This was a surprising little bit of information. I hadn't consciously realized that international acts had returned to touring in Australia. In fact, they haven't; the Foo Fighters are the first.
It gets a bit stranger from there. Instead of touring the country, they are playing a single performance. Instead of that single performance being in a big capital city like Sydney, Melbourne or Perth, it's in Geelong -- which, like Ballarat, is one of the lesser-sized cities here in Victoria. Granted, it's about an hour away from Melbourne, and certainly a significant percentage of the crowd will be Melburnians, but the Melbourne Cricket Grounds or Marvel Stadium would have been a far more logical place for them to play.
They're funny like that. It's consistent with their decision to play Cesena, Italy a few years back, though granted, that was in response to a viral video where a thousand Italian musicians got together to simultaneously play the Foos' song "Learn to Fly," as documented both on YouTube and in a documentary I saw at MIFF last year called We Are the Thousand, which has yet to achieve any sort of widespread distribution as far as I can tell. (From an article about the concert I found online: "Singer Dave Grohl is understood to have called up his record label and begged them to make the concert happen, insisting he wanted to be the first international act to play Down Under.")
The lack of distribution for We Are the Thousand doesn't mean the Foo Fighters aren't plenty well represented at the movies, as I discovered upon reaching Ballarat Wednesday. I had a cheeky plan not to report to the informal dinner the night before the conference began -- so informal that no one had actually told me where to go, though I could have found out easily enough -- because I wanted to go to our favorite Ballarat Mexican restaurant and then catch a movie at the Regent Theater, which I've visited on two previous Ballarat trips to see 1917 and Promising Young Woman.
There wasn't a third best picture nominee in the offing, but there was Studio 666, the new horror comedy starring the Foo Fighters that I'd only just heard of a few weeks earlier. (Which I suppose I shouldn't write off as a possible Oscar nominee this time next year, ha ha.) It features the six current members of the band recording their tenth album in a mansion in Encino, where another band met its untimely demise 30 years earlier after the lead singer started worshipping the devil and slaughtering his own bandmates. (Didn't really happen but makes for a good story.)
I enjoyed the movie -- helped, I'm sure, by two coconut and cucumber margaritas -- and also wrote my review while in Ballarat. That's linked here. I wrote it between Thursday morning, before our first session, and Thursday afternoon, during a break before dinner. I mocked it up for posting during a bout of insomnia at the hotel in the middle of Thursday night -- not dissimilar to the bouts of insomnia that lead this movie's version of Dave Grohl down a dark path. While it leads Dave to some rather gruesome things that I won't spoil here, it only led me to struggle through the Friday sessions, and I'm sure my four drinks with Thursday night's dinner and the bar afterward didn't help. But having mocked it up also meant I could publish it Friday morning before the weekend.
The Friday session I didn't struggle through was when they hired a local Ballarat entertainment act to perform for us and provide us an activity during lunch. I suppose this guy specializes in the particular schtick he presented to us, which is to host a workplace trivia while also playing for us on his acoustic guitar. It might sound lame but it was fun. I don't do trivia nearly often enough for how good I am at it. (My team won, thanks in part to some questions my movie knowledge enabled me to answer.)
And what was this guy wearing?
Well, funny you should ask. It was a Foo Fighters t-shirt with the band's name stylized in the same way as the Vegemite logo.
Now, we had no indication that this guy was planning to make the trek from Ballarat to Geelong, though the journey would have taken him only an hour and ten minutes, and he finished up with us in plenty of time for him to make such a journey. In any case, I doubt his wearing the t-shirt was just a coincidence. Maybe he'll see my co-worker there. Or, saw her there as the show happened last night.
Now I'm back in Melbourne and I don't really expect to hear about the Foo Fighters again this week.
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