After scoring a very rare HardRockHouse 10/10 for their latest album, 'Dirty Hearts' last year Aussie rockers Dallas Crane made a rare live appearance in the UK following their trip to the SXSW festival in Austin Texas. Without a doubt the Camden Barfly was the place to be tonight.

Even before they took to the stage Dallas Crane weren't helped by the fact that the ‘cock’ of a lead singer from the last support band decided to have a Spinal Tap moment & climb the speaker stack, grabbing the light rig as he went. This caused all the lighting fuses for the stage to blow so Dallas Crane had to take to the stage lit by the equivalent of a couple of large torches occasionally covered by coloured tissue paper - but this was certainly not going to effect the energy and effort the Aussie quartet put into their performance. 

Back home Dallas Crane regularly headline to over 1,000 people in Oz & and as befits a band of such stature the Barfly was sold out and populated with a myriad of fellow Aussie ex-pats all looking for a piece of home. Although they may be used to playing larger venues you would not be able to tell this from the performance tonight, which for them was to a relatively small crowd. The pace of the gig started slowly & progressively got faster & faster. This format to the show mirrored by the crowd reaction, which became more vocal as the evening went on, turning the gig into a real party - Aussie style of course. Concentrating in the main on tracks from the Dirty Heart album also proved a wise move,  all of the so-called ‘home’ crowd obviously knowing the material extremely well and feeding off the energy emanating from the stage.  

This was one of those gigs that despite it's length, seemed to last all of about 10 minutes before lead vocalist Dave Larkin announced the 'last song' of the night. Thankfully it wasn’t & the band carried on serving up more and more to the by now ecstatic crowd. Dallas Crane are planning to return to the UK later this year & my advice would be to get along & join the party. On the evidence of the Barfly show they are indeed an excellent live band with masses of stage presence. No doubt this comes from playing larger shows back home, but in the stripped down, intimate atmosphere of the Barfly it was equally, if not more effective...

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