A few months ago I was talking to my parents about live music, and they casually dropped that they once saw Chrissy Amphlett in her 80s Divinyls peak perform at Bankstown Sports Club. I was floored. When would you ever see an act so iconic perform at your local these days? Jump back in time 40 years and the Australian music scene looks remarkably different than in the age of the algorithm, legendary bands cutting their teeth at local RSL’s and rowdy pubs, an era of raw talent and hedonism which we both mythologise and interrogate.
Gigz (Michael Giglio), the eponymously named muso ringleader at the helm of That’s Me In the Corner, exists as metaphor for this tension, and also as a regular guy with a guitar playing Aussie classics in the back of a pub. Nestled under the keno screens and a speaker building anticipation for the meat raffle, Gigz is a true everyman, a larrikan, flinging through hits from the Angels, Midnight Oil, and INXS with ease.
Giglio’s show, held at Erskineville Town Hall from the 1st-5th of September before landing at the Pottery Lane Performance Space from the 24th-26th of September, is a one-man devotion to the craft of live pub performances. It’s also a show in crisis. As Giglio flips between the characters of Gigz and venue manager Dave-O, Gigz discovers that the main reason clubs have live musicians is a legal loophole so they can keep the pokies open for an extra two hours.
How complicit is the singer in indulging gambling culture when gigs are the main way they can make a livelihood? As Gigz himself monologues, ‘if I was a lawyer or carpenter then I’d complain, but I’m a musician’, artists are trained to sit and suffer for their art. That’s the price of passion, what we’re taught is needed to make it in the music world these days. But as Gigz tries to play through his stress, he unravels. His heroes were assholes who dated minors, his crowds are small, and his music is a balm for the gamblers losing horrendous amounts of money two rooms over.
