The Brian Jonestown Massacre

He's talking about Kevin Rudd, obscure bands, the tambourine, John Safran, the Black Ryder gig last night, Aimee Nash's breasts, Steve Kilbey, and the need to not throw cigarettes around inside. The crowd is restless and yelling at them to just play. I want to slap him and the people who constantly barge past on the stairs.

The percussionist has sunglasses, double denim and is all chunky, clunky side-burns. I say percussionist but he plays only one instrument, a tambourine.

At the house above the sea I come across this: "The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange." But sometimes it seems like it takes no imagination at all to make settled things strange. Perhaps settled things are mostly strange.

It's a yellow morning and no accident that during that week I've found myself in the department store wondering what fashion feels like now.

At the Brian Jonestown Massacre fashion feels sometimes like checked lumberjack coats and greasy hair. Boys barely out of their teens are inexplicably championing natty hats and then sitting on the stairs with their head between their legs for a drunken breather. Behind us one says that it's moments like these that change your life. I mostly feel irritation at the lost momentum and beauty wasted in endless cigarettes between songs. I wonder if irritation can be life changing.

We leave before they finish. He's said they'll play all day, and we don't doubt his word. It means that the toilets are empty as we leave.