Voigt/465

Slights Unspoken
Independent, 1979

There are many differences between Melbourne and Sydney and even more people who like to argue about them. In the last few years I have noticed some. The first is that the words "experimental" and "underground" have a distinct meaning in the Harbour City. Music outside the mainstream is usually played in suburban warehouses and decrepit inner-city apartment buildings that writers are afraid to name in print. Invitations are sent to mailing lists that are occasionally purged and compiled again to avoid detection. At most of these gigs watching a band comes with an anxious feeling that the police may arrive. Emmy Hennings wrote about one such confrontation last September, when kids filing out of a well-known warehouse in Surry Hills met with officers waiting downstairs.

Whether it is because of this tension or not, the music made in Sydney's underground spaces is more challenging and often more violent than anything I've heard previously. The other difference between the two cities is that, in line with popular opinion, Sydney really is quite soulless. If the eastern coast of Australia was a body, Melbourne would be the heart and Sydney the brain – and Brisbane, I guess, would be the brawn. You can hear it in the music, both mainstream and underground. There is a particular sound that has been running through avant-garde bands in Sydney since at least the late 1970s that I find alienating and anti-human. It can best be seen today in the work of Naked On The Vague and Castings, two bands that seem to have done away with emotion entirely.

I happen to work next to one of the most soulless places in the city, Darling Harbour, an enormous pre-fabricated tourist district with clinical lighting and overpriced merchandise. One of my favourite photos is of discordant Sydney post-punk band Voigt/465 playing an illegal gig on the Darling Harbour construction site in 1978. They only managed to play a few songs before the police arrived, but several photos of the occasion exist. One shows the band with their instruments set up between the pylons and against the backdrop of the Sydney skyline, playing to an audience of just one gleefully happy young child. Every time I walk through Darling Harbour now I think about that photo and it makes me smile.