Tickled Big Pink: An Horse & The Big Pink @ The HiFi

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Written by Rhys Tate

I had an awful equine pun lined up for An Horse, but the ayes were outweighed by the neighs. Bing! The hot Brissie export opened to a pretty light crowd; the HiFi's upstair bar was closed and there was plenty of room for a trio of indie dervishes (dervi?) to Kate Bush things up in the pit. This was my first opportunity to see Kate Cooper and Damon Fox live and immediately I was struck with a rheumy-eyed longing for another Sunshine State export: Screamfeeder. An Horse were tight and fun and pop - everything you should want in a support. And then they did an extended outro to 'Shoes Watch' which just blew the crowd backwards and proved this might be more than an after-hours side project.

The Big Pink entered to the looped horns of Cypress Hill's 'I Wanna Get High' (and when they've finished with my mixtape from 1993, might I ask them kindly to put it back where they found it), and launched into a chugging version of 'Too Young To Love' which would kick sand in the face of the album version, if they ever met on the beach. 'Velvet' was the inevitable rabble-rousing third song (with all the guttering fuzz feedback that ended most songs, poor Melbourne got a little confused as to where and how long to applaud, often leaving frontman Robbie Furze scowling at a momentary and deafening silence). Similarly, you knew from the start that 'Dominos' was going to be the inevitable encore. That's the way things work with bands touring their debut albums; always save the biggie for last.

But this wasn't the way things worked. The Big Pink re-made the sound of their album, often moving in perpendicular direction to the mood and slipping in some astonishing covers - of which an almost a Capella version of Otis Redding's 'These Arms of Mine' was the highlight. They straddled a number of divides - Furze's festival frontman posturing, dance keys, noise-gaze guitars - but rather than falling between the bases, The Big Pink instead suggested that they could easily move further in any of these directions. And there was no encore, no waiting, no bullshit: "This is our last song, Melbourne, so make it count," Furze howled as an intro to 'Dominos', and I'd like to think that despite out lack of numbers, we did a damn fine job.