X

+ Leadfinger + Golden Fang + Kill Dirty Youth

Live Review by Alec Smart

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X, celebrating their 40^th anniversary, performed at The Factory Theatre in Marrickville, Sydney, on Friday 21 July, supported by Leadfinger, Golden Fang and Kill Dirty Youth.

The audience was slow to arrive, and openers Kill Dirty Youth, a solid, driving grunge group from Melbourne, played to a near-deserted hall.

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Kill Dirty Youth

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Featuring twin distorted guitars, rumbling bass and tortured vocals, the five piece resemble Nirvana at their bleeding, screeching, manic-depressive best – compare them to Nirvana’s brutal Rape Me as opposed to their more melancholic and better known Come As You Are.

A young band, Kill Dirty Youth show a lot of promise with powerful songs that really rock.

Golden Fang succeeded them, a unit with a stronger emphasis on melodies, which brought to mind early R.E.M. and similar jangley guitar-led American college rock bands. Their set included a song about Clem’s cafe, a long-running fried chicken takeaway just a kilometre up the road, and I Cried The Day Doc Neeson Died, about sadness after Aussie rockers The Angels’ iconic frontman passed away.

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Golden Fang

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Leadfinger remind me of American stadium rockers like Free, Foreigner, Bad Company and Whitesnake, with the singer-guitarist performing dexterous guitar scales over fast and catchy riffs. Mid way through their set, he switched to a Rickenbacker electric guitar, known for its chiming ring (an instrument utilised by Golden Fang earlier), although the clearer sound didn’t diminish their overall sonic aggression.

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Leadfinger

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X, formed in Sydney in 1977, hail from the primeval fringe of Australian rock ’n’ roll. Their raw, hard-edged gritty sound, punctured by flourishes of rumbling bass, evolved in smokey inner-city venues peopled by tattooed bikers, leather-clad rockers, spiky punkers and assorted degenerates, most fuelled by combinations of narcotics, nicotine and hard liquor.

Celebrating 40 years the trio has not lost its caustic appeal and a host of old rockers, many of whom would have been in their late teens or early 20s when X pounded the beer-soaked stages of Sydney and Melbourne, hobbled in to enjoy the spectacle.

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On the previous night, original vocalist-guitarist Steve Lucas played a humble, seated solo show in the Golden Barley Hotel, a stone’s throw across the park from X’s gig at the Factory Theatre. Performing a mix of his own originals that sat well amidst a collection of old Blues classics, his voice was versatile and expressive, effortlessly alternating between moody 12-bar ballads and a raw rock growl, despite the challenge of a vintage Gibson guitar prone to going out of tune.

At The Factory, Lucas occasionally summoned a screech that resembled a jet engine prior to take-off, fine-tuned after many years of flying at peak performance.

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X

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The lion’s share of X’s set list was drawn from their first two albums, X-Aspirations and At Home With You, released in 1979 and 1985 respectively, and those that resonate most with fans. The former of these two, recorded in just five hours, was listed in 2010 among Australia’s top 100 rock and pop albums.

Although Lucas is the only original member, the revitalised trio still does justice to X’s sparse songs, despite the big hole left by former bassist Ian Rilen a founder member of hard rockers Rose Tattoo, who, sadly, succumbed to bladder cancer in October 2006.

Two other former X members also died prematurely: Steve Cafiero and Ian Krahe, the first drummer and guitarist, respectively, although people generally remember X in their most stable line-up from 1984 onwards, featuring Lucas, Rilen and Canberra drummer Cathy Green.

The current line-up includes former Hunters & Collectors’ drummer Doug Falconer, who shares a history with X in that he married Rilen’s ex-wife Stephanie; the pair of them played in Rilen’s post-X band Sardine V.

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X

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Incidentally, Rilen and Falconer co-wrote Stuck On You, which appeared on Hunters & Collectors’ 1986 album Human Frailty.

X and Hunters & Collectors often shared stages together and the latter band’s brass section, The Horns Of Contempt, performed on X’s second album At Home With You.

Ian Rilen’s boots are difficult to fill, but current bassist Kim Volkman does them justice with a similar downbeat-dominated style played fast and raw without any effects.

Volkman is the visual cent of the band, pounding at his low-slung instrument as he paced the stage like a caged tiger demanding release from captivity.

Popular songs included their long-term crowd pleasers I Don’t Want To Go Out, Infamy, Suck Suck, the ever-smutty Dipstick and the much-requested encore Oxford Street Nick, about the notorious Darlinghurst Police cells were many a young drunk punk spent a night sobering up back in the 1980s.

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The band also played two covers: John Lennon’s autobiographical ballad, Mother, with all the heart-rending emotion Lennon also mustered in this ode to his long-departed mum; and country artist Mark Dinning’s 1960 hit Teen Angel, about a girl struck by a train on a level crossing when she returned to her stalled car to retrieve an engagement ring.

A 40^th anniversary version of X’s debut album, with bonus tracks, was released to coincide with this tour.

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Check out Alec Smart’s gallery of this show HERE

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AMNPLIFY – DB