“Skull!” cries somebody the packed audience at Melbourne’s Palace Theatre, late on Wednesday night. “I’m in it for the long haul” Flogging Molly frontman Dave King chuckles into the microphone, sipping reservedly on his can of Guinness.
This proves to be true of more than King’s drinking with the show stretching to two hours, but it is anything but reserved.
Weaving through a well selected set-list spanning the band’s almost 20 year career, the distinctive head-held-high Celtic Punk is maudlin, but far from overly sweet.
For every one part of self-pity, they have added at least three parts raucous energy and two parts righteous anger. There’s fighting spirit, but the kind that’s directed at the CEOs of the world rather than the bloke or lass standing next to you.
An anthem for those made jobless and desperate by those who control the economy, “The Power’s Out” finishes with “blood sucking leech CEO… C-E-O, must, go!” and a pointedly raised middle finger on King’s hand.
Though it’s a recent track, released on their latest album Speed Of Darkness, “Saints And Sinners” still has punters singing along. King raises his hands in a slightly mocking prayer to the stage, lights beating down on his face.
Four down tempo songs in the middle of the show form what King calls an acoustic set. The song “Wanderlust”, he says, is about “needing your friends then finding them on the other side of the world”. The more relaxed feel of the song doesn’t stop a crowd surfer from being launched into the air as it kicks off though.
As the band ramps up the energy again with “The Kilburn High Road”, King opines “The Vatican needs a good whoopin’.” Bass player and backup vocalist Nathan Maxwell’s heavy breathing propels spit, sweat, or both into the beams of stage light.
Feeding off this energy, the beating, sweating heart of the audience is in the pit. Here, high velocity sweaty bodies careen into each other as they shove, shimmy, and jig themselves around the beer slippery floor.
Though it may not be clear to the punters standing outside, it is solidarity rather than aggression that inspires this shoving.
Elbows stay at elbow level and fists don’t fly, but rather float. Whenever someone slips over, and this happens often, three or four people scramble to drag them up before they’re trampled.
It’s a primitive, almost skill-free sort of dancing together, but it’s beautiful in a time when ‘dancing together’ is all too often reduced to moving alone in a crowd.
Here is a group of people exorcising their demons and pouring out all of their energy in concert with the other bodies pressing all around them, intimately colliding, sometimes bruising, but undeniably making something together.
“You’re doing a fantastic job down there, dancing your heart out,” shouts King.
Helpful hands launch crowd surfers onto the heads of the tightly packed crowd, keeping the security guards at the front busy.
When one of the few women in the audience is launched, the negative side of the pit’s intimacy is on show, as an anonymous hand attached to a perverted body steals a feel of her through her jeans.
In the course of the show, Flogging Molly takes the audience in their collective hand, swinging and shoving them through their own (distinctively Irish) take on human suffering, memory and hope.
Walking sweat soaked into the chilly Melbourne midnight, most of the punters in this audience doubtless felt that it was worth their ticket money.
