Fugazi’s Instrument with Guy Picciotto at Vivid Sydney
The byline for Sydney’s yearly Vivid festival of arts is: LIGHT. SOUND. IDEAS. And, as exciting as one big old chemical combination of all these elements might seem, when they’re catalysed through the filter of one of the most seminal, influential, post-hardcore bands of all time, Fugazi, they becoming all the more reactively intoxicating.
In a small hall ginneled inside the Opera House, on the day of the festival’s commencement, the band’s documentary, shot using pastiched footage spanning a decade-long slow simmer to global fame throughout the late 80s and 90s, then released in 1999, was specially screened to a small but sell-out group of excitable fans.
Entirely hazed through the archaic beauty of super-8 shots, the film wildly pogoes back, forth, sideways, and spinning through Fugazi’s building drumroll to repute. Wild, sweat-soaked concert and tour scenes from the band’s first public show, a charity benefit in 1987, cut arrhythmically to a tour van ride in 96, then ricochets back to a rare 1993 TV interview. A toying with chronology sounds theoretically, like an A1 way to confuse and delude an audience, however, such is the electric, kinetic sheer energy of the film, and the building crescendo of punk spirit rhythmically punching holes under the time-leaps, that you honestly just don’t give a damn. Your damns, in fact, are, through viewing, stripped from your very soul and replaced with crackles of rock and roll lightning.
Fugazi have become revered through contemporary musical history as an everyman’s band. They used the power of their fast, hard, serious guitar music to connect with as broad a group of humanity, in as positive a way as they could – playing benefit after benefit, going without pay checks, sleeping on floors and in cars, halting mid-performance to break up fights in the crowds, and that’s really the story the documentary so excellently tells. Some of the best scenes by far are 10 second or so ‘vox-pop’ style interviews with fans, standing in the ticket queues of their 90s gigs, explaining what the music meant to them, their friends, and the causes their shows so unflinchingly, consistently supported. It was moving, humanist stuff, but with an inflection of humour too, and a cosied, animal warmth, which the realism of the home-movie camera shot style really echoed.
After the final scene closed and the wooping, charged applause had died down, the band’s lead guitarist, Guy Picciotto, took to the stage and answered an audience Q+A session eruditely, consideredly and genuinely, which was the perfect sugar pill to soften the shot of documentary lightning the film had just given the audience.
Far from just kicking, screaming, and making a general rock-and-roll racket in the musical sub-culture sub-genre of film, Instrument is truly makes a confident dent right in the ribs of the documentary category itself.
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Interview by Cherry Anna Brearley.
