BABYFREEZE AT SOUND AND FURY

For those who have been tracking Babyfreeze’s life as band, playing at a Warhol-esque performance art party within a roiling sea of burlesque artists, dancers and poets probably seems like the logical conclusion of something. Even by our standards this gig was on the fruity side, and one of the funnest we’ve ever played.

Sound and Fury is a semi-regular series of nights curated by the indefatigable Chenoeh Miller, an ACT arts producer of singular focus and sensibility. Sound and Fury takes place inside the Nishi Gallery at At New Acton and it’s core audience are used to a dizzying array of performance that ranges from the frantic to the ruminative.

Many of the acts were scored live by a quintet of string players from the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, and I was very lucky to wangle my way into singing a couple of numbers with them. Sitting atop a podium for the first two hours of the night, cutting a figure of inconsolable misery, I periodically broke into ultra-bleak torch favorites from the history of pop such as What Now My Love and Hopelessly Devoted To You. This simple SadSinger character is one I’ve had in the hindbrain for a while and this was a crazy-fun way to roadtest him for future use.Playing things ultra-sad for that long meant that when I moved from the podium to the stage, introduced Babyfreeze and then kicked into our mega-banger Christmas Number One with FULL STRING QUINTET ACCOMPANIMENT is was an instantly floor-filling moment, and maybe as close as we’ll ever get to a movie-style set piece (though not if I have anything to say about it). We vaulted from that straight holiday uplift into one of our sleazier and sketchier sets to date, and the beautiful crowd went right along with us. The whole thing was a real Yuletide Gay.Photos by Chenoeh Miller, except for this one of me doing a headstand by Andrew Richey: