Gang of Youths have never been particularly interested in behaving like a band that should be playing the Sydney Opera House. Four years since their last Australian shows, the Sydney five-piece indie rock band returned home for two sold-out nights, bringing with it the songs, stories, and general chaos that have made it one of the country’s most beloved live acts.
Margaritas are rolling out onto the stage. There are jokes, there are stories, there is an almost aggressively down-to-earth energy that feels wonderfully at odds with the grandeur of the room. This is, after all, the band that can make a song about grief feel enormous and then immediately puncture the moment with a joke. And then there’s David Le’aupepe. Part frontman, part comedian, part emotional wrecking ball and, for me, a longstanding teenage crush dating back to the age of 14. I vividly remember a poster of Le’aupepe that stayed on my wall long enough to leave an impressive amount of sticky tape residue when I eventually moved out (I still have that poster, by the way). At one point, he makes an ode to his wife that is so sincere it threatens to tip the entire evening into sentimentality, before the band pulls it back into something warmer, funnier, and distinctly Gang of Youths.
This emotional whiplash is kind of the point. One minute, Gretta Ray’s voice is cutting through the room; the next, three people in the audience are standing in a group hug. Everywhere you look, someone is crying, laughing, dancing, or doing some combination of all three. It’s difficult to think of another Australian band that can make a venue as imposing as the Sydney Opera House feel this intimate. There’s no great performance of rock star mythology here. Gang of Youths are just themselves. Messy, earnest, funny, sentimental, and completely unafraid of being sincere.
By the end of the night, the standing ovation has become almost its own recurring act. I don’t think I’ve watched a live performance receive quite so many standing ovations in one night. One song finishes, everyone stands; another finishes, everyone stands again. But perhaps that’s the most fitting response to Gang of Youths: get up, make some noise, hug the people close to you, and stay a little longer. For a band that has spent years singing about life in all its enormous, devastating, ridiculous beauty, there’s something fitting about its homecoming feeling exactly like that, enormous, completely ridiculous, and somehow very much like home.
