Raw-boned Music Returns With Beefweek

Newcastle Herald

Thursday December 22, 2005

By BEN QUINN

ONE sweaty night while murdering schooners and soaking up the unpolished ambience at one of the last old-school pubs standing, Wickham's Lass O'Gowrie Hotel, an uninitiated punter asked me what to expect from the Australian Beefweek Show.

I scratched my stubble and searched for the right words.

Such a complex question.

"Ever watched with admiration as the black sheep of the family chucks an all-out browneye at the new bub's christening?" I replied.

"What?" he said, utterly miffed.

"You'll see."

And he did see.

Beefweek, returning to the Lass tomorrow night for a Christmas reunion gig, are among Newcastle's more slovenly and raucous bands.

Think Weddings Parties Anything paralytic on rotgut wine, with brickies' cracks for a backdrop and rubber thongs for percussion.

Think Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife given a full frontal Dead Kennedys lobotomy.

Think Nick Cave lurching menacingly through the Birthday Party's Nick the Stripper.

Nasty stuff . . . but funny, too.

Songs often fall apart tragically an old wino ready for the cot only to be resurrected in unlikely peaks.

The beauty in this raw-boned music is the stomping, whomping unpredictability. These hellraisers have been roughing up audiences for nigh on a decade with their caustic brand of bush punk.

Hell, one wired bloke even had a heart attack and dropped dead while they were cranking out an Accadacca cover at a bush festival.

"We've done two festivals at Nymagee, out near Cobar," says frontman Chris Wash, the only foundation member in the current line-up.

"A 10-hour drive to the middle of nowhere. It's like a B & S in this old coal pit, so there's heaps of miners and rednecks. One of 'em we got so drunk we didn't make it to the stage. The other one the dude died."

Beefweek have released only one EP, The Russian Lunch Affair, but have many more originals in their 60-song repertoire.

Among the returning brethren will be singer-songwriter Mick Daley, a shrewd observer of humanity's foibles who put in about six months with Beefweek before making his bones in the Re-mains.

At press time Wash was unsure about the attendance of former singer-guitarist Pete "Bufo" Hanson.

"The logistics of getting us to play is quite frightening," he says.

"Some have moved on. Some of us have got kids. Members of the current line-up are in other bands.

"It'll be good to get together and let loose."

The Australian Beefweek Show play the Lass O'Gowrie Friday night with support from Goatroper.

© 2005 Newcastle Herald

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