Despite being billed as a 25th anniversary celebration, the double bill of The Dandy Warhols and local indie pop legends Even at Forum Theatre (3 November) could easily have been mistaken for a time machine to 2001.
Anyone with their ticket stub from the last time The Dandys played under the beautiful faux-sky of the Forum Theatre would be forgiven for thinking they were seeing double, right down to the same support band.
Even opened the night’s proceedings much the same way I imagine they did 18 years ago, with what frontman Ash Naylor referred to as a series of “ball-tearing rock anthems”.
The trio served as a perfect opener to get the crowd in the mood for a Dandys retrospective. They delivered a solid set of rock ballads that erred on the fringe of psychedelia without fully taking the plunge, leaving that for the headline act.
Walking out to their instruments onstage with no pretence or grandeur, The Dandy Warhols kicked the night off with ‘Forever’, the first of several cuts from their most recent offering, ‘Why You So Crazy’. As if to send a message to the Portland four-piece about what they had paid to hear, the audience barely gave a reaction to the song save for some polite applause as it wrapped up.
While this may sound par for the course with a Melbourne crowd, there was hardly a hipster in sight. Instead, this was an audience of Gen Xers who simply didn’t care for the new songs.
As the band launched into ‘Holding Me Up’, a number more in tune with the Dandys' signature psych drawl, the energy shifted and the tension faded away to dancing. This continued as the juggernaut riff of ‘Ride’ took over.
While some may have assumed a 25th anniversary set would be loaded with many more of these early classics, the band instead curated a balanced set that paid equal attention to each stage of their deep catalogue. The glam hit ‘We Used To Be Friends’ gave way to a country-tinged trilogy (including ‘Get Off’), while ‘I Love You’ segued into a stoner-psych jam that eventually emerged as the dreamlike ‘And Then I Dreamt Of Yes’.
Following her sole lead vocal performance in the Dolly Parton pastiche ‘Highlife’, keyboardist Zia McCabe fled offstage and returned with a birthday cake for guitarist Pete Holmström. The crowd sang happy birthday twice (the encore for McCabe’s daughter Matilda at home, which McCabe gleefully recorded on her phone), and the band kicked back on a high with the ‘Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth’.
The band’s intrinsic chemistry was highlighted best when, for a fleeting moment, it went astray. At the tail-end of ‘Be Alright’, the new album’s lead single, Holmström seemed to have trouble finding his way into the solo. Watching on curiously, the other three wrapped the song up quickly as the guitarist shook his head in frustration.
Despite this awkward ending, the slow drone opening of ‘Godless’ had the crowd roaring their recognition – easily the loudest reaction of the evening. All was forgiven as the set wrapped up, hitting all of the remaining favourites: ‘Bohemian Like You’, ‘Every Day Should Be A Holiday’, and ‘Boys Better’.
As silver balloons descended from above, a feeling of giddy euphoria swept throughout the Forum. Though the new material may be as unsatisfying for the fans as it was for the birthday boy playing them, the psych-pop rock songs that defined the Dandys for the better part of their 25 years in action still hold up.
