Ask someone a live music lover about their favourite show and they’ll likely tell you exactly which one was the most memorable, and why. Yet paradoxically among people who live for gigs, the more shows you attend, the more likely that the combined mass of all those events will inevitably blur.

Sure, you won’t forget the spectacularly good ones. The times the band was incandescent; the crowd went bananas; or the sound, lighting or performance was unsurpassed.

You probably won’t forget the stinkers either. When the performers were trashed; the crowd (if there was one) hurled objects on stage; or the astounding technical failures.

Yet nestled between these extremes lies the vast, beige mass of all those ‘other’ shows that neither sucked, nor did they blow you away. These gigs – which I suspect represent the majority of shows that most serious gig-goers attend – are the ones that had nothing great nor terrible to distinguish them. They’re like pervasive “3 out of 5 stars” albums because it is precisely this samey mid-ground that makes them blur in one’s memory.

Sometimes, though, the memory of a show is affixed in one’s mind for oddly specific reasons.

Often that has nothing to with the quality of the performance…

Forever etched in my memory

I was recently reminded of this phenomenon when I heard about the re-release of Vacation Town, an obscure EP from now-defunct Melbourne grind / crust band Rotten Chop.

Although I could attempt to explain what they were about, bassist Mile Brown articulated it best in this post about the new release:

11 years ago I played bass in a super fun completely unhinged scuzz grind band called Rotten Chop. We played around underground Melb, supported Napalm Death and then called it a day. Now brilliant Sydney punk label Innercity Uprising has released our EP in a super limited CD edition.

That almost sums it up.

Almost.

Because while that nails how Rotten Chop sounded, it doesn’t capture the sheer strangeness that characterised their shows.

I recall seeing the band live on three occasions. These were, in every sense, underground gigs – performances at dingy, dark and typically dubious locations. They were rip-roaringly fun. And even today they were hard to forget.

For instance, there was The Apartment Gig. As the name suggests, it occurred in an inner-city flat. The drummer was in the toilet, the vocalist at one end of the hallway, and the other two on the stairs or wherever they could fit.

Playing to a narrow but dense crowd squeezed down a hallway, they played their unhinged, ear-bleeding grind at full-noise. The actual residential complex was large, but the apartment not so much. Amazingly, they got through a sizeable portion of their set before police lights on the road outside signalled the fun would shortly end if things didn’t quieten down.

Then there was The Warehouse Gig, held at a converted residential warehouse in the suburbs, and therefore not in any way an official live music venue.

The extraordinarily eclectic line-up included Rotten Chop; three other outfits respectively playing sludgy black metal, 100 per cent electronic EBM, and Atari Teenage Riot-inspired industrial. The rest of the night was given over to a line-up of well-known Melbourne techno and electro (ok, I know that’s not the correct genre term) DJs.

Even today, the occasion stands out for its singular intensity. Out of the night and into this large room poured a black mass of goths, ravers, hippies, freaks, geeks, party monsters, and every other imaginable night creature. The atmosphere was intensely heavy man – it was as though I’d crossed the underworld and joined a bacchanalian celebration of the dark arts – and though the police apparently received multiple noise complaints, the dark party went on until sunrise.

The strangest show of all

But the show that truly stands out for its strangeness occurred, for once, at a licensed, legitimate venue. This one I call The Arthouse Gig.

Try to picture this: it’s a weeknight, it’s winter, and there’s a line-up of filthy, crusty, grindy local acts playing at the equally filthy, crusty, grindy (and much-loved) venue that was The Arthouse.

Rotten Chop are early on the line-up. They begin their show, doing their thing, clanging with energy, when the wildly leaping vocalist announces that he’s now done his back. He sits down at the front of the stage, and does the rest of the show from there.

So far, that’s kind of funny, but hardly strange.

Then another chap ascends the stage from the audience. He’s in a polo shirt and while the band plays, he does a kind of shakin’ jiggly ‘dance’ to the music.

He looks nothing like the 20 or so crusty guys (and they were almost exclusively guys, clad to a man in black hoodies with illegible logos) looking back at him with indifferent crossed arms.

The song ends, and a band member says something, that I don’t really catch, about someone’s birthday. They don’t speak to the guy, and they play the next song. And Old Mate on stage keeps dancing and jiggling.

Then he takes his shirt off. And keeps jiggling. There’s another song. More clothes are removed. This continues until he is stark naked. By the time Rotten Chop close their set, Old Mate hasn’t limited himself to a full frontal, naked jiggle – he also showed the crowd his posterior, bent down, and spread his cheeks for all to never unsee.

The band finishes, pack up, and carry on as if nothing out of the ordinary happened. Then I say hello to Miles. I remark about what just occurred and I say words to the effect that this must be a wild birthday.

In my mind, what I just saw was one of their mates having a grand old birthday romp. So I ask: “Who was that guy anyway?”

The response floors me.

“I have no idea who that was,” says Miles.

Turns out, it was some totally random guy.

As I said, sometimes it’s neither the music or the performance that makes us remember some shows…