There is this debate in marketing around how many exposures are required to create a brand awareness in someone. I’ve heard six, eight, three.. Whatever. Hits have proven that once is enough. Anyone who was at their show last night will agree with me, I’m sure.. If you saw the show, you know and love Hits.

And this is Brisbane at its best, I think. A dodgy little bar cage that none of the coolsies have found yet, wedged between peep shows and a Fortitude Valley arrest hotspot. While it seems a high volume traffic area for simians and the homeless, none of them are interested in entry. Their mistake. The stairs drop straight down in to a pit of day glo kitsch and UV lighting. One end of the place has pinball and pool, the other has a (working) wall-mounted crucifixion rack and some demure seating. Bless, I am home.

There is practically no one there when The Young Liberals mount the step-high stage platform. I’d say maybe 15 – 20 people are milling about like ponces. They begin and a few things are immediately obvious:

1) The PA is shitty. The kind of set up that was designed for giving speeches at high school assemblies.
2) Everyone is here for FUN. The songs are silly, the crowd is silly, my laugh is silly. Fun.
3) The night is going to be fantastic.

The Young Liberals are uncontrived and very funny. When Before Hollywood pegged them as ’60s garage tunes with a Dave McCormack bent they were right on target. Their lyrics alone made me laugh, but more pleasing was the fact they looked genuinely amused for the entirety of their set. Everett True jumped on stage for a few songs and things only got funnier. This was my first real life viewing of the man, the Legend, and frankly it won me over. His songs – I use the term loosely as they were mostly spoken word hybrids – were hilarious. I won’t elaborate as it undermines their impact and I demand you all go next time to witness first hand.

I am digressing though. There is one point here: Hits.

Everett shuffles off stage and Jo the Butcher Bird is back up there. The Young Liberals play a few more songs and get off the stage.

The Young Liberals made a band to take the piss. They ended up with a shit hot band that could pull off anything but mostly take the piss. The distinction is an impressive one.

The Heels. Not even worth talking about. I hope that people do not take last night as a display of The Heels’ live show. I saw them with the Dirtbombs months and months and months ago, I think, and they were bordering on awesome. This show was a struggle to sit through. I’m not sure what happened, though Tom did say much earlier in the evening that they’d all been sick and he really just felt like having a lie down.

Fuck that. Hits are coming. I go outside and smoke a hundred cigarettes and I talk about how excited I am and I make some new friends and we talk about how excited I am. The day that led me to this point has been an easy fairy tale. I have this killer mojo going on and I know it is one of those Cindarella things but the point is not the prince, it is the fact something becomes precious when you bookend it with time and deadlines. Wait, no it isn’t. The point is the Hits. And they’re playing. So back down in to the pit we go.

The beast has changed. Everyone is huddled together in front of the band. The chairs are emptying. Dick pushes the tiny foldback a few feet away from the stage and announces that he has been learning kung fu and if anyone walks in this circle he will kick them.

Hits start playing.

Fuck. My compadre said to me later, “It is a rare thing that a band will play and right then at that moment you know they are the best band in the world. That just happened.”

Right then, at that moment, Hits are the best band in the world. I have felt this before at a Drones concert. Everyone in the room is linked in no tenuous way by an all-pervasive happiness because we are here and we are seeing this and these people are somehow – SOMEHOW – through the most bizarre of instruments for the purpose, well.. they are getting us and we are getting them and if you could see interaction like a colour there would be this nebulous mixture of the entire spectrum flowing both ways between them and us. Evil Dick swells behind the mic and becomes the epic front man who gives himself up so savagely you think he might collapse from the sheer loss of psychic blood, but his band have no problem keeping him steady and it is clear he has faith in that. I look around and everyone is dancing. Dick is howling. He is in the crowd and he is howling and the people around him are howling too but they probably haven’t realised it yet and I think, fuck, this is some mojo. And I look around again and suddenly understand the entire history of music and how it has leaked in to itself and licked its own wounds and I get it because Hits get all of us and they taught me where to find the answer rather than what it was.

Re-focus. Hits. We are halfway through the show and the band are locked in like a fucking handshake, and this is my favourite bit. This is my favourite bit. When they all start to drift off course but there is that undeniable, iron maiden undercurrent that tells you they’ve been playing together forever and everything will be fine. They sound fucking amazing. Stacey Coleman is in the crowd now and she is doubled over playing her guitar centimeters from the floor and Tamara is just fucking BEAMING to herself as she destroys soundwaves with soundwaves and wails like some freaky siren behind Dick and the drums are falling all over the place because Gregor is ruthless and there is one perfectly simultaneous dance move because we are puppets to the higher biorhythmic order that Hits just created and Tamara jumps in to the crowd too and this has become five, ten, fifty minutes of total abandon and overwhelming glee for all of us and I think FUCK my Cindarella mojo, FUCK the twelve o’clock pumpkin collapse THIS IS HITS AND IT IS BIGGER THAN ALL OF US.

Yes, this is Brisbane at its best. Hits at their best. And the rest of us at our best too.

Hits.

EDITED TO ADD: This guy is THE bootleg man and he has recordings from last night up over here.

The Young Liberals.
The Heels.
Everett True (Brighton England was possibly my favourite song from the night).