Live Review: Refused, Sydney

14 November 2012

by Poppy Reid

Tuesday November 13
Enmore Theatre, Sydney, NSW

“Sometimes punk rock is beautiful because it’s a reflection of what life should be, and sometimes it’s just a stupid clique for adolescents. When it’s time to die, who is ready to die as nobly and as gloriously as the fact of our mortality demands? Who is ready for that? By the time you die, you’re so exhausted and so beaten and miserable, you can only die.” – from Refused Are Fucking Dead.

The solemn story of Refused has plagued their zealots and the creatives who shaped their own stylistic hedonism and integrity on the band who punk rock could not save.

This concert may have been fourteen years in the making, and would have been vastly different had it come any earlier, but thankfully, somehow, Refused are still the non-conformist visionaries whose romanticised ethos haven’t wavered.

From the menacing pound of David Sandstrom’s bass drum to Dennis Lyxzén’s first leg-jerk - which kicked off his androgynous front in opening tracks The Shape Of Punk To Come and The Refused Party Program - Refused eclipsed any doubt that the close-to-forty-year-olds had lost their vexation. In fact, over almost two hours at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre, the Swedish five-piece sounded more embroiled with fervour than they ever had been.

“We wrote all these songs when we were younger and we were super angry,” says Lyxzén while taking first-timers through a history crash course. “And one of the things we said was ‘how are these songs going to hold up when you're 40 and wearing skin tight pants?’”

As the guitars melted into the first lines of Rather Be Dead, the crowd screaming “than alive by your oppression,” the track hit a chord with all who knew their tragic story. This was the track they didn’t get to finish, this was the last sound before their split, these were the words screamed before police came to their rescue, ending the exhaustion in a Virginian basement. Lyxzén stacked two amps vertically on one another at the cusp of the stage, mounting the two with ease for the penultimate chant; the crowd seemed both anxious and exalted before his rhythmic leap back onto the wood.

“It was life,” Lyxzén declared as he explained their absence. “It fucked you over, it fucked us over, but then again if we did come in ‘98 we would have played the fucking Annandale Hotel or something.”

Throughout tracks like Summerholidays vs. Punkroutine and Hook, Line and Sinker, each member harboured their own mania, still looking like adolescent punks out to start a riot, which they did. Lyxzén created a circle pit with a simple twirl of his index finger during the track inspired by the mosh mainstay. “I like the fact that you're very rowdy people here in Australia,” he laughed.

Later, the frontman tried to tell a Patti Smith anecdote only to be forced off course by a shouter. “You start your own fucking band. I'll come and see you and you can say whatever you want,” he laughed. “I mean that, I will come see you.”

As guitars created a state of emergency alarm sound preceding final tracks Refused Are Fucking Dead, Worms of the Senses and Faculties of the Skull, Sandstrom and his rapid-fire percussion drew a playground for the other players to loom over.

After a dangerous encore, where Lyxzén entered the crowd and one radical made it onstage, Refused had surprised, awakened and satiated. This was a band who the mainstream had ignored, yet a band who have inspired so much of what falls under the umbrella now. And even now, fourteen years after their tragic end, Refused are still an untouched acme of alternative music.