It was only last night that Manning Bar was being pummelled by Psycroptic and Rivers of Nihil. Tonight, the room has undergone a fairly dramatic personality transplant. The death metal has departed, the guitars are considerably less murderous and Alex Lahey is back in Sydney to celebrate ten years of the EP that changed everything.
B-Grade University arrived in 2016 with the sort of title that immediately told you something about Lahey’s worldview: funny, self-aware and suspicious of taking any of this too seriously. Written in her childhood bedroom at her mum’s house in Melbourne, then financed partly by selling her blue Toyota Corolla, the EP ended up travelling considerably further than the car ever could.
A decade later, Lahey is revisiting it with B-Grade University (Reunion Edition), which brings together the original EP with newly recorded versions of ‘You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me’ and ‘Let’s Go Out’, alternate recordings and a 2017 triple j Like A Version performance. Tonight, though, the anniversary is less about archival housekeeping than seeing what happens when songs written beside a small bedroom window come back to a crowded room ten years older.
Before Lahey gets anywhere near the stage, though, Retail Therapy make sure nobody is easing gently into Saturday night. Their set is blistering, all sharp guitars and momentum, and they throw a couple of inspired covers into the mix. PJ Harvey’s ‘50ft Queenie’ is tackled with swagger, while Sonic Youth’s ‘Kool Thing’ explodes over an enthusiastic crowd.
Suzi changes the temperature completely. Her set is more intimate and conversational, peppered with anecdotes between songs that gradually draw the crowd closer. Where Retail Therapy come charging through the front door, Suzi gets there by quietly pulling people into her orbit.
When Lahey arrives, she is not simply here to rummage through 2016. B-Grade University gets its moment in full, but the night also reaches across the records that followed.
And that is perhaps the more interesting story tonight. B-Grade University didn’t just introduce Lahey to a much larger audience; it gave her a way forward. The songs have accumulated their own histories in the meantime, picked up by listeners and attached to lives Lahey could never have known about while writing them in that Melbourne bedroom.
Tonight at Manning Bar, they come home for their tenth birthday. The Corolla may be long gone, but B-Grade University still has plenty of kilometres left in it.
The tour moves to Perth and Adelaide next, tickets HERE.
Images Deb Pelser
