The fucking [REDACTED]. Let me tell you, the [REDACTED] are an ’80s Perth band I will never forget. The sight of them mangling “Fight For Your Right To Party” at a Battle of the Bands in 1988, and the embarrassment with which they mumbled the “We’re the Beas … Tie … Boys” at the end of the third verse will never leave me. Without exploratory electroshock therapy, anyway.
I was judging, too; I forget who the other two judges were, but we couldn’t work out a way to give them less than 20 out of 100, because they could technically play their instruments. That was when I was going to gigs on a Monday night, writing the review, then driving to the X-Press offices smashed at 3am to get the copy in by the 8am Tuesday deadline. Great days, great days. [REDACTED PROMOTER NAME] didn’t give us nearly enough to drink.
I found the [REDACTED] Facebook page, which I’m not going to be so cruel as to link you to. There’s a video of them doing a reunion gig in [REDACTED DATE]. One of the things the [REDACTED] did was covers of popular alternative bands, who were good bands, but the [REDACTED] did a bad version of their only radio song. They did whichever Green Day song it was that Green Day ripped wholesale from “Poison Pen” by the Hoodoo Gurus.* The [REDACTED]’s originals took three or four of these radio songs by good bands, mashed them together and called it an original. This let them play battles of the bands.
I started ranting at my English wife, who has no fucking idea about any of these people, about these terrible incompetents who absolutely nobody cares about thirty-five years later, because I’m still pissed off that I ever heard a note from them and I’m even more pissed off that I’m pissed off. It’s stage four rock journalism, and there’s no stage above stage four, because being past stage three means you’re gonna die.
The wife does know local band scenes — many years in the folk scene, roadieing for goth and EBM bands (knows how to do Ronan Harris’s tea) and used to be Jim Morrison in a Doors cover band — and has a keen and personal understanding of talentless fucks who are absolute in their certainty that the way out is the way through. And that is the [REDACTED].
I mean, I’m sure they’re lovely blokes and their families love them.
* “Longview”. But you know when a band gets to the chorus and just doesn’t bother doing a good one and fudges it? Yeah.
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