Report: All Tomorrow’s Parties Day 2

AARON CURRAN continues his coverage of ATP Melbourne with the festival’s Drones-curated second half, featuring sets from the reformed Beasts of Bourbon, The Stickmen and The Crime and City Solution. Photos by KATIE FAIRSERVICE.

Archived image 1 withheld pending rights reviewImage details are recorded in the restoration file. Returning to Altona 10 hours later on an even hotter Sunday morning requires willpower, salty drinks and less clothing. Seems that’s just too much effort for some, as we’re a couple of thousand people down on yesterday’s attendance numbers. Hopefully that’s not too much of a financial blow for the organisers but this extra space, along with minor but significant site improvements and a new line-up that offered less noise and more nuance, contributes to a much more relaxing and comfortable day. Or maybe we are just getting better used to the place; one wit renames the main stage ‘Hell’ and the Grand Star Bar/Second Stage locale ‘Heaven’.

ATP’s Barry Hogan has called Gareth Liddiard “one of the best songwriters of his generation,” and it’s satisfying to see The Drones deservedly positioned on equal par with past ATP curators like The Bad Seeds. In the festival booklet, the band sum up their programming objectives as wanting to book only “good and true artists,” an admirably idealistic sentiment if expediently vague. In truth the line-up lacks a little diversity: a few more female-led outfits and musicians with different cultural backgrounds would have balanced things a bit, more in line with ATP’s usual approach. Anyway, didn’t Gaz say he was mostly listening to “good music from around the world” these days, not “white middle-class fucken’ bands”?

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Cam Butler takes pole position. Perhaps better known for his work with Silver Ray and Ron S. Peno & The Superstitions, he formed six-piece outfit The Shadows of Love to play live renditions of his string-driven solo instrumental albums, which I for one will be tracking down after seeing this performance. The songs are epic, with the drumming and the twining violin and cello making a particularly commendable contribution to the band’s evocative sound – comparable to Australian instrumental groups like The Dirty Three and MacKenzie Theory. One wah-wah-fuelled number even has a bit of Blaxploitation feel to it.

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It’s substantially cooler in the main room today, but not for My Disco. They expend great sums of energy racing about in time with pneumatic riffing that’s visually emphasised by unremitting strobe lighting, which silhouettes the trio. Earlier material like ‘Administer a Prosthetic Dream’ is aired alongside more recent tracks like ‘Young’ and ‘Turn’, and the fans give them solid applause. If the number of people leaving after a short listen is any indication, though, they don’t appear to be making too many new converts.

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The cheerful good humour of Dan Kelly and His Dream Band marks them versus most acts on the bill. Kelly wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Endless Boogie’ (me wants), but first track ‘On the Run’ sounds more like Neu!, with a motorik drumbeat and Rother-esque guitar lines that meld surprisingly well with Kelly’s high melodious voice and the initially shy but always sincere backing vocals of his young nieces. (They also take on placard duties, showing the audience the scrawled name of each song before the band begins.).Tracks like ‘Ex Bandito’ and ‘Dan Kelly’s Dream’ are also excellent, and they get a strong response from this afternoon crowd.

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Simon Bonney has reformed Crime and the City Solution after a two-decade break, with three original members – himself, Alexander Hacke from Einsturzende Neubaten on guitar (owner of the world’s best “I-have-come-to-clean-zee-pool” porn star moustache) and violinist Bronwyn Adams – together with five new additions, including Jim White lending his distinctive percussive swagger to the ensemble. Another idiosyncratic new element is the Cinemascope-sized imagery projected behind them, including expansive desert landscapes, excerpts from the Book of Revelation and a curious painting of a girl with a dog on her head.

They open with ‘The Bride Ship’, melding lyrical imagery worthy of Bowles or Burroughs with the keening sadness of what sounds like an Armenian duduk but is probably keyboard. It’s all a bit quiet though; the song sounds thin and constrained, the mix taking a couple of minutes to resolve. Bonney introduces “an old song,” ‘Rose Blue’ from the classic EP, Just South of Heaven, and though it sounds wonderful, I can’t help wishing that some of the original musicians who played on that record were also on today’s line-up. Like Mick Harvey, who is actually here in the audience, and the late Rowland S. Howard, who in a better world would still be alive and playing on tonight’s main stage in a headline slot, or guesting here with Bonney and cohorts.

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Back to ‘Heaven’ for the ATP Book Club, with Don Walker reading from his unconventional rock memoir, Shots, and Courtney Collins regaling us with excerpts from The Burial, a work of fiction based on the strange but true story of an Australian female bushranger in the 1920s. There’s the odd awkward silence or meandering interrogation when question time begins, but Walker’s voice is so mellifluous you could happily listen to him recite a truck-stop café menu. There’s an hallucinatory edge to his choice of language, saying his next work featured “a tavern built into the side of an Antarctic whaling station, where the workers drink and do the tango while they await the arrival of Satan, who sometimes looks like a vampire and other times like a spider, in a spaceship made of three cathedrals.”

Mike Noga of The Drones has long proclaimed his admiration for fellow Tasmanians The Stickmen, but it was still a welcome surprise when this ’90s outfit agreed to reform especially for I’ll Be Your Mirror 2013. The band’s reputation as the island’s finest purveyors of “frenetic psychedelic surf/noise rock” has been steadily growing over time, and as they take their places under the lights the crowd becomes animated. After a knotty opening instrumental, second track ‘Shoot to Kill’ sets the template: yowling vocals and chiming guitars, propulsive drums and impolite bass lines, backed by turntable-driven rhythms and textures that quickly shift from sigh to storm. Sounding a little like Mission of Burma, their songs usually take more than one listen to unfold, so the audience gradually splits between the devout and the mildly engaged.

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The Drones release their first LP in five years next month, but they’re saving a full live premiere for later concerts, with today’s setlist dominated by older favourites. Opening with ‘Sitting on the Edge of the Bed Crying’, stretching out on its familiar structures before ploughing into a brazen ‘The Minotaur’, an anthemic ‘Shark Fin Blues’, ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ and ‘I Don’t Ever Want to Change’. Something has changed in their sound though: there is more restraint, with guitarist Dan Luscombe’s adept playing more often understated embellishment than traditional lead. There are tighter harmonies too, with the bludgeon of a track like ‘Jezebel’ subtly modified with a more potent, controlled arrangement.

Liddiard pipes up with a few cracks about the weather, saying that he was genetically capable of surviving Saturday’s apocalyptic main-stage heat as he is an “evolved human being,”,then mutters something about setting an air conditioner going on full power in his paddock to increase the size of the hole in the ozone layer in order to eradicate fat people. Absent guest Kev Carmody, too ill to appear, receives a forceful tribute with a coruscating cover of ‘River of Tears’. It’s the highlight of their show.

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Harmony is made up of members of Mclusky, The Nation Blue and more, who play an emotive amalgam of gospel, blues and urban clamour. Lead singer Tom Lyngcoln stands left-of-stage howling browbeaten ballads, while on his right a Greek chorus of women answer and contradict his lines in three-part harmony, to powerful effect (if a little gloomy). After a well-received debut album, it’ll be interesting to see where Harmony take this music on new album Carpetbombing, out later this year.

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Pere Ubu are a revelation. As strong as the band’s early records are, who knew they would be able to kick out the jams in such a determined manner? They first play all their glorious early Hearpen singles – ‘30 Seconds Over Tokyo’, ‘Heart of Darkness’, a rapturously received ‘Final Solution’, ‘Heaven’, et al – before moving to debut LP The Modern Dance, which is played in original order. Frontman David Thomas looks like a crotchety old Midwestern farmer in checked shirt and red braces, squinting like a mole in the sunlight, but when his between-song patters is in full flight you can see why he received the nickname ‘Crocus Behemoth’ from his bandmates. Thomas plays the role of ecstatic preacher, hollering out repeat variations on the line “He’s got the ghost town in him” and then speaking in tongues.

There are elements in Pere Ubu’s live performance that aren’t immediately apparent in their recorded versions – shitloads of Theremin, for one thing – but also fragments of early blues and girl-group anthems and echoes of Eno-era Roxy Music as well as the nihilist punk of their Cleveland forebears. Performance of the day.

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Beasts of Bourbon could have benefited from a few pinches of David Thomas’s curmudgeonly attitude. As entertaining as it is to hear their early material again, Tex Perkins’s lascivious performance was more self-satisfied than gloriously unhinged. Maybe it’s unfair to compare them with past glories, but there used to be an element of real danger in a Beasts performance that made watching them so compelling. Though it’s still great to watch Kim Salmon and Spencer Jones trade licks on a big stage, it felt like something was missing.

No argument with the set list, however, which followed their discography’s chronology, starting with ‘Evil Ruby’, ‘Graveyard Train’, ‘Psycho’, ‘Dropout’ and more from psychobilly classic The Axeman’s Jazz. Then in was onto a withering ‘Hard for You’, ‘Door to Your Soul’, a gripping ‘Playground’ (Spencer’s slimy, repetitive guitar solo a highlight) and others from Sour Mash, ending with a best-of selection from third LP Black Milk, including Hound Dog Taylor’s frenetic ‘Let’s Get Funky’.

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Who knew Don Walker was such a commanding frontman? While used to seeing him behind a piano, it was refreshing to see this besuited, silver-haired gent working the front of the stage with such authority, sharing eloquent tales (“This is what the ancient Sumerians referred to as a fat tyres versus big tits situation”). Never was a backing band better named than The Suave Fucks, with these mature musicians playing a driving mix of rockabilly and country, featuring special guest Red Rivers on lead guitar. ‘Yakuza Girls’ is a standout, with its withering lyrics (“Who’s that pulling on a rubber glove? It’s Yakuza girls and they’re looking for love”) while Walker’s needle-sharp performance of ‘Harry was a Bad Bugger’ begs for it to be recognised as one of the finest Australian compositions of the last 20 years.

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Festival languor sets in at the beginning of Einsturzende Neubaten’s set. Too restless, I’m unable to connect with what is happening onstage, though the rapt faces around me contradict that position. Others claim it is the performance of the festival (I encourage you to share why in the comments).

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Returning to the cinema for what was planned to be a few minutes rest before returning to see Blixa and company, my companions and I become caught up in the last section of There Will Be Blood. Daniel Day Lewis chases a young man around an indoor bowling alley, beating him to bloody death with a bowling pin. “I’m finished!” he shouts, the film’s final words. After two long, sweltering days and more than 23 acts, so are we.

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DAY 1: Deafening guitars, marathon post-rock and crazy-tight garage.