I meet my friend Paddy at a bar across the road before the show. I know that he’s amped – he’s already called me six times today to confirm that yes, we really are going, yes, we have tickets, yes, I know where the gig is, yes, we definitely have tickets, and yes, we really are going. It’s my first time going to the new Palace since it was born from the pool of primordial scum that was Metro. The crowd is quite markedly different, seeming relaxed and friendly after the hordes of frantic meatheads that used to invade Metro every night.Downhills Home, one of WB’s 10 Bands to Watch of 2007, are already onstage by the time we arrive. They play earnestly, but their alt-country stylings seem too modest to fill the space or enliven the crowd, who are generously attentive but never get excited. Still, it’s a decent fillip for these guys to support a band of the Dandys’ stature.
    
The main act hit the stage right on time, and fire crisply into their set. They have a charmingly inclusive stage set-up, with drummer Brent de Boer’s kit situated front of stage, between Zia McCabe’s keyboards and frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s strut-o-sphere. De Boer is also sporting an awesome mo/fro combo that makes you wonder if he just escaped from the set of Welcome Back, Kotter. Apparently it’s tougher than Alcatraz. The opener is an atmospheric, moody affair that eventually bleeds into the far more distinctive tones of ‘We Used to Be Friends’. Taylor-Taylor is hitting the falsetto parts perfectly, and the crowd starts to shuffle and nod.

A drastic tuning problem with McCabe’s keys allows for some stellar banter between her, Taylor, and the crowd. It’s a warm conversation. “We got all night. We got, like, six or seven hours,” says Taylor, before launching into ‘Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth.’ Amazingly, he manages to cram even more pop melody into the hook than he does in the comparatively deadpan album delivery. De Boer is crackling on the drums, and has the biggest shit-eating grin you’ve ever seen plastered across his face. The rest of the band, though, isn’t exuding much energy, and unfortunately, the levels on the mixing desk are badly awry. There’s a huge amount of harsh treble in the sound, and a substantial portion of Taylor’s vocals are lost in the surrounding noise.
    
A slow gathering of beautiful soft chords eventually leads into ‘You Were the Last High’. This is a brilliant performance of a song that wasn’t especially remarkable on radio. It fills the room with its lush intro; its evocative, insistent beat; and the sweet fade of the chorus. It’s a musical opiate, and after one taste I’m itching for another hit.

It’s here that things really start to get interesting. The Dandys crank up the ‘epic’ switch on their guitars. Then, for a good hour, they move through a series of meandering soundscapes, featuring deep, looping, ever-building rhythms, like a stoned jam session (the musical kind, not the cooking apricots kind). It’s punctuated by crowd favourites ‘Bohemian Like You’ and ‘Get Off’, played back-to-back in a burst of populism, but otherwise the soundscaping continues. A number of existing songs are drawn into it, used, expanded upon, reworked, chewed up and spat out. 13 Songs from Urban Bohemia is heavily represented, with as many as 10 or 11 songs taken from it over the course of the night, while material from Odditorium or Warlords of Mars is also used. But it’s the re-invention of these songs that is fascinating. There are hints of post-rock, prog, and lashings of psychedelia. Each song features a crescendo, a resolving climax, and then bleeds into the next.

The one thing I keep noticing, though, is the lack of real energy from the band. It’s explained during a break in performance when Taylor tells us that this is the last show of their Australian tour. “We landed in Perth a couple weeks ago,” he says, “and we’ve been playing a lot.” Apparently they’ve done something like 36 hours of stage time in the past two weeks, so it becomes clear that Taylor’s low vocals aren’t so much the fault of the mixing desk. The poor bastard is just exhausted. With that in mind, you can hear the strain in his voice. Even on the big numbers, he’s struggling to get any real lift or carry into the crowd. De Boer is doing his best but flagging, McCabe is barely bopping around, and while his axemanship doesn’t falter, in terms of showmanship Peter Holmström might as well be a guitar strapped to a coat rack.

But they’re not quite ready to give up, and there are a couple more surprises in store. Taylor gets back to his drumming roots by breaking out a set of toms for ‘(You Come In) Burned’, in a wonderful bluesy rendition, while Holmström harks back to Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, playing his guitar with a violin bow. All up, the Dandys press on for a full two-hour set - not bad for a band on the brink of exhaustion. This leads to an interesting situation when the band refuse to come back for an encore. All I can think is that Ed Butler would be delighted , as the crowd try to cheer them back out. Eventually McCabe comes out alone. She tells us that the rest of the band are wrecked, but that she’ll play us a song of her own. And she does – a delightful, gentle ballad listing all the tattoos she has, where they are on her body, and how and why she came to get them. It’s a touching and quite special finale. As far as encores go, this is a unique experience, and one that the Palace crowd was lucky to be a part of.

Overall, it’s just a shame that the band were so worn at the end of such a suicidally packed touring schedule, and that the sound guys couldn’t kill the horrible broken-glass sound stabbing us out of the speakers. Treble is not your friend. Tiredness aside, the Dandys showed they’re a professional outfit, with a whole lot more range than you would expect given that they’re generally promoted as a pure-pop outfit. Yes, their pop songs are immaculately constructed, but there’s a lot more going on between their collective ears than all the ‘whoo!’ on their radio songs would suggest (though I have to admit, Courtney Taylor-Taylor does have some of the best-written and best-placed ‘whoo’, ‘whoo-hoo’, and ‘ooh-ooh-ooh’ in the history of pop music). See them another time when they’ve got the strength to rock out all the way.