In 2018, Miniskirt bassist Jesse Pumphrey drove ten hours to Sydney for an important show.

Upon arrival, he realised he didn’t pack his bass guitar. So he borrowed one from a friend. With the crisis averted, Jesse relaxed with a few beers before Miniskirt took the stage. No sound check, no warm-up and evidently no tuning of the borrowed bass. The show had huge energy, but the sound was pretty sloppy. Fortunately, the energy was enough, and the Cosmic Psychos voted Miniskirt the winner of the VB Hard yards competition. Five years later and the Psycho’s have Miniskirt supporting them on their national tour. I linked up with the bands at their Vinnie’s Dive Bar show at Southport, on the spectacular Gold Coast: beautiful one day—perfect the next.

These bands suit a dive bar, and Vinnie’s isn’t just a dive bar by name. They sell long necks over the wood, the room smells like sweat and piss, the decibel limit is pushed beyond reason, and the bathroom is an outdoor dunny that is also the center point for what is the venue’s alfresco lung lolly lounge. A middle-aged man wearing a backpack danced around the Miniskirt stage for a while before signaling to the crowd he was going to stage dive. He followed up by doing one of those safety-style egg rolls into the crowd. That was funny.

A middle-aged woman crawled on all fours to the Psycho’s drum kit to collect a broken drumstick before crawling back to the crowd. Also, funny. I’m not going to review the gig with any more gusto than the above, but what I’m getting at is that there were middle-aged people there. There were also hot young crew there, as well as stinky old punks with spiked-up mo-hawks. I loved that this show was headlined by a farmer that plays in a punk band and has just released a kid’s book. I love that the show was attended by a wild cross-section of the Gold Coast society in a dive bar with a shiny brand-new tram stop out front. This was a side of the Gold Coast I hadn’t seen before, and I think I really liked it. The bands were good as well. The End.