The Espy (29/5/2009)

After a good free gig at the Prince of Wales on Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, be walked around the corner where we had heard one of our favorite up-and-comers: The Fearless Vampire Killers were playing...

The Espy

Cool refreshing beer straight from the tap, why a venue would not have such a fantastic commodity beats the hell out of me - stick that Prince of Wales! The Espy is dirty, smelly, airless hot and awesome! Beer taps are a big part of venue rating in my books, but each to his own.

The Fearless Vampire Killers

Getting out of You Am I kinda late (1am) we weren't really expecting much more from the espy than a beer and a game of pinball but man were we in for a surprise - when we walked in the front door of the front bar, I am pretty sure we heard the start of the first song of their set as by the end I couldn't think of any of their other songs that I didn't hear. After their opening song they followed it with The Sinner (see my previous post on TFVK to hear it) - awesome song. They were playing well and the crowd near the front of the stage were either off their tits or overcome with a need to dance inspired by the music; I'm thinking it was a mixture of the two. In an unexpected turn of events and to phrase it in Sean's words "The kick pedal is fucked" - so whilst another friendly drummer on the night saw to that issue, the remaining members of the band on stage proceeded to continue the show without drums, they managed to pull of a version of something I didn't directly recognise but the style was familiar and heavily bass driven - it was interesting anyway. Luckily by the time that song was complete the drum kit for back to a fully functional state and they were ready to rock again! Around the end of their set I recognised the dudes from the frowning clouds were amongst the munters near the front of the stage and they were hilarious! One of the dudes climbed on to the stage in a crouched stance with a silver coloured serving platter full of spring rolls and crawled along the front of the stage distributing them to the folks in the audience. Once he arrived at the other end of the stage he stood up and threw them at people - funny stuff. Once he was out of spring rolls he frisbied the tray at some dude's head, then erratically ran the front-centre stage and launched himself like a horizontal javelin into the crowd in what I'm sure he intended to be a very rock-and-roll crowd surf but ended up resembling a wrestling spear tackle on 2 poor girls that failed to see him coming or everyone around them moving away. Greatly entertaining show, I cant wait to see which members of which bands will disgrace themselves at the next TFVK show!