Comedy/Music
By Tomas Ford
Fri 23 Jan
Noodle Palace
by Kate Prendergast
Face it: there’s no way you’ll ever be taken seriously dancing to Daryl Braithwaite’s ‘The Horses’. And that’s okay. ‘Embrace it’, Tomás Ford tells Perth Fringe-goers. Own that awful, in your own special way.
A goofball hail to the beloved shithouse that is and was popular music, Ford’s Crap Music Rave Party gives you this licence to indulge even the daggiest of bygone hits. Taking requests from the crowd, Ford will play anything. That goes for your mum’s old records, one-hit horrors, Barnsey and Bonnie Tyler, Crazy Frog and Kate Bush, glitter-trap cringe and Eurovision travesty. The one rule is it has to be crap.
It’s an insouciant skip-hop over the quibble of subjective taste. It really doesn’t matter at this party— whether you genuinely like what’s playing or listening to it curdles your soul, you’ll be dancing. And probably lip-syncing too. And yes, inevitably, conga-lining. And then participating in a glitter-fingers-circle that goes on far longer than it should (with all the attendant weird memories at dawn). You can’t help yourself. When it comes to ABBA and NSYNC (and other bands with mysteriously capitalized names), no one can stop the righteous murder of pride on this dance floor.
Pack-leader to the chaos is showman and bodacious wag Tomás Ford. In tank top, sailor’s hat, boardies and lei, Ford’s madcap antics are the reactor core to the room’s energy. Like a divinely salacious elf, he scampers rocketingly about, seducing happy dancers with hand-held disco lights, launching nearly-weds into crowd-surfs, and all the time bouncing off hot transvestite space pirate hype-man Ayden Doherty, who seems to both dig and be forever half-bemused by his partner-in-music-crime.
Whilst upcoming raves will be held in Midland and Fremantle, the show made its Fringe début on Friday in the Laksa Lounge of Northbridge’s Noodle Palace. With its cream-carpet floors, frosted-glass entrance, low-ventilation and snug dimensions, the space brought to mind a last-minute booked high-school reunion. Lame-factor was amplified— for better or worse.
Without losing sight of its happy-scrappy origins, Crap Music Rave Party has grown into something of a cult phenomenon in Australia and overseas, boasting sell-out shows at Edinburgh Fringe, Adelaide and Perth. There seems to be something universally uplifting in the daggy pleasure of getting down to doghouse tunes. You find yourself throwing yourself about the room in ecstasies of abandon, caught up in a kind of wank-free glamour-hammy post-modern burlesque.
Much of the joy, perhaps, comes down to not quite knowing where the irony begins and the nostalgia ends. In the midst of a soundtrack to the apocalypse of pretension, you can’t help but grin. Then strike a pose. Ain’t nothing to it.
Tomás Ford’s Crap Music Rave Party will be running at various locations until February 7. Buy tickets here.
