I didn’t get around to saying, but about a week ago I went to see the Straitjacket Fits.
I’ve seen them play once before, in Sydney in 1994, just before they split up. But they were the first act at the Big Day Out, and the sound guy had apparently neglected to make any preparations whatsoever. I think he figured that he could muck around with the sound while the obscure Kiwis played and get it right before Björk came on, not realising that he was ruining one of the last performances by the Greatest Band Of Their Time. Then they split up.
Not wanting to take any chances this time, I spent an hour or so before the gig talking to the sound guy to make sure he was up to the task of working for the semi-reunited Fits. It turned out that he had prepared the night before, but come in early anyway to make sure everything was OK. He had good credentials touring with big international acts, and he was a Mac user, so all was well.
The Auckland audience was rather oddly restrained, and seemed determined not to let anyone see them having a good time, let alone doing anything that might be construed as dancing. They stood in the mosh pit sipping from wineglasses and clutching their handbags. And when I say mosh pit, I mean the place where there was supposed to be one, except it was only me. I pogo’d hard, and they started nodding their heads a little. Eventually some of them caught on, but overall I couldn’t rate them higher than a four.
The band, however, rocked. The wall of sound was wondrous powerful, and Shayne Carter’s guitar was as expressive as a bucket of big-eyed jaguar kittens that could leap on you from trees and knock you to the ground and they were sad inside but the could fly and they had x-ray vision to see inside your soul. They played all the good stuff, and She Speeds twice because the audience showed signs of enthusiasm the first time.
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