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the old bar

  • the tommys single 2024After a 20-year hiatus, Melbourne slackabilly surf trio The Tommys are back on the live circuit and launching a new singe. 

    Well pedigreed veterans Ollie Laurie (Exotics), Jonathan Lickliter (Died Pretty) and Rob Lastdrager (T Bones) are unveiling their red vinyl 45 single, “Born to Follow” b/w “Window Pane”, at the Old Bar in Fitzroy from 4pm on Saturday. June 7.

    They'll also play a live-to-air on Melbourne community radio station 3CR's Burning Vinyl Radio show radio on the Friday between 2-4pm. 

    The Tommys released their debut album, “Grow Fins”, way back in 2000 and the follow up single, “Chastity Melts”, recorded live and dirty at the Old Bar in Melbourne, four years later.

    Reforming for Garage Fest 2024 they toured of duty in Cambodia and now they’re thrilling audiences in Melbourne and Sydney once more with their tsunami of lo-fi garage surf grooves.

    Special guests The Kreep 500 are supporting with their own brand of savage howls with garage nous. A duo far beyond the sum of its parts (think Cramps, Scientists, Reigning Sound),their debut album sold out in months and its follow-up is due in late 2025 on the Groovie (Europe) and Off The Hip(Australia) labels.

  • swedish mags launch

    Swedish Magazines
    + Thee Cha Cha Chas
    Old Bar, Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia
    Friday, 3 December 2021

    When Nick Carraway suggests the impossibility of recreating the past, F Scott Fitzgerald’s nouveu-riche protagonist Jay Gatsby is incredulous. “Can’t recreate the past? Why of course you can!” Gatsby, of course, is wrong. The past, as vivid and real as it may seem to us, cannot be dialled up like an old movie on the latest streaming service. At best there are flashes of lived experience, memories that loom large in consciousness, recollections skewed and exaggerated.

    I can’t remember exactly when I first saw the Swedish Magazines. Probably about 2003 or so, I think, in a world that seems quaint by comparison to today. Van and Cal Walker had already been in Melbourne for a couple of years or so. They’d been noticed by the right people around town, if not the people with the money and connections to catapult them down the road of commercial success.