Reviewed onSaturday July 2
We’re a funny mob, us Aussies. We have a strange, hysterical stoicism – a reliance on the relaxed that’s so profound it occasionally threatens our true feelings. Just take the ground floor of Newtown Social Club on Saturday, as a roomful of tipsy Labor and Greens voters nervously tried to pretend they weren’t nervously watching the LNP Senate seat numbers rise like the swelling sea levels the Coalition doesn’t believe in.
The story upstairs was, by the end of the evening, very similar, as Falling Joys played a set full of their blocky pop to an audience trying to ignore a whole host of blatant truths. Namely, that it’s been some 32 years since the band formed; that the years have not been kind to their everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to songwriting; and that the group’s lack of showmanship was beginning to cast such a pall on the depleted audience that it felt like a wake might burst out at any minute.
It was bleary, doom-laden stuff, and though Suzie Higgie et al. played the set every diehard fan in the audience wanted them to play, they did so without charisma, charm or much energy. Proceedings were so dull it felt like the floor itself was buckling under the weight of all that boredom.
But in between the two failures – the failure of politics and the failure of the Joys – something very special occurred. Though The Hummingbirds took to the stage to enthusiastic cries, not even the most committed of fans could have expected what was going to happen next.
The band members actively encouraged moshing, but nobody took them up on their offer. Instead, the crowd stood in quiet awe as the group blasted through tracks like ‘Blush’ and ‘Hollow Inside’, trembling tunes that the years seem only to have strengthened. Hummingbirds songs are the auditory equivalent of neat handwriting – precise and deeply satisfying.
By the time the triumphant musicians crossed their last ‘T’ and nodded their way offstage, a sigh shuffled through the room – not of relief, but of very sincere contentment. And though the audience members tried to keep the smiles off their faces as they wandered over to the bar, where the bad news poured out of the TV, there was only so much they could do. It’s hard work hiding joy that sincere – even for Aussies.
