Door staff can really make or break your night sometimes by setting your mood and I must say that I’ve had nothing but good experiences straight from the get go at Miss Libertine. Thankfully tonight was no exception so the night was bound to go uphill. It’s a bit like scoring a rock star park out the front of a venue; always a good omen. Upon entering the front bar section, where the bar staff are equally as friendly and adept at mixing a grand gin, the breaksy tracks continued to put me in to an uplifted mode and I have always thought that having a DJ behind and above the bar was a novel concept. As my friend hadn’t been to this venue before (having recently moved here from Adelaide as have I) we headed from this bar in to the back room which deceptively seems as if it could be an outdoor area, until further inspection proves that there is a fully enclosing roof up amongst the various angles. For the moment the music from the front bar was being piped through to the back, but equipment on the stage gave some clues as to what was to come. Damn, but, the multimedia outfit Mink Engine had already played and the duo are an item that shouldn’t have been missed. I could have done with some sweet stimulating visuals to sassy bold beats.

The wait wasn’t long before the next artist performed his set and I say this as it was one rapping MC on the mic on stage supported by a DJ on the other side of the room, effectively behind the dance floor. I shuffled over to take a peek at the technique and although I could see a lot of scratching action, it could hardly be heard above the track playing on the other turntable and the on stage vocals. All I could think was that the DJ was doing himself a disservice by not being seen or heard. Well if the three wise monkeys are anything to go by then there was indeed someone speaking, MC Tray. One of the lines that caught my fanciful ears basically conveyed that spoken word made rhyme sound ill which I found quite ironic given that most of his lyrics rhymed. But the sentiment wasn’t wasted on me, after all I have seen Gil Scott Heron live and spoken word was the birth mother of many genres of music. I always like to compare an artist’s styles to other artists, so this act are best described, in my opinion, as Eminem lyrics to Kanye West beats, in the sense that the lyrics invoked thought and weren’t just a part of the melody.

The next band to play I’m afraid I can’t comment much on as I was too engrossed by the music in the front bar section, featuring Leftfield’s _Afro-Left), a thumping track that I haven’t heard out in ages. Let me suffice it to say that the band, Skipping Girl Vinegar, were very Brit pop and if you have an affinity for Coldplay albums you would like their sound.

Well my friend had to split but thankfully some of the members of High Rise Rollers took me under their wings and ushered me from the outside smoking area in to see The Galvatrons. Stay at home folks if you feel that electro and rock, punk is best kept in the 80s, but if you are like me the resurgence by this original energetic four piece is refreshingly different from the straight out pure electro or rock band breeds. But I don’t mean literally that you should stay at home, as this is one band that needs to be seen to be believed. I just want to state for the record that they are flat out fun, if you don’t take the whole act seriously and just go with it. Live a little! The lead singer knows how to perform, and he and the bass guitarist (who can hardly be seen for the thrashing of an excellent head of hair) certainly can wah the strings of any guitar. Then there is the uber cool keyboarder backed up by a maniac on the drums (a real animal); that is a maniac in the nicest possible way. I would describe their music as Van Halen, Poison (if only because of the lead singer Johnny’s brazen blondness) and Europe (again if only because they sample some of The Final Countdown) on massive amounts of Red Bull.

And if I didn’t get enough of them at Miss Libertine, I happened to unexpectedly see The Galvatrons play again the very next night at Soco, the temporary shipping container club down at the promenade in St Kilda, next to the Palais. How kismet.