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Ghostboy with Golden Virtues
26 September 2009
Fringe Hub, Lithuanian Club
(the re-mix)
If you take a date to Ghostboy with Golden Virtues, I promise you will be naked together by the end of the evening. But there are only two chances left.
It hurts to sit and watch performers present their hearts, desires and sexual kinks to a mere handful of besotted punters. Ghostboy with Golden Virtues (GBGV) have only two more shows left in our town (Swallow and Exit) and our Fringe goers are missing them. This is not only unfair to them but also heartbreaking for everyone who doesn’t see them.
Their attitude is punk, but their musicianship supreme and their lyrics awaken deep desires that leave us blushing with recognition. GBGV are from Brisbane, so they already have to fight for respect in our southern climes, but remember that the city that produced Joh (why was I the only person who laughed at that reference?), also produced the likes of Ed Kueper and The Go-Betweens; perhaps the constant temperature lets music mature to perfection.
With a seduction technique somewhere between flirting with an angel and squeezing into latex for a swingers party in Frankston, Ghostboy and his stage lovers don’t believe that audiences are just there to watch. Breaking this barrier is confronting before it’s liberating, so it’s best to jump in and enjoy early because one day ‘Your smile will fade, your skin will wrinkle and no one will love you’.
Melbourne Fringe supporters are fickle. We know what we like and we like to see what we know. Next door to GBGV, hundreds of grinning, fizz-swilling Last Tuesday Society fans were spilling out of the Fringe Club. I only left because I trusted the recommendation I had to see GBGV. Given the chance, everyone who was at the club, or wanted to be at the club, would fall head-over-arse in longing lust with this group.
GBGV are Melbourne’s type. There’s the too beautiful goth girl violinist; the hotter-than-Marilyn (Monroe, not Manson) platinum blonde guitarist and singer; the silent masked gimp bass player; curvy dancers; oddly handsome musicians; and an unshaven, bald headed, divinely tattooed enigmatic lead singer who wears a black tulle petticoat and a fascinator far better than any Spring Cup goer. Melbourne, you know you want them.
Given the chance, this town would fancy GBGV so much that we would try to extradite them, but instead of holding them to our loving bosoms, taking them to laneway bars and hand feeding them canapés recommended by Matt Preston (and then shagging them senseless), we’re standing them up like a bad internet date.
Ghostboy with Golden Virtues reminds us what art can be and what it’s really all about. We love a serious mind seduction, but we’d give it all up for a fuck. And I don’t mean that tedious, it’s-1am-and-we’re-not-asleep-and-the-DVD-has-finished sex, but the uninhibited kind that leaves you groaning and tingling with the understanding that love and wildness and passion can exist together.
More 2009 Fringe reviews.
This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.
