SHAUN PRESCOTT reports from Sunday’s Decolonise Festival in Sydney’s inner-west, where he witnessed things you’d never see in a licensed venue.

Most of Sydney’s underground bands cut their teeth in grimy little warehouse spaces scattered about the Marrickville industrial area. There’s always stuff happening here, but if you’re imagining a rich bohemian space ala Fitzroy or Newtown then you’ll be disappointed by the lack of amenities here. Where the action is, there’s nothing but low-rise red-brick factories, petrol stations and warehouses. There’s not a bottle shop nearby, no slip-in pubs, and barely a kebab shop in sight. In a city known for its beautiful beaches, this part of the inner-west is the exhaust fumes to the otherwise gentrified inner-city potpourri. It’s ugly, but then, so is much of the music it accommodates.

The Decolonise festival is a celebration of the constantly threatened DIY culture in Sydney. It’s threatened not necessarily because it’s subversive, risque, or pushing stylistic envelopes, but because more prosaic pressures – noise complaints, fire exits and foolhardy “fun police” – are ever-present concerns. Warehouse venues generally pop up for a few months, host a few punk/noise/indie bands and then disappear into local mythology. So a festival that wields all current available spaces at once over a long weekend is considered ambitious and faintly dangerous.

A cavernous workhouse in St Peters – just off the Princes Highway - hosted Newcastle’s Polyfox and the Union of the Most Ghosts on Sunday afternoon. When we arrived, Nicolas French was already in the throes of his loop pedal psychedelia, the audience hunched on low stools or cross legged on the cement floor. Polyfox is French’s solo “pop” project: he’s better known as one-third of noise group Brassskulls, but this act sees him layer his melancholic pop songs via loop pedal, guitar and keyboard.

Playing at only half volume through a guitar amp, French built his skeletal tunes for a few minutes before abruptly killing them off with the switch of a pedal, sometimes half-way through a bar. Any sense of drama or showmanship was meticulously avoided, leaving only fragments of song, like a viral FM melody looping over and over in your head.

Next was Harriet, a female acoustic two-piece also reliant on the cult of the amateur. Both artists belong to an ilk for which theatre, showmanship and conventional ideas about ability or merit are moot. They actively avoid sheen and overt musicianship, so fiercely anti-establishment they purport to be.

Further driving this theme was Hee Haw member Louise Berlecky, who played only one song, predictably based around a loop pedal as well as an acoustic bass guitar. The sound she achieved was lovely, but Berlecky’s performance only lasted five minutes and her textures weren’t given enough time to flourish. The crowd clapped meekly and promptly departed, sure at least that what they just saw would never happen in a licensed venue.

A few hours later and a 15-minute walk down the poisonous Princes Highway, another St Peters warehouse hosted six more bands. Situated deeper into the sparse concrete suburb, the planes here seem within reaching distance during their descent into Mascot airport. The sparsely furnished warehouse is dark and makeshift, though this event is a markedly more “professional” affair, evidenced by Mercy Arms guitarist Kirin J Callinan, a lurching, menacing figure wielding a possessed guitar.

A strikingly distinguished performer, Callinan traipses the stage like an amphetamine addled outlaw, wrenching venomous sandpaper fuzz from his guitar. With wrist pressed firmly to whammy bar, Callinan conjured panoramic visions of deceased suburbs, overgrown vacant lots and asphalt playgrounds. That peculiarly Australian, menacing sense of eternal space was perfectly rendered in his songs, and it’s these nigh mystical figures that keep the scene alive. Among all the hobbyists, Callinan is stunningly accomplished, potentially important. When he finally loops a guitar riff and proceeds to accompany it on a drum kit, he’s won over everyone in the audience. And you know, as good as Mercy Arms may be, Callinan ought to be winning hearts and minds by himself, because he is stunning and original.

Later on, after an instrumental set by Sydney three-piece Hee Haw, Naked on the Vague board the stage, promptly adopting their familiar roles: Lucy Phelan leans over her keyboard and flails her head recklessly, swaying to-and-fro, while Matthew Hopkins wrestles with his guitar, attacking the tighter regions of his fret board.

There are plenty of angry bands but NOTV actually sound a little threatening: Phelan’s voice is a determinedly staunch monotone, while Hopkins will often yelp, sigh and screech on the periphery, his mic immersed in echo and reverb. Carnival-esque keyboard passages weave their way through the grey noise, while the industrial beat stomps ineffably onwards. It’s perfectly psychedelic music, and it suits the climate to an almost frightening degree.

Naked on the Vague isn’t conspicuously politicized however, which distinguishes them from the majority of bands they often share spaces with. It’s this crusading demeanour – which characterises many of Sydney’s punk groups and spaces - that proves alienating for many punters. Thus the warehouse scene is a fairly insular one: a community where radicalism and punk rock can function as separate from mainstream society, where you’ll always encounter the same faces, the same dress sense and the same haircuts. In some ways, it’s a support group. Though if a band is willing, determined, and importantly, good, they will transcend the scene and - like My Disco, Fabulous Diamonds and Naked on the Vague among others – achieve a wider listenership.

It’s not necessary, nor especially desired, that a group reach a bigger audience. But it does happen occasionally and that’s exciting. The creativity of the underground continues even while the relentless gentrification of Sydney’s inner suburbs continues; even while Australian Idol [lackeys]( dish out career advice to hapless Hopetoun bands.

There’s no need to worry then, because they are as resilient as cockroaches, these punks.

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