Mike Noga: A quiet Saturday night in a quiet bar in Darlinghurst.

Mike Noga

Golden Age Bar

With a couple of exceptions, Sydney is still working out the ‘small bar’ thing. That’s partly due to the ongoing cage match between a council trying to keep some culture in the inner-city and a state government intent on selling off not only any building with human activity, but the park opposite as well, and even the bus that got you there.

And some blame could be sheeted to the bars themselves, where the musical entertainment provided is often just to be background music to deciding which single-origin spiced pilsener you want with your artisan cheese platter. But sometimes you want more than old mate yowling Dylan covers, or noodling like George Benson. Someone to entertain and engage. Someone like Mike Noga.

The random nature of a Saturday night means there’s a crowd where some know all the words from his genuinely terrific solo work, a proportion having to be told he used to be the drummer in The Drones, and a few who might need explaining that “See, there’s a band called The Drones…”. But armed with only the guitar his dad bought him, a $5 harmonica (“Yeah, really should have got the $30 one…”), and a tambo on the floor to add occasional percussion, Noga is chatty from the little mirrored box with a mirror ball that is The Golden Age stage. He offers samples of his often downbeat muse: the mortal regret of I Will Have Nothing silences the chatterers, chunks from his churning latest album King like the sadly jaunty All My Friends Are Alcoholics – always striking as an interesting choice to play in licensed premises – and “Irish murder ballad by a guy from Tasmania…”, Eileen.

There’s also the danger and delight of such intimate venues: the punter at one of those almost-on-the-stage tables having the hiccup attack right in the quiet bit of M’Belle. Noga stops, laughs with her, soldiers on. Or the lady further back who asked for something a bit more upbeat, and is rewarded with the swing of Down Like JFK as the 35^th president considers taking the convertible may not have been the best of ideas.

He finishes with King’s closer, the human need and longing of This Is For You, and most everybody – even those likely who had no idea of who or what was on offer – probably considered this a good way to spend a Saturday night.

 

You Am I: And thereafter, you put the needle to the (Live) record...

You Am I

All Onboard

The You Am I Set Pty Ltd

 

In which the finest guitar band in Christendom attempts to deal with two of Australia’s great rock and roll orthodoxies: “Yeah, they were always better live…” and the ever-popular “We like your old stuff better than your new stuff…”.
  
Thing is, on their night – which is actually now more often than not than it once may have been – You Am I are an absolutely supreme rock and roll band. And there are points across these two slabs coloured vinyl (naturally…) where there is a glorious gasping and grasping energy to them.

Tim Rogers’ and Davey Lane’s guitars dogfight around over Andy Kent’s bedrock bass and Russell Hopkinson’s still superlative drumming to make something that can move an audience or pin it to the wall as necessary. Timmy will probably always half-jokingly despair about his voice, but even he seems more aware of how to hold it together - or when that crack in the note and grab for the next breath is all part of the drama of what they now are.

The second part of the conundrum is a little more problematic. Many in the crowds seeing them on the 2017 regional tour from where these performances are accumulated probably haven’t even listened to much of the band’s 21^st century output, but things like Convicts’ It Ain’t Funny How We Don’t Talk Anymore and Friends Like You can hold their heads high besides the Mr Milks and Jewels And Bullets of the catalogue.

Of course no live album is ever going to truly give a gig’s smell of sweet sweat and beer, but some of the personality of The Australian You Am I Tribute Show does come through - the drumrolls of Rusty’s intro to the towering Trike have a wander through Land Of 1000 Dances, then heads for some chicken tenders at the Colonel’s before it all rips in, or as Rogers puzzles some of the younger souls in the audience by reciting one of Live At Budokan broken English preambles as they cover Cheap Trick’s I Want You To Want Me with the grinning care of true fans.

Apart from all that, All Onboard also has most all of what even the casual observer would require from their peerless back catalogue: Get Up, Good Mornin’, Rumble, that one about a piece of German seating furniture. Get as a souvenir of many nights well spent - by both you and them.

Hits and (occasionally hazy) memories. Not the first, and not the last, live appreciation of The You Am I’s.

YOU AM I

Enmore Theatre

Roughly, I’ve probably seen 10,000 bands. A hundred good ones. A dozen great ones.

And one You Am I.

And this night, a sense of occasion - as your favourite band play the two records that mean so much too so many. Most present having such an investment in Hourly Daily and/or Hi Fi Way Tim Rogers probably didn’t need to sing at all - we knew the words anyway.

Some quibbled these recitals occurring in reverse order – discussions of the albums’ relative merits went on endlessly at nearby bars before and after the show. But Hourly Daily is an arc, an entity. Coloured with brass, cello, and video backdrops of the inner-west Sydney it is so much of, there’s even greater resonance merely because you’re there. “This song was written about 12 minutes’ walk from here…,” as Rogers reflected at one point. There’s a hundred couples in the audience who were those puzzled lovers of If We Can’t Get It Together. How many of them here are still together another question entirely. We’ll avoid those now-ex’s in the interval, as the band dispense with the scarves and checkered pants look for the second act.

For Hi Fi Way is a rock and roll record, played by a magnificent rock and roll band, in increasingly sweat-soaked t-shirts. A shudder of volume went through the place as Jewels And Bullets roared. If not entirely lost in the moment, marvel at just how good Russell Hopkinson is as the cymbals shimmer and splash, while Andy Kent’s bass strolls and heartbeats. Davey Lane is a young rooster strutting. Purple Sneakers is still every inner-west girl you’ve ever kissed. And How Much Is Enough? the perfect fullstop.

Encore? Sure. A divebombing Sound As Ever, a sprawling (literally and figuratively) Young Man Blues, Berlin Chair’s sparkle and shatter. Plus thanks, and advice from that guy with the guitar and the blue crushed-velvet trousers: “Take risks. Get out of your comfort zone. Fuck yourself up…” And “Be excellent to each other…”. In turn Rogers promises this band “Will keep making mistakes for you”. Long may they do so.