Kings Arms, Auckland, November 25 2011: Framed by a video backdrop of a campfire, Jed Town begins to play his acoustic guitar, and talk about the backstory of some of his songs. The audience falls almost silent. This is good, I think to myself. Respectful. It doesn’t last long. For the rest of the set, Town struggles to be heard above the rising chatter. So we move closer, and enjoy the 12 string flourishes on ‘Sparse’ and ‘Now That I’m Wanted'. Towards the end of the set Town is joined by a friend on second guitar and harmonies for a heartfelt “Norwegian Wood’. “Shut up!” Town tells the crowd, but he’s laughing. “You won’t be able to hear yourselves when we play the next set.”
He’s right. Fetus Productions are brutally loud. At first there is only Town on stage, in cape and balaclava, playing his Travis Bean guitar (famed for their sustain) to a backing track. Between songs, I hear someone beside me saying “They used to play video of an autopsy. It was full on, man. You wouldn’t want to see that on LSD”. Then, with almost comic timing, the autopsy film begins. The music pounds, the audience don’t know whether to laugh or scream. Some do both. It’s a fine line between hilarity and horror.
Town is joined by Serum, Ian Gilroy on drums and Chris Orange on bass, and they play ‘What’s Going On’ ‘Flicker’ ‘Backbeat’ and ‘Sparks Fly’.
On to the next set. Chris Orange’s powerful playing propelled the X-Features through ‘We Got The Stage’ (which dates back to Town’s pre-Features band the Superettes), ‘Victim’, ‘City Scenes’ and two of my favourites: ‘Human Weakness’ with its thundering bass line, and ‘Party’, where the protagonist wants to find that party but there is only ‘a room full of vacant faces/broken bottles’. Orange joked that Town was thirty years ahead of his time, but he is not far wrong. At the end of 'Nunvember' it was good to see Fetus Productions and Jed Town’s musical and artistic legacy so enthusiastically received.
