I am a procrastinator. For as long as I can remember I would put stuff off for as long as possible before eventually being bottle necked into getting the job done. In secondary school I got the majority of my homework done an hour before it was due. At college I would stay up all night to get a 3,000 word assignment done in time for the first lecture of the morning. Even now if I have a deadline to get a story done I’ll spend time aimlessly browsing through Facebook, then blitz the story when I know I have to start it. But for the first time ever I’ve been looking forward to doing a review and haven’t put it back, and I can thank the Axis of Awesome for that.
The Australian three-piece comedy band were set to play Whelans, on the 23rd of this month with doors at 8pm, so naturally I showed up at 9pm. For a Wednesday gig I didn’t expect the venue to be as full as it was, but that just shows the heights these lads have risen to over the last several months. A pretty edgy introduction from a man wearing a dodgy suit left me wondering if I had built this up too much in my head. But when the band did come out from backstage I knew all was right with the world. They explained how they were used to playing arenas and festivals with everything from giant robot dinosaurs behind them to eccentric firework displays. They basically got you laughing from the offset.
When they did settle into a song, I, like everyone else there, couldn’t stop laughing. That was the brilliance of their tune ‘How to Write a Love Song’. They completely butcher every aspect of the typical boy band love song by taking the piss out of what boy bands actually do. And although it isn’t their biggest song it’s my favourite. After a couple of songs a theme began to emerge. In between songs front-man Jordan and guitarist Lee would find different ways of slagging keyboarder Benny over his petit size. They would say things like ‘we were playing miniature golf the other day, or as Benny calls it: golf’ & ‘you should have seen the time we were at Lego Land, they tried to put Benny back on the display’. Lee, depicted as the idiot of the band, would also insist on playing his song about KFC over-and-over again before being shot down by Jordan and Benny.
I have to admit that it was one of the gigs of the year in my eyes, I was enjoying it that much. At times I was thinking that a band like this might be more suited to a venue like Vicar Street, but during the song ‘The Language of Love’ the rough edges of Whelans set the theme perfectly. You certainly can’t imagine a pint-sized man screaming out German lyrics (yes German is allegedly the language of love) in Vicar Street.
After a solid hour of non-stop laughing the band finally got to the one song everyone was their to for: The 4 Chord Song. If you haven’t heard this song then you don’t know what you’re missing. The 4 Chord Song is a montage of popular songs over the last number of decades, and it makes fun of the fact that every one of the them uses the same four chords. Everything from Lady GaGa’s Poker Face to Andrea Bocelli’s Time to Say Goodbye are included, and they even include their own song Birdplane, which is a cover of Five for Fightings song Superman.
When they finished their flagship song they left the stage on the back of a mass of applauds. They came back out saying they would do one more song but had run out of songs to play. This was Lee’s cue to suggest his KFC song one last time, and with a crowed literally begging for them to play it the Axis’ jumped straight into it. And like every other song they have it was a priceless piece of comedy gold.
As I said above, I didn’t expect there to be as many people as there was at this gig, and I’m so glad that so many people did take the time to see the Axis of Awesome. I’m sure the majority of the audience turned out to see The 4 Chord Song. And I’m also sure that by the end of the night they loved it as much as any other song played on the night. You don’t often get a song that is bigger than the band that plays it. The odd examples would by Blue by Eifel 65 or Come on Eileen by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I would hate to see the Axis of Awesome fall into that category because they have so many great songs that just aren’t as exposed as The 4 Chord Song. Every song is great, every single one of them. They make you laugh out load, and if you go to see them on a Wednesday like I did, they’ll give you that midweek pick-me-up that is so often dreamed of but never gotten.