Live Review: Peggy Frew, Sweet Whirl @ Bergy Bandroom, Melbourne

Outside the Bergy Bandroom, the singer-songwriter Peggy Frew is perhaps best known as an award-winning novelist or, amongst TheMusic readers, as the bassist for the award-winning indie band Art Of Fighting. Tonight, inside the Bergy Bandroom, she is just Peggy.

Here to launch her debut album Dial Up, released several days earlier, the room is a cocoon of family, friends and fans. Her daughter runs the merch table, selling vinyl and t-shirts. Her son, Fraser Turner, plays guitar in her band. Numerous people sharing Frew’s angular visage are in the crowd, some in t-shirts that read “Peggy Frew” in a large handwritten font. This is not the kind of environment in which an album launch can fall flat. But, even without the intimate familiarity, Frew’s songs, delivery and stage presence would have made this a very special night.

The album, a low-key blend of atmospheric indie rock and muted orchestral pop is made for headphones and small rooms. As is the music of her support act, Sweet Whirl, Esther Edquist. 

“I’m a bookseller,” says Edquist. “So, quite often, I will see Peggy in some textual way. It’s nice to see her in real life.” Seated on a tall stool, head cocked slightly toward the microphone, thick fringe over her brow, Edquist cradles her bass guitar, on which she begins to gently pluck arpeggios. With a warm, expressive voice that sounds as though it could have come from a sunlit living room in Laurel Canyon, Edquist thrums and picks her bass, moving air around the room as she sings songs about quiet defiance, the ending of relationships and feeling “damned to be a loser and a weirdo”.

A swooning, artfully crafted new song that she seems to name Station on the spot is perhaps the strongest of the set. Majestic in miniature, it is another song strong enough to work with a band, an orchestra, or, as it is, just bass guitar and voice. That we see them in such a close environment feels special. “If you’d like to find me in your spam folder,” she tells us, “sign up to my mailing list.” 

In the late 1990s, when Art Of Fighting were moving from being a camera-shy indie band that only Punters Club Form Guide readers had heard of to an ARIA award-winning, chart-crashing camera-shy indie band that triple j listeners had heard of, they became known for their ability to transfix a noisy pub with a few spacious chords and the whisper of vocalist Ollie Browne.

Twenty years on, and to full-throated cheering and applause, Frew finally takes centre stage. Backed by her longtime collaborator Marty Brown, her son on guitar and occasional clarinet, and bassist and backing vocalist Jessie Warren, she opens her set with album highlight Landslide.

Frew sings with such delicacy and hesitancy that, as with her former band, you have to lean in to really hear the song. At times, it feels as though Frew is singing for herself or the band. Words begin and are swallowed, her eyes closed, or her gaze trained on the keys of her synthesiser.

Yet, with this setting, the care placed on the words and the arrangements, everything feels important, like a first confession. Turner’s guitar is so minimal that it is almost gestural at times, but the parts he plays are vital and loaded with intent. The set is so quiet at times that the hum of amplifiers almost becomes another instrument.

Moving through the album, the single Country House is a standout, as is Off Season, the gently epic Newtown and album closer Whereabouts. Frew’s songs sound like home videos of pivotal moments in her life: Sitting next to an empty dancefloor in a Sydney bar in “August ‘97”, the care given by a friend in the wake of a relationship ending, “$15 in my bank account” ... “We were just kids then.”

At times, it is almost like a sung memoir. Frew ends her set with an unrecorded Art Of Fighting song she wrote with the band, a song from the band’s Second Storey album, Where Trouble Lived, and a sparse and moody cover of Roy Orbison’s Blue Bayou before closing with her former band’s I Don’t Keep A Record.

“When I played in Art Of Fighting, I would have one song per album,” she tells us midway through the set. “I realised there were more songs than would go on them, so I had to do something else. I didn’t want to sing, but Marty was quietly firm about how things were done,” she says, looking back at her collaborator behind the drum kit with a smile.

She talks about how personal the songs are, but it is also clear how important they are. With the pictures she draws across the album and tonight’s songs, the power of writing your own story is at the core of her performance. Hopefully, it is also an inspiring one.