Live review by Ali Williams
There are anniversaries, and then there are anniversaries that make a room full of adults reminisce about a time when they once had knees that worked without pain, disposable income and a working relationship with Triple J.
Spiderbait’s Ivy & The Big Apples turning 30 is one of those cultural milestones. It’s far more than just an album celebration. It is a reminder that Australian alternative rock once had a gloriously feral middle finger jammed in the proverbial socket, and Spiderbait were one of the bands brave enough to leave it there and see what happened.
Saturday night at The Tivoli was the opening show of the Ivy & The Big Apples 30th Anniversary Tour, and Brisbane treated it accordingly. The place was heaving, sticky with anticipation, and full of people who clearly knew this wasn’t going to be a wholesome trip down memory lane. It was a rolling mosh pit doing a victory lap. This was Spiderbait. Kram, Janet and Whit are not a heritage-listed act being gently wheeled out for polite applause while everyone silently prays for their lower backs not to let them down.
Inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame last month, Spiderbait are one of the great Australian three-piece units, still wired strangely, still loud enough to rearrange small internal organs, and still capable of making a room feel like it has collectively made a very poor but deeply enjoyable life decision.
The genius of Spiderbait has always been how little sense they should make on paper. A drummer who sings like he is trying to kick the sky in. A bass player whose voice can go from sweet to savage before your brain has finished filing in the paperwork. A guitarist who looks like he is quietly holding the whole machine together with tone, weirdness and a private stash of chaos. Mark “Kram” Maher, Janet English and Damian “Whit” Whitty came out of Finley, New South Wales, and somehow built one of the most distinctive careers in Australian rock by refusing to smooth out the bits that made them interesting. Punk, pop, metal, grunge, electronic oddities, country-town mischief, bratty humour, and riffs that sound like they were raised in a shed with no adult supervision. Simply delightful.
Before Spiderbait took full custody of the evening, the supports made sure the night had a proper pulse. VOIID were a brilliant choice to open the Saturday show, not merely because they brought local venom to the bill, but because their presence made the night feel connected rather than laminated. The Brisbane punk outfit hit with that particular kind of youthful fury. They have teeth, intent and that glorious refusal to behave that makes punk work when it is done properly. There is no polite shuffle into VOIID. They land, they bite, and they leave the room sharper for it.
The Gnomes followed with the kind of garage-fed racket that feels like it has been dug up from a backyard, dusted off, plugged in, and immediately blamed for property damage. Melbourne’s emerging rock gremlins have been handed the enviable and horrible job (insert sarcasm here) of warming audiences across the tour, which is a bit like being asked to babysit a lit barbecue. They handled it with admirable disregard for self-preservation. Their set had that frantic, hooky, slightly unhinged charm that gives a crowd something to grab onto without spoon-feeding it to them like we are all toddlers with streaming subscriptions. Job well done.
Then came Custard, and honestly, what an insanely good inclusion. Lifelong friends of Spiderbait, the crowd embraced these guys and collectively threw back to a festival somewhere where they had the joy of catching them both on the bill. Brisbane loves Custard because Brisbane has taste in between its questionable urban planning decisions. Dave McCormack, Paul Medew, Matthew Strong and Glenn Thompson have always lived in their own peculiar lane, deliberately making songs that sound loose. Custard are experts in the fine Australian art of sounding like it was all by accident and then slapping you in the face with the intentional hook and drive of their songs.
But before we continue, we need to take a moment to talk about Dave. Some know him as Dave McCormack, frontman of Custard and national indie-rock treasure. Others, however, know him as Bandit from Bluey, which means I can brag to my grandbabies that I’ve seen Bluey’s dad play rock songs live on stage, at the same time giving them an education in what quality Aus music looks like. We love you, Dave. No one predicted that the inclusion of your weird and wonderful with an animated preschool series would result in being an international sensation, loved and adored by kids and adults alike. Kudos legend.
Saturday night’s set did not disappoint. Custard were simply superb. Dry, odd, charming, sharp, and completely themselves. Dave has that wonderful gift of looking like he is underplaying everything while somehow commanding the room anyway. It is not rock-star posturing. It is better. It is the confidence of a man who knows the song is good enough that he does not need to pull shapes like a motivational speaker at a tambourine convention. The band had that beautifully lived-in chemistry that only happens when musicians have spent decades knowing exactly where the weird parts belong. They were funny without trying too hard, warm without getting soggy, and tight without losing the slack grin that makes Custard feel like Custard.
It would have been very easy for Custard to be treated like a novelty warm-up because of the Bandit factor. They were not. They were adored because they deserve to be. Brisbane knew it. The room leaned in, sang along, grinned stupidly, and remembered that they had always been far more than a fun fact for parents. They are one of this city’s great bent little treasures, and on this bill they made perfect sense. Custard before Spiderbait is not a support. It is foreplay for people with excellent record collections.
When Spiderbait arrived, the room changed shape.
Opening an anniversary tour with the album being celebrated in full is a bold little contrast with the crowd. It says, “You remember this? Prove it.” Ivy & The Big Apples is not a neat record. That is part of its charm. It is spiky, bratty, melodic, heavy, silly, sharp and restless. It has Buy Me A Pony, the song that stormed the Hottest 100 and became stitched into the national nervous system, but it also has the gloriously grubby personality of Chest Hair, the fizzing punch of Hot Water & Milk, the strange bends and jolts that made the album feel like a breathing, living entity in 1996 and still alive and kicking in 2026.
Kram remains one of Australian rock’s most ridiculous gifts. Watching him drum and sing at full force is still like watching a man argue with gravity and occasionally win. He does not so much perform as detonate in rhythm. There is force there, obviously, but also precision and joy. Proper joy. Not the stage-managed kind sprayed onto press releases by dead-eyed marketing departments, but the real stuff. The kind that leaks through when someone still loves the noise after all these years. It’s that grin they can’t hide, that pure, genuine joy they feel in the moment. It is distinctive. It is real. And it is beautiful. When you see a drummer who plays like this, you will know it. They walk amongst us.
Janet English deserves every bit of love thrown her way and then some. I unashamedly admit she is my girl crush, my fellow bass Queen. Her presence is central to Spiderbait in a way that cannot be overstated without sounding like an awards-night speech; nobody needs that trauma. Her bass tone has bite, her vocals cut beautifully, and when Calypso hit, the room did exactly what rooms are supposed to do when Calypso hits: it lost its dignity in unison. Janet has always brought colour, cool and steel to Spiderbait, and on this tour, she is not merely revisiting a classic album. She is reminding everyone how much of its heart belonged to her in the first place. We love you, Janet. (raises glass) Here’s to more girls on bass.
Whit, meanwhile, remains the crucial third wall of the whole glorious structure. He is not flashy in the boring “look at my fingers” way, which is a mercy because guitar theatrics have done enough damage to society. He is stranger, better and more important than that. His playing gives Spiderbait its grit and shape, the scuzz and propulsion that stop the songs from floating away into pure madness. Whit is the reason the weird stuff lands with weight. He is the anchor in a band that otherwise looks like it might gleefully throw itself through a ceiling fan.
The Ivy run was the spine of the night, but the second part of the set proved Spiderbait were not just here to worship one album and go home quietly with a sensible chamomile tea. The later catalogue favourites came out swinging. Shazam! still has that instant ignition. Fucken Awesome remains exactly what it says on the tin, subtle as a sledgehammer. Tonite carried its familiar charge. But it was Ol’ Man Sam and Black Betty that did what they do best. They turned The Tivoli into a single shouting organism; these songs were the feature tracks in the soundtrack of my misspent youth. They equally share the role of being officially the unofficial national anthem
The night was a living interactive display of Aus music history. It was never intended to behave like a cultural relic pulled from the archives with white gloves. There was no glass case around Ivy & The Big Apples. No precious reverence suffocating the fun out of it. Spiderbait played it like it still belonged to them. That matters. Anniversary tours can sometimes feel like bands performing their own Wikipedia page. This felt like three people standing inside the mess they made 30 years ago and discovering the electricity was still left on.
The Tivoli was the right room for it, too. It has that old Brisbane theatre charm, a venue pretty enough to photograph well and sturdy enough to survive middle-aged Australians showing the youngins what a real mosh pit looks like, before climbing the shoulders of the dude in front and crowdsurfing their way out. The sound had weight, the crowd had heart, and the whole night carried that rare feeling of a bill that had been built with precision to survive trends and be so perfect that doing a remake would be offensive because the original is flawless.
VOIID gave it teeth. The Gnomes gave it a garage-rock shove. Custard gave it warmth, weirdness and Brisbane royalty. Spiderbait gave the main event the substance it deserved.
Thirty years on, Ivy & The Big Apples still sounds like a band refusing to sit nicely in the genre chair assigned to them. They still sound and look like they used to as well. They reminded Brisbane why it mattered, why it lasted, and why Australian rock is better when it is a little bent, a little bratty and a lot louder than necessary.
The album has aged like it has been banned from several venues, and is still proud of the paperwork. Spiderbait gave Brisbane a birthday party with distortion, heart and no interest in behaving. The love is real, and the memories are forever.
