The Drones
East Brunswick Club, Melbourne

As the talk went at M+N HQ prior to this gig, “Can’t let a Drones tour pass without an M+N review.” The dominance of the Drones in these pages and in the consciousness of the local music scene is an index of their unwavering reputation as, let’s say it, Australia’s best live band. At one level, they’re a musicians’ band – see tonight’s re-worked ‘I’m Here Now’ – but at another, their live show is pure cathartic revelry, pure expression. They stand there, drawing out strains of anger, exhaustion, disappointment and channelling it into a gnarled mass of guitar which veers quickly into silence and isolation. As the door swings open to the street at the end of their set, we stumble out. Drained. Jubilant. Mesmerised.

Although, the Sunday night set at Melbourne’s East Brunswick Club may go down as their most subdued gig yet. “Have we walked into an exam,” Gareth Liddiard questioned at one point. With Monday morning alarms creeping ever closer, the audience even seemed tentative about asking for an encore. (Liddiard did also observe that the crowd looked more like a Centrelink queue than a deskbound workforce.)

Roused back to the stage, the quartet had stripped down to a duo for a stunning rendition of ‘Sixteen Straws’. Liddiard and Mike Noga, out from behind the kit and out-front on harmonica, hushed the chattering crowd. This was a different power to the one we associate with a Drones gig. From front row to back, the entire club was reverently attentive for the song’s final three minutes, following Liddiard’s cut-to-the-quick convict tale of metaphysical hi-jinx from deep in our national past. Liddiard respected the attention, dropping to a whisper and muting his chords. Noga played his harmonica off-mike, a ghostly presence.

Earlier, the duo of Noga and Liddiard had done similarly transcendent things with ‘Locust,’ from the band’s Wait Long by the River…. This equally evocative tale of remote barbarism, also historical but set closer to our day, is an instance of The Drones amplifying quiet moral ravages in a time of political darkness. It’s a brave thing, enacting this drama of remembering – consciously recalling and revisiting the past when even the most liberal, the most ‘aware,’ plead historical ignorance, forgetting the violence of yesterday so they can protest all the more readily today. Little children are sacred, we’re reminded again, as if we didn’t know it before, when Gareth sings of “standing in the shade of a wedding cake hotel doorway/Watching sister with her liquor in a jar/Talk to older boys in cars.” Of course, “they made the blacks live outside of town”. Probably still do, in this town where “they pulled iron from the ground and knife wounds from the port/They built a prison and it tempered in the sun/It rose up off a plateau like the last tooth in a gum /You went there by train /And you would never be the same.” It’s all the more harrowing for its vision of life barely lived, life in a town not on the national map, but lurking somewhere in the national psyche (Mad Max, Wake in Fright, etc).

Little sympathy was found among the audience for the band’s reported 4am wake-up the following day: they are set to jet off to the US in the early hours of Monday. They leave our shores and our stages for about a year, Liddiard reported at the end of their set. Time to work on new songs, new ideas, a new record and get to work in new territories. I imagine no dearth of unsettling stories for Liddiard to describe on the next record.

by Ben Gook