the burrow

_{Budge from La Fetts. Mark Chandler photo.}

La Fetts
+ Rioting  Revolver
+ The Spivs
+ Beef Mountain
The Burrow, Prince of Wales Hotel, Ipswich
September 19, 2026

Words: ANGELA EVOL
Photos: MARK CHANDLER & ANGELA EVOL

It was 32 degrees Celsius which is fairly standard Ipswich Spring weather and The Burrow felt like someone had put a stage under a classic Queenslander house and forgotten to install the air-conditioning.

Located beneath the Prince of Wales Hotel, The Burrow is a relatively new live-music space with a low roof, an open side and the relaxed feel of a backyard gig. This was a free Saturday matinee, running from noon until six, with four very different bands and a small but appreciative crowd.

_{Beef Mountain. Angela Evol photo.}

Beef Mountain had the difficult job of opening the afternoon while people were still arriving and finding the least sweaty place to stand.

These Ipswich veterans are led by guitarist and singer Mark Wold, with Brisbane drumming legend Cameron Howe behind the kit. I don’t know the names of the other two members, so I won’t pretend I do, but together they are an assured and unfussy live band.

There is a country edge running through their punk and rock sound, without it ever becoming country rock. They are straight players who let the songs do the work rather than trying to force a reaction from an early crowd that was still small and quiet. There was plenty of experience on that stage, and Cameron remains one of those drummers who makes everything look easier than it is.

_{The Spivs. Mark Chandler photo.}

The Spivs (Declaration: I am part of their entourage) were next and went to 100 percent from the moment they started.

Their sound sits somewhere between ’60s garage rock, rough-edged rock and roll and the power-pop end of punk. The musicians are tight, while frontman Caveman operates on an entirely different level of reality. He prowls, gestures, dances, bends himself into strange shapes and generally behaves like a man who has never considered standing still to be a viable performance option. It should be distracting, but it works because the band behind him is so solid.

A new song, “Go Getter”, was one of the highlights. It slots naturally into The Spivs’ set and has the same immediate energy as their established material. There was some slightly nervous dancing from the crowd, although nobody on the floor could hope to compete with Caveman. The Spivs always bring energy and a certain amount of insanity, regardless of the room or the size of the audience.

_{Riot Revolver. Mark Chandler photo.}

Then came Riot Revolver, my discovery of the afternoon.

Cherry Green is a commanding frontman and one seriously cool presence. There are traces of Hendrix, James Brown and Lenny Kravitz in what he does, but Riot Revolver are much heavier and stranger than that description suggests. At different points they also reminded me of Death, the pioneering Detroit band whose music sat somewhere between hard rock, punk and heavy psychedelic noise before anyone had decided what to call it.

Riot Revolver have that same knack of existing outside a neat category. They are psychedelic, heavy, raw and completely captivating. While the other bands worked within recognisable strains of punk and garage rock, these guys seemed to come from somewhere else entirely.

Cherry owned the front of the room, leaning into the songs while the band kicked out a huge, grinding wall of sound behind him. The crowd might have been small, but people were watching with the kind of attention that comes when something takes you by surprise.

_{Cherry Green. Mark Chandler photo.}

Their set also included three well-chosen punk covers. The one that hit hardest was the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer”. Founding Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome had died only six days earlier, which gave the song an unexpected extra weight. I don’t know whether Riot Revolver intended it as a tribute but the timing was impossible to ignore.

By the end of their set, my main thought was: Who the hell are these people, and why haven’t I seen them before?

La Fetts closed the afternoon, bringing a completely different kind of weight to the stage.

Budge was out front, with Noel on bass, Darrin on guitar and George on drums. From the opening seconds of “Only Way Out”, they went from zero to 100 and stayed there.

The band first emerged as The Fits in Goodna in 1980, growing out of a working-class punk community that existed between Brisbane and Ipswich. They became La Fetts a few years later, but the attitude and original punk ethos remain intact.

There is nothing polished, nostalgic or carefully preserved about them. Budge still works the floor with the microphone in his hand, pacing, leaning towards the crowd and using every bit of available space. Behind him, the band plays with the same directness and urgency that made this music matter in the first place.

^{La Fetts. Mark Chandler photo.}

For me, there was an unavoidable sense of nostalgia. There were a few old punk friends from the ’80s in the room, and watching La Fetts in Ipswich made the distance between then and now feel surprisingly small.

They finished with their most notorious song, “SEQEB Scab”.

The song grew out of the bitter 1985 dispute between the Electrical Trades Union and the South East Queensland Electricity Board. The Queensland Government sacked 1,002 striking workers, including La Fetts guitarist and SEQEB electrician Peter de Hesse.

The band responded almost immediately. They took an existing song, rewrote it around the dispute and recorded a short blast of anger aimed directly at what was happening. “SEQEB Scab” was picked up by 4ZZZ and became closely tied to the strike, protests and wider resistance to the government’s actions.

More than 40 years later, it still sounds furious. It is not a historical curiosity or a harmless old punk song. It came from a real fight involving jobs, unions, government power and people’s lives. Ending the afternoon with it in Ipswich, played by a band that was actually there, felt entirely appropriate.

The crowd remained small throughout the day, which is a shame because this was exactly the sort of event people often complain no longer happens. Four original bands, six hours of live music, free entry and a venue willing to give them a stage.

If people want The Burrow and other new live-music spaces to keep putting on afternoons like this, they need to patronise them. Turn up, buy a drink, watch the bands and support the venue. These places cannot survive on people saying they would have gone if they had known about it after the fact.

The afternoon gave me both ends of what makes live music worthwhile. La Fetts brought the history, the memories and a direct connection to Queensland’s punk past. Riot Revolver delivered the surprise of finding a band I now want to see again as soon as possible.

Not bad for a bloody hot afternoon under a pub in Ipswich.