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 Everett True

OMG! The Thin Kids (LOL) to support Kate Nash in Brisbane!!

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Wednesday 4 August
Corner Hotel, Melbourne

My favourite review of this night comes courtesy of the Things To Do blog.

The supporting act was ridiculous: The Thin Kids, I assume it was some sort of irony cos one of their songs included the lyrics ‘we’re thin and we’re proud and we’re happy, don’t judge us!’ Or something along those lines. And they weren’t thin, and they sure didn’t look happy. The lead singer especially was a creep, he seemed like one of those weird old men who would approach you on a tram and try to tell you all about his day/week/life. Then I wikipedia’d him and turns out he used to be some mega famous music journalist for NME and later MM and stuff, so weird! AND he was the one who introduced Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love, and the three of them used to be good pals and shit. So bizarre that now he’s playing in some crappy little band.

Damn straight.

For hours I wander the streets of the CBD in the bitter cold and rain, thinking, “Ah yes, this is PRECISELY why I didn’t move to Melbourne”. My five-year-old son Isaac phones me up. “Are you going to play [his song] ‘Poppycock Is Nonsense’ tonight?” He laughs when I tell him it’s raining. I eat authentic Italian cuisine with Bruce Milne and Ed G. I visit the Tim Burton exhibition. I eat authentic Melbourne loft food. I sit in a dire coffee dive on Swanston for hours and read my racist John Buchan adventure story. I watch a video of myself from the previous night and resolve never to put my hands in my pockets again on stage. It was one of those days.

On stage, I cut back a little on the jokes about being from Brisbane and the fact we only have two ideas for songs (Brisbane and being thin): “But they’re both good solid dependable ideas for songs, much like the good solid dependable plastic playgrounds of Brisbane … and anyway, that’s two more ideas than most bands have.” A little. We focus on the “limp-wristed guitar sound” (© Mess+Noise, 2010) instead, and drag an oddly pliable Kate Nash on stage to play piano with us for the final three numbers – ‘Courtney’, an alcohol-sodden tale of a debauched night in St Louis, which I guess you could call beat poetry if you really wanted to denigrate the form; ‘This One Goes Out To…’, an endless fairground-type piano refrain matched to sudden bursts of skewed No Wave guitar over which I give numerous shout-outs to my younger selves who were, at varying stages of their lives, “FUCKED UP ON ALCOHOL”; and the ubiquitous ‘(You’re Not On The) Guest List’. The second-mentioned number is becoming alarmingly popular … the number of blokes who’ve come up to me afterwards and said, “That’s my life you were describing” runs into the, um, fives. Still. Everyone loves a drunk, right?

Four numbers in, I ask the audience if they’d mind taking out their mobiles and filming the next song and then posting it up on YouTube, as it’s the one by Isaac. Several girls do, and it’s up there now in all its 25-second finery. Ed and Scotty are well made up after our set, the amount of teenage girls who come up to us and start going, “Where are you guys from? I’ve never heard of you before.”

Kate’s set is spellbinding, wicked. Love ‘Merry Happy’, where she thumps the keyboards all beaming, and the way she goes, “This one’s about homophobia.” (Cheers from audience.) “You shouldn’t be cheering homophobia”.

The Thin Kids sell five CDs.

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