Friction Presents One Love feat TV Rock @ Academy, Canberra (10/03/06)
Generally, if you have a film clip on Video Hits it means that you have commercially ‘made it’.
TV Rock (Made up of Victorian house music giant Grant Smilie and veteran super-producer Ivan Gough) have gone a few better and made it all the way to number one recently with their crossover smash ‘Flaunt it’.
In true ‘naughties’ fashion, I actually heard this tune for the first time as a ringtone on one of those tv ads promising ‘all of the latest chart hits’ (and yes, if you do SMS ‘Gullible’ to 9999 you will get sent ALL of them EVERY day for the rest of your life….my ‘friend’ told me…honest).
After a rather large year pumping out more remixes than the Swedish house mafia, the group has tasted commercial success and broadened their market from sweaty young adults to sweaty young adults AND pre-teen wannabe sweaty young adults. This meant that the ‘ol cinema’ would be a generational melting pot of young Axel Whitehead/Lowey’s hot 30 fans and us ‘old’Academy regulars.
Jeff (Rollover Rockstar) Drake and Chris (Piss off, I aint closing this time) Fraser opened the night with a top notch selection of current fav’s such as Chris Lake – Changes and the King Unique mix of Mish Mash – Speechless along with newly reworked classics EBTG – Missing and Madonna – Holiday not to mention Jeff’s and Nash’s new dancefloor leviathan ‘Rollover Rockstar’ which got the ladies in the front row all riled up and more snap happy than a Korean tourist at Darling Harbour. (I wonder how much the ‘Me and Jeff Drake/Chris Fraser’ photos will sell for on ebay…).
TV rock came on at around 1am and smashed the sizable crowd into a writhing mass of limbs with a surprisingly fresh sounding collection of new tunes and re-edits. I was expecting a ‘No more conversations/love generation-a-thon’ but was blown away by the amount of tunes I had never heard before…except the Tocadisco remix of ‘Walking away’ during which I yelled ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ like that scene from ‘When Harry Met Sally’ although this was more like ‘When Tim Heard the only tune he knew’.
The guys put on a show that has to be up there with one of the best this year, the One Love brand is huge in Melbourne and its vibe seems to be as infectious as Bird Flu, so much so that I predict in a few years there may just be shots available for it at your local GP.
Academy has been a great venue for these sorts of parties and is attracting more and more people every week and with the quality of the acts its not a huge surprise.
If I had to guess what ‘One Love’ stood for I would have to say that it would be something like ‘dirtyhandsintheairfilthyelectroboobsoutdancefloorhousemusic’.
