My personal idea of hell is quite simple. It’s a room, full of people, all tormenting me with stories of the bands they saw. All of which I love. All of which broke up before I was born. All of which I’ll never get to see.
No one, though, gains as much glee from my torment, as my mother does when she tells me stories of the bands that she saw when she was younger. Every second she has a chance, she’s pushing them into the conversation, much to my annoyance.
We share a similar taste in music, me and my mum. It makes sense I guess since my tastes are a mix of her love of 90s Aussie rock and my fathers love of 60s classic rock, with a sprinkling of whatever random records I now find for 50c at Vinnies.
When you ask her though of the best concert she went to, her answer is always the same, “oh easy, Silverchair at UTS.”
It cost my mum and her brother less than 5 dollars each to see them, back in the 90s, a cost now that is the most insane part of that story. Sitting on the stairs in what was called “the dungeon,” my mum was mere metres away from them. At this time, they were virtually unknown, a bunch of 15-year-olds from Newcastle who couldn’t even drive let alone had topped the charts. Around 100 people packed in on that Thursday night, to see a completely unknown band, and as my mum will say “was life-changing.”
That story, as exciting as it must sound, starts to get very annoying when you’ve heard it 100 times in a row. Despite having seen bands somewhere in the hundreds, that is always her go-to story and boy does it get old!
Other, less noticeable, yet just as exciting mentions include being backstage at the equinox festival at Macquarie to see midnight oil, Boom Crash Opera at a pub opposite Sydney uni, Jenny Morris in Byron Bay RSL sitting on the edge of the stage and John Cougar Mellencamp who was so good she saw them twice.
I hear those stories less often than the Silverchair one, though they do come up. At times like this, when my mum is feeling nostalgic I hear the full spiel, my dad often joining in too and adding to the list with the bands he saw too.
It’s disappointing that I never got a chance to see these bands that I love so much, and I definitely amp up the annoyance when I hear these stories, just to poke fun at my mum. But that being said, I’ve seen my fair share of bands.
For someone who’s only 18 (whose first year of being allowed to see most bands has been spent locked down), I’ve seen loads of bands. AC/DC, Midnight Oil, San Cisco, The Chats and heaps of others, new and old.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, that the Australian pub rock scene is dead, that there are no new modern Aussie bands. Sure, maybe it’s the case that you won’t get to see Silverchair for $5 at a university hall, but maybe you’ll see the next Silverchair, at an open mic night, before they make it big.
New music isn’t dead, good music is still just as alive as ever. You can’t just sit around and wait for it to come to you!
I plan to see as many bands as possible while I can, the cheap, the shit, the expensive, the weird. Find new music, drag your friends along, take photos and enjoy yourself. Stock up on as many stories as possible. You’ll need them to torture your kids with one day.
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