Ah, the Northcote Social Club: where punters have no qualms about sitting cross-legged on the carpeted ground. Support act Yeo stands on stage with his electric guitar, next to his drummer/backing vocalist, who has traded in sticks for brushes to suit Yeo’s easy listening jazz tunes. Yeo’s lyrics are cheesy or cutesy depending on how you look at them, and his melodies are not particularly groundbreaking in any way, but the music is nevertheless warming and the crowd—sparse at first but growing by the minute—applauds encouragingly after every song. Yeo’s charmingly dorky banter wins us over: “It’s really hard to see you guys from up here, ’cause the light’s really bright… My heart’s beating really fast but you can’t tell!” he squeaks sheepishly. As his set draws to a close, he thanks Butterfly Boucher for having them, to which she shouts, “My pleasure!” from somewhere near the bar.
The diverse audience here tonight—from young to middle-aged, all dressed differently—finally rise from their sitting positions as Butterfly takes the stage, just her and her guitar, some pedals and a beast of an amp. She starts with “Life Is Short”, an old favourite off her 2003 debut album Flutterby. Watching her, a few things are apparent: she is completely comfortable being alone on stage, and while it would have been great to hear her songs in a band setting, she can hold her own without one. Also, she isn’t afraid to coax the audience into singing along with her, especially in the parts of her songs that don’t actually consist of words, just sounds: “I’m not good at remembering lyrics, so that’s my gift to you. ‘Oh’s and ‘ba’s.
As the songs continue, Butterfly impresses more and more. In new songs “The Weather” and the heartbreaking “Warning Bell”, from her upcoming self-titled album, she sings with her whole body and face; not in a dramatic way, but rather organically, as though she can’t help but put all of herself into her singing. And while she isn’t the most technical of guitarists, she wears the instrument so naturally and plays with obvious passion. Plus, speaking as a woman with a rating of 2 on the Kinsey Scale, what’s hotter than a lady pulling off short hair, brandishing a guitar in a rock-stance?
To top it all off, she makes the intimate performance feel like it’s an impromptu house party sing-a-long, casually talking to us between songs as though we’re all her mates. In what proves to be a special moment for all, she invites Yeo back on stage to accompany her on tambourine for “I Can’t Make Me” (complete with improvised solo, which elicits whoops from the crowd), and steps away from the mic in the penultimate chorus; our cue to take over. She tries a different tactic in “Another White Dash” by singing very quietly, widening her eyes and nodding her head at us.
Butterfly announces that she won’t be doing an encore, so we should “get ready to get your minds blowened.” She quickly realises that ‘blowened’ is not a real word, and explains that if that had happened in America (where she currently resides) she could have just said, “That’s what we say in Australia,” but for obvious reasons that trick would not work on us.
Butterfly ends the night with her new single “5678!”, cranking a backing track after the first verse. She has used a few backing tracks during the course of her set, but none have worked quite so well as this. Towards the latter half of the song, two people shimmy their way to the front of the stage and dance with admirable unselfconsciousness, causing Butterfly to shout “YEAH!” mid-verse; they are soon joined by two more dancers. The rest of us are content to stay where we are and bop along in the darkness. We thank a thrilled Butterfly—one of Australia’s finest and most bafflingly underrated singer-songwriters—for an excellent evening with resounding cheers.
– Stephanie-Bowie Liew
