I got a tip today about a new club opening in Brisbane. A couple of DJs who used to kick around the valley in my younger years are opening a club called Overdrive on Friday 13th at the old Lands Office hotel (cnr George St and Mary St.) Does that place even exist any more? I thought it closed long ago…

Anyways, these guys are promising to play all the music you dance around your lounge room to because it isn’t played in clubs anywhere. I’m going to try and track them down and figure out exactly what kind of music they are talking about, but if its anything like the stuff they used to play, we’re talking Beasties, Bjork and Blur.

So far, alls I can tell you is it opens at 9pm, its free before 10pm, and closes at 5am; they are promising cheap drinks, plus anyone who attends on the opening night gets free membership. I’ll report back when I’ve chatted to the boys and got a little more information.

Last week, I saw the Dropkick Murphys and Sick Of It All, two bands I’ve listened to for a very long time, but never seen live. I discovered Sick Of It All like I discovered a lot of new music, from snowboarding movies. The Dropkick Murphys, I discovered in a drunken haze somewhere or other .. possibly while also listening to Flogging Molly and The Gourds.

The show was at the Tivoli, and I do believe more of my friends turned up to this show then any other concert I’ve ever been to. It was a great night!

Sick Of It All were a lot more hardcore than I remember. When the ‘Murphys came on stage, even Al said “I asked those guys to take it easy, but like always they didn’t listen…” Now that I think about it, I don’t think I have any Sick Of It All albums - maybe I should have done a bit more research before I went there. But that’s ok - my time was well spent waiting in line for booze and catching up with friends.

When Sick Of It All left the stage, the “Let’s go Murphys” chant began and didn’t stop until the show got started.

The show was great, and the crowd was rougher than Queens of the Stone age at the Arena a few months back. In fact, my slight friend Ryan and I started a circle pit, the physical abuses of which I haven’t enjoyed for a couple of years. There was crowd surfing and moshing, all to the slowest punk music there is - Celtic punk (aka Irish drinking punk.)

I came out of there drenched in sweat, with a ‘Murphys football jersey and a smile on my face. Too bad it was a school night and nothing was open afterwards.

On June 21st, Brisbane will host Fête de la Musique for the very first time. Fête de la Musique is a free multicultural, multi-community event which began in Paris in 1982. Every year on June 21st, hundreds of cities worldwide celebrate this event.

Presented by Brisbane City Council, Brisbane Marketing and Alliance Française, Fête de la Musique offers free concerts in a variety of indoor and outdoor locations, not traditionally dedicated to music. There will be a number of performance spaces throughout the Queen Street Mall and Fortitude Valley malls with a huge finalé concert scheduled at Reddacliff Place at the top of Queen Street Mall on George Street.

This event is a unique opportunity to encourage major music institutions, like orchestras and operas, to perform outside their usual locations. Being a multicultural event, many styles of music will be represented, including classical, jazz, rock, electronic, rap, pop, folk and traditional.

This is a non-profit event and artists can perform as many times as possible during the day. When a schedule is available, your intrepid reporter shall provide. What this space for information about what’s going to be a massive free music festival!

In an attempt to quash those gay rumours once and for all, Guy Sebastian has married “long-time love” Jules Egan. In September 2006, the original Australian Idol winner revealed he was on the verge of quitting the industry after relentless scrutiny over his sexuality and other matters that are no one’s business but his own.

To then flog the exclusive rights for all the wedding details (bar some, I hope) to New Idea - who did him no favours by picking up the story and running with it - for $200,000 seems a bit hypocritical. But hey, that money would go some way to easing the pain of being slandered to his fan base of retirees and stay-at-home mums.

Of course, I wouldn’t be quite so greedy. Feel free to slander me for ten bucks and a nice MLT - mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, when the mutton is nice and lean, and the tomato is ripe. They’re so perky. I love that.

50 Cent (or “Fiddy” as he’s known to his close friends, entourage, fans, wannabes etc) was recently in Australia for a series of concerts. He was spotted by a friend of my in the Qantas lounge at Sydney airport, checking his own website. That’s fine ‘Tash - I check my own websites on a compulsively-regular basis. However, as she pointed out, I don’t have my own song as a ringtone. That is, I had to agree, a sign of narcissistic personality disorder (defined, for those who don’t know, as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.”)

It would be easy to write off most rappers as self-aggrandizing nobodies with nothing substantial to say, but I’m not one to broadly generalize about a genre I don’t really listen to. To be honest, it seems these days that the “gangster rap” “bling and bitches” style seems (thankfully) to be on the decline. Maybe its just because I don’t listen to commercial radio, go to mainstream clubs, or watch top 40 video shows, but if it is the case, it would be a welcome relief.

That’s not to say rappers don’t still like to party. South Australian boys, the Hilltop Hoods, have been throwing the same party every show for the last four years. Zing! Take that Hilltop Hoods. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but I have seen them a bunch of times, and they do pretty much the same set with the same crowd participation every time.

But let’s look at the positives. Rappers like Kayne West, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def and Wyclef Jean have impressed me with the things they have to say. Well, Kayne may display a touch of NPD on occasions, but who am I to judge?

And a lot of Aussie hip hop seems to display a sense of awareness and community. Artists like Urthboy, Bliss and Eso, The Herd, and yes, even the Hilltops at times have things worth listening to.

I heard an unsigned rapper called “Rapaport” on the Triple J Unearthed website recently and was immediately struck by his message. The lyrics are simplistic at times (”They say killing people will get rid of evil / It ain’t gonna work, they’re just making it worse”) but his message and aware of current world events (”From the way the CIA first funded Osama / To free trade laws that hurt the third world farmer”) is not only impressive, but commendable.

If only we heard more Dead Prez and less Fiddy on the radio…