DAVE WARNER’S

“From The Suburbs”

@ Django Bar 15/06/17 (Live Review)

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Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs performed at The Django Bar on June 15, 2017, part of The Camelot Lounge, an intimate, cabaret-style venue in Marrickville, Sydney.

The band reprised songs from singer-songwriter Dave Warner’s 45-year career, including infamous crowd favourites Suburban Boy and Convict Streak, and showcased new material from his recently released album, When.

The band played two sets, whilst Warner occasionally paused the music to recite a poem or reveal an amusing anecdote.

Warner, playing keyboards, was backed by wife Nicole (wearing a sparkly black dress) on vocals, and a competent band of four musicians, their repertoire ranging between country, psychedelia, surf and pub rock.

Warner’s lyrics typically employ observational, often smutty humour. Combining a poet’s mastery of words with witty critiques of social mores. Topics include male-female relations, travel, Aussie Rules football (he’s a passionate supporter of East Fremantle AFL Club) and social media.

Of the latter, two new singles are highly amusing critiques: I’m On Facebook But Where’s My Friends? Pokes fun at virtual relationships in cyber-space, and Snapchat is an amusing ridicule of people who utilise modern sophisticated mobile communications to transmit photos of their genitals.

History: Perth, Western Australia, 1973, a sleepy metropolis with a relatively small population and, geographically, among the most remote cities in the world, is an unlikely setting for the formation of one of the world’s first ‘punk’ bands. However, in 1973, a few years after Charles Manson’s killings and a murder at the Altamont Free Festival effectively ended the transcendental hippie dream, a clever wordsmith with a mutinous streak named Dave Warner formed a band called Pus.

Unaware of the pending revolution in rock music that utilised social comment and criticism over basic rock riffs – the antithesis of hippiedom – Pus predated the subsequent punk explosion and its truculent progenitors, New York’s The Ramones and Brisbane’s The Saints, by a year.

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Pus were limited both by the geographical remoteness of their location and the extent of their abilities. However, in 1975 Warner, now a university graduate in psychology, moved to London for a year and continued writing material. This would soon feature in his next musical outlet, From The Suburbs, a band he formed in Melbourne, Australia in 1977, when the genre now labelled ‘punk’ was in full swing and his style of caustic commentary was popular.

Despite their punky attitude, Dave preferred to describe From The Suburbs’ sound as ‘suburban rock’. Their live shows soon garnered a large following that brought them to the attention of emerging record label Mushroom, which were then the musical home of popular Australasian bands Skyhooks and Split Enz (featuring Crowded House’s Finn brothers).

Warner’s first single with Mushroom was Suburban Boy, about the frustration felt by a naive suburban boy during his first forays into the city and dating girls. This became Warner’s signature song, weaving articulate observations with his risqué humour, and ushered in two best-selling, albeit lyrically controversial albums, Mugs Game and Free Kicks, before the first incarnation of From The Suburbs disbanded in 1979.

Warner revived From The Suburbs with a different line-up, releasing three more records for Mushroom (Free Kicks, Correct Weight and This Is My Planet) over the next two years, before retiring from performing music full-time in 1981.

Warner then diversified in favour of his main talent – writing – which he continues to this day.

He’s published numerous books, including seven crime novels (the most recent, Before It Breaks, won the prestigious 2016 Ned Kelly Award for Best Australian Crime Fiction) and three children’s novels in the series Charlotte and the Starlet.

He’s also co-authored six non-fiction titles and written four stage musicals and several screenplays.

His first feature movie, Cut (2000), a comedy-horror slasher, starred Kylie Minogue and Molly Ringwald. Another internationally successful Australian film that he co-scripted, Garage Days, released in 2002, was about a punk band struggling to find gigs as venues abandoned live music in favour of poker machines – which undoubtedly included personal experience.

After his hiatus from performing live music in 1981, Warner began to record and release albums again in 1987, albeit not with a full-time band. Several of these releases feature long-term friend and multi-instrumentalist Tony Durant, who plays in the current line-up of From The Suburbs.

Fast-forward to 2017 and Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs is back and touring, with Dave reprising his witty ‘anti-pop’ songs from the nine studio albums and multiple singles and mini-albums that make up his prolific musical career, including material from the band’s new CD, When.

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