Live Review: Dry Cleaning at Brisbane’s Princess Theatre
Dry Cleaning. Photo credit: Kelsey Doyle (@kjdoyle)
As part of the Tivoli Group’s sixth instalment of Open Season, post-punk South Londoners, Dry Cleaning, kicked off the Australian leg of their Secret Love tour on Thursday night with a mammoth set at Brisbane’s Princess Theatre. One of my favourite bands at one of my favourite Brisbane venues.
The older you get, the easier it is to find familiarity in everything. New music sounds like old music. It’s all been done before. But Dry Cleaning is one of the few bands of the past decade to carve out a unique identity for themselves with their distinct sound. Their dependable, driving rhythm is pleasingly hypnotic when paired with lead vocalist Florence Shaw’s lyrics filled with tidbits of conversations that seem to comfortably bury themselves in your brain. Shaw finds little gems in mundane everyday conversation and expertly transforms them into a magnetic sonic experience.
Starting with their newest single, Sliced by a Fingernail, the opening verse floated through the air, tinged with an eerie darkness; “Happy Birthday to you...”
There were gasps and delighted moans from audience members hearing the band perform live for the first time; “Oh my god, her VOICE!” – fans blown away by Shaw’s iconic, deep, melodic spoken-word style of performance.
The band’s instrumentation delivered a deep, driving grunge with sharp cohesion. They swiftly transitioned into Blood– personally, I’ve had this one on repeat since the show – a track with an exceedingly catchy, insistent beat from their latest album, Secret Love, released earlier this year.
Shaw swayed, fingers sometimes jerkingly grasping at nothing, eyes closing, transfixed. Long straight hair, arty top; a cool aura, as always. While generally not one to engage in a great deal of crowd interaction, Shaw shed her mostly quiet demeanour to briefly banter with the crowd, asking for hair tips in Brisbane’s humidity (locals of course gasped “it’s COLD” after an unusually stormy May week left pundits shivering in a frigid 14 degrees for the usual smoko intermissions between each act).
Brisbane seems to evoke fond memories for Dry Cleaning. Shaw reminisced with the crowd about their last show here back in the summer of 2022, which I also had the pleasure of attending; a sweaty, energetic affair in a packed, sticky-floored Brightside. That was a room brimming with love, still emerging from a post-covid fog, desperately devouring live music from international acts again.
This show proved the love hasn’t faded at all.
The amount of dancing showed just how joyfully engrossed the audience was in the performance. Shaw delighted in this, commenting on the horseshoe-like formation of movement she could see spanning the room. And this tour really seems to have a strong association with dancing; upbeat indie riffs on tracks like Joy really lean into this theme. To complete this vision, a series of music videos for songs from Secret Love feature contemporary choreography from London-based creatives, BULLYACHE.
Fans of their past records would have been ecstatic to hear old favourites like Scratchcard Lanyard and Her Hippo (New Long Leg, 2021), the Magic of Meghan (Sweet Princess, 2018), and, of course, Gary Ashby from their last album released in 2022, Stumpwork.
For the finale, the band took Conversation (2018) from its usual lighter rolling beat and led it into a heavier, hypnoticguitar sustain, before briefly exiting the stage, leaving the audience in a trance, longing for more.
The encore was emblematic of the overall tone of Secret Love, which is perhaps a slightly more mellow affair compared with previous releases. Finishing with a funky, punchy bassline and steady beat, Hit My Head All Day proved a fitting end to an evening of joyful grooving.
