Three bands you might not have heard of.

We’re a pretty international mob here at Yelling About Music. Not only do we hail from three different countries, but in fact three different continents. Which is neither here nor there, really, except that it helps to explain why today I’ve decided to tell you all about three bands that have been doing the rounds and building substantial reputations for themselves here in Melbourne, Australia, where I live.

I haven’t always lived in Melbourne. In fact I’ve only been here for three years; but in those three years I’ve comfortably been to more gigs than I had in the entire twenty-five years I was around before I moved down here. Melbourne’s like that: when even a judge on the cravenly bottom-dollar Australian Idol refers to a city as “Australia’s live music capital”, there must be some kind of scene worth sitting up and taking notice of. Naturally, most of these bands don’t get too much attention outside of Melbourne – which is where a site like this comes in.

I

There’s a phenomenon that people are fond of talking about here in Australia called the Cultural Cringe. It’s two-sided: first, it assumes that anything Australian is automatically inferior to anything from overseas; secondly, when in some cases this assumption is proven to be false, the Cringe dictates that this fact must be cause for great joy and celebration and pats on the back all round. It’s absurd, of course, but it’s a difficult habit to break out of. So it’s always a happy surprise when a band springs up that’s genuinely world-class. It doesn’t happen as often as we’d like, of course: a bunch of times in the 80s, supposedly, but not much since then. The last one of any significance might have been the Dirty Three, but it’s been pretty lean since then. So it’s with a slightly unsettling sense of pride that I can confirm that one of the greatest gigs that I’ve ever been to was last year, in Melbourne, and the band was a Melbourne band.

It was at the Salon room in the Spanish Club on Johnston Street in Fitzroy (now bitterly defunct as a major live music venue), and the band was Martin Martini and the Bonepalace Orchestra. The occasion was the launch of their debut studio album, entitled Dream Until You Die. The band had been around for a while by then, and the first time I’d seen them I’d quickly dismissed them as being overly gimmicky. The second time I’d seen them, at a friend’s urging, they were reaching the tail-end of a very long residency at a small out-of-the-way pub in Fitzroy, playing in front of small and not overly enthusiastic crowds. They were good, better than I remembered them being, but I didn’t find them particularly gripping. I left early, though not without regrets at missing the remainder of the set. But by the time the Spanish Club gig rolled around, I was well and truly a fan. This was largely because I’d finally hit upon the band in its natural habitat: upstairs at Bar Open, on the famous Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, which is surely the epicentre of the Melbourne live music scene.

A great gig is composed of numerous parts that must all be working in harmony, and only one of them is the band itself. The audience, too, is important: if they’re not that into the music it’s hard to get swept away; on the other hand if they’re too into the music it’s hard to hear the band. But of course the venue is also crucial: some bands, like it or not, just don’t work in a large space. Doesn’t matter how full the space is, some bands just fall flat in all that air; but the same band could be a life-changing experience in a smaller venue. Some bands build up such a reputation at a particular venue that it’s difficult for the devoted fan to imagine them somewhere else; such is the case with Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra whenever they play at Bar Open, which they do fairly regularly. Sure, they play a lot of gigs at other venues, but whenever they play at Bar Open it feels like a homecoming. It helps, of course, that Martin Martini himself can be regularly spotted strolling around Fitzroy (often putting up posters for his own gigs: the Melbourne scene is nothing if not hands-on). Even so, when they play at the Evelyn, just down the road, it doesn’t quite feel right somehow. Perhaps it’s the fact that you have to climb up the stairs to the band-room at Bar Open, and then work your way around the corner so that you can snatch a glimpse of the band, and that by the time you’re there you’ll probably be crammed in with a lot of other people into a fairly small space, and everyone’s getting right into the music because if they weren’t they’d be downstairs, in the bar. Undoubtedly it helps that Saturday night gigs at Bar Open are always free: there’s something magical about discovering something so wonderful just by chance, because you wandered in to check out a free gig. I expect Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra have picked up a lot of fans that way.

Of course, all these are well and good but the final and, possibly, most vital component of a gig is the state of the gig-goer’s mind: if you’re not into it you’re just not into it, and it’s probably not the band’s fault. When I went to that album launch at the Spanish Club I was in a rather turbulent head-space: I’d received news that morning that my grandmother had died. She was 92 and had been ill, so it was neither tragic nor unexpected; but she’d been a constant presence in my life, so it was sad and, as death always is in one way or another, brutal news. If I’d received the news in the evening maybe I wouldn’t have felt like going out at all; but the phone call came at breakfast time, and by the time the sun went down and I’d been thinking about it all day I needed a release. I’d been looking forward to the gig for weeks, and I don’t think it even occurred to me not to go.

Still, as much as I’d been excited about the gig, I’d also been sceptical: the Spanish Club was not Bar Open. Bar Open is tiny, and sweaty, and almost like a secret; the Spanish Club was cavernous, and the only other gig I’d been to there (by Vulgargrad, on whom more later) had been sparsely attended. The room didn’t work too well with a small crowd. And if ever there was a band which could be defined as “cult” or “niche”, it was surely Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra.

At which point, of course, I should tell you a little bit about the band. First up, there’s Martin Martini himself. Mr. Martini writes the songs, and sings them, and plays keyboards, and does them all with the same sort of jumping-out-of-his-seat enthusiasm that Dr. Teeth brought to the band in the Muppets. He has a similar kind of voice, too, now that I think about it – a gruff, gravely voice, which he sometimes projects through a megaphone. The Bonepalace Orchestra is made up of drums, a tuba, a clarinet, and trombone, and a violin. When a guitarist was added at a recent gig, it was so unexpected that it merited a special announcement by Martini.

The music played by the band makes no secret of its debt to Tom Waits, with whirling and sometimes almost cataclysmic collisions of jazz and folk and anything and everything in between. Indeed, it might be easy to dismiss Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra as Tom Waits wannabes, were it not for the fact that the band is clearly having too much fun being themselves to be easily written off as anyone else. Furthermore, if this is Tom Waits then it’s Tom Waits with a distinctly Australian bent: not just in Martini’s singing accent (nine out of ten Australian bands sing in an faux-American or, less commonly, faux-British accent), but in the dark, dry yet ribald humour of his lyrics, for instance: “A child born ugly/Can make friends with a rat”; or “Well I’ve tried counting sheep/I’ve even tried the goats/But none seems to get across the fence/And the sleeping pills/Make my dick go hard/And I think about house insurance”; or “Lucky’s hanging from the ceiling/With a noose firmly round his neck/Frozen in space like a cupie doll/The blood rushes to his head/It’s about time he left this place/And Lucky smiles within/Till that old mud brick roof/Comes a tumblin’ in.” In Mr. Martini’s songs there are always death, and taxes, and sex, and birth, and god, and inebriation – in short, life, twisted, surreal, grim and uplifting, but always undeniably life. To bring the Dirty Three up again: Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra’s songs are like Warren Ellis’s fabled mid-gig monologues, rendered into song form.

Which is precisely why a Martin Martini gig was the greatest gig I could possibly have gone to on the day I heard that my grandmother had died. My fears about the Spanish Club were, it turns out, completely unfounded: the gig was sold out, and someone had sensibly moved the tables and chairs that were usually in the room out of the way, and Martin Martini held the entire crowd in his sway like some kind of joker-shaman, and the band teased and tempted and roared and whispered and the crowd clapped and danced and sweated and felt, for a couple of hours, like it had stumbled upon the most amazing religion in the world. And me, well, I didn’t forget about my grandmother’s death, but somehow the music of Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra helped me make sense of it. For at least those couple of hours, I understood that death was part of life, just like taxes, and sex, and birth, and inebriation, and all those other things we stumble into when we’re looking for something else – and that was all right.

II

As mentioned above, sometimes sharing the bill with Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra are another Melbourne band called VulgarGrad. It’s easy to see why the two bands go well on a bill together. They’re both great to dance to. They both have gruff-voiced singers. They both have an unusual instrumental line-up. And they both give off the same air of devil-may-care love for life, including the bad bits.

That VulgarGrad manages to convey this last point to the majority of the punters who regularly flock to their gigs is quite amazing, because the songs they sing are entirely in Russian. VulgarGrad play Russian criminal songs, with the occasional Russian punk song thrown in for good measure. They look snappy, all in hats (of varying kinds) and black-and-white striped t-shirts – the latter of which some of their more loyal fans have taken to wearing to gigs. And this is a band that builds loyalty.

It’s always a good sign, with a band singing songs from another country, when ex-pats from that country turn up to the band’s gigs time after time. At a VulgarGrad gig you’re more likely to hear Russian being spoken – or shouted jubilantly – than at any other time in Melbourne. I didn’t know there were so many Russians in Melbourne until I started going to VulgarGrad gigs; maybe there aren’t, maybe every single one of them goes to see the band. They’re in good company: the band also seems to have a sizeable following in the local punk community, though their music is not particularly punkish (even the punk covers). Plus, of course, there are the indie kids, which I guess is where I fit in. Well, also Russophiles in that case: it was the idea of hearing Russian criminal songs that first enticed me to go see the band.

That first gig was at the Old Bar, again in Fitzroy. As Bar Open is to Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra, so the Old Bar is to VulgarGrad. It’s sad to think that they might possibly be getting too popular to play there much longer: for the past couple of years they’ve appeared some time in autumn and set up camp in the Old Bar for a series of gigs that have seen more and more people cram into the tiny space each week. Once the band gets going there’s no room in there, but people dance anyway. It’s that kind of music. The band have self-released one short C.D., but I desperately hope that somebody records one of their gigs at the Old Bar because if ever there was a band that needed to be experienced live, it was VulgarGrad. It helps, of course, that their singer is the seasoned actor Jacek Koman (those of you reading this outside Australia will probably best know him as Tomas from Children of Men): he knows how to work a crowd, even when most of that crowd doesn’t have a clue what he’s saying (he stays in Russian mode almost exclusively throughout gigs, though he’s Polish in origin). He doesn’t engage the punters through grand gestures or wild actions; in fact, he’s quite reserved on stage. But like any good actor, every move he makes has maximum impact. And, of course, he knows how to use his voice: the meaning of words is only partly literal.

A VulgarGrad gig, when it’s up and going and their loyal fanbase has come out of the woodwork to support their heroes, is an electric and transcendent experience. Even more so than a gig Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra: with Martini and co the energy comes in a large part from the sense of discovery, from the fact that the music is so fresh and exhilarating that you can easily recall the first time you really started listening to it, and thus you can feel the excitement of those in the crowd who are experiencing that epiphany for the first time themselves. At a VulgarGrad gig, the excitement stems from being part of the in-crowd: from knowing that nobody in the city is having a better time or listening to better music than you, right at that moment. Being at a VulgarGrad gig is like being receiving a jolt from some other universe, and just barely getting a grasp of it before it disappears again; before the band disperses to their various other pursuits for the rest of the year, as they’re wont to do, and are unheard of for months on end. In those long months it all becomes a bit of a dream, something you vaguely recall and whisper to your friends about, without being able to fully explain just what happened. Still, there’s always next autumn.

III

The last band I’m going to talk about today couldn’t really be more different from the two discussed above. Anthony Atkinson & the Running Mates are one of the numerous bands who recorded for the much-loved, much-missed Candle Records, home to (the rather better-known) Lucksmiths, Simpletons, and Darren Hanlon, as well as the Mabels, of which Anthony Atkinson was the lead singer. If pushed to genre-box them, I suppose you’d say that Atkinson’s songs are pop-rock-alt-country-singer-songwriterish, which is a description that could be matched to any one of a thousand other bands currently doing the rounds. And it’s true, there’s nothing particularly unique or startling about Anthony Atkinson or his music – certainly when compared to Martin Martini & the Bonepalace Orchestra, or to VulgarGrad (who, although they are technically a covers band, play covers of songs that the vast majority of Australians have never had a chance to hear – and, as the saying goes, put their own stamp on them). But nonetheless, pretty much since the moment I first saw Anthony Atkinson perform (at one of Candle Records’ annual birthday gigs: I was there solely to see Darren Hanlon) he’s been one of my favourite singer/songwriters.

If anything, Atkinson is proof that if you do the old things well enough, you don’t have to do anything new. After all, it’s all very well listening to experimental or avant-garde or otherwise unusual music, but sometimes you just want to lie down and listen to good old-fashioned songs. Songs about people falling in love, and worrying about their girlfriends, and going for drives, and watching a bit too much T.V. Songs that have a solid beat, and a good tune, and are performed by musicians who all know what they’re doing and enjoy doing it, and what’s more do it really well. If that sounds like damning with faint praise then I can only apologise, and offer this endorsement: Anthony Atkinson is one of the finest songwriters currently working in Australia. Not musicians, nor composers, but songwriters: because writing a song is as much craft as it is art, and Atkinson nails the craft just about every time.

And the art, too, of course. With two solo albums under his belt, plus his previous career with the Mabels, Atkinson has been around long enough to know what he’s doing. If there’s a better break-up song than “Shifting Sands” I’m yet to hear it. Take this verse: “He kissed a girl who’s now on T.V./She can’t believe he tells everybody/She kissed the coach of the rowing team/But he doesn’t know she was only fifteen.” Atkinson cuts straight to the heart of the matter, but he trusts his audience enough to leave some gaps unfilled, some questions unanswered. He doesn’t create characters in his songs, so much as set scenes: sometimes jubilant, sometimes wry, and sometimes downright heartbreaking – I can’t imagine how anybody could hear “City of Gold”, the final song on his 2006 album Loyalty Songs, without wanting to cry.

Loyalty Songs saw Atkinson’s current band, the Running Mates, recorded for posterity, and that’s something music lovers everywhere should be thankful for. For the last couple of years this band has been playing the odd gig around the traps in Melbourne, and they’ve been getting better and better with each one. When he’s performing solo Atkinson is very much in the quiet singer-songwriter mode – but the band brings out the rock ’n’ roll in the man and in his songs. Sure, the songs remain as thoughtfully and gently worded as ever, but those words are driven home with a passion and energy that can sometimes seem lacking when it’s just Anthony Atkinson by himself. And this is not just because suddenly the songs have a drum-beat behind them: Atkinson also transforms, singing with spirit and striking every chord on his guitar like there’s a thousand essential words written right there in the notes, and the crowd just has to hear them. And this enthusiasm, of course, is readily transferred to the crowd: even now, remembering that slight pause before Atkinson and the band launch into a collective chorus of “Ba-ba ba baaa” to close out “Sunday Drives”, I catch my breath slightly. It’s this kind of moment that makes me rush to a gig every time I see his name on the bill.

I just hope that his next album includes “The Night Ruth Cracknell Died”.

http://www.martinmartini.com/ / http://www.myspace.com/martinmartiniandthebonepalaceorchestra

http://www.vulgargrad.com/ / http://www.myspace.com/vulgargrad

http://www.myspace.com/anthonyatkinson