Nice Fade #3 - You'll be the one to always complain

Remember when Yves Klein Blue gave Ric's what they obviously thought was a folksy, backhanded compliment (although it was phrased a little carelessly) and thus provoked a personalised reproach from the venue itself in the form of a public press release? That sort of thing might have been one of the reasons Sleeveful of Slight chose like me to write under a pseudonym. But as SOS's previous columns have made abundantly clear, his love and hope for this city's nightlife are great and with that investment comes great concern (check the word count). I give you Nice Fade part 3: "the critical instalment". All opinions are those of the author yada yada but I've got his back in a fight.

Hutch, Kleenkutt and Butterz – the old school hip-hop team of B B Bounce

I don’t like hip-hop but a lot of people do. Still, you wouldn’t know it by looking at the barren upstairs dancefloor every second Friday when B B Bounce is on. I don’t know where the fault lies and I’m not saying that the dream is dead but something is definitely wrong.

DJs Tablesalt and Bluebeard

While everyone else we’ve looked at so far dates from the Heinz era, either as a DJ or a punter with a fully formed persona, DJs Tablesalt and Bluebeard represent a new generation of disc spinners. This pair isn’t a DJ team but they share the same temperament and their faults as DJs. One night I turned up at Ric’s to find Tablesalt downstairs and Bluebeard upstairs and their sets were indistinguishable. You’d rush away from one dancefloor and arrive at the next only to hear the very song you’d just tried to escape being faded in. To save with repetition, I’ve grouped them together.

If the problem with these two DJs had to be summed up in one word it would be obviousness. Remember when Triple J promoted the Hottest One Hundred by giving away a cardboard box in which you could package all the Hottest One Hundred’s released to date? I swear that that box is all that these two bring with them when they play. Their sets are bludgeoning in their obviousness. It’s not that the music that they play is all bad. In fact, being obvious, a lot of it is quite good. The songs that you know you’ll hear and are looking forward to when you step out the door in the evening are all there, but they are together in such an uninspired fashion that the experience is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

There is no vision or intuition in their work. They don’t seem to be striving to create a tangible experience for their audience or playing off them. They just want “to DJ” and go about it in the most paint-by-numbers fashion possible. It’s as if they’ve commissioned a survey of songs that music fans in Brisbane want to hear when they go out, taken the 20 songs that appeared most frequently, isolated and distilled their key common features (by this stage they amount to a big chorus, big beat, possibly Triple J airplay) and then put this into a computer that compiles a set of songs that best match the criteria. All the heart, risk, individuality and all of the magic is drained out of the night and you’re left with a shitload of Queens of the Stone Age and the one Strokes song that you’ve heard too many times battering you about the head. On paper, this might not seem like such a problem. Obvious songs are good songs – what more do you want? Had I not seen it in practice, I’d be convinced by this proposition but I have and the reality is something quite different.

String a few obvious songs together in succession and you start to feel a strange feeling in your chest. It’s as if your capacity for positive belief is draining out of your veins and being replaced by a cold, empty dread. This vague uneasiness grows and as a new song fades in, it takes form in the thought that the possibilities for the night are narrowing. Just when the night should be going stratospheric, this thought becomes a conviction. Bluebeard and Tablesalt are masters at conjuring this feeling. I hadn’t felt it since going to The Depot and hearing ‘This Charming Man’ slide into ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ week after week. But at least at the Depot, the feeling that you could be stabbed at any moment provided some excitement to offset the disillusionment. Ric’s is a nice place – you won’t get that. Instead, you’ll think that perhaps you could try to talk to a stranger but dismiss it as ridiculous. Those kind of conversations require an ecstatic delirium that you’ve noticed has just vanished from this room. You realize that you feel a whole lot more sober than you did before and think about getting a drink but you remember that you’ve already spent more money than you were supposed to tonight. As you turn these thoughts over, the last of your fervoured expectations for the night drain away. It happens just when you should be leaping into a deep and meaningful conversation. Best to go home. There’s a bus in twenty minutes and as you walk to it you reflect that maybe you do go to Ric’s too often. But where else is there to go in Brisbane? You wait for your bus and think about moving to Melbourne or London.

I’d suggest that Tablesalt and Bluebeard go out on a limb more but to tell the truth, these guys are at their best when they stick to the script. ‘Last Nite’, ‘The Bucket’ and ‘Paper Planes’ will be dropped in brutal succession but they will be the highlights of your night. It’s when they get into the “DJs pick” slots on the printout that you really start thinking whether you know anyone sitting at the tables outside. There’s Bluebeard’s trawl through late nineties Australiana (Girls Like That, The Song Formerly Known As, Buy Me A Pony); there are the nostalgic signature tunes (Bluebeard – P.U.S.A.’s ‘Lump’; Tablesalt – Cake’s ‘The Distance’) and then downright stumpers (Foo Fighters ‘Monkey Wrench’ and The Offspring’s ‘Come Out and Play’). Just because you remember it, it doesn’t mean that it’s good.

It’s not a completely lost cause. Tablesalt deserves plaudits for his early spinning of the John Steele Singer’s ‘Strawberry Wine’. While nepotistic circle-jerking is an ever-present ingredient in the inability of local music scenes to rise out of a square ditch of perpetual mediocrity, this is a song which earns its place alongside the songs we come to hear. Any DJ who realises this, plays it and, through this, inspires local bands to make music that people might actually want to dance to deserves credit. And Bluebeard – who's been singled out for a lot of criticism here - always pulls a few dance moves from behind the decks which bring an energy to the turntables that I’ve not seen before. If he could harness that to a bit more vision - who knows?

It’s been said that you can’t knock a tryer and these guys do try. They are out there more than I care for, spinning tunes into the small hours and this kind of enthusiasm shouldn’t be discouraged. It is essential to any great cultural scene. The enthusiasm and ego of indie DJs is an unseen thread that runs through the history of pop music. That burning desire to share and encourage music is what seeks out promising bands and gives them the self-belief and chance to actually deliver something good. It’s behind every good club night and every good indie label. It reaches its apotheosis in the reckless, almost self-destructive devotion of the Alan McGees of this world without whom we’d have no My Bloody Valentine, no Primal Scream, no Oasis, no Ride, no Jesus and Mary Chain and no Teenage Fanclub. Where would we be then? Fucked - that’s where. But enthusiasm itself is not enough. Give them a fulcrum and they could move the world but fucking hell, it’ll take some engineering.