(diaryland) August 16, 2001 - 10:51 p.m.

Yesterday I drove to the city twice because Roland left the drier on at home.

We went to one of the heats of the Melbourne University band competition and met Michele and Jon there. By watching the bands I learned two very important things:

a) Breakfast of Champions should have entered this year.

b) Watching band members swap instruments all the time makes things tedious and dodgy.

I�ve always been a fan of bands with multiple lead singers and I had always thought it would be really cool if there was a band that had people who could jump onto different instruments for every song. It would show how clever they were, the songs would sound all different to each other, and good times would be had by all. But nope.

The first band were OK. They had large NOFX stickers on their instruments. They sounded like NOFX stickers too. But they were quite pleasant in their own way; the way in which NOFX stickers are quite pleasant. Ooh. I sound like a Zen master today.

The second band had the same drummer as the first band. The bassist/guitarist wore a hat so they sounded a bit more like Rancid. This was reinforced by the way everyone suddenly swapped instruments and some seemingly random friend came up onto the stage and took the drums hostage and some other guy came up as well. They all did a rendition of Knowledge by Operation Ivy. But, boy, was it dodgy. The new drummer got put off by the way the new singing dude couldn�t sing in time to save himself. The original drummer, who was now the guitarist, played a cake of noise. The bassist, who was the only person who swapped back to their original instrument, actually had a fair idea what he was doing to this song because he was giggling all the way through it. I�ve never seen anyone do a cover of Knowledge live before, but I can safely say it was the worst one ever executed. Dude, totally.

Then came a duo who had some really nice songs but it was a pity they didn�t have a bass and drums because they are the sort of duo that could benefit from a couple of those. The singer had a really nice voice. Some of the songs were written in a most super way.

Then came a band that did the swapping thing too. They played very, very well, but they sounded slightly too clever for their own good. They sounded a lot like a spaghetti western. It was just twee.

We all left in the middle of this band as Roland was feeling ill and I was overly tired, so we didn�t get to find out which two bands out of the four would make it to the next round. In my opinion, the first band and one of the last two should have made it through because even though that first band was obnoxious, they did have some good tunes under their belts, there wasn�t swapping of instruments, both the guitarist and the bassist sang songs, and there was gratituous wah pedal use. But nothing jumped out at me screaming, �I AM A GREAT BAND!�

Hopefully we will watch the finals at the end of the month.