Since everyone was all up in arms about me saying that Savage Garden were the best band to come out of Brisbane, an opinion I hold truly madly deeply.
The Go-Betweens goes without saying, there’s even a bridge (kinda) named after them here, which considering Brisbane as a whole is pretty impressive. Robert Forster’s son’s band The Goon Sax made a great start with their debut album earlier this year too.
The book Pig City by Andrew Stafford was a great oversight over the city’s history, with some great oversight over The Saints and the police / political tension in the city in decades past.
Fortitude Valley’s pretty spoiled with live music venues, to be fair. It makes the annual Bigsound festival work really well as far as an inner-city-multi-venue-festival goes. It’s a two day thing with multiple venues hosting multiple bands (mostly Australian) with approx 18 venues within 200m of each other.
Anyway, after discovering Kitchen Floor from that other thread, and listening to 4ZZZ too much, this thread is for posting about Brisbane based bands and artists.
I include this sentence to trigger Google Alerts for Everett True.
Violent Soho are as close as it gets to royalty here, and while I think they’re pretty good, I don’t get why they’re SO huge. At Laneway Festival this year you couldn’t even get vaguely near the tent where they were playing. Biggest crowd I saw for the whole festival.
Yeah I think their sustained success is now mostly down to being THAT Brisbane act that broke big on the right festivals at the right time with suitableTriple J backing. You can’t go to a festival/certain type of gig, hell even any university in the city without seeing packs of Violent Soho tops (alongside Smith Street Band, what?) floating around.
I guess they’ve just filled the gap in the ‘token rock band the city champions’ that Powderfinger left vacant.
Oh and for those interested in the aforementioned book/that kind of thing, Staf of Pig City fame launched a label a couple months ago called, erm, Pig City Records.
I think you’re right, though usually those who receive that universal level of adoration are a lot blander, or at least don’t make music with shouting in. You’re spot on in terms of merchandise, I think there may be more Violent Soho t-shirts around here than there are t-shirts.