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Music

How Much Does It Suck to Play A Lunchtime O Week Gig?

“It’s a good gig if you kinda want to be ignored.”

Images: USMU

O Week isn’t just about free food and beer. Actually, it is. But while you are waiting in line for an undercooked snag and Aldi beer from the Engineering Students Club stall, the student union, your student union, will have booked some mid-tier band that you may have heard on Triple J, to play in the courtyard.

Acts like San Cisco, Last Dinosaurs, Cloud Control, Washington, Art vs. Science or whoever the Student Union Activities Officer can get for under a grand, are popular acts on the O Week circuit.

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But whether you are Drake or Diafrix, any lunchtime gig sucks. A lunchtime gig that involves a shitty hired PA and members of the Harry Potter Club sitting cross-legged in front of stage sucks real hard. The lunchtime O Week gig is awkward for both band and audience.

In what has to be some kind of Human Rights violation, Sex on Toast played the University of Melbourne O Week three years in a row. The nine-piece, describe their sound as, "an explosion of 1980's pop music, yacht-rock, Rn'B, and synth-funk” (yes this is an O Week band with a horn section), but during O Week, their sound falls on indifferent ears.

“I’ve never experienced anything quite like it, to be honest,” explains Sex on Toast’s Angus Leslie. “The Melbourne Uni lunchtime gig is good if you kind of want to be ignored.”

The singer understands that for many people during O-Week, entertainment comes second fiddle to standing in line for free shit.

“I found myself getting frustrated during those gigs to the point where it felt like the students were more interested in getting in line with 600 other students for a free sausage and a can of soft drink than seeing us play.”

“It got so bad, that at certain points during our show, I’d get off the stage and eat someone’s sausage. In fact, I ended up in the audience a number of times trying to get their attention.”

Of course, as Angus tells me, there will always be an interested few – fans of the bands who take a break from the free food to actually enjoy and watch the music.

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But generally, these gigs are designed to boost the morale of the student union and to distract new students from the forthcoming burden of student life, not to kick-start any bands career or provide students with a wildly banging live show.

Bands play for their designated time, drink or eat their rider, and then probably piss off to prepare to play another show later that night.

Lunchtime university shows don’t hold the same level of gravitas as they do in other places in the world and most probably consider them to be a waste of time. But according to Sex on Toast, the gigs themselves don’t really matter:

“We got looked after with a good rider. We had tinnies and sausages, so we were actually pretty happy.”

Scoring free shit - isn’t that what O Week is all about anyway?