Shop tactics

March 18, 2005

The music in the charts and supermarkets has been a lot more colourful since Machine Gun Fellatio gatecrashed them. Jack Marx reports.

Where: Sydney Harbour
When: March 25-27
How much: $60-$75 a day; three-day tickets $140-$190
Bookings: 9209 4614
More information:
Machine Gun Fellatio play the Turbine Hall on March 26, 2.45pm

'I've tried really hard to grow up," says Pinky Beecroft, singer-songwriter for Cockatoo Island headliners Machine Gun Fellatio, "but it's just such a difficult thing to do."

So it would appear. For the better part of a decade, this band of thirtysomethings with names such as LoveShark and Chit Chat von Loopin Stab have been dressing like vagrants loose in a clothes-hire shop.

The presentation sometimes doesn't suit Machine Gun Fellatio, a band that can bang out a charming piece of music when it wants to. But as Beecroft points out, there is simply no other way to be.

"As the singer in a band, I'm always aware of the absurdity of it," he says. "I mean, 99.9 per cent of people who sing in bands don't seem to be aware of it. They get up to the microphone and pull rock poses without any awareness of the irony that they might be No. 151 million in a long line of lead singers to pull the very same pose while singing yet another variation on 'C'mon, baby, let's get it on now, please.'

"There's something so inherently silly about that that I find it amazing so many bands can get up every night of the week and do it with a straight face."

Even Kiss eventually took off their make-up.

"Yeah, and wasn't everyone happy with that? We've been on tour with Kiss, so I've seen a lot of them with their make-up off - and frankly, I think it was a good idea that they went with the make-up caper in the first place.

"But we are still playing dress-ups, it's true. And to be playing dress-ups at this age and to be still getting paid for it ... well, wouldn't you?"

Machine Gun Fellatio were formed from a collision of Sydney subculture art bands in 1997. Their line-up has remained largely unchanged, although Widow Jones recently left the band "to pursue her own interests and chill out at home for a while".

Beecroft and von Loopin Stab were credited on the Whitlams' huge 1998 hit No Aphrodisiac, but it's fair to say Machine Gun Fellatio were never the serious punter's choice for commercial success. For example, 1999's Mutha F---a on a Motorcycle seemed too aberrant for mainstream tastes.

But that single, the success of Unsent Letter, No. 16 on the Triple J Hottest 100 in 2000, and the additional boost from their gig as pub stage fixtures in the hit ABC series Love Is a Four-Letter Word, pushed Machine Gun Fellatio into the charts.

Beecroft says that's a place that has never felt entirely like home.

"I think even really mainstream sort of people probably have days where they wake up feeling like an alien who's crashed its ship, and I have those days, too," he says. "But I think that's why people cling so hard to the little things they love. I also think that's why the minute you play a venue bigger than the 50-seater that you played a few nights ago, those 50 people will be saying, 'Oh, I really hate them now. They've sold out to play the 300-seater and they were mine ... They were my little band that I loved.'"

Doing a tour sponsored by Coca-Cola last year didn't help the band, either.

"We copped bucketloads of shit for that," Beecroft says. "Y'know - 'You're doing a tour for Coke, man, and they're evil. You've sold out.' And they were always little North Shore turds with Nike running shoes on.

"You do what you can to get money from wherever you can so as to avoid having to work in a bank. I do whatever I can to get my stuff out there and that's it. I sold out when I got my first record deal, y'know? 'Show me the money and I'll show you my cock' - that's what I want on my tombstone."

Like previous outings, Machine Gun Fellatio's latest, On Ice, does not at first appear to be a slam dunk for the commercial charts.

But new single What the F--- (Do I Care) is already receiving commercial airplay in the most unlikely places. This proves Beecroft's theory that deliberately writing for the charts is a mistake in the first place.

"A friend of mine called me recently to say she was standing in Safeway or Coles or something and they were playing What the F---," he says.

"I mean, the song says 'f---' about 800 times and it's being played in a major supermarket chain in the middle of the day. How could you pick that? You can't. You've just got to do what you do and hope for the best."

For now, Beecroft is simply content just to be the big kid who is yet to outgrow his clothes.

Or his old prejudices.

"I run into people in the street sometimes, kids that I went to school with," he says.

"And I just wish that at the time, in the playground, I'd had somebody with me who could have said, 'Did you know that Gerard Smith is going to be a complete loser in 15 years' time?' Then I wouldn't have taken so much notice when Gerard Smith gave me shit. I would have said, 'Hey, Gerard - you're a loser ... or you will be, anyway.'"

And who exactly is Gerard Smith? "Aw, who's not? Take your pick - he's everywhere."


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