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With support from The Goon Sax & Shifting Sands, June 5th 2022
GRAIN, General Press, Felons Barrel Hall by arrangement with Feels Present, are extremely proud to present Baxter Dury’s first ever Brisbane performance with the return of globetrotter locals, The Goon Sax and Shifting Sands. Happening on the 5th of June at Felons Barrel Hall.
BAXTER DURY
We’ve had two decades of Baxter Dury’s louche sardonic music, twenty years of late-night London snapshots, shuffling basslines, comedown disco tunes, all run through with seedy bleakness and a sweet love for humanity.
British musical raconteur Baxter Dury brings his indie croon-come-disco swagger to Brisbane in his first Australian tour after a career spanning two decades. In that wry self-deprecating way of West Londoners, Baxter describes himself as ‘a guy in an ill-fitting ’80s suit singing over a synthesiser’. What he delivers is louche sardonic music fuelled by late-night London snapshots. Baxter’s chamber pop, shuffling basslines and comedown disco vibes all juxtapose a seedy bleakness with a sweet love for humanity.
After a topsy turvy youth and addled early adulthood, Baxter found an unlikely avenue into a musical career on the back of a performance at his old man’s funeral. That old man was no other than new-wave punk icon Ian Dury. Though Baxter never aspired to be a chip off the old block(head).
Instead, he has forged his own peripatetic musical path, mopping up vignettes worth intoning along the way. Minor characters often take centre stage in Baxter’s songs. Spinning wry stories of life among the well-heeled yet badly behaved, he has that rare knack for making the ordinary sound extraordinary. Hear him turn grey into gold as he surveys modern life’s underbelly in his whisky-bar-at-2am voice.
“Like his pater, Dury is a compelling performer, enchanting and amusing in equal measure. Between songs he engages in bluff, geezerish banter,… this scruffy cherub could be Jeff Buckley reincarnated as a Cockney stoner.” – The Guardian
THE GOON SAX
Brisbane's much-loved hyper-emotional pop trio The Goon Sax preview songs from their upcoming third album, due mid year. Released internationally by iconic US label Matador (Kurt Vile, Kim Gordon, Snail Mail) and Chapter Music locally, the new album is a new beginning, both more universal and more weird than anything they've done before. The band traveled to Bristol to record in Portishead's studio with producer John Parish (Aldous Harding, Perfume Genius, PJ Harvey).
The result takes everything that makes The Goon Sax great - shared vocals, lyrical candor, ascending guitar pop structures, and elevates it into newfound expansiveness and sonic experimentation.
Coming off the back of an extensive USA tour with Snail Mail playing theatres around the country and having been announced on the US tour with Interpol and Spoon, we are extremely excited to be able to catch The Goon Sax as they continue on their journey of international notoriety.
SHIFTING SANDS
Shifting Sands beginning was intentional. Of this there can be no doubt. Though the initial intention still remains a mystery the result from this beginning can only be described as a “happy accident”.
Geoff Corbett (SixFtHick) and Dylan McCormack (Gentle Ben & his Sensitive Side, The Polaroids) glued together words and music as a post-work debrief to take the edge off dealing with life’s little realities of someone else’s problems in a Drug & Alcohol unit in a faraway hospital.It was never meant to mean anything. But it did.
At the core Corbett and McCormack along with a revolving door of Brisbane’s finest managed to spit out something not heard and not tried on the stage-boards for quite some time, maybe forever ( in northern climes at least). It was tagged down-beat, depresso-core. The Sands were the quietest heaviest band around and still are