MUSIC
TISM: Death to Art
Sidney Myer Music Bowl, November 9
★★★★★
Given (gestures around) all of this, perhaps moving into the 21st century was a bad move, after all. So here we are at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl pretending it’s 1999. Art-rock terrorists TISM are the main attraction, along with a double-take-worthy line-up of bands who were a big deal last time TISM headlined a show two decades ago.
“Time doesn’t exist!” declares The Mavis’ Matt Thomas, alongside his sister Becky, dressed almost exactly like she was when their hit Cry came out in ’98. The night is full of proclamations like that. “DEATH TO ART” is scrawled in red across the stage backdrop. “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth,” says Ben Lee, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde and donning a TISM-inspired balaclava, before playing Catch My Disease to a crowd willing to suspend their traumatic associations with words like “mask”, “truth”, and “disease” for one night.
Dressed in red coveralls and matching balaclavas with red foam mohawks TISM look like alien priests.Credit: Martin Philbey
The crowd, who would have been in their late teens the first time these bands hit, is awash with picnic blankets and grey hair. Sharehouse chore rosters have been replaced with community Facebook groups, and pingers have been replaced with little Proustian madeleines of songs that fill you with bittersweet nostalgia.
Machine Gun Fellatio, reuniting after 19 years, were once renowned for a kind of crassness that is long out of fashion now, all circus, seediness, and terrible hats, but being out of fashion suits them. Songs like Mutha Fu__a on a Motorcycle and Unsent Letter veer beautifully between the ridiculous and the sublime.
TISM fans welcomed the chance to return briefly to a simpler era.Credit: Martin Philbey
But the five stars are for TISM. Performing in red coveralls and matching balaclavas with red foam mohawks, they look like alien priests. Behind them is a three-level scaffold on which 15 artists in PPE paint on 15 canvasses. The crowd boo them affectionately as they blast through an energetic stage show, dancing and bumping chests. More bad taste ensues: songs like What Are Ya?, Saturday Night Palsy and Defecate on my Face whip up a flurry of crowdsurfing.
Then, the pièce de resistance: the painted canvasses now complete, the band throw them into the audience during (You’ll Never Be An) Old Man River. They’re torn to pieces in seconds, to chants of “I’m on the drug that killed River Phoenix”. After mere glimpses of these artworks, they’re gone for good.
