'Foundations' and the out-and-out Breeders steal of 'I Just Love You More' and the way she sways solid and assured in the breeze, and her self-deprecation, and the drummer's glasses and the pushing at boundaries and...
The Thin Kids sell one CD.