On January 30th, 2006 I grabbed my sony, my tv, clothes, cds, the few books I had and $4 and myself and two of my best mates moved to the big city with 3 other friends of mine doing the same thing in the two weeks before, and the two weeks after.
I had spent the previous 7 years falling in love with punk/hardcore bands and poppier bands loosely related to those genres. I didn’t have the internet at home, but my friends did. I mainly relied on magazines and stuff to get me by, seeing as our town didn’t have any sort of store that catered for anything too “alternative”, so I feel like I had a pretty romanticised and naive view of how all these “scenes” that this bands came from worked. Where I was, it was me and maybe 5-10 of my mates going to council funded “Battle of the bands” and shit like that, but that’s all we knew and we had a blast. I just figured elsewhere it was all perfect and amazing and how couldn’t it be with all these photos of bands singing to heaps of people and everyone’s losing their mind? It seemed like a world away to me then.
I think moving to Brisbane changed that. I soon saw how people who had that priviledge of constant live music around them really took it for granted, and there’s a lot of bullshit. Give me five years and I’m the same fucking person, and it sucks because I’m still young and don’t know shit. Since I moved away, I’ve been to and played countless shows in Brisbane and around the country, and seen more shitty bands than I can remember, and I’ve seen some fucking amazing bands as well. But I don’t think I ever had that feeling I thought I would feel put on on me as much as I thought I would, there was always some bullshit. One band was always an exception to all this…
I wish the grey hoodie I’m wearing in that photo really fit me as good as I thought it did when I wore it every day in 2009.
The Gifthorse are my favourite Australian band ever. They’re the only band where that feeling that I thought every kid I saw in every photo singing along to all my favourite bands in all those magazines I purchased actually became a reality. There was absolutely no fault in any of it at those shows, I couldn’t convince myself not to be stoked, and that’s a pretty special thing, considering I can’t get into 8/10 bands I watch these days and I can find any reason to not like something/someone. I don’t think people outside of Brisbane really understand just how much we loved them here. That whole performer/crowd bullshit was thrown right out the door every show. A lot of bands like to claim that they maintain that kinda vibe, but a lot of bands are fucking liars who are full of shit. For a while after moving to Brisbane and a few failed friendships and bands ending, I always had this little bit of doubt about whether I made the right choice about leaving where I grew up, which didn’t make sense to me. The Gifthorse played a pretty big part in helping me forget about that and see that at the time, I was a part of something that was pretty fucking awesome.
I don’t even feel awkward about writing something like this about a band of dudes that I’m essentially mates with. If I did, that’d kind of be missing the point of this whole big awesome thing that’s helped me get through everything.
One day they played a show in my loungeroom and I sang a Hot Water Music cover with them. It was pretty alright, hey.
Feelsgoodman.
