Goodbye Moshy
Just short of a decade
The Moshpit Calls It A Day
The Moshpit announced this week that they will shut up shop on 28 November this year. Gods below, they only received some grant recently from Stage NSW to upgrade the backline gear. It didn’t come as a complete surprise because talk of this closure has been circulating in murmurs for about a year. At the core of it is the rising costs and falling revenue that put them in a difficult spot. Every business is about its margins and if you have no margin, it’s no business at all. Rents being what they are in Sydney, you can’t be doing this stuff if you can’t keep your own household going. This is the economic reality in Sydney in 2026. There is also news that 185 Bar in Marrickville is also closing its doors. Venues with very active scenes are nonetheless going out of business.
The Moshpit has been great for our band. It’s felt like our home ground for a long time. It’s not lofty, it’s not some sacred site, you won’t run into famous people there - but it is the one place you could go play for broke for so many bands - bands that probably didn’t get a go anywhere else to begin with. I’ve seen some amazing and amazingly obscure acts there. The energy of the place was always empowering, and you would feel it on the stage coming off the audience. Maybe in years to come people will write about it.
For now, I guess we have a number of weeks to get to the bitter end. WhatEva is tentatively booked to play the 21st of November, a week before doors close forever. It would be fantastic to see you there one last time.
Fearful Prognostication
After I wrote about that Open AI Agent that broke containment and went and hacked another company steal their data last week, I had one of those moments where I wake up in the middle of the night with a weird insight. China and the USA are in competition in this AI arena. Depending on whom you ask, USA is still ahead by a nose or China is ahead by miles. It’s hard to say, but Chinese AI is out there and it’s a thing. If not this month, at some point a Chinese AI Agent is going to break out of containment and start hacking other companies for data.
And what’s scary about it is that we won’t know that China lost control of their AI until it’s too late because China does’t like admitting it fucked up on the world stage - and that’s exactly how the whole world ended up with the Covid Pandemic. Therefore my fearless prediction is that when AI goes out of control and starts fucking up the world, it will be a Chinese AI. We won’t know it’s happening until it’s too late because the Chinese Government won’t admit they lost control.
Spiderman And The Never Ending Capitalist Machine
I caught the new Spiderman movie at the movies this week. It is breaking box office records in its opening weekend and this is perhaps a very welcome thing for the exhibitors. Last week was ‘The Odyssey; this week is ‘Spiderman - Brand New Day’; they had ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ only a couple of months ago; they still have ‘Godzilla Minus 0.0’, ‘Dune 3’ and the new Avengers Doomsday movie to look forward to at the end of the year.
The cinema was packed like in the heyday of blockbusters only a decade ago when we last piled into watch movies. ‘The Odyssey’ had a good number of people in the cinema on a Friday night, but this was a Saturday matinee and the audience was pumped for the experience. All age groups were present. Clearly the new Spiderman movie was an event not to be missed. It’s enough to make you think that maybe the coming death of cinema was greatly exaggerated. People still want to see some Star Wars, some Sword-and-Sandal epic, and watch a beloved comic hero swing into action once more. If the good folks at MGM and Amazon can just get off their high horses and make a fun James Bond movie, maybe the business can just keep going on indefinitely.
What struck me abut the crowd - not the movie, the crowd - was how keen it was to see Spiderman once more. Sony’s obsession in making such aimless and audience-alienating movies such as ‘Madame Web’ and ‘Kraven the Hunter’ was awful and misguided. I’ve watched those on streaming services and felt grateful I didn’t have to file into a cinema for those offerings. Indeed, it seriously makes you question what the Sony creative executives were thinking in making those movies. Fancy trying to make a Spiderman movie without Spiderman and calling it ‘content’.
The problem for Sony could be that it wants to keep control of the Spiderman IP but it doesn’t understand what it has in the IP. Spiderman is the leading citizen of the cast of charters Marvel has created over the years. He belongs in the full context of Marvel movies. Trying to create a parallel concern to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is counter to what the audiences want to see. The audience is happy to see Yelena Belova played by Florence Pugh turn up in the story. They love it when the Punisher comes on full of bluster and guns, and swaps barbs with Spidey. A cheer went up when Sadie Sink’s character was revealed as Jean Grey. People want this gathering.
In a sense Sony doesn’t have a Marvel problem. It has a Not-being-Marvel problem. Marvel can always build toward a huge ensemble piece every decade and get people in to cinemas with their leading characters. Sony cannot get the audience into cinemas with this IP unless Spiderman is front and centre. They want to control how the grand Spiderman narrative goes, but they only make money when Spiderman rejoins the Marvel context. They’re going to need a better plan than the ‘Sinister Six’ movies. They should have made TV series out of those characters, like they did with Nicolas Cage’s ‘Spider-Noir’. Start small. Build an audience through story telling, not cliche-ridden spectacles.
There’s probably a lesson for Warner Brothers as well, after the terrible showing ‘Supergirl’ had at the Box Office. Looking back to Helen Slater’s turn donning the costume in the 1980s, I can’t remember a time when the character Supergirl was actually a draw at the Box Office. I loved Melissa Benoist’s turn as Supergirl, but I don’t think I would’ve paid to see a big screen Supergirl movie with her in it. Right now, Warners has Superman, Batman and maybe Wonder Woman as their cinema draws. The rest of the DC characters are better as TV series until they can build a little cult, which I guess is what is going on with Green Lantern. Colin Farrell as Penguin was wonderful. A showdown between that version of Penguin and a Pattinson Batman is very viable as Box Office fare.
Anyway, ‘Brand New Day’ is a fun movie. Go watch it at the cinema. Don’t wait for streaming. That’s not how this thing is meant to be experienced.
RIP Glenn A Baker
The great Rock’n’Roll know-it-all-person, the delightful Glenn A Baker passed away this past week. It feels like another one of those moments where the Baby Boomers are giving into time and checking out. An interesting tidbit that came out in an interview with his son was that Baker had changed schools 10 times in 12 years, and somehow that experience had driven him to the comfort of collecting records. Having had the same experience of changing school 10 times in 12 years, it did not surprise me that his vast collection of audio media came from such an experience. You can change houses, schools, friends, cities, states, countries, but you bring your records with you everywhere. They’re the constant in your life. Baker’s was an extraordinary life in music and he was an extraordinary keeper of Rock Music Lore. He is sorely missed by his fellow record-huggers.
What’s Spinning This Week (in no particular order):
Focus 1973 BBC Live -Focus
Amigos - Santana
Climbing! - Mountain
Dreamtime - The Stranglers
And Then There Were Three - Genesis
Foreign Tongues - The Rolling Stones
Focus woodshedding on BBC in 1973 is a pretty choice bit of recording. It illustrates the power, precision, and energy of Focus playing live. These guys could really bring it. Everybody is playing with immense passion and commitment. These guys are really good, but so were a lot of other bands. Now that there aren’t that many good bands about, their recordings stick out. It’s a bit unfair it took so long, but so it goes.
‘Amigos’ follows up a pretty good album with an even more remarkable record. If you ever wondered where ‘Los Endos’ by Genesis comes from, it comes from listening to this album. If you ever wondered where ‘Steve Vai’s ‘Tender Surrender’ comes from, it’s surely a vibe lift from ‘Europa (Earth’s Cry Heaven’s Smile)’ from this album. Look, I don’t have anything to add but more praise for Santana’s early to mid-1970s catalogue - This stuff is gold.
'Climbing!’ by Mountain is a blues rock masterpiece. It is like a codex of blues rock. This is some serious guitar playing. Like Santana, Mountain is also a Woodstock alumnus. I really like Leslie West’s playing. He’s a big guy with big strong hands so his lines sound sinewy and his chords sound muscular. I guess I like those sorts of players regardless of genre but West is a standout. He should have become much more popular on the back of his appearance at Woodstock, but somehow he’s been buried deeper. It’s a real shame. This album is a punchy, tasteful, rollicking bit of fun.
‘Dreamtime’ by The Stranglers used to be a party staple in the mid-80s. You’d go to some party held by some University students and somebody would put it on. The bland and banal ‘Always the Sun’ was the single off it but the rest of it is pretty interesting. Probably because the Stranglers were a keyboard-driven band masquerading as a punk band, they were quick to don the post-punk artifice and play this kind of mid-80s pop. I’m not nostalgic about it, but it’s such an album of its time, where everybody was so in love with the then-new Digital reverb. The synths sound very dated, the guitars sound very chintzy in the 80s Pop style. Everything is dripping with digital reverb on this record. It’s a mixed bag, but the songs are good.
I didn’t purchase ‘And Then There Were Three’ on CD for a long time. I don’t really know why. Maybe at one point I must have assumed I had already done so but I was recently shocked to find that it was not the case. I had significant holes in my Genesis catalogue on my CD shelf. Heck, I didn’t even have ‘Invisible Touch’, which is another topic. I think when I started buying CDs, I had zero appetite for re-purchasing stuff I had recently bought on LP. That meant I overlooked Genesis, Talking Heads and Simple Minds. Not having heard it for nearly 40 years, I have to say Phil Collins is amazing on this record. He makes this music work. The other two are good players, but without Phil, they end up making ‘Calling All Stations’, - and that really says it all.
‘Foreign Tongues’ is the 25th studio album by the venerable Rolling Stones. Is it any good? Yes it is, but it very much depends on what you would mean by ‘good’. This album picks up where they left off with ‘Hackney Diamonds’ and sounds like a sequel. At this point in time, they have perfected what The Rolling Stones are and how they should sound. Does it break new ground? No. Does it turn you into rhetorical Kevin Rudd type asking these kinds of questions? Yes. It’s just so good to know you can still rock out at 84.