arc12: Royal Headache at the Valhalla Muay Thai Stables Brisbane (Mess+Noise, 2012)
+++good riddance to the live music review, thank the archive for this live music review
A few years ago I found out from a friend that the below live music review was being taught in an Australian university. I can’t remember if it was being taught in Brisbane or Canberra, nor can I remember the subject (flaccid gonzo music journalism?), but it was odd, and maybe the first sense I had that anything from the Mess+Noise era wasn’t in fact, dead and deleted, but living on in some way—even if I wished it didn’t! I never liked this review, and was always confused that it met a positive reception, but on finding it when going through the files tonight, I thought it best to let it go before some university ends up being the only institution with a copy of it. If nothing else, I think it’s interesting to recall how much Sydney band Royal Headache meant to people at the time. I also just want to grab my my past self by the head and scream, “you are SO CLOSE,” but instead, please enjoy this 2012 live review that says: “hmm, Converse sponsored punk event is interesting with Brisbane policing history as a back drop.”
LIVE REVIEW: Royal Headache & Kitchen’s Floor (Valhalla Muay Thai Stables)
Shogun is shirtless and pacing along the edge of a Muay Thai ring in the heart of Fortitude Valley. He shrieks into a row of sweating faces, all clutching the ropes for support from the mosh pit that rises behind them. Royal Headache shifts up a notch and someone leaps from the turnbuckle. They halt between songs and the pit staggers, drenched in a stream of free beer that showers the front rows through the set. The band kicks in again, and a few hundred Brisbane youths are sent flailing over the ropes or belted into the walls, or one of the dozen boxing bags that litter the venue's edges. This is more than just a free gig backed by a sneaker company—this is Royal Headache providing a city with reprieve from its ailments.
Brisbane is in a fragile state. Following 2011's floods, Queensland voters dumped the Labor government in favour of the first set of conservatives (excluding a Nationals term in the late ‘90s) since Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen's infamous twenty-year reign. In this cash-strapped post-flood economy, new premier Campbell Newman then began his shanking of the budget. It’s reported that Newman is in the process of cutting a projected 10,000 jobs from the public service and, if you linger long enough to soak up the drunken vitriol in the Muay Thai stables, has generally given the finger to every policy that provided any form of social or moral comfort to the people of Queensland. The lingering memory of Queensland's period of irrationally right-leaning policy has always stained Brisbane's image, and tonight it's hard not to see the crowd as fed up, distant, and vaguely unsettled.
“This city is fucked,” I'm told by a woman who plans to cut her losses and move to New York City rather than try to find work alongside the rest of her axed peers. A friend just sacked from his first job in the public service, is unemployed, nigh on broke and hiding extra free beers in the corner just in case the supply runs out. And just to press his point, Newman labelled the cut to the job force as akin to “discarding dog shit” on the very night of this show. So people are on edge from the start, releasing it all the moment Royal Headache take the stage. “Take pity on us,” Shogun shrieks. His audience throws themselves at each other in response, and after an hour of this, I walk away with someone else's blood on my shirt.
The whole event is a weird mess of contradictions. It's sponsored by a shoe company, and feels as though a media team assembled, consulted with police, and then hoped for an image of anarchy. But the show is genuinely unhinged. There's a single line to the men’s for the only toilet bowl available. Once the booze starts flowing and the line gets desperate, a smaller line forms sheepishly behind the change-room shower. Out in the main room, people are staggering blind, grabbing at the rows of beer that the bartenders rush to open in time to meet a sea of outstretched hands. There's a guy in a suit doing lines from a windowsill in full view of security, who seem concerned only with making sure nobody is passing out in the dark corners of the room (which would make for a bad photo on the website.) Each band member was given a pair of free sneakers by the company in question and were asked to wear them on stage. Only Kitchen's Floor's bassist abides, and on this night, its the brightest shade of white in the ring.
What would Bjelke-Petersen think of this Brisbane? Would he take pride in his legacy when a new Liberal-National government cuts savagely at public sector jobs, or stand horrified at a commercially-funded, police-sanctioned replica of a savage warehouse show by The Saints? Tonight, the city hosts three-hundred newly gypped youths, all covered in each other's sweat and spilled beer, watching Kitchen’s Floor revel in songs of poverty-stricken desperation. For all the ferocity Royal Headache stir in the crowd later tonight, the Brisbane band feed this rising tension with their dead-hearted take on punk. Few people look as devastated fronting a crowd as Matt Kennedy, and sticking him and his band in the middle of a roped off Muay Thai ring does nothing to dispell the feeling.
Later, Shogun paces in silence before saying blankly: “Alright, let's do ‘Surprise’.” His band snaps to the song without a second thought. They drop hit after hit, new and old, and the crowd's reception is steadily maniacal across it all. Their reinditon of ‘Girls’ is probably one of the most powerful versions I’ve seen them deliver, while unreleased track ‘Stand and Stare’ feels immediately at home in their live set. The infamous reluctance of Shogun as frontman is mostly absent tonight, trading his simmering angst for a genuinely enthused grin. Across the set, the crowd never lets an individual song interrupt the steady thrash of bodies. Even as the set stops and starts, as a whole this is as much about seeing one of 2011's most exciting breakthrough bands as it is an hour-long catharsis. If there’s no more appropriate place than a Muay Thai stable to kick off some pent-up aggression, then I couldn’t think of a more appropriate band in the country to soundtrack it.
The bar switches from beer to water as Royal Headache end on the relatively dulcet ‘Honey Joy,’ then the stables empty into the streets. We face a wall of about two dozen police and ‘night chaplains,’ all of whom face the alleyway exit in a shocking line of fluoro yellow. It's a wall that exists in the realm of Brisbane’s mythology, but it’s not 1978. The batons stay holstered, and the cops timidly observe a drunken mess of three hundred get injected straight into the heart of the infamously violent strip of Fortitude Valley.
+++other updates__
__while that review was a mess imo, wouldn’t you love to read something even messier? i’m still trying to fix the jamming arms on my typewriter that were responsible (in part) for the clumsiness of the last barely human zine & tape ‘GIVE PHILISTINISM A CHANCE,’ but if you subscribe to this substack for $50AUD i’ll post out that edish and the next one coming in april: ‘THIS IS OUR BRAIN ON OUR IDOLS’ featuring an a-side bootleg of songs and interviews by THE FALL, and a b-side of the same by DEAD KENNEDYS. the zine will explore the outspoken frontperson (good and/or bad?), the punk/underground canon, and like most of the barely human project’s subjects: notions of legacy and lessons learned (or unlearned). email me at max@barelyhuman.info if none of that makes sense, but you like zines and tapes nonetheless.