COLLAPSE BOARD

Let’s have a hologram party

It’s nostalgia time, ladies and gentlemen. In the name of mixing it up, I’m going to pay tribute to one of my favourite bands to ever come out of Australia. Dead Inside The Chrysalis.

Picture a 17-year-old Thomas, bright-eyed, Mohawk-less and for some reason thinking wallet chains were the shit, wandering into the Alley Bar in Milton. It was the first and last time I would go there, as it would soon be demolished, further removing Brisbane from its classic local rock venues. Some bowling enthusiasts would have been pretty pissed too.

It was my first real gig, and is still one of my favourites. I can’t recall the name of the opening band, but I have a strong suspicion it was the F1 Elevens. The second band was The Wrath, who continue to be one of my very favourite bands from South East Queensland. All of The Wrath have gone on to do other things (The Go Go Haunters, Kill The Apprentice, Todd’s 500 different bands that he drums for), but every now and then they reunite to do a show, but that’s a story for another day.

My youth was spent in a Christian high school, so my idea of a live rock show was four well-groomed prodigal children strumming their pristine instruments purchased with their parents’ credit card, playing through the Hillsong songbook. You might say I was a bit unprepared.

Dead Inside The Chrysalis got on stage and melted my face.

They were such great musicians. They never officially split, but they had some pretty big internal conflicts causing all but two of the members to leave. That day, however, they played their brand of mutant synth glam punk beautifully. Their showmanship would have made Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson proud, with the vocalist performing an impressive feat of auto-asphyxiation, before being covered in blue ink from a discreetly bitten ink pellet and running out of the bar area, into the bowling lanes, much to the concern of a youth group out for an innocent day of loving Jesus.

They had many releases in their time, but for me the best was The Class Of 2099. It was short, but every song was catchy, and a great example of the genre-bending material that made them famous. Indeed, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Fly” was my Myspace profile song for quite some time, and we all knew how important we thought that honour was.

Upon investigation, it seems the last vestiges of the once great band are still doing stuff around the place. I’d love to see what it’s like, but on the other hand, I don’t want the memory of my ‘first time’ ruined. Have you seen them recently? Let me know.

My pet alien hand salutes you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 10:16 am. It is filed under Tom Fiend and tagged with Alice Cooper, All Ages, bowling, dead inside the chrysalis, f1 elevens, glam, Marilyn Manson, punk, synth, the alley bar, The Wrath. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.