| Sounds Like | What the critics say about The Histrionics:
“I was laughing at myself and I was hating myself for laughing at myself – very little art makes me respond as strongly as that. Maybe its good. It cuts pretension off at the knees.”
Dr Rex Butler
“One’s entire intellect, body and senses are entwined and not unpleasantly confused in the multiple acts of citation occurring simultaneously, delivering the audience into a kind of whorl of reference that is completely absorbing and which leaves one’s critical disposition slightly flailing.”
Stuart Koop
“We begin wondering whether the substituted references to contemporary identities in the local art world are reverential, sycophantic, affectionate or critical.”
Alex Gawronski
“Tribute bands are cargo cultists, longing for the authority of the absent, international original. The Histrionics act out the art scene’s provincialism, and, by playing in pubs, counteracts its privilege.”
Dr Chris McAuliffe
“Less like the Party Boys than that part-time band that tennis players John McEnroe and Pat Cash formed to play at post-tournament piss-ups, The Histrionics take AM classics and rewrite them as send-ups of post-modern art-speak 101.”
Clinton Walker
“Voici l’histoire de l’art et celle de la musique malmenées, pastichées, trafiquées ensemble. The Histrionics sont un cover-band australien, line-up de rock classique, qui a comme particularité d’être composé d’artistes qui s’amusent à détourner gaiement les standards de la musique rock en leur attribuant de nouveaux texts, ayant tous trait à l’histoire de l’art moderne.”
Alain Rouault
“Die produktiv korrupten, antipodischen Pop-Übersetzungen fischen in truben Gewässern und lassen Kontroversen, Andeutungen und Gerüchte mit einfliessen.”
Anette Freudenberger
“Innovative Bühnenrequisiten und choreographierte Stunts machen das Konzert zu einer synästhetischen Erfahrung, die HörerInennen und ZuscauerInnen nicht so schnell wieder vergessen werden.” Christiane Mennicke
“It made me cringe a little – its just a bit like “Weird Al” Yankovic really.”
Vicki Kerrigan
The Histrionics
Town Hall Hotel, North Melbourne 3 December 2003,
Review by Stuart Koop, Broadsheet Vol 34 No1, Febuary 2004
As they say in both art and rock‘n’roll, The Histrionics appeared at the Town Hall Hotel in North Melbourne ‘triumphant’ from their Never Mind the Pollocks European tour which included performances in Germany, Austria, Holland and Luxembourg (especially triumphant given the total absence of government support). The band looked resplendent in their suits spattered and dripped with luminous paint as if they had stood between Pollock and the canvas.
This is precisely the fantastic, figural gap in which the band critically operate; between such an original artistic gesture and its popular reception years later. Indeed, the current Australian tour and launch of the single Drip It - on ode to Pollock set to the tune of Devo’s pop frenzy - celebrates the 30th anniversary of the purchase of Blue Poles by the National Gallery of Australia.
In the form of the cover band, The Histrionics have found the perfect vehicle for their analytical but loving piss-take on contemporary art and music. In their first incarnation they appeared as ADAWO, a tribute band performing the music of Martin Creed and his band owada. These days they call themselves a ‘concept-art-(heritage)-rock-cover band’, and there are no better five key words to describe the enterprise. You won’t find better publicists either, since the spin is an integral part of their project.
For a start, The Histrionics just play covers, in fact, they murder some real epochal classics, but these are performed to new lyrics drawn from ‘art world history, discourse, controversy and rumour’. Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild, an anthem of biker rock, is thus transformed as Taught to be Mild:
Did a bit of writin’
Gonna be a DJ
Read a bit of Nietzsche
And whatever comes my way
Yeah darlin’ gonna move to London
Take the artworld in a love embrace
I’ll meet everyone at once
Start an artist-run-space
Like a true art school child
We were taught, taught to be mild
But we’re satisfied
We’ll never ask why
Other covers performed live from their latest album Never Mind the Pollocks - Here’s the Histrionics included Hip to Paint Squares (Post-Painterly Abstraction after Huey Lewis), Me and My Third Hand (an adaptation of Charles Green’s, ‘Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism’ after Joan Armatrading), Nam June Paik (after AC/DC’s TNT), and Appropriation (after The Beatles’ Revolution; You want to use appropriation/Well, you know, we all want to change the words). In each case, the specious artworld issues, described and annotated like a postgrad essay, seem ludicrously substituted for the universal themes of love, freedom, and sorrow that characterise pop/rock.
To quote frontman and founder Danius Kesminas from Melbourne’s Herald-Sun, the band incorporates ‘the ubiquitous Australian phenomenon of the cover band to articulate how the local experience of international culture is often a second-hand mediation’. Thus bad 70s and 80s theory (reproduction, dislocation, simulation) is merged with bad 70s and 80s music (however well-played it was), which included all the generic tropes of live pub rock such as the goose-necked bassist, the pogo-ing front-man, the head-nodding drummer and so on. In this heady mix of theory, music and performance, we are reminded that both art and pop/rock have their hit parades, their moves, their styles, and these can seem pretty dated only a decade or so on.
But as with all of Kesminas’ projects (including collaborations with Mike Stevenson, Slave Pianos, Pedagogical Vehicle Project as well as his own work), there’s an added dimension to the programmatic interrelation of art and pop milieux. For example, while sipping a beer at a pub watching Kesminas dart around stage delivering his ‘Art History 101’ showman spiel while adjusting the overhead projector so we can all read his new lyrics, watching bass-man Dave O’Brien take his shirt off and hoist lead guitarist Craig Fermanis on his shoulders (amazingly Fermanis continues his solo throughout), tapping your feet to a song you never really liked (say, Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’) but which you might now find intriguing for its arcane references to Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (All in all it’s just/Useless steel in the mall), a strange thing happens. A whorl of reference that is completely absorbing and which leaves one’s critical disposition slightly flailing. From the inside of this flurry I variously recalled lying in the back of panel van on my way to Rye back beach listening to Pink Floyd, a girlfriend’s house, searching the library stacks of Monash University for back issues of October magazine. Like many other cover bands, nostalgia pervades The Histrionics repertoire and reaches fever pitch in the band’s live performance.
However, like no other band I’ve seen, except perhaps This Is Serious Mum, The Histrionics reminded me that the only way out of such wistful sentiments (not to mention the endgame of painting, or the crisis in representation more generally) was more irony, beer and laughter; in equal parts, Auld Lang Syne and embarrassment.
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