Gig review: The Victims at Crowbar, Sydney

Live review: The Victims at Crowbar, Sydney, Friday, December 2 2023

By BRIAN GIFFIN

AS our founding editor was on the other side of the world preparing to watch the final performance of one of the most famous bands of all time, a small but not insignificant era in Australian music was coming to an end in Sydney. While thousands were streaming from Good Things in Centennial Park as storms threatened, only a few kilometres away, hundreds had packed themselves into the band room at the Crowbar to witness the last ever show by The Victims.

Music and entertainment history generally celebrates only the biggest successes or most spectacular failures. The Victims were neither, but neither were they a band that let anyone dictate the meaning of either of those terms to them. If the measure of a person’s popularity is the number of people who come to their funeral, then the Victims would have been a massively popular person. This was no gathering of the hip and trendy who had come just to say they were there, either. With the average age closer to 60 than to 25, in a sweltering venue that offers standing room only, these were rock and roll diehards here for this last hurrah.

The Hellebores and Chimers had the distinction of opener honours; I know they acquitted themselves well even though a friend’s birthday party prevented me from arriving in time to see them, barely finding a place to fit in the room as The Victims unloaded the 40 seconds of straight-up punk rock mayhem of “Victim” to open a set that contained basically every song they ever wrote. Stage right, Dave Faulkner pleasantly regales the crowd with snippets of dry wit and reminiscences between bouts of thrashing his guitar into submission. To his left, Ray Ahn adopts a familiar pose, throwing himself back and forth, stepping up to offer a gem or two of his own between songs now and then. In the middle, James Baker doesn’t so much drive the beat as smash it out of the place. By every account playing his final live show, he’s making every hit count as the set list flies by – “Horror Smash”, “I Understand”, “Uranium”, “Telethon Song”, “Elvis”, “Girls Don’t Go For Punks”. Ray’s lifelong bandmate Blackie steps up for a cameo and helps rip the place apart. “Television Addict” descends and it’s almost a religious moment even for someone like me who came to the band very late. A few songs before Dave declares he “can’t believe we’ll never play these songs again” and now here they were still somehow looking fresh after blazing through 22 songs in less than an hour. It’s all over… until it wasn’t, and they return to blast out “Chinese Rocks” from the Heartbreakers, then “Perth is a Culture Shock” and, at the last, “Disco Junkies” and then it really does end. There’s no more songs to play. They’ve played them all and they’ll never play them again. The Victims take their final bow and the capacity crowd shuffle slowly out into the light and air of the Crowie’s public bar, a chapter closed but in such a glorious, memorable and emotional way.

Image: Rod Hunt