My First Gig

The first music venue I remember going to is the Seaview Ballroom in St. Kilda, sometime in the early eighties. I remember drinking cider because it was cheap and got you drunker quicker, but perhaps because of this I don't seem to remember which bands I saw, and in what order. It could have been The Dead Kennedy's, The Laughing Clowns, The Strange Tenants, Plays With Marionettes (?), or any other band that has now fallen into a slough of obscurity. It probably wasn't any now lauded Australian Alternative Rock band like the Birthday Party, The Saints or The Triffids, because by the time I was rolling around on St. Kilda venues' sticky floors they had buggered off to London to make their fortunes. (That went well.) I remember other musical shitholes now renovated or demolished: The Chevron, The Punters Club, Le Club Foote; The Palais still stands like a corroded rock in the middle of a sea of renovation. I saw New Order at the Palais in 1984; they bored me rigid.