Discussing the legendary morning music show Recovery is, for Australians of a certain age, an insight into what it must have been like to be a boomer talking about Woodstock or Sunbury: remember when Dylan Lewis interviewed Hanson in the hotel pool? Remember when Midnight Oil played Advance Australia Fair in the middle of a stage invasion? Remember all the times mum said you should find a nice boy “like Leigh from Recovery”?
For many years, pining 30- and 40-somethings have wondered if lightning might strike twice, so when the ABC this year poured cold water on the notion of a revival, few would have assumed their refusal to give in to nostalgia was due to the fact that the network was cooking up a new live music show: The Set, heralded by more than one outlet as “the new Recovery”.
The show, which premiered on ABC and iView on Wednesday, is a half-hour “house show” hosted by Triple j favourites Dylan Alcott and Linda Marigliano that is clearly in thrall to the blessed memories of Recovery. This time, however, there’s no suggestion that the hosts live in a sharehouse (perhaps because, in the smashed-avo gig economy, they’d be more likely to be living in their parents’ laundries); instead, The Set presents a house party in full swing.
The first episode kicks off with Alcott giving viewers a tour of the party, from the living room, where DJ Shaad is spinning tunes, to the backyard where a giant possum (sure, why not) is rootling through the bin. Vera Blue headlines the premiere, and though her ponderous Florence-isms sound to my ears like anonymous uplifting gym anthems, the crowd of predominantly young women is rapt.
After performing under a fairy-lit Hills Hoist (a nice touch, though a hanging goon bag would’ve been even nicer), Vera Blue introduces her chosen guests, Wafia and, most excitingly, rapper Baker Boy.
If Vera Blue and Wafia’s performances are diverting enough, Baker Boy’s effusive presence and Yolŋu Matha rhymes take The Set to a new level. Similarly, his genuine reaction to a surprise birthday cake (and the audience later eating slices of it during Illy and Vera Blue’s Papercuts) gives the show a much needed injection of earnestness.
Through the half-hour, the camera team and editors work hard to give the show the impression of being live-n-loose, but it still has the distinct whiff of grown-ups in the the editing suite (you can almost hear the producer barking, “Push in on that dude doing shakas, camera two, that’s ‘random’!”). Perhaps because of the prerecord, the crowd also seems a little listless; assuming the giant ringtail possum is The Set’s answer to The Enforcer, maybe they can do a little audience warm-up, too. The irrepressible Alcott tries his best to raise the energy of the show and one hopes the format and audience will rise to meet him in weeks to come.
The Set bills itself as, first and foremost, a live music show, and its attempts to harness the excitement of a live performance are scattershot, possibly not helped by the meditative quality of Vera Blue’s music.
There was a looseness to Recovery that has been impossible to replicate, even by its own cast of presenters during various reunions and reboots, and if The Set suffers in this department it’s because – ironically enough – Alcott and Marigliano are just too good at their jobs. The true seat-of-the-pants frisson of Recovery was due, more often than not, to both its hosts’ and guests’ relative lack of media savvy (any Frenzal Rhomb appearance is testament to that).
It felt genuinely anarchic and a little haphazard, with host Dylan Lewis always slightly at the mercy of the guests (especially those, like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, with a penchant for throwing the rulebook out the window). And, crucially, it felt like this punk quality (even if it was massaged by producers) was in direct opposition to its contemporaneous political climate. The “freewheeling improvisation and fondness for dirty jeans” Recovery offered, as Guardian writer Nathan Dunne put it, “also acted as a counterbalance to the conservatism of the Howard years”.
While it’s entirely possible that producer-bothering “off-script” political stunts will occur in episodes to come, The Set’s politics are delivered more stealthily, in the refreshing diversity of its cast of presenters.
If the shadow of Recovery looms large over The Set, it’s partly because of rose-tinted nostalgia; there were also plenty of episodes of Recovery that were boring, that dragged, that featured record label-enforced performances by bands nobody cared about, or that were less anarchic than they were amateurish. It also, in its three-hour format, had a considerable leg over The Set in terms of breathing space.
The rest of The Set’s premiere episode is made up of quick interviews and moments of “fun” (a tribute to venerable BBC show Art Attack, in which the hosts and guests paint a floor-portrait of Vera Blue’s album cover, pushes the limits of compulsory “just 90s kids” nostalgia) that, given the constraints of the format, all have the distinct sense of being over before they’ve begun. Finally, the “Set Piece” – the final performance, in which all the musical guests collaborate – is revealed.
Vera Blue chooses Neneh Cherry and Youssou N’dour’s 7 Seconds to cover, with a shy nod to “what’s happening in the world at the moment”, the show’s most outwardly political statement, but the 1994 track’s impact seems lost on the primarily fresh-faced crowd (your correspondent, on the other hand, flashed back to a rolling brawl between Cross Colours-wearing teens in the quadrangle of Elwood high). But when Baker Boy slips a Yolŋu Matha verse into the collective cover, reinventing the song and presenting it in an entirely new context, you get a sense of just how cool The Set could be.
• The Set is on ABC TV on Wednesdays at 9.30pm, with a full hour version – The Full Set – showing on Saturdays from 10pm
