When Sydney punk group Housewives plays a show it is usually to a modest crowd in a warehouse, loungeroom or record store. Housewives do not belong in public arenas. They are ugly, discordant and uncaring. They belong in the decommissioned spaces at the city’s edgelands.
Tonight Housewives played at the Sydney Opera House. It was against the rules to drink a longneck while watching, and it would have been very rude to shout at the band between sets. Tonight it was only possible to stand there and politely watch Housewives play. Punk music ostensibly does not belong in theatres, but maybe, in 2014, that is exactly where it belongs.
The Studio is among the smaller stages in the Opera House, but tonight’s crowd never threatened to fill it. No marketing budget could have reversed this fact, because RIP Society is an intimate record label and has not been sufficiently mythologised. The Sydney independent label, now in its fifth year, is averse to a lineage. When people see rock shows at the Opera House they are usually doing so to belatedly be part of a history: on the same night the Avalanches had their respected 2000 LP Since I Left You celebrated upstairs, while on Friday Pixies played all of their classics to a sold out main hall. Rock music usually only happens at the Opera House if it is already dead and thus no longer liable to surprise.
When the unbearably tense Brisbane group Cured Pink starts its set shortly after Rat Columns’ meticulous guitar pop, there are no aesthetic parallels to be drawn, and these bands do not appear to be separate chapters in the same story. RIP Society is not a rock label, it just releases rock music sometimes. Even the most simplistic rock groups associated with the label demonstrate a wariness of punk ‘worthiness’ tonight: Bed Wettin' Bad Boys thanked their parents between songs, while Housewives’ Lincoln Brown lazily waved his guitar above his head as if to mock the expectation that he’d smash it.
The best moments tonight were when the spectres of "rock" or "punk" were not in earshot. Tasmanian duo the Native Cats were in their element on a large stage because their theatrics had space to flourish. In his dress and leggings, Peter Escott seemed adamant to fend off the mundanity of the tortured white male archetype. Sydney electronic duo Half High played to a fraction of the audience punk group Constant Mongrel did, but they were better equipped to exploit this unlikely context. Wedged between two louder groups, Half High’s somnambulant drones sounded legitimately strange.
Tonight’s headliners, Feedtime and the Dead C, are icons in the antipodean underground, but the ugliness of their music and even the way they stand on stage seems contemptuous. The Opera House has the potential to fossilise them. It is a step towards acceptance. This is the risk when a fiercely independent network of musicians has its special night at Australia's most ostentatious music venue: they lose their outsider context, and the music is forced to do all the legwork. The music managed very well, in the end.
• This article was amended on 28 May 2014. An earlier version referred to Lachlan Brown rather than Lincoln Brown.
