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BOB MOULD
+ Jack Bratt
@ The Triffid, Brisbane,
1st December 2024
(Live Review)

Review and photos by Alec Smart (@alecsmart_fotos)

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Bob Mould, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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Bob Mould, the former singer-guitarist with 1980s melodic hardcore band Hüsker Dü, and later, Sugar, performed the last night of his 2024 solo Australian tour at The Triffid in central Brisbane.

The tour, titled simply ‘Solo Electric’, covered three dates in three capital cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane) and was billed as his returning “for the first time since 2012 to perform Highlights from his Solo Career plus Hüsker Dü and Sugar Classics!”

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Jack Bratt, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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Main support on the tour was singer-guitarist Jack Bratt, a veteran of Australian bands Shifter and Blonde On Blonde. Fresh off a tour opening for former Shihad singer Jon Toogood, Bratt performed a set of his own songs whilst sat on a stool.

Bratt’s songs are slow ballads with country and blues influences. He often starts a song playing a series of chords that he then digitally repeats via a looper pedal, over which he plays lead guitar scales.

Bratt strummed his new tricolour Fender Telecaster guitar that was inspired by the late country & western Texan music star Buck Owens, who performed on a signature red, white and blue striped acoustic guitar. Bratt’s is coated in silver flecks that sparkle under the stage lights.

Bratt has a new song, Twelfth of Never, released the week before he went on tour with Mould. You can listen or download it, along with songs from his 2022 album, Slow Release, at this weblink.

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Jack Bratt, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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Bob Mould ascended to the stage without introduction or fanfare, plugged in his black Fender Stratocaster guitar, checked the tuning, then flicked a switch and launched an avalanche of fast, melodic songs. This pace continued unabated for the next hour with a surprising intensity for a 64-year-old known for his calm disposition.

He began his set with The War, from his 2014 album Beauty and Ruin, then performed a few tracks from his earlier band days, Flip Your Wig and I Apologise (Hüsker Dü) and Hoover Dam (Sugar), which went down well with the audience, the majority of whom were over-50s.

In the 1980s – 90s, when these songs were often heard on independent radio and at punk rock parties, the crowd might have been slam-dancing from Mould’s vitality exuding from the stage. Except this was an Australian audience, not known for their agility, and in the early summer humidity of sub-tropical Brisbane, everyone remained still, conserving their energy.

Mould then continued with a medley of songs from his long, post-Sugar solo career – all delivered with the same fiery intensity, which saw him occasionally reeling away from the microphone and pacing around the stage like an angry tiger in a cage.

Mould is like a punk rock Paul McCartney with an enviable ability to weave together an ear-pleasing sequence of chords. At times this reviewer felt the addition of a backing band would have been an improvement, adding another layer to Mould’s wall-of-distorted-guitar sound, and reinforcing the strong melodies.

In addition to recording six studio albums with Hüsker Dü and three with Sugar, Mould has released 13 studio albums since 1989 (Hüsker Dü split in 1988), plus an album collaboration with Richard Morel under the name BlowOff, and an album of electro dance music as LoudBomb – an anagram of his name.

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Bob Mould, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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Incidentally, ‘Mould’ is his real family name, not a punk rock epithet like ‘Vicious’ or ‘Rotten’, although Americans spell the word ‘mould’ without a ‘u’.

Despite achieving limited mainstream commercial success throughout his long career, Mould’s musical influence has been acknowledged by popular ‘alternative’ bands, including Pixies, Green Day, and Foo Fighters.

Mould has often been called the ‘Godfather of Grunge’ acknowledging how Hüsker Dü were among the key bands that inspired the post-punk ‘grunge’ genre that spawned Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.

At The Triffid, Mould played another trio of Hüsker Dü tracks – the depressing duo of Too Far Down and Hardly Getting Over It from the Candy Apple Grey album (1986) which primarily consisted of introspective songs about sadness and loneliness.

Surprisingly, these were the songs that incited the biggest audience response, with many in the crowd singing passionately to the heartfelt, albeit somewhat miserable lyrics. Not sure if that says something about living in Brisbane, but it might hark back to the era when those singing along first heard these songs as youths.

In 1986, when the Candy Apple Grey album was released, Queensland was being governed by the infamous Joh Bjelke-Petersen, aka ‘the Hillbilly Dictator’, a tyrannical Lutheran who gerrymandered electoral boundaries, corrupted authorities and ran it like a Police State. Punks, hippies, anti-Apartheid campaigners and alternative-types were consistently harassed by bullying police.

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Bob Mould, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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During that authoritarian era high-profile homosexuals like Bob Mould (a self-confessed ‘gay bear’, i.e. bearded and stout, who, in May 1983, married his lookalike partner Don Fisher) wouldn’t have been headlining a city-centre music concert attracting a large punky audience, for fear of being raided by cops.

Mould then performed Celebrated Summer, a personal favourite of this reviewer, perhaps one of the best utilisations of the D-C-G-A progression of any song utilising those four chords.

Mould continued with a few more from his solo repertoire, including his most recent track, The Ocean, released in 2022.

After thanking the audience at the show’s terminus, we were then treated to a hardcore encore of four fast early-era numbers without him leaving the stage.

They included Sonny Curtis’ Love Is All Around, the theme song for 1970s TV series The Mary Tyler Moore Show (not the Wet Wet Wet cover!), which Hüsker Dü boosted in 1984 as a power-pop ballad.

Then Mould finished on the Hüskers’ Makes No Sense, but, despite the humidity, we had no problems making sense of it all.

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Bob Mould, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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Set List

The War
Flip Your Wig (Hüsker Dü cover)
I Apologise (Hüsker Dü cover)
Hoover Dam (Sugar cover)
Stand Guard
Siberian Butterfly
Sinners And Their Repentances
The Descent
I’m Sorry Baby But You Can’t Stand In My Light Any More
Next Generation
Walls In Time
Keep Believing
Too Far Down (Hüsker Dü cover)
Hardly Getting Over It (Hüsker Dü cover)
Celebrated Summer (Hüsker Dü cover)
The Ocean
Daddy’s Favourite
Black Confetti
Something I Learned Today (Hüsker Dü cover)
If I Can’t Change Your Mind (Sugar cover)
Love Is All Around (Sonny Curtis cover)
Makes No Sense (Hüsker Dü cover)

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Bob Mould, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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Check out Alec Smart’s (@alecsmart_fotos) full gallery of this event HERE

Check out Lucas Packett’s (@lucas.packett.photography) full gallery of the Melbourne event (The Forum, 28th November 2024) HERE

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Bob Mould, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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Follow BOB MOULD
Website – Instagram – Facebook – X

Follow JACK BRATT
Instagram – Facebook – Spotify

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Bob Mould, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 1 Dec 2024

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Press Release 1st November 2024 (below) HERE

BOB MOULD
touring Australia next month

Returning for the
first time since 2012

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AMNPLIFY – DB