Dry Cleaning
The Forum, Melbourne, VIC
Saturday, May 30th
Now in its fifth year, Melbourne’s RISING Festival kicked off last week, seeing in winter with an eclectic mix of arts and music. Past headliners have included Arab Strap, Obongjayar, The Damned, Yves Tumour, and Japanese Breakfast, and Saturday night delivered the return of South London’s Dry Cleaning to a rammed Forum.
The lucky recipients of Dry Cleaning’s early arriving and attentive audience were local band Silicone Prairie, fronted by US expat Ian Teeple.
They kicked like a scrappy throwback to ‘70s UK punk, but as they moved through their set their playing proved to be tight. Their no-fuss, banter-less set was fast-paced and never dull.
Dry Cleaning know what buttons to push to make even their staunchest fans feel on edge. As the band took to the stage focus was drawn to the giant backdrop reproduction of their Secret Love album cover, featuring an eye being held wide open by a thumb and forefinger as an eyewash is readied to be administered. The backdrop was cropped to show just the eye and fingers — the giant eye positioned sideways. When the lights dimmed, just the eye was spotlit, hovering above like a demented full moon.
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The normally four-piece band entered the stage with a fifth member to carry out keyboard duties. Bathed in dark red lights, they got straight to business as vocalist Florence Shaw stepped to the mic and greeted the crowd in her signature deadpan tone: “Happy birthday to you”.
There was a cheer of recognition for the opening line of Dry Cleaning’s most recent single, “Sliced by a Fingernail”. Wiry guitar lurched across faltering beats as snippets of Shaw’s dialogue weaved in and out of the mix: “to be a dog,” “a disco night,” “why are you concealed?”
The band pushed straight into “Blood” (from last year’s Secret Love) and “Gary Ashby” (from 2022’s Stumpwork), their spoken-word, post-punk set-starters always moody and mesmerising, the crowd immediately entranced.
Guitarist Tom Dowse stepped to the mic with unexpected enthusiasm, and the room momentarily snapped back into reality. He thanked Melbourne audiences for their support (Australian fans were early adapters and remain the band’s biggest market outside the UK) and introduced his fellow band members.
It was a rare interruption to the 90-minute set that included the entirety of the Secret Love album as well as some of their back catalogue, at times going as deep as 2018’s Sweet Princess EP.
A stark light display soaked the stage in eerie hues of red, purple, and green, Shaw often the only one in a white spotlight. Psychedelic and geometric patterns rotated across the stage, a white-dotted light sequence at times creating a glitch effect — at one point Shaw appeared as if caught in TV static.
The band fleshed out their songs as extended post-punk jams. Sometimes angular, other times dubby — sounds moved in, out, and around Shaw’s enthralling poetry. By the time drummer Nick Buxton switched to saxophone for the hypnotically seductive “Anna Calls From the Arctic”, we were all well and truly in the zone.
Shaw, about to take up tambourine duty, invited the crowd to dance, promising “no judgement,” and a mini-set of uptempo numbers, including “Cruise Ship Designer” and “Scratchcard Lanyard”, followed. Shaw dutifully noted that the responsive dancing crowd looked like “a beautiful ocean.”
The set’s intensity built and built until closing song “Conversation” erupted into a freefall of feedback writhing around Shaw’s dispassionate recital, “Brrring brrring, hello… Am I on a date right now?” A cacophony of sound rolled through the venue as the song’s ending stretched out, buoyed on by loud cheers from the crowd.
A deafening feedback loop continued even as the band exited the stage. All cries for an encore were sucked into a blackhole of stage noise that refused to let up until they returned. The roaring drone dissolved into last year’s “Hit My Head All Day”, Dry Cleaning determined to keep us on edge until the bitter end.
Check out Dry Cleaning’s remaining ANZ tour dates here.
