Dracula's Cabaret : A feast for audiences
life and society arts 29 minutes ago
"Thrill with excitement and scream with fear!" The man behind Dracula's Cabaret promises their latest show will scare and delight audiences. Luke Newman is a third generation Dracula, he told Jesse what makes their performances stand out from the rest.
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3 hours ago
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Thus Spoke The Broken Chanteuse, The Lavish Second Album From Fast-rising Punk Group, Wet Kiss, Is Out Via Dinosaur City
[Friday, June 27, 2025] Rising Naarm/Melbourne glam-rock group, Wet Kiss, today release their highly anticipated sophomore album Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, via Dinosaur City ahead of national tour dates this August. The first run of vinyl is an extremely limited-edition collectors item, with each record individually marked with a kiss of red lipstick, courtesy of the Broken Chanteuse herself, Brenna O. This will not be replicated in future pressings. Secure yours here before they disappear, or order a copy through your local record store. Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, the antic glam-rock group's second record, is exactly what the title suggests. Our chanteuse here is the sensational jezebel Brenna O: Part Factory Girl, part Fassbinder heroine, all peroxide locks and shiny, skin-tight '$2 dresses', sneering and growling across the stage, mixing greasy punk with cabaret excess. Or as she likes to put it: 'the punk Bette Midler." What is she saying? Well, a few things. Produced by Andy McEwan, Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse is about the grubby pleasures of hopping on the Melbourne-to-Berlin artist pipeline. It's about 'daddy at the abattoir,' slaughtering piggies. It's about gloomy waits at the gender clinic so you can get your estrogen. It's about dingy, crap clubs, desolate glamour, strutting down the street with your dignity in tatters, upskirting, indulgence and the glory of turning fantasy into reality. The album name is also something of a joke, melding a music journalist's snide comment about the band ('broken chanteuse') with a nod to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The story of Wet Kiss is the story of myth-turned-real. Brenna knew what she wanted – glam-rock mutated for the adderall age – she just needed to find the players. So she put out ads in local rock magazines and found them: daniel dog (guitar), Al Amour (piano), Ben Addiction (bass), Ju Sugar (lead guitar), Ruby Rabbit (drums) and Agnes Wailin' (dubbed 'Screamin'' for their tenacious vocal belts). The band quickly moved in together, quickly put out their beguiling debut record She's So Cool, and quickly built a live reputation. Their performances left crowds gobsmacked: there were floppy bunny ears and buckets of sweat; costume changes and clothes ripped to smithereens; ecstatic howls and hilarious antagonism. The first single off Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, 'Isn't Music Wonderful', is perhaps the best distillation of the band's sly, stylish lunacy. The song title is yelped in earnest, but is Brenna taking the piss? Music is wonderful – it shoves misfits together, it makes life worth living, it is a fleeting, euphoric high, hard to replicate chemically. But to be a musician is also a pain in the ass, where getting your dues is a long and tortuous path ('When am i gonna be a star / I'm searching in my bag for last nights drag' as Brenna sings). Nothing left to do except nurture dreams and delusions, and smack make-shift opulence onto every surface you can. The song is pure glam bombast: layers of honky-tonk piano, jeering back-up singers and Brenna hissing street-wise bon mots. ' It's about needing to self-actualise. The verses are all about that necessary posturing and self-deprecation, ' says Brenna. Plenty of Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse is brimming with this tension – between the hedonistic triumph of inventing oneself, and the dreary texture of modern life. Brenna became well acquainted with this conflict during a long stint in Berlin. Much of the record was written there, and as such, many of the songs are slathered in a thick glob of Weimar decadence. 'Chick from Nowhere' is a janky piano ballad (of pianist Aldo, Brenna affectionately calls them the 'Barry Manilow to my Bette Midler'), that descends into a full-blown rock opera, about picking up lovers in the early morning, relishing the freedom of being an unknown entity in an unknown city. The melody was written back in Melbourne, the band high on ecstasy and suddenly eager to write a really tight pop song. 'It's not really a standard pop song at all' laughs Brenna, 'it's more of a rock saloon song.' A couple of the album tracks deal with disastrous, yet funny and formative, gig mishaps abroad. 'Skirt' is a 70s rock anthem by way of 90s PJ Harvey, laden with whoof whistle samples, serving as a retort to leering audience members but also poking fun at Brenna's on-stage humiliation ('Girls get paid in fascination / even while the night gets wasted'). She had just moved to Berlin and was playing her first solo set, but the show didn't pan out as planned. 'I got really drunk on white wine and it was a disaster. I luckily saved it by bantering. I had my foot up on the amp the whole time, and after the set my friend was like, 'Oh my God, everyone was trying to peer up your skirt.' 'Pink Shadow' is grimy punk burlesque, about the convergence of taking hormones for the first time and trying to insert yourself in a new music scene. 'It's about intertwining the mythos of myself and the mythos of the city,' says Brenna. Elsewhere on the record, Wet Kiss are inserting themselves into lineages, old and new. The speedy punk of 'Metal Silhouette' toys with Burroughs' cut-up method, the drawl of 'Gender Affirmation Clinic,' sounds like something you might find on David Bowie's Space Oddity record. 'Babe' is a sauntering, lovestruck cover of the underappreciated folk song by artist Rick Penta. 'The Gay Band' is sweet glam magic, a glimmering anthem with lip-smacking vocals, about the death of friends and the metaphorical death of an old self. 'I want to carry on that spirit of dirty street decadence, but also the great tradition of self-invention,' says Brenna about the album. Wet Kiss catapulted onto the scene with the release of their debut album She's So Cool via Dero Arcade (cumgirl8, Divide & Dissolve) in 2022. In a somewhat shock move, Olver and daniel dog relocated to Berlin just a month after the album dropped. When plans of their 2024 return became public (alongside whispers of a new record), a frenzy was ignited with fans and media alike. One year on, Wet Kiss have played Melbourne Town Hall for RISING's sold-out DAY TRIPPER festivalalongside Bar Italia and HTRK, showcased at SXSW Sydney, made their 'Sup debut for Golden Plains alongside PJ Harvey and Fontaines D.C. and were invited to throw a secret house party for Dark Mofo 's Night Mass earlier this month. On top of that, they've scored support slots with Amyl & the Sniffers, RVG, Spike F*ck, CIVIC, Floodlights and Private Function, this momentum has been bolstered by critical acclaim from influential outlets like Sydney Morning Herald, Gusher Magazine, Frankie Magazine, Beat Magazine, Rolling Stone, Gusher Magazine, BBC 6, WFMU, 3RRR, PBS, among others. You can dunk yourself in Wet Kiss' filthy, lavish depths as they tour the new album across Australia this August.
NZ Herald
a day ago
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Pitt, Stop: Why Brad's slick F1 flick is a drag
Racer man: Even Brad Pitt can't lift F1: The Movie above the ordinary. Photo / Supplied NZ Listener Arts & Entertainment Editor Russell Baillie has worked at the Listener since 2017 and was previously the editor of the NZ Herald's TimeOut section. F1: The Movie, directed by Joseph Kosinki, is out now. There are big hopes of this doing what Top Gun: Maverick did for the cinema box office in 2022. After all, it's by the same director, and it features an elegantly ageing Hollywood megastar with a winning grin beneath his helmet visor. It also puts him in the cockpit of a fast-moving vehicle and takes us along for the ride. Woo, and indeed, hoo. But Maverick had a couple of decades of fan worship for the original to build on and, well, Tom Cruise. F1: The Movie has 61-year-old Brad Pitt as a race car driver, who, 30-or-so years ago, was Formula 1's Next Big Thing. Recruited into a failing F1 team by an old co-driver and desperate owner played by Javier Bardem, Pitt's Sonny Hayes gets one last chance at glory. That's despite his age – the last F1 driver over the age of 50 was in 1955 – and frankly, his nationality. While doing that, he gets to be not only an unrequited adrenalin junkie but a wise mentor and strategist, just like Cruise's Maverick. But if the story chassis is similar to Top Gun and from many of the same writers, unlike TG:M, F1 never really takes off. Neither does Pitt's performance. And while his fictional F1 team has plenty of whizz-bang tech, its workshop has only a 1D printer for supporting characters. Much of F1 is filmed on tracks during actual F1 seasons in 2023 and 2024, and it's an adequate car-race movie of moderate excitement, but one where it's not clear just who our heroes are trying to beat or why. There are some race team politics involving Bardem's character and Tobias Menzies' board member, but mostly this is a very simple, predictable movie. F1 champ Lewis Hamilton, also a producer who gets a very brief cameo, has described it 'as the most authentic car-racing movie ever made'. Which rather damns a lot of far better car-racing movies and many terrific documentaries about far more colourful F1 drivers. Authentic F1: The Movie may be, but it assumes its audience has never seen F1 before, with an incessant scripted commentary by actual commentators breathlessly explaining things. Helpful things such as being in last place are not ideal. The faux broadcast just shrinks the film to sports television ordinariness, or movie-of-video game contrivance. Though the commentators do offer deep insights about tyres and well, no, mostly tyres. No one leaving F1: The Movie will leave the cinema without a deeper appreciation of where the F1 rubber meets the road. But there's not much else in F1: TM that delivers anything memorable or convincing. Not Pitt's raffish turn as the couldabeen champ who still lives to race but doesn't care in what or for whom. Not his mix of Obi-Wan oversight of, and rivalry with, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), his young, gifted and black English team mate, who seems based on a young Lewis. And not his fling with the ah, driven, team technical director played by Irish actress Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin). Her sexy boffin romantic interest owes much to the Nicole Kidman character in Days of Thunder, the 1990 Cruise race movie which, like this, was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Still, as the film and its many product placements whizz by, you do have to admire the corporate synergy of it all. The movie is backed by Apple TV+, a streamer vying for future F1 rights. The F1 business, surely the world's least sustainable sports league, will be happy with its US$200 million commercial, every slick but fairly dull, US market-aimed 156 minutes of it. It does have its moments, usually involving Pitt's Hayes making a brilliant tactical move verging on cheating. Afterwards, repeatedly, the track-cleaning crew comes out to clear the debris and sweep up the sports movie clichés that keep getting stuck in those tyres. Rating out of five: ★★½
Scoop
3 days ago
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Dracula's Second-Ever New Zealand Tour Kicks Off In Auckland This Week With Three Shows At The Civic
Australia's iconic vaudevillian variety extravaganza Dracula's opens their all-new show at The Civic in Auckland this Thursday 26 June, marking the start of a seven-city nationwide tour. After selling out their debut New Zealand tour in 2023, Dracula's wild, weird and wonderful cast is back with a brand-new show, Sanctuary, a high-energy, adults-only production that's bursting with thrills, chills and outrageous fun. The tour starts in Auckland and goes to Rotorua, Wellington, Palmerston North, Christchurch, Invercargill and New Plymouth. Initial ticket releases sold out in record time, with extra shows being added in every city to keep up with demand. With just days to go until Auckland's opening night, final seats are disappearing fast. Dracula's: Sanctuary is part cabaret, part comedy and all chaos delivered with Dracula's signature risqué edge. Musical tributes to icons like Guns N' Roses, Elton John and No Doubt will leave audiences wanting more, with an encore promised for those who cheer the loudest. Dracula's steward and Newman Entertainment CEO Luke Newman says they can't wait to bring the mayhem back to New Zealand stages. 'We were blown away by the response in 2023, and this time, it's even bigger. Sanctuary is next-level Dracula's, and we're so pumped to kick things off in Auckland next week. Get ready for a bloody good time,' he says. New Zealand Tour Dates: Tickets and more information available at
