WAR Show

Tonight on Theme Party, our theme was WAR. Here’s a song list and some other details.

Katie came all bundled up in a (faux)fur hat and blankets and such; she was a Cold War. Nat came as someone who was sick at home and was Silent War (I may have made that up, but she was at home ill). I came as a copy of The Truth, i.e. The First Casualty of War.

We opened the show with ‘Love is a War’ by Rogue Traders, who are an Anglo-Australian band. The song was the lead single for their latest album, Night of the Living Drums, which was released earlier this year.

We kept up with the new music by playing John Mayer’s ‘Heartbreak Warfare’ from his latest album, Battle Studies. This was a listener request; we were originally going to play ‘War of My Life’.

Next up was one of my selections, Bronski Beat’s ‘No More War’ from their debut album, Age of Consent.

Katie and I had seen Clare Bowditch at an event at the Wheeler Centre earlier this evening, so it was only fitting that we played something from her latest album, Modern Day Addiction (with The New Slang), ‘The Start of War’.

We travelled back in time to 1984 again, for ‘The War Song’ from Culture Club’s Waking Up With the House on Fire album. Supposedly, Boy George hates this song, so of course I made a gag on Twitter about it being his favourite song.
http://twitter.com/#!/joythemeparty/status/2670297387892736

Even in the one-hour format, I still manage to squeeze in a showtune or a Eurovision song most weeks. This week it was Valters and Kaža, who came fifth in 2005 for Latvia with ‘The War is Not Over’.

Then it was time for the Cocktail Menu. I think the last time I did the Cocktail Menu on two consecutive shows was back when we had the two-hour format. I did three drinks, the kinda disgusting Celtic War Party, the kinda lethal Suburban War Hammer, and the kinda awesome Unknown Warrior.

We played a lot of new music and a gratifyingly high percentage of female artists, and our next track, Janelle Monáe’s ‘Cold War’, helped with both of those demographics.

As we were drawing to the end of the show, it was time for a bit of a comedown, with Cosima De Vito’s extra-ballady cover of Cold Chisel’s classic ‘When the War is Over’. What happened to Cosima, anyway?

It’s time to wrap this mother up. And we did so with the song that I think everyone was expecting we would play, Edwin Starr’s iconic ‘War’. (Hunh! Good God, y’all!)

Hopefully, Nat will be back on deck next week, but in the meantime, Katie and I are prerecording interview inserts with Cassidy Haley this weekend for this month’s Celebrity Theme Party (to be broadcast on the 25th of November).

I’m going to end with a couple of plugs that we mentioned in the show.

The first is Cassidy’s show at Kaye Sera’s Bizarre this Saturday night. You should totally run to the phone RIGHT NOW and book for this. Obviously, if you’re reading this immediately after it’s published in the middle of the night, you can wait until you get up in the morning, and if it’s after the 13th of November where you are, you’ve missed it.

The other was for the Outland Fake Pride Rally happening tomorrow fortnight in the Catani Gardens in St Kilda. A friend of ours is making a television show (like a proper one for the ABC and everything) and needs a crowd for scenes set at Melbourne’s Pride March, which, being in January, is a bit hard to film on schedule, so they’re staging a somewhat fake one for the sake of filming. Ah, the glamorous world of showbiz!

Tags: Theme Party