This is bass-heavy punk rock from Sydney with an initial "we're-drinking-cans-at-the-football-on-the-hill-so-sing-along-with-us" flavour. This is five, short and sharp songs with names like "No Logo Is A Joke" and "You Want It" so you might suspect that it's all politically incorrect. Of course, first impressions are often wrong. It's punk rock with a left-of-centre social bent.

Super Best Friends (wasn't that a South Park episoide?) have already had the Triple Jay thumbs-up - but don't hold that against them. They knock around with Children Collide and Violent Soho so it's going to work as punk rock for the generation that can't remember last Friday night, let alone the Sex Pistols.

Guitarist Johnny Barrington sings in a broader-than-Sydney-Heads accent without sounding like he's bunging it on( like those worse than awful Australian hip hop acts.) Matt Roberts' bass sound hand playing s more pliable than the GDP of a small West African country and Adam Bridges' fluid drumming kicks things along nicely.

There's a lot of crunch in the guitars and a whole bunch of shouting. Blips of sythn run through "Karma Karma" so it's not just rote punk. The songs are catchy with choruses and drop-outs. All in all, perfect festival fodder. I can hear the kids at the next Splendour In The Grass singing away to "You Want It" or the scathingly anti-xenophobic "The Bleachers."

Fast, furious and fun - and a step above most of the latest wave of what passes for punk rock, Super Best Friends might lyrically fly over the heads of some the people who pick up on them but that's not going to stop anyone having a good time. - The Barman

1/2

Here's French garage rock from five guys who have soaked up a fair bit of the output of The Lyres, at a guess. I caught them in the flesh a couple of years ago, supporting a reformed Screaming Tribesmen in France's best rock and roll tavern, Mondo Bizzaro in Rennes, and this four-track 10-inch EP sounds like they do live.

Belle Phoenix with Jeffery Wegener and Ken Gormly
+ Fabels
Thursday, 4 September 2025
Lazy Thinking, Dulwich Hill, NSW

WORDS: Ed Garland
PICTURES: Keith Claringbold

With her elfin appearance and cat’s eyes, Belle Phoenix, is part musical performer and part Factory girl, and surely would fitted into Andy Warhol’s Bohemian scene of 1966. Her sweet vocal has held her in good stead as a backing singer on other people’s albums, but she’s steadily built an impressive body of work with her own material.

Belle Phoenix’s music would work as a soundtracks to European movies (indeed, she did live in Europe for a time with Finland a home base.) It has hints of the spoken word spirit that pervaded the San Francisco of 1958 when alcohol-fuelled beat poetry nights were all the rage, long before anyone had an inkling of the Summer of Love that was lay ahead.  Yet, Belle can also sing like the angels and produce pure soprano bliss amidst her swamp darkness.

_{Happy Hour at The Gin Palace.}

The Gin Palace
+ Swaggerland
Factory Floor, Marrickville
Saturday 9 August 2025 

On a wet and miserable Sydney winter night, a cosy Factory Floor welcomed around 50 punters to  share an intimate musical experience. It was the long awaited gig to launch The Gin Palace’s online single “Petrichor” and album material from Bronwyn Eather’s latest project  Swaggerland 24.

First up The Gin Palace: A super group of players, with a pedigree drawn from, among others, Crow, Glide, and Copperline, they are a six-piece band and welcomed us with a short set of songs from upcoming album, “The Year of the Dog”. As it turns out, it was a set that was almost too big for this little stage, as The Gin Palace powered through an effortless and positive set of numbers with their unique, euphoric sound.

The Hives
+ Clamm
Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Wednesday, 23 July 2025

In these austere times, a full Enmore Theatre midweek sounds as unlikely as an affordable round of drinks in a Justin Hemmes-owned pub, but there you go: If the joint is full to the gills by 8pm on a Wednesday, it must be a Hives show.

Dunno about you but I’ve been following The Hives since they formed in Sweden in that eruption of Scandi Rock at the start of the ‘90s. The six albums are all top-shelf fun but the live experience had somehow evaded me. So, it’s off to the Enmore on a school night that I must go.

The urgings from people like The Celebrity Roadie not to miss this were still echoing in my tinnitus-scarred ears as I sipped my first beer. The Barmaid had even feigned interest by asking if the band would sing in English (not that she was going) but, really? It’s a self-evident truth that The Hives speak fluent Rock and Roll. Their dialect is universal.

John Cale
Xani
The Recital Hall, Sydney
July 10 2025

Do you remember that annoying kid in Year Nine at school? The one who used to badger you with his arrogance and who raved about obscure songs and artists to prove he was superior? He would rattle off their names like a machine gun, firing off the titles of B sides of obnoxious Rush singles and dropping the name of some obscure European prog band that had elves on the cover of their debut album. 

You, on the other hand, had discovered “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal” by Lou Reed and had proudly made the connection that it had Dick Wagner on guitar who was now playing with Alice Cooper. And the ever-annoying wanker classmate would declare that the Reed record that I had just bought at Ashwood's was "shit" because it was “commercial” before name-dropping someone called John Cale.