Day 5: Perth

2024 Australia Summer Tour
Written By Benjamin Sinclair

Welcome

Yesterday we enjoyed a relaxing day in downtown Perth and played a headline show in the evening.

It was Labour Day, and the streets were quiet when we descended from our rooms in search of sustenance. Most of the café owners on our street had shuttered up, deciding to enjoy this public holiday for themselves – and fair enough – but a few blocks away Little Willy’s was taking advantage of the increased business that this brought, and churning out unpretentious and reasonably priced meals and enjoying a busy patronage. Tristan and I were seated by a cheerful staff member and didn’t take long to order the same thing off the menu – the raspberry porridge with banana and slivered almonds. Liz turned up shortly afterwards and we all dined together, enjoying a slow and easy start to the day.

We returned to the hotel and after putting Tristan down for his afternoon nap I headed downstairs to get some writing done. I found myself a table in the deserted hotel bar where the accompaniment from the Bathurst 500 playing on the big screen and the virtuosic smooth saxophone coming from the small speakers recessed in the ceiling did their best to get my creative juices pouring.

Eventually though the smooth saxophone playing began to distract me with its power and grace and I put down my fingers for a while to enjoy the powerful sounds, the many climaxes. I took out my phone and made a field recording so I could share my experience. Then I shazammed the song and found out that it was Gerald Albright, the talented Los Angelean who had starred in this recording, and I stored that information away so I could come back and find his album at a later date.

Skyscrapers jutted up into a clear blue sky, glinting in the bright sunlight while obscuring the horizon and suggesting to my temporal lobe that I was in an isolated desert city like Phoenix, or Albuquerque. It was midway through the afternoon and I was in Perth’s museum district, standing outside a beige brick building that is home to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and thankfully this public institution had remained open across the public holiday weekend. The next ninety minutes were joyful and heavy, roughly painted with emotions and ideas that often remained just outside comprehension, evading the conscious mind, but soaking through into my chest. Glass Blower Yhonnie Scarce’s exhibition was the focal point of the gallery and the powerful centrepieces Thunder Raining Poison, and Death Zephyr draw from the experiences of her ancestors, displaced from their homes by the Australian Government to make way for the 1956 Maralinga nuclear test, and subsequently victims of the fallout and radioactive clouds that rained across the region.

At 4:15pm we all assembled in the hotel lobby, rested and ready to start our workday. Our equipment was retrieved from the luggage room and we piled everything into the back of the Staria which set out for the venue with Liz at the controls. It didn’t take us long to drive the few kilometres to the Rosemount Hotel and when we arrived, we were pleased to find a pair of empty car parks and easy load-in awaiting us. It was a neat and tidy establishment. Everything on and around the stage was labelled and organised and in a historic first our tech rider was even printed and neatly pinned to the wall; we knew at this point that our setup would be a breeze. This process flowed gently into a soundcheck and by the time we arrived at 6:30pm Gabe was happy with what he was hearing at Front of House, and we awarded ourselves a gig-ready certification.

We drifted upstairs to the green room and ordered dinner, relaxing into some deep couches, and looking forward to playing a nice, early set, and the subsequent early night that we would get to enjoy. It was at a very civilised 7:30pm that the first downbeat fell for Juice Webster as she opened the show, alone on stage this time, playing stripped back versions of the same songs we had heard in Sydney a few nights ago. This gentle offering was warmly received by a full room of Perthians who were respectfully quiet and accepted her delicate guitar playing and dulcet vocal with open arms.

At 8:30pm we played our own first downbeat, and then continued with thousands more of them as we eased into a Monday night stroll, a calm but energetic performance that suited the burbling energy of the room. The Rosemount Hotel has a nice performance space, a medium sized room, pleasantly asymmetrical with a bar along one wall and plenty of elevated areas scattered around for those that require a vantage point. The feeling from up on stage is that you are inside a very organic assembly, embraced from all sides by a static swarm, quietly buzzing in place. It felt intimate, like a club show should, and we thoroughly enjoyed being up close and personal with our audience.

When we returned to our hotel the streets were empty and quiet. We unloaded everything from the van, stashing it in the luggage room and headed upstairs to rest.

The bathroom blind getting put to use before bedtime.

Benjamin Sinclair
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