Make underground music angry again: The (re)rise of Sydney hardcore
A shorter version of this essay originally appeared in the third print issue of Soft Stir. Many thanks to the Soft Stir editors for helping guide the direction of this writing and helping to craft the initial drift. Sus this link to have a look at the incredible work others are doing in the indie media space. This No Filter take is an expanded updated version of the original.
SPEED live at The Great Club, Marrickville, 2022. Photo courtesy: Georgia Griffiths.
8 PM, March 12, 2022. The Vic on the Park, Marrickville.
Those in the mosh pit stamp and howl like horses chewing on the bit at the starting gate. The room is a maelstrom of elevated heart rates, pent-up frustration and masochistic delight. “Push up. Push up. Move up. Hey, hey, hey. Keep it coming, keep it coming. Before we start we just want to pay respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. This show is taking place on stolen land. Sovereignty was never ceded… This is a hardcore show now MOTHERFUCKER.” Jem Siow roars into the mic amid opening guitar chords and a tease of the drum kit.
“Respect this, boy. Respect each other and mosh hard as fuck. This is a gang called SPEED, babyyyyyy”.
The band launch into their hit track We See U, force-feeding rocket fuel down the gullets of those lucky (insane?) enough to be present.
The closer you are to the centre of the thrashing bodies, the more reality bends at the edges. Some punters windmill and two step on the stage within touching distance of the band members. A few brave souls flip and cartwheel into the heaving mass of nondescript body parts. There’s no boundary between band and spectator.
It’s in this room, on board this Shinkansen of chugging basslines and discombobulating metalcore-like rhythms, that I realise this is exactly how Sydney music should sound.
As a resident in Sydney’s Inner West, a supposed countercultural heartland, I’ve noticed vastly different modes of creative operation: from white-walled art galleries where audiences sit cross-legged and whisper to illegal raves in warehouses where passive spectators share cuddle-puddle nangs and vibe out to ambient soundscapes and bush techno. These art scenes tend to prioritise hedonism, frivolity and irony – impotent responses to late stage capitalism that subdue our political impulses.
But this is Sydney. Rules regulate every movement: where you can make noise at night (nowhere), where you can smoke in a pub (the courtyard out back, mate) and where you can protest (block someone from entering a religious place of worship and you now risk a two-year prison sentence).
For years Sydney’s nightlife has famously suffered. We live under a nanny state where poker machines have more value than live music. In Australia, you’ll find 20 percent of the Earth’s pokies – and half are those are in New South Wales. Bureaucratic red tape has ensnared NSW’s hospitality and live music industries. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels like years of inner city noise complaint enforcement and underfunding for the arts have finally caught up with Sydney. Sometimes it feels like there are barely any choices for worthwhile weekend events. From a city of 5 million people, you’d expect better.
So why aren’t the city’s creatives angrier?
Listening to SPEED that night at the Vic, I’m overcome with relief.
This isn’t a band with an archive of albums. It’s a bunch of mates taking a stand against the system – a 25-minute burst of teeth-clenching rage that makes me proud to be from Sydney. I doubt Melbourne could’ve produced this level of determination. To stick around in Sydney as a creative, you have to be a little cracked in the head.
SPEED have amassed such a large following so quickly because they’ve managed to do what almost no one else has: they’ve united Australia’s underground. Their openness to new fans has galvanised their meteoric rise in a territorial scene where bruises, scars and broken bones are badges of honour and tattoos, clothing patches and army surplus jackets are visual representations of authenticity. Go to a local SPEED show and you’ll find a list of names on the run-sheet drawn from the holy triumvirate of hardcore punk, hip hop and techno: AWOL, Concrete Lawn, Mulalo, Nerve, Posseshot, Fukhead, Ptwiggs.
But their mass appeal doesn’t only stem from their attempt to move outside of subcultural silos. They’ve tapped into an undercurrent of rage in Australia while also offering their fans empowerment.
Wherever they go, SPEED make a statement. It’s not just because of their racial composition – predominantly Asian – in a scene that’s historically white, or because of their knack for calling out racism. It comes down to their groundedness and the intensity of their music, which they refuse to dilute as industry professionals circle.
SPEED live at The Great Club, Marrickville, 2022. Photo courtesy: Georgia Griffiths.
Despite the macho bravado of hardcore punk, their stage presence is remarkably humble. A common refrain that the band members repeat at live shows is their lack of difference from audience members. We are you, they say. Anyone can do what we’re doing.
There’s no them in the SPEED cosmos, only us.
“I see a lot of new faces in the room”, Jem Siow shouts at the Vic that night. “If it’s your first hardcore show, put your hand up. Yo, thank you for being here. I really appreciate that. This is a hardcore show. If you get hit, it ain’t personal, ok,” Jem instructs.
“Please respect what we do. It’s all out of respect and love. That’s the bottom line here. Always remember that shit.”
* * *
Jay Preston croaks through the phone with all the grace of someone who sounds like they just ripped a straight baccy cone the size of a Christmas tree.
“In the old days, I used to live in a few sharehouses that were out of farkin control. We had a six foot skate ramp in the backyard in Fotheringham Street in Stanmore.”
In the early 00s, the Fotheringham Street palace, fondly nicknamed the Thunderdome, was where you’d find “dog shit absolutely everywhere”, impromptu piss-ups, endless band rehearsals and dress-up parties with “200 punks going mental” to distorted, eardrum-nuking punk and metal. The lesbian ladies next door would host a viewing party on their balcony, Jay recounts, whenever they got wind of a backyard bash at Jay’s place. Kids of all ages would rock up, and so would the police. Regularly.
But the cops never stayed long. The crowd suffocated them with misinformation and collective resistance, pleading ignorance when asked who was living in the house.
“There were too many people for them to take on,” Jay says, forcing the words through his battered throat.
Jay dives into yarns like an unsupervised kid entering a slide at Wet’n’Wild – headfirst. It would be easy to discount his ramblings as hyperbole or the nostalgia of an old head in the hardcore scene. Jay currently runs the record label Innercity Uprising and makes noise music under the alias Milat. He also plays in the staunchly-political hardcore punk band Backhand, which is fronted by his partner KP, a Kamilaroi woman. So he’s been around the scene forever. But I fully believe him. Sydney has changed.
“Back in the day, every house I lived in, we had band practice,” Jay says. “Fuck, some days it was probably three bands practicing. It could happen three or four times a week and no one would ever complain. It was just part and parcel of living in the city.”
Today, it’s a different matter. Evidence of the presence of an underclass – no matter how artistic – is a direct threat to the moneyed boomers and yuppies that saturate Sydney’s Inner West. Sure, you can blast jazz late at night, no problem, and commissioned street art pieces won’t be erased. But the moment any inkling of a drum kit or distortion pedal reaches the ears of Boomer Barry from around the corner, you best believe the riot police are turning up on your doorstep. Loud music and street art isn’t necessarily the issue; it’s the type of culture on display.
Nowadays Sydney is renowned on the global stage as a hub for financial services, a spawn point for corporate yes-men and an early testing ground for ‘lockout laws’ – intense policing of hospitality and music venues to counter alcohol-fuelled violence. The 2022 Time Out Index – a survey of 20,000 city-dwellers – ranked Sydney as the third-worst city in the world for making new friends, and the second worst for nightlife. In short: Sydney is not a party destination.
Far from the ideal of the Australian dream, of Sydney as a laidback beachside metropolis, Sydneysiders are known for the grind. Not only has inflation climbed to levels not seen since the first Nintendo Game Boys hit the market, but Sydney is the most expensive city in Australia for housing.
It doesn’t exactly bode well for the sustainability of creative practice.
* * *
SPEED are now an established feature on the international festival circuit. They’ve been nominated for three ARIA Awards. They’ve signed a deal with Nike to sell SPEED-branded kicks. You’ll even find photos of Kourtney Kardashian rocking SPEED merch online. Yes, the Kourtney Kardashian. They’ve achieved all this while repping a countercultural hardcore scene that actively shuns fame and a city – Sydney – that is one of the most gentrified in the world.
Understandably therefore, their success has come with a dose of scepticism. To their fans, SPEED are trailblazers. They reflect the gen Z demand for hardcore’s modernisation, for diversity. To naysayers, they represent TikTok hardcore. They’re not Sydney hardcore at all; they’re a group of sell-outs who’ve come to represent precisely the corporate Sydney culture they were intended to critique. To others yet, there’s grudging respect amid concerns over the evolution of local hardcore.
Whatever the take, everyone seems to have an opinion.
* * *
“Playing in the same two pubs is a bit fucking boring,” growls Olli from local hardcore band Robber over a jug of VB at the pub.
“I don’t want to be giving money to Merivale and those fuckwits,” he says, referring to the hospitality mega-group renowned for toxic work environments and underpaying employees.
“I’d be much happier doing something independent, supporting the little guy.”
In the early days of the band’s existence – circa 2016 – Olli organised a DIY outdoor gig on a headland in Sydney’s south-east where the skeletal remains of World War II bunkers dwarf low-lying scrub. Getting audio and lighting equipment into and out of the headland was no easy feat.
The Robber gig at Malabar bunks in 2016. Photo courtesy: ProfitCorp Records.
“It was a punish,” Olli states, describing the pack down that morning. The coastal paths are all dirt and sand, and the crew hadn’t slept a wink.
“We brought fridge trolleys, but you can’t push fridge trolleys along sand. There were four of us dragging this thing, munted. We were actually collapsing.”
It’s a testament to the lengths underground creative communities will go to in order to avoid the city’s sterile pubs and clubs.
But there’s a seeming paradox in our conversation, an unmarked road that fails to appear on the cultural map many across the nation have drawn for Sydney: Olli expresses cautious optimism about the future of Sydney hardcore. And so does Jay.
“It does seem there’s a bit of life happening again and I swear since COVID it’s been even better,” Olli says. “I don’t know if it’s my imagination or maybe finally people have started to hear about us. I feel like gigs are more fun. There’s a bit more hype and excitement. I think some of that hype does come off SPEED.”
Robber live at Crowbar, Leichhardt. Photo courtesy: Oisin Dermody.
* * *
Hardcore punk first emerged as a volatile critique of the stardom of 70s rock’n’roll. Shouted vocals, anti-authoritarian lyrics, disdain for private property and outsider status in a capitalist system defined punk. In the face of commodification, political activism and direct action became essential for authenticity – and hardcore punk provided the soundtrack.
In contrast to arena-filling rock’n’roll gigs with fireworks displays, punk fans came face to face with their heroes in crowded taverns and squats. “A band was on the same level as the audience, sometimes literally, and at most performing on a small stage a foot or two above the floor,” writes music historian Simon Reynolds. In Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past, Reynolds highlights the “intimacy” of these gigs, arguing that the mid-70s pub rock rebellion in London against “hippiedom and progressive music” spawned the punk movement. Standing at the front of a mosh pit, you could “smell the beer on the singer’s breath”. Head-banging guitarists and frantic drummers, arms like scythes, splattered those in the front rows with sweat.
Distinctive for its simplicity, this music wasn’t about long-haired yahoos shredding guitar solos or time signatures reminiscent of fractions you’d find in a 4 unit HSC maths exam. Hardcore democratised music and event production, celebrated collectivism and disintegrated the passive-spectator/genius-performer dichotomy embedded in rock.
In Sydney, the punk scene’s anti-authoritarianism, anarchist inclinations and DIY spirit pushed it towards unlicensed spaces. Jellyheads, Thunderdome, Dirty Shirlows, The Pitz, Maggotville, Birdrib, Black Wire Records. Vale. Familiar names to those who know the score, second homes even. They’re almost all gone now.
Within these marginal spaces of excess and self-expression – often match-box sized backrooms, smoke-clogged warehouses, public skate bowls and derelict urban ruins functionally useless to capitalism – intense live performance and dancing broke down societal norms.
At their best, mosh pits are a space for the outsiders – the freaks, weirdos and goths – to resist expectations. Women and enbies are able to rebel, subvert gender conventions and dabble in performative masculinity. In this unruly mud bath of animals, kids learned the meaning of respect – or they’d have it hammered into them.
For Jay, hardcore equates to self-discovery.
“I came from a family with a very abusive father,” he says. “If it wasn’t for hardcore, fuck knows what I would be doing. I learned a lot through hardcore. I learned about the world. I learned about politics. I learned about the difference between right and wrong.”
“Watching a band and having a mosh? Who gives a fuck. To me, you have to take more out of hardcore. There’s more to it.”
Jay pinpoints Black Wire Records as the “quintessential punk and creative arts space” – one that was “running the gauntlet” and hosting illegal shows every weekend under the threat of closure between 2010 and 2017.
With the front windows blacked out by thick cloth, Black Wire Records was, from the outside, just another blank shop front on a struggling strip of Parramatta Road with low rents and high vacancy rates. You found it heading westward from the city centre, before you hit the used car sale yards in Ashfield. Stroll through the record store inside and you would feel like you’ve entered a living museum dedicated to the last days of authentic inner-city grunginess. Racks of records lined the walls and posters vied for space. A glass-top cabinet housed cassette tapes and punk memorabilia. Past the kitchen, you’d discover the iconic volunteer-run performance space that shared the Black Wire name, and above it three bedrooms.
Black Wire Records on Parramatta Road. Photo courtesy: Stefan Lee (we think?).
According to Lila, a frequent attendee there as a teenager, the venue was “tiny and horrible”.
“Everybody was on top of each other. It was stinky. The attendees never showered. The music quality was shocking,” she recounts with a hint of pride.
Black Wire was never a fully-licensed venue. It was a treasured self-regulating all-ages venue without any seccies – a rarity in this city. Punters picked up bottles at the end of the night and placed them in bins without anyone telling them to do so.
When I meet Craig Lyons at the pub one recent afternoon, a musician and urban geographer who has written a Master’s thesis on unlicensed DIY music venues in Sydney, he tells me that residents and volunteers at Black Wire Records negotiated event times and noise levels with individual neighbours.
“That is the work of urban planning done at an everyday level,” he says.
Craig found himself studying urban geography thanks to his own indoctrination into DIY music scenes. He says that spaces like Black Wire Records exposed him to people who had “a different set of politics and a different orientation towards the city”. He started to see more hardcore live, more grindcore, more dance music. Within the thriving unlicensed music venues of Sydney’s Inner West, there was “a shared understanding of practice rather than a rigid adherence to genre conventions”.
But the community behind Black Wire Records couldn’t always ensure civil relations with the local populace.
In Jay’s words: “You always got complaints because some dickhead was pissing on the neighbour’s letterbox.”
Following rental increases that necessitated a venue-saving fundraiser in 2015, the ship that had supported, trained and housed the city’s punks and decibel-addled freaks finally capsized. The crew from a new local business, a bondage club, blabbed to the council and the media that Black Wire’s operation fell outside the building’s permissible uses under planning laws.
“Nothing has replaced Black Wire”, Olli says slowly.
* * *
10.30 PM, October 26, 2024. The Marrickville Bowlo, Marrickville.
It’s a Halloween gig but it’s not immediately obvious that anyone is dressed up. Hardcore punk is, well, a bit Halloween by nature. Sure, it’s a little more serious than arena-filling metal. But it’s just as much about theatrics, about provocation.
KP from Backhand, their lead singer, screams into the mic. She’s decked out in a nun outfit and there’s a chunky Christian cross around her neck. The get-up conveys a subtle message: Halloween for mob is the mission and force-fed religion. Sure, I could be reading into it too much. But KP isn’t one to shy away from her politics and Aboriginal background.
Over the phone, Jay describes the band to me as a “politically motivated” project, and it’s clear from the aggression and speed of the music on their debut EP Gentrification is Genocide that they mean business. Order the EP as a cassette tape and you’ll receive in the mail a sticker pack, zine and written explanation of the lyrics. It feels like Jay and KP are guiding you through a personal scrapbook diary on Indigenous struggle, domestic violence and mental health challenges in so-called Australia.
(“Kristy’s not going to sing about rubbish,” Jay explains.)
After Backhand, Boudicca, a hardcore punk from Muluubinba/Newcastle, NSW, take to the stage. Their set begins with pub rock but they quickly ramp up the intensity, which peaks with guitarist Jacob Cummins, a Gamilaraay man of Dispossessed fame, absolutely shredding a metal-influenced riff in their track Tapestry. It’s chunky bone-shattering rage-fuelled hardcore that steamrolls those present and feels all the more powerful thanks to the female voice over the top of it all. “Destroy colonial relics”, singer Madeleine Mitchell shrieks during Millions of Dead Centurions. By this point, the gig has truly morphed from a stale pub gig to a street rally.
There’s only one problem. Punters fist pump and jump around. But, beyond the stage, the atmosphere is a tad flat. It’s the layout of the Marrickville Bowlo and the fact that the majority of the people wandering past the punks are just there for beers and food.
To endure live music in a space that was never built for that purpose is a peculiarly Sydney experience. I always think of the upstairs level at the Abercrombie Hotel, a rare Sydney venue with a 24 hour license, as the archetypal example. It’s mainly used for techno events these days. Walking through the upstairs fried on party drugs is like trying to escape naked through a hall of one-way mirrors, like you’re some kind of human lab rat in a government experiment assessing the quality of Sydney nightlife (shit). There are crooks and crannies and doors that open onto further crooks and crannies. When it’s packed, claustrophobia eats you up ravenously.
One of those doors opens straight onto the front of the dancefloor. It’s a door you can open both ways, so it’s constantly flapping on its hinges like a strutting rooster with a gangly red chin at a cockfight and it never fails to spill a supanova of light onto gacked faces. You’ll find a DJ grimacing between two PA speakers (there’s never any subwoofer) and punters meandering with blank facial expressions.
Sure, the Marrickville Bowlo isn’t that bad. But the square wooden dance floor surrounded by kitsch 80s carpet does give Year 6 school disco vibes.
As some local writers have pointed out, underground music scenes in Sydney have found refuge in unexpected places: ethnic clubs and bowling greens. In the cat-and-mouse game of gentrification, it’s a journey undertaken by necessity, one catalysed by the complacency and lacklustre atmosphere of pub gigs. But it’s far from an enviable solution and it’s destined to disappear quickly like everything else loud in this strangled city.
* * *
Sift through local hardcore merch – the bumper stickers, hats and hoodies with graffiti-style typography – and you’ll quickly realise a pattern. Everything is Sydney hardcore – not Australian hardcore but Sydney hardcore. Consider SPEED’s motto: “100% Sydney shit”.
Recognising the impact SPEED have had, Jay labels the band “the kings” of hardcore.
“They’re flying the flag for Sydney. It’s sort of wanky. It’s music. But there’s a lot of pride for some of us.”
Jay plays in the relatively new hardcore band Backhand and it’s little surprise that their merch too is emblazoned with the phrase “Sydney hardcore”. In these circles, it’s important to rep your hometown because – if I was to summarise hardcore in one word – it’s all about family. Hardcore isn’t music; it’s a lifestyle and a street education.
Olli, for instance, a staunch metal and gabber head, was actually a late arrival to the hardcore punk scene. He says that the metal scene was already dying when he first started attending metal gigs in the mid 00s. The shows were “sterile” and too many in the crowd stood still, arms folded.
The energy of the hardcore community quickly stole his attention.
“Hardcore had a lot of that bleakness that black metal had but it had rowdy fun shows where there were fights and cunts doing graffiti and people into doing petty crime,” Olli explains. “I was living out of home so I was shoplifting heaps. I grew up in the graffiti scene. It seemed like a melting pot for all the shit I was into anyway.”
For Jay, the central message of hardcore is non-conformity. Within his own life, he embraces an authentically-criminal lifestyle. He’s a self-described “hustler” with an appetite for “dodgy shit” but he recognises that another person’s rebellion may involve not eating or wearing animal products.
“There’s no rulebook,” he emphasises.
This also happens to be the reason SPEED are flourishing – the band is rebelling its own way and it’s especially appealing to Australian Zoomers.
This new breed of hardcore, the SPEED school of hardcore, has made this music accessible to the masses. From band members rocking crop tops on stage to the band discussing the rise of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic in interviews, they’re fuelling renewed interest in hardcore. They’re also bucking a trend.
Hardcore has long had a complicated relationship with violence. On the one hand, the mosh pit teaches us that we can channel and control our rage. In turn, visible anger, when warranted, can force political change. Hardcore’s affiliation with anarchism has meant that many fans embrace the usefulness and legitimacy of violence in political protest.
On the other hand, the mosh pit is an exclusive club. It doesn’t cater to those who behave abnormally, to neurodiversity and gender diversity, to physical disabilities. Sure, there is camaraderie. You pick up anyone who falls. You try and keep your elbows tucked in when you create windmills with your arms. You hold back around people who are smaller in stature. But in a space as compact as a mosh pit it only takes an individual or a small group misbehaving to shift the atmosphere from catharsis to frustration and disgust.
As an historically white alcohol and amphetamine-fuelled scene, which catered to an audience with a taste for the extreme, hardcore punk in Sydney also attracted those on the complete other end of the political spectrum: neo-Nazi skinheads.
“I grew up in a scene that was very very violent,” Jay says, reminiscing about Sydney hardcore in the 90s. “The shows were a bit scary, like 10 skinheads could turn up and start punching on with everyone. People were fighting police.”
The bands Toe To Toe and Tutti Parze were at the forefront of that early movement. These pioneering groups of anarcho-punks with a knack for punching cops and smashing the windows of Newtown butcher shops just before sunrise – they were anti-racist animal rights activists – produced gems such as the track TRG You Are The Scum, a reference to the Tactical Response Group, the counter-terrorist arm of the NSW Police Force. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these gigs attracted a volatile mix of characters whenever they played live. Sometimes drunk men scrapped with other audience members, settling scores and claiming turf over crews from rival beachside suburbs, Jay explains.
Tutti Parze playing at the Sando (Sandringham Hotel), Newtown, circa 1990s. Photo courtesy: Jody Bartolo. Sorry we didn’t find you to seek permission to use this glorious photo Jody. We jacked this from Facebook. Please forgive us.
A bunch of them – “Bra Boys”, “Bankstown boys”, “Baulko boys” – ended up forming the SHC, which stands for “Sydney hardcore crew” or “Sydney hate crew”, depending on who you ask.
Today there isn’t a lot of data on physical violence and sexual assault in mosh pits at live music gigs. But YouGov research suggests that over four in ten women under the age of 40 (43%) have experienced unwanted sexual behaviour at a UK festival. In one online survey of 500 Australian festival-goers, undertaken by a group of criminology professors to investigate perceptions of safety at music festivals, the mosh pit was the most commonly cited location where people believed sexual harassment could occur. 153 respondents (30.6%) highlighted overcrowding as a key factor stimulating concerns about safety. This issue is hardly an industry secret. We all know what goes. While this research has always focused on large-scale festivals, rather than intimate pub events and DIY gigs in unlicensed spaces, which tend to function differently, it would be a mistake to assume that the problem is less prevalent in the underground.
As music journalist Hannah Ewens has written in The Guardian: “The biggest defenders of mosh pits are usually straight men. Most women I know who go to shows are either agnostic or hate them.”
It’s clear that fans of heavy band music want change. Jay included.
“I’ve been through all that [violence] and I reckon it’s all bullshit,” he says. “As you get older, that means nothing to you. As a 25 year old, 30 year old in the punk scene, it’s all about hanging out with mates.”
He proudly tells me over the phone about a recent Innercity Uprising release which exclusively platforms transgender, non-cis male and female-fronting bands. 13 bands, no dudes singing. He says that he’d love to see bands with a big platform such as SPEED encourage more female and trans crowd participation at gigs, a step they already seem to be approaching.
“I just feel that the guys have to step aside for a little bit, put the tough boy attitudes away and just let the girls have a go as well.”
Lila says that she witnessed sexism within punk music and groping at gigs throughout her time as a punter.
“Sydney doesn’t deviate from the normal narrative of underground music scenes in that way”, she states.
But she acknowledges that safety at band events is “definitely improving” in the digital age and that the punk community more broadly is more culturally diverse and gender diverse than at any point in the past.
Hardcore gigs are by no means immune to anti-social behaviour but there is at least a recent sincere attempt by those within the scene to subvert the standard hardcore tropes. Some would call it a reckoning.
* * *
9.30 PM, February 3, 2023. Unlicensed BYO venue, Alexandria.
Waves of distortion smother the room. The floor vibrates. The guttural growl of lead singer Olli from Robber invades my ears.
This DIY show is a throwback to the Oz Rock era of the 70s and 80s when promoters crammed as many punters into a pub as possible. There’s no pressure here to abide by hyper-specific building code regulations which mandate expansive fire exits, sprinklers and fire-proof furniture. There are no health and safety regulations limiting the number of punters. The packed-out room is small and the only way to see what’s happening is to step inside the sauna and participate. Sweat drips from the ceiling. Moist limbs press against mine. In between tracks, there’s incoherent shouting – hopefully someone abusing the band members for being deadset unhinged cunts.
This is precisely where we find true creativity: alongside grime, sweat and spit. There’s no perfectionism here. The polished concrete and spotless walls of clinical art spaces may attempt to tell us otherwise, whispering lies in your ears, but it’s undeniable that all art has dirty beginnings.
Robber playing in Alexandria, February 3, 2023. Photo courtesy: Dougal Gorman.
Olli is a rabid dog tonight. He barks into the mic, drenching the crowd in a cocktail of vulgarity, foaming at the mouth.
In ‘Drink Graff Rack’, Oli shouts “Graffiti vandals and thugs in hoods/Fucking ya daughter and stealing your goods/Drunken army of neer-do-wells/Forever making your life hell”. It’s a homage to a previous neighbour. In a nutshell: they didn’t get along.
When I chat to Olli at the pub he describes SPEED as “tough guy hardcore” that is “all about empowerment” and “family”. His own music, he says, centres on “radical acceptance of the bleakness”. The world Robber inhabits – distinctive still from the SPEED scene – is about “embracing the shit and doing garbage angels in it rather than trying to rise up and out of it”.
There’s a perverse humour to Robber’s music. It’s the kind of hardcore that jumps on your back and takes you for a ride, all the while hitting you with a fistful of tall poppy syndrome.
Some academic boffins have underlined the carnivalesque dynamics of metal shows, aligning these gigs with Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical conception of the “carnival” and the “grotesque”. In his oft-cited work Rabelais and his world, Bakhtin sought to define persistent traits in folk culture. He found inspiration in mediaeval carnivals – non-hierarchical spaces that temporarily destabilised societal rules and the solemnity of the daily grind. Distinct from official ceremonies, these carnivals subverted behavioural norms with chaos, humour, heckling and excess; they stripped the sacred of power, abolishing piety and celebrating the earthly and bodily. Contemporary commentators like Karen Bettez Halnon perceive in live punk and metal performance a similar kind of playful grassroots power.
In her essay ‘Inside shock music carnival: Spectacle as contested terrain’, Halnon suggests that extreme band music “challenges nearly every conceivable social rule governing taste, authority, morality, propriety, the sacred, and some might say, civility itself”. This is not carnivalesque partying and moshing as the fulfilment of neoliberalism’s compulsory hedonism, as mind-numbing sensory overload, as directionless thuggery. Heavy band music, Halnon proposes, is where alienated youth go to discover dis-alienation.
Herein lies the power of hardcore. In this era of rampant inflation, rental stress, gambling addiction and uncertainty across Australia, it’s impossible to shy away from reality, to look the other way. It is precisely Sydney’s political context that both makes it difficult for hardcore punk to flourish and vital that it does flourish.
Hardcore bands stare reality down and launch into darkness with clenched fists. In this scene, I perceive a growing movement: a disruptive thoroughly impolite underclass pushing back against the middle-class norms that saturate Sydney’s underground, against the gentrification of the arts and the city itself.
The hardcore scene has always thrived on the margins of society, so it’s unsurprising that many long-term hardcore fans, shoved into the public spotlight all of a sudden, view the scene’s newfound popularity with suspicion. They worry that hardcore has become a fashion accessory, a passing fad. Like many families, the hardcore family is rife with division. There are petty squabbles galore, and serious ones. SPEED is pushing the culture in new directions but they’re a part of the hardcore family whether people like it or not and they’re not going anywhere.
What bands like SPEED, Robber and Backhand all offer is a stick-it-up-yer attitude with a mouthful of local vernacular. Their engagement with darkness and ambiguity is a counter-cultural stance in light of our Zoomer-orientated cultural zeitgeist; there’s certainly no silly, no slay and no irony in their music. There’s simply the dogged pursuit of limit-experience; the yawning fissure outside the boundaries of normalcy.
Jump into the abyss and you might just find Sydney’s true underground.
SPEED live at The Great Club, Marrickville, 2022. Photo courtesy: Georgia Griffiths.
