“Now should you expect to see tuning that you haven’t seen / In a band that you’ve known since you were sixteen / If strings can snap out of the blue / What is a string but a glorified screw / But it holds the whole show together.”
I’m stealing the words of a great Australian song to tell you the story of Augie March’s Brisbane gig. Plagued by obscure tunings, a snapped string, and false starts, the band’s show at the Triffid as part of their ‘Moo, You Bloody Choir’ 20th anniversary tour was nonetheless full of sharp banter and great music.
To open the evening, the wry and bizarre Davey Lane puts on a great show with his band Josh Coleman and James Fleming. Kicking off with the uplifting (jk) 2017 track This is Hell, twinkling twangy guitar meets expansive synth and subtle percussion. Confessing their bassist pulled out two days before the gig, Lane says: “We’re making do, working with what we have… which isn’t much.” Fuzzy guitars and high energy for Biggest Star have us tapping toes and has me questioning, who is this guy? A quick google and I’ve sheepishly discovered that I’ve definitely missed a few things. Lane is lead guitarist of Aus music icons You Am I, and has played in Jimmy Barnes’ and Crowded House’s bands.
Handing over the bass to Fleming, usually on keys, he says: “There’s gonna be a bit of this shit going on.” “Who is keen for Augie March?” he asks. “Having seen them four times before… I can say you’re in for a fucking treat.”
Over, Over & Out finds the band with a steady beat, high-pitched chords struck at the end of the chorus, and a groovy lead solo. Just as I’ve recognised a Beatles-like quality to the chorus, Lane gets behind the keyboard for the next song, saying: “I always feel like Paul McCartney at this point. Hey, we got any Wings fans out there?” he impersonates in McCartney’s accent. The ascending pre-chorus of the next song launches into a very Beatles chorus with a British-style intonation and echoey vocal effect, singing: “He’s howling for oxygen… The flame flickers on / The flame is gone.”
Taurus All Apart he dedicates to a good friend. Synth and pacey drums and a key change from verse to chorus creates a gliding, uplifting sound despite the bittersweet topic of losing friends. As he grooves, Lane moves in a small, contained way, almost like stop motion.
“I’m known for my songs of optimism, and this is one of them,” he says next, ironically introducing God, I’m Fucked Up Over You. Each song has a very creative soundscape, and this one has a metallic, echoey quality. Then we get an unrecorded song, about someone from this city, Lane tells us. The maturely named Dumbass Feelings has chiming synth and bass take centre stage, and Lane duets with the synth as he sings: “What do I do with all these feelings?” He has a quirky habit of sticking his tongue out when he talks about songs where his heart is on his sleeve, like Dumbass Feelings.
Then, guitar crashes into the next song, and there is a great guitar solo in Flippant Words. You’re The Cops, I’m The Crime, meanwhile, is all about the catchy cadence of the rhyme. “See you clapping out of time / Then you stammer with your rhyme / All the stranger fiction I’m / Muddling up with gin and lime.” It’s wistful (“Going nowhere that we ain’t been before”) but builds into hopefulness with Lane’s vocals cresting over a melodic peak through the chorus.
Quick strums and a bright beat belie another pessimistic message, not that you’d know it from the cheerful tonality (the same trick Sam Fender has been playing with his euphoric tracks filled with the saddest stories you’ve ever heard). The song gains body in the chorus as the bass starts. “Blow it all to bits / Cause love is now an option now.” Davey Lane finishes his set with a severely (life-threateningly) funky song… no idea what it was, but it was incredible, full of energy, and had the band and audience both rocking out.
Augie March’s updated lineup features vocalist and rhythm guitarist Glenn Richards, bass guitarist Edmondo Ammendola, drummer David Williams, keyboardist Kiernan Box, with the recent addition of Dan Luscombe on lead guitar.
A lilting 6/8 beat tapped out lightly on the cymbals and three-part harmonies start the show with the short but sweet, mysteriously named, Vernoona. “Autumn leaves are flying / Each a baby’s brittle boat / The season’s dying / Winter’s mottled pigeon throat.” The song sets the stage for a wintry album, full of dark and moody scenes and allegories.
Richards swaps guitars for Thin Captain Crackers, and there is a cheer in audience for the brassy reverberating sound, with dramatic booming drums. The song is a poetic puzzle, with curious lyrics like: “Where all your dreams are borrowed all your senses are thieves / And Ned Kelly won’t ride past your window despite the freeze on your disbelief”. To me it seems like a song about class differences, but there’s more there, about the inability to fulfil ambition, perhaps.
Perched behind the drum set, Williams thanks us for coming and for sticking with them all this time. After a few jokes from the band about it being “sticky tonight”… “What’s brown and sticky? Our gig.”…they embark on their next song, The Cold Acre.
On the first line, Richards laughs, “Whoops I got that wrong”. Box’s piano, flowing and cinematic, and Luscombe’s jazz guitar, played with lots of fluttery long chords, are fitting for the doleful and sentimental lyrics – exploring belonging, death, loyalty, grief: “My heart is a cold acre, in my chest is a cold acre / I don’t grow any good anymore though I’ve seeded my soul / With all kinds of love that don’t grow in a cold acre.” Despite the bleak lyrics, there is a bouncy drum part, and the shimmery texture of the jingle bells Williams shakes at the end leave room for hope.
Now, for the first and not the last time, Richards has to take a beat (or many beats) to retune his guitar. He explains that he didn’t realise until he went back to learn the songs for this tour that they had recorded just about every song on the album in a different tuning. About their next track, Mt Wellington Reverie, he says: “I don’t think we ever really played this song live before, so it took me two days to figure out the tuning, and two days is brief for me to figure out a three-minute song these days.”
The song is haunting, seeming to tell the story of Tasmania’s convicts and the Black War, where massacres of Indigenous peoples were carried out in the early 1800s. These ghosts seem to haunt the guest houses where tourists now come to learn about convict history: “There’s a pair of black eyes staring down at you / From the mountain top, through your window.” From the perspective of a tourist, then a convict who died trying to escape in the Derwent River, then those convicts compelled to take part in the killing – “We’re shooting them from the rocks / And we’re shooting them in the water.” The gravelly side of Richards’ voice adds to the sinister effect.
Pausing again to retune, Richards says playing this album is like every song is an exam. Realising he has lost his pick, Luscombe passes him one. Williams jests, “Dan Luscombe on pick technician, everybody!” Luscombe recounts his recent experience at Melbourne Airport, where he walked through security forgetting he had left guitar picks in his pocket. “They made me put five picks back through the machine,” he said incredulously. “Fuck this planet.”
Before launching into Victoria’s Secrets, Richards jokes: “Sing it with me so I hide the fact I can’t hit the notes anymore.” It may be true that his voice has changed, maybe gotten a little thinner, but it adds drama to his vocals. There is a rough but golden edge to his voice as he treads the tightrope of keeping his tone in the sweet spot. Luscombe plays a sultry solo, sobbing into the night for the woman in the song.
Then, a broken string. “I got a new guitar, made like they used to, which means if a string breaks you can’t pull it out, so they’re dealing with that backstage,” Richards says. Following are many minutes of banter while the legends backstage restring and retune. “Is this why Adam left the band maybe?” one of them quips. (Adam Donovan was their longtime lead guitarist). “No, we love Adam.” The bluesy riff of their next song is abruptly stopped – the guitar’s out of tune. Williams takes the opportunity to talk about the three different studios they recorded the album in, and says in the same session that they recorded Baron of Sentiment, they recorded another song, The Brothel Creeper, which never made it onto the album.
They skip ahead to another song with a different guitar while the other remains out of action – Bolte & Dunstan Talk Youth. It’s quiet and simple, arpeggios, leisurely bass, and it seems Box plays the piano with a somnambulant ease. “I need to apologise to the band, because my fingers were playing the wrong strings throughout that entire song,” Richards confesses afterwards.
Now they are back to waiting for the guitar. Luscombe, the new kid on the Augie March block, says that he used to see them a lot. “I stepped in for this tour. I gotta say the show’s gotten a lot slicker since then,” he joked. Richards departs to consult the guitar tech and returns dissatisfied, without a guitar. After some banter with the crowd, a cheer goes up when Bretto, the guitar tech, comes out with the goods. Finally, the bluesy The Baron of Sentiment, with its piano flourishes and catchy triplet-laden chorus.
Richards gets into a discussion with Bretto while switching guitars again, and they quip, “There won’t be another song for 15 minutes.” Not quite 15 minutes later, Mother Greer comes with a catchy drumbeat and a fabulous harmonica part from Box. Somehow, a reference to Germaine Greer, I fail to catch the substance of the song’s meaning. This is part and parcel of an Augie March experience, though – Richards is known for his cryptic lyrics, which hold more value in their imagery than their storytelling. A good listener can imbue their own meaning, though. You could never truly climb into the songwriter’s brain, even if they spell it out for you.
The Honey Month, after another retuning – Richards saying: “Satan himself doesn’t tune this low” – is kicked off with pondering, chromatic synth and a roll on the drums. His vocals are like a wheeze, a pained whisper, matching the enigmatic troubles of the song – “The evensong of the abattoir”. The piano becomes a part of the melody, replying to the lyrics, while the lead guitar doubles the whispered lyrics.
Richards seems to come to Bottle Baby with relief. “This is a bedroom recording,” he says. “I’m not so good at the studio recordings, but no one can stop me in my bedroom.” Stripped back, it’s just the guitar and small, subdued band parts, no percussion. Read troubadour stuff. So the “heinous law of an endless love” line in the chorus hits hard, unadorned.
Just Passing Through sees the band back with a vengeance: a big thudding drumbeat, crunchy guitar, and fun, colourful lighting for the fast rock number. “You redeemed yourself!” someone from the crowd shouts. “At what point did we drop off?” Richards enquires with a laugh.
Then the song we all came for. At the sound of the arpeggiated rhythm guitar, all else dropped away, and the crowd applauded. I had listened to this song many, many times when I was younger, and its magic for me is that it could mean so many different things. Richards has apparently said it was inspired by the Australian war photographer Neil Davis, who covered Vietnam and many other Southeast Asian conflicts. His biography was titled One Crowded Hour, a phrase from a poem by Thomas Osbert Mordaunt: “One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name”, a line that Davis wrote in the front of each of his work diaries. This backstory gives the song yet another palimpsestic meaning, especially when you discover Davis’ camera filmed his own death while covering a Thai coup in Bangkok in 1985.
The encore delivers us Stranger Strange, and when Richards introduces it, he requests that we please give some money to those who are sleeping rough. A flurry of notes in the riff passes like a siren, as he sings about the cruelty and kindness of the world.
One last lengthy pause for a retune, as Richards sets the scene. “Anybody hung around St Kilda lately?” Then, realising he was in Queensland, “Anyone know what St Kilda is?” “It’s basically like the valley here. You can work out, you can get a $300 meal, you can get crack…” Clockwork was written there. The high hat is like the tick of a clock, and the low, mournful guitar riff, while high, tinny synth contrasts, paints the picture of a grungy city block, pungent and diverse.
Augie March might not sound exactly as they did in the studio on ‘Moo, You Bloody Choir’, but they put on an engaging, if slightly bloated, live show that showcased their talent as musicians, and the ability of their songs to stand the test of two decades.
Thanks to On The Map PR
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