_{Nick Spaulding photo}

Everyone, it seems, has seen The Buzzcocks. Usually many times. Why?

The old songs always bring a smile or a rueful thrash as we contemplate our ghastly mistakes in love, and our splattergun rage at … the way things are. Dammit.

_{The Mummies in full flight. Shona Ross photo}

The Mummies in Australia? No fucking way! Hard to believe, but true. A hit-and-run visit spanning three states in less than a week (with a stop-off in New Zealand on the way home) admittedly but a tour, nonetheless.

The Mummies were The Shit in garage rock in the late 1980s. Conceived as the ultimate anti-band by Trent Ruane (organ, vocals), Maz Kattuah (bass), Larry Winther (guitar) and Russell Quan (drums), they were a lynchpin of San Francisco’s lo-fi scene. Emerging from their tomb sporadically in the ‘90s and ‘00s, they’re renowned for being the band that gave the then very hip SubPop label the finger when refusal to sign was a death-wish. They have made no-frills Budget Rock an art-form.

_{Sunn0))) holds court: Tomway Armie photo}

It’s one of the last couple of nights of the Festival and Fringe; Womad is grooving away in Botanic Park, hipsters are growing beards, diners are admiring themselves and magician James Hessler is befuddling everyone else. Crowds are flocking like pigeons in one of Godspeed (etc)’s fillums.

Over at Thebarton, we pick up the tickets and plunk ourselves outside the door. The beefy bouncers all wear yellow shirts and clutch industrial strength earmuffs. After about 40 minutes we scurry in, straight to the interior entrance, for another 30 minute wait, and a $12 plastic cup of cider (our last, at that price).

It’s bloody festival time here in Adelaide; the week has been a hot one and between stepping around benighted tourists we’ve been taking extra-long detours around the city in order to get anywhere, cheerfully accepting the extra time and travel because the V8 car race is also on.

Then the weather bureau decided that there would only be a 30 percent chance of any rain. Parking the car the heavens opened in what is a sort of minor subtropical hissy fit, and I get drenched.

Hurrah.

_{Steve Lucas at the Newtown Social Club. Murray Bennett photo}

X is a Sydney band.

I can’t think any other outfit that personified the street-level, brutal and at times minimalistic music of Sin City Sydney of the late ‘70s like X. Theirs' was a world of squats with a city awash with Terrence Clark's cheap smack, the odour of brown bags of dirty money and nightly beatings at Darlo police station.

It was a world of corrupt pollies and police in the post-Askin Sydney. X captured that harsh, nihilistic inner-city world. One that has long since been gentrified.

_{Tamara and Evil Dick.  Caroline Burston photo}

In a parallel historical universe the vast southern continent now known as Australia might have been conquered by France.

While France was still a functioning monarchy at the time Captain James Cook invoked the now discredited legal fiction of Terra Nullius to claim the territory on behalf of the English throne; by the time Arthur Phillip lobbed into Botany Bay in 1788, France was starting to buckle in the face of rising bourgeois unrest, and had bigger internal fish to fry (or heads to lop, as the case may be).