SWEAT, SWEARING, AND SOOTHING SOUNDS: THE CHATS AT SWG3, GLASGOW, 24/3/2022.



Well, this gig has certainly been a long time coming. It had to get cancelled a couple of times after the smothering discomfort blanket of the snotter-death plague descended on us all in 2020, and I had almost given up hope of seeing the Australian social media-catapulted shed rock band come to Scotland, having missed them the last time they played.

Compounding my misery on that score was the fact that, by the time they played this time round, they were literally not the same band whose first album I glowingly reviewed here in 2020:

https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-chats-high-risk-behaviour-review.html

Amazing guitarist Josh ‘Pricey’ Price had left for others pastures, for reasons I still have zero clue about, to be replaced by Josh ‘No Idea Of His Nickname’ Hardy of some Queensland rockabilly band contemporaries of The Chats, appropriately called The Unknowns. So I would be seeing a literal different band than the one I fell in love with in 2017, and I was not entirely sure what I was going to see.

Mind you, I was not the only one in Scotland to get immediately into this band: High Risk Behaviour, their album, went to number 15 in the Scottish charts which, given their drunken and self-destructive subject matter, does not surprise me one bit. Whether it saddens me is another story for another day, mind you.

So I drove through from just outside Kilmarnock to the SWG3 in Glasgow, a venue I had never been to before. I was hoping it would be easy to find, and there would be parking available. My engine light in the car has been on-and-off for weeks, so I was also hoping that the car would not break down or explode on the way (you’re not meant to do high speeds when that light is on), sending me spraying all over the motorway in an onlooker-entertaining, Youtube-uploaded-video cloud of sparks and blood and screams of impotent vehicle-cursing fury. And obviously I survived, or you’d be reading this through a medium and a fucking Ouija board.

So I got through to Glasgow and made my way to the area where the venue was. It looked pretty damned shady, like something from Mad Max: Fury Road, as I pulled up and parked nearby. The venue was at the end of a cul-de-sac, but there was an overhead railway right next to it, so it added to the clanking, grinding, post-industrial scummy surreality of the place.

There were hordes of young teenagers in a queue, milling round, screaming and drinking and pissing in the street, shooting videos, having limitless, parents-free fun. Dressed in bright garish day-glo colours, they were obviously not here for The Chats, and it looked like an under-18s disco or rave was on at a different part of the same venue or something. As a middle-aged man it made me feel very, very old, and somewhat sleazy, to be honest, like I had no real reason to be here. I took some photays of cool murals on the wall the teens were lined along and waited for my pal Scanny, whom I have not seen in the flesh for a good couple of years, for obvious reasons, and I have known since the 80s.






The Scanman turned up eventually and we went down to the front of the very small punk queue and got into the sold out gig, heading, as ever, to the bar, where we had a pint and caught up a bit. The venue itself was more like a WWII concrete bomb shelter, sparse and minimalist and concrete and grey as fuck. I mused to Scanny that at least there wouldn’t be much structural damage if there was a tragic, everything-and-everyone-engulfing fire. It was not a place I liked much, built like some sort of animal trough you could probably just spray down with hoses to get rid of beer and sweat and blood once the kids had left, brutalism meets sweaty youngsters and loud over-amped-hornets’-nest music. The acoustics would be interesting, at least.

So we made our way down to the front stage right, feeling our age. Most people there were at least a third to half our age, and the older you get going to punk gigs the freakier it gets. Still, better than sitting in the house on the net ranting about the decline of Western civilisation, I suppose, weeping bitter tears of hopeless grief over a wasted life, abusing mimes and jugglers on internet forums.

Always good to get out and about.

Before the first band started, an attractive young Irish woman of round 21 years old started talking to us when her boyfriend was away at the bar or bog or something. She was studying occupational therapy, and we talked about me having worked as a carer and recognising how important a job she was studying for. Her boyfriend came back and eyed Scanny and us curiously, briefly, but instantly realised we were no threat to him.

She clearly recognised the same thing, that she could talk to two middle-aged men without us taking it as a come-on. I am sure she would not have talked to us if we had been round her own age, as we might have taken that as her hitting on us. Maybe she was missing her dad back in Ireland! Funny to be regarded as deranged defanged father figures, and I am chuckling here. Just funny how crowd and conversational dynamics change as you get older. If she only knew…


The first band of the evening were Dennis Cometti, an Australian snapping, snarling surfpunk trio. They’re apparently named after a retired Aussie sports commentator. The sports angle of things came through in their yobby footy clobber, all shorts and cut-off sleeve tops, perfect for cold wet Scottish weather, which reminded me of the gear that legendary bogan Paul Hogan used to wear in his Hoges and Strop skit:


They were pretty damned good, and the first song of theirs I looked up (I had never heard of them before the day of the gig) made me want to go into a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland and fight for petrol; with prices what they are these days, it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch:

                                              

Insulting Australian clichés and stereotypes aside, they were a very entertaining, blood-buzzing start to the evening, made all the cooler by the mullet and moustache on the mad bastirt guitarist. He looked like this nutter I very vaguely knew back in Falkirk years ago who is in prison for murder now, which added to the whole experience. I liked when they did I (H8) The CBD, cos I have no idea what they were talking about. Magic! Sure the CBD are worth h8ing though, anyway, the cunts, so fuck it.

                                               

Soon enough, though, the sun-sand-surf-spilling, acronym-confusion-sowing power trip were off, and the second support band of the evening were on, the English quintet Chubby and the Gang. Can’t say I was impressed. Not much you can say when the first song you look up before seeing them totally rips off the riff from Disco 2000 by Pulp wholesale:

                                                  

The poser singer looked like a young Jonathan Ross (minus speech impediment), and as Scanny put it, “If he was chocolate he’d eat himself.” He peacock-strutted across the stage to the band’s uninspiring tunes, making Henry Rollins poses constantly, doing endless ranting about the Metropolitan Police (that’s what you get for living in that dump London, mate) and how shit they were. Ho-hum. Getting frequently arrested for crimes against music can take its toll on a man’s soul, I would imagine. It was one band member’s birthday, but I couldn’t sing Happy Birthday to somebody named ‘Razor,’ no matter how much goodwill I tried to muster. The inclusion of an attractive young female bass player was the only thing saving this boring band from being unlistenable to me. Shrug. Next!

                            
                                                      Scanny salutes Chubby and the Gang.

Who were, of course, The Chats, the main Antipodean sonic course of the night, after the variable-quality whores d’oeuvre. They bounced and bounded in stage left, and apologised for the length of time it had taken to see them. They did a song or two, starting with Nambored, with the Glaswegian crowd (notorious on this island) going mental as usual. Then Eamon stopped and spit up into the air, catching most of it in his mouth. Clearly not quite got the hang of this punk gobbing malarkey yet.

The ginger-minge ear-ringer (what happened to the mullet, Eamon?) then did a heartwarming, eloquent speech about people watching out for and looking after each other. But the pendulous thread-thin slobber dribble hanging from his neck, swaying this way and that before snapping and splatting onto the floor, did detract from his public safety announcement, I must admit. As if to instantly prove him wrong, a young really drunk guy, late teens or so, behind me, riding on somebody’s shoulders, took a tumble, and I heard his body and head hit the cold unyielding concrete with a sickening hard bonecrunching snapthud. “Are you alright?” I asked him in concern, as his pals helped him up off the floor, and he grinned and bounced away. “Showing my age by asking if he’s alright,” I grinned to one of his pals, and he chuckled. Bet you the wee bugger felt it the next morning though, as drunkenly youthfully invincible as he was right then.

So were the band any good, you are asking. And yes they were, is the answer. You know what it’s like when a guitarist, or any major band figure, leaves a band, it takes a while to warm up to their replacement, and sometimes you never do – the new Dead Kennedys singer is a case in point, and he can never replace Jello Biafra. So I was very curious to see how Josh Hardy (who bears more than a passing resemblance to the late Bill Hicks, to me) would perform. There have only been a scant handful of songs with his input on them released onto the net, and I was slightly dubious about him, until the recent, excellent Struck By Lightning – that sealed the deal for me.

                                                
The band were very tight, having evolved from a barely-functioning half-joke from round the time of Smoko in 2017, to the arsekicking venom-spitting trio of today. Hardy messed up a couple of guitar ram-parts, which seemed to annoy the ginger singer, but the guitartist appeared to have done some sort of injury to his hand, so perhaps having an off night was to be expected a bit. But it never fell apart, and I realised that he was really bringing a more metal sound to the band than his predecessor. Which is fine, cos the laddie can play.

(Pricey seems to be wandering round in the sonic desert right now, not quite sure what he is doing, jumping musical styles from hardcore to mainstream pop-punk, so seeing where he ultimately settles will be interesting – he can certainly still SLF (Shred Like Fuck) anyway, and is still one of my all-time fave guitarists. His sound was so integral to High Risk Behaviour that it would not have been anywhere near the same without him, in its eager breakneck sulph-snorting rush to jarringly pogo from one mad amazing guitar solo to the next.)

Josh 2.0 did the songs decent justice in playing them, though I wasn’t quite as fond of them live as I am listening to them on the album. It will be interesting to see what their next album sounds like, with Josh II playing on them, evolving beyond their first incantation incarnation. Sure the results will be pretty good, if this was anything to go by. Stepping into big shoes to fill after a band member leaves is never an easy thing, so I would say congratulations Josh The Sequel, you won me over, for what that’s worth.




The band did what I consider to be some of my absolute all-time fave punks songs of recent times: 4573, Billy Backwash’s Day, and Ross River. They also did the firm fan faves like (of course) Smoko and Pub Feed and Bus Money (which contains the amazing, all-time-classic rhyming couplet “I spent my bus money on a sausage roll/I’d have more money if I wasn’t on the dole”) and Nazi March, and it was all great stuff, the crowd going absolutely apeshit for it all, two pent-up years of covid trial and terror and shit and nonsense dissolving in a short clipped precise punk velocity sound-atrocity burst from hurtling hardcore tip to toe.

I have idly wondered about what Eamon would write about, in his hilarious and laconic way, after seemingly expressing the parameters of their chewing-bogan-slanguage lyrical concerns in the couple of EPs and album they had put out: getting drunk constantly, blistering heat, smoke breaks, being unemployed and skint, mad drunk cunts from their home town, and getting STDs. Apparently, according to the two new songs they premiered, the answer is lighters (Jet Lighter) and fast cars (Six Litre GTR). Couldn’t really make out what was being sung, what with jumping around like an old fool and all, but it sounded pretty good anyway. The singer, a graduate from the Johnny Rotten School of Gurning and Angry Enunciating (maybe it’s a redhair-identi-thing), has a real way with wayward words, easily conjuring up flickering, buzzy, dipsomaniac portraits of the zoomers and loonies and bums and scum that comprise the dregs of society in his home town, and indeed, in his friend circle, and in the band as well. He’s actually a writer whose stuff I look forward to hearing when he brings out a new song, and diving into the next album will be fun.

Speaking of jumping around frantically when you’re basically too old for it. It’s a problem with me. I always say that I am not going to leap about like a maddo when I go to see a band, but then they come onstage…the music starts…and I just can’t help myself. Fuck it. I fistpump-bumped and jumped around for about the first third of the gig. Then I fell over, and people started looking like they were going to fall onto me…and we all know that that’s not something you want in a packed, angry, energetic environment. “HELP ME! HELP ME!” I pathetically squealed (laughing out loud as I think about it here) like an old lady who had fallen over and broken her hip, unable to get back up, waving my hands above me, dark sweaty big-young-man flesh clouds threatening to burst over me, before a couple of guys dragged me up and slapped me on the back and sent me on my shaken way. After that, I had learned my hastily chastened lesson, and, restraining myself, refrained from pitfalling.

And that really will be me done with that.

Until the next time.

As I said, the band were tight. Eamon muttered scattershot drivel dribbles in between songs, nonsense syllables; Josh waded into guitar responsibilities with ease and style and, as ever, Matt ‘No Nickname Either’ Boggis, the drummer, just skinspounded away on his small functional drumkit, metronome-like, effortless, ho-fucking-hum. He always looks bemused in band videos, like he can’t quite believe he’s there, never quite buying into whatever outlandish scenario is presented, from buying drugs on the net to dining-and-dashing to being struck by zigzaggy skystorm electrofryery.

My friend Paul (who used to be in the Falkirk pop-punk band Turtlehead many moons ago) and I used to bet which member would leave the band first, the unit seemed so chaotic, and we both figured it would be Matt, who was the surf-smiling intersection point in between the eternally angry Eamon and blandly smiling Pricey. We were both wrong, obviously. But he’s perfect for the band, so more power to him.

“This is a song by a band who’ve meant a lot to us in our lives,” Eamon gravely intoned at one point, and kicked off into a cover of a song by Antipodean children’s telly anarchists The Wiggles, Can You (Point Your Fingers And Do The Twist):

                                                  

Eamon was not joking when he said what he did in kicking the song off. One amusing thing that happened because I got sidelined by (A) work commitments and (B) a snotty grungy brain-incapacitating headcold in writing this review late (sorry, James Sherry!) was that I got to see an article about ReWiggled, which is the album the Chats cover comes from. It’s a platter of reworkings by a load of artists of Wiggles songs. In the article, the mistyeyed (beer or weed perhaps?) scowler-howler waxes lyrical about dressing up as the programme’s pirate character Captain Feathersword:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/apr/05/how-the-wiggles-took-over-the-world-and-got-the-cool-kids-on-side-too

The photo from that piece is worth reproducing, just for sheer surreality’s sake:

                                                       

What this does show is that Eamon Sandwith has a sense of humour about himself, and it was an oddly touching, slightly naïve thing to do. In a world of fake image engineering, the ginger-stinger does something incredibly uncool: he provides a photo of himself as a toddler to a major newspaper (if you consider The Guardian a major rag, that is) to prove his love for his childhood sonic heroes. In some ways he’s kind of an exaggerated, comedic cartoon caricature of a punk singer himself, so he’s like a young, drunk Wiggle. The Wiggles themselves responded by doing an excellent, surf-guitar-inflected cover of Pub Feed:

                                  
The band went, after less than an hour with no encore, off into the bilious bowels of the brutalist building. I was wearing my Wake in Fright “NEW TO THE YABBA?” teeshirt, hoping to get to meet the band and get my photo taken with them, but no such luck.

                                                    

The Yabba teeshirt is from the classic 1971 Australian nightmare drink-drowned film Wake in Fright, which I thought was appropriate, given all the drinking songs the band do. If you have not seen this film, do yourself a favour and watch it. It’s an absolute classic:

                                    


And that, as they say, was that. I waited for a while at the back while Scanny bought some stuff. A young morbidly obese woman wandered past me on the way out, saying/shouting loudly: “If ah see another guy wi his top off, ah’m gonnae be sick!” Either of the Sapphic persuasion, or unable to get a man; either way, her melodramatically over-amped gripe was kind of hilariously see-through. Scanny eventually got served and we headed out into the bracing, sweaty-tee-chilly night Glasgow air. A young woman said she liked my shirt and asked about it. I told her to watch the film on Youtube. It was actually funny; I genuinely had five or six people tell me they liked the shirt, but none of them had seen Wake in Fright. I directed them all to it. That’s another few converts for the kangaroo-killing, beer-swilling, arse-filling cause! Every little helps. Being a pro, I had brought a change of teeshirt in the car, and changed when we got to it. Nobody had smashed the windows and grabbed anything, which is always a bonus. You never know in these dodgy Glasgow areas.

Bonus: after the gig, this hilarious incident apparently happened, though I never personally saw the cheeky wee imposter:

https://twitter.com/thechatsband/status/1507396358193487895

I drove Scanny home and we sat and blethered for ages, catching up, reminiscing, taleswapping, life-explaining, future plotting and planning, you know how that goes, before I headed off in the early hours of the morning back to Kilmarnock. Great driving at that time cos there’s no traffic on the road, obviously, though I did still wonder if I would be killed in my faulty car on the way home. I couldn’t even distract myself by listening to a CD because the CD player in my car has had a bloody Nanowar of Steel CD stuck in it for around a year or so now. Oh well. Managed to get home alive, having had an extremely pleasant evening, well worth the long-overdue wait for it to happen. Can’t wait until next time. Let’s hope it’s not as long again. Give us loud music lovers a break, epidemics, eh? Disease is for cunts.

In closing. My friend, documentarian Andrew Leavold, is putting the finishing touches on a new documentary called Pub, about Fred Negro (real name), the deranged Australian cartoonist and punk singer. I just want to get a plug for that in here, because it fits the subject matter (sure the band will know who Negro is) and it looks great. So here’s the trailer. Keep an eye out for it. Cheers!

                                    

THE END
















 

 


























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