The Cold Record

If you’re wondering which of the 85 Brisbane Festival shows you should drop your hard-earned cash on, I wholeheartedly endorse expenditure on The Cold Record.

It’s brilliant and beautiful, there are music and beers, and days after the experience, I still can’t stop thinking about how it made me feel.

If it were a song, it would be a two-part harmony, the final power chords bringing everything together in a crashing – and crushing – crescendo that had me begging for an encore.

The sole performer, Eli, greets us at the door like an old friend, offers us a beer, then invites us to take a seat in a makeshift living room.

Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow 19 audience members, we start playing the music we’d been asked to request before the show, revealing our personal connections to our chosen songs.

This builds an easy camaraderie, a trust between strangers bonding over music.

That connection is vital for the second half of the show, a 28-minute story about a 12-year-old boy trying to set ‘The Cold Record’ for the number of days he gets sent home from school so he can listen to punk rock.

Eli delivers the tale with a frenetic energy that mimics that of a pre-teen, connecting with each and every audience member in his living room.

There’s an intimacy and urgency to the performance that doesn’t feel contrived or uncomfortable, owing largely to the relaxed and easygoing first half; that unforced connection between strangers.

I made a pledge not to divulge the specific content of the second half; to do so would ruin the experience for future audiences.

But even knowing what I do, I would drop the needle again and again and play The Cold Record on repeat.