Reviewed on Saturday May 14
Melbourne’s Black Cab brought history, synth and electro soundscapes to Newtown Social Club over the weekend for the launch of their new single ‘Uniforms’.
It isn’t the biggest venue in the world – it doesn’t take much for the room to fill up – but this gig was properly packed. Everyone was dancing terribly (think Bez of Happy Mondays fame, their official dancer and drug dealer), but so were the band, so it was OK.
Everyone jerked and twitched happily along to ‘Victorious’, ‘Sexy Polizei’, ‘Uniforms’, ‘Call Signs’, ‘Closing Ceremony’, ‘Church In Berlin’, and for the encore, a rendition of Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’. It’s the closest to Ian Curtis that I’ve ever come and I won’t be forgetting this gig anytime soon.
If you’re at all familiar with Black Cab’s oeuvre then you’ll know they love the marriage between music, culture and history. As lead singer Andrew Coates confirmed in a 2014 interview after the release of their fourth studio album Games Of The XXI Olympiad, “We’ve always been cultural history nuts, particularly for Europe in the 1970s, and I’ve always been fascinated by German history, culture and music.” The influences of British new wave, post-punk and Manchester hung in the air all night with spritzes of krautrock and lyrics inspired by post-WWII Germany.
Black Cab are all about the concept album. Their first was Altamont Diary (2004), based on the Altamont Speedway Festival in 1969. Their second, Jesus East (2006), was based on the premise that George Harrison had left an ashram in India and travelled to Germany via the Autobahn. 2009’s Call Signs was an ode to East Germany – that’s when the post-punk and krautrock influences on their sound really came to the fore. And Games Of The XXI Olympiad was inspired by the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and the East German doping scandal. I wonder what world ‘Uniforms’ belongs to – a totalitarian one, or something else altogether?
