The ladies were loving it and their boyfriends  – well, they did a slightly less enthusiastic boogie of sorts – as Ladyhawke returned to her former stomping ground of Melbourne to showcase her sophomore album Anxiety, before she gallivants off to Byron Bay for Splendour in the Grass.

With just one single release behind them it’s not hard to see why Melbourne outfit All the Colours drew few punters early on in the night. But those keen enough to turn up for their set witnessed one of hell of a vintage pop argument. With each member donning their own bow tie, the four-piece sought to gather some class for their retro pop stylings.

They easily succeeded winning the smallish crowd over in the end, with the fact that Josh Moriarty was previously of Miami Horror fame was barely noticeable. His new outfit is a lot less dance and much more guitar pop driven than his previous band.

Their harmonies and classic vibe was more than enough to suggest that the All The Colours’ memo, while not yet received by the majority, is a note that is getting louder with each new show they play.

Finishing off with their debut single, ‘Love Like This’, if anything was going to convince the latecomers that they’d made a mistake by missing out on the set, than this was it.

Pip Brown, the lady behind Ladyhawke, was in the mood for an enjoyable homecoming of sorts. Well, at least she said as much.

You can’t quite tell just how excited Brown really is when she says she’s “having lots of fun.” Her infrequent and at times awkward crowd banter meant she was hard to read. But her music and the crowd’s reaction was far from perplexing.

The mood to party was further encouraged when Brown played the heavy synth tracks of her eponymous debut album. Tracks like ‘Magic’, ‘Better Than Sunday’, ‘Paris is Burning’ and ‘Back of the Van’ saw the shuffle on the Billboards dancefloor erupt with much more passion than her newer songs. Although to be fair, Anxiety has only been out for a few months and her darker rock sound – while still having the hooks of her debut – is slightly less infectious than its predecessor.

Still, songs like ‘Sunday Drive’ and ‘Black, White & Blue’ showed there were plenty of die-hard Ladyhawke fans in the venue singing word for word. Brown may not be very confident when it comes to chatting in between songs, but this quickly becomes irrelevant as the songstress revels in her own music and the guitar she cradles.

After deliberately spoiling the encore, Brown walked off and back on the stage in less than a minute. After a night of photographers – both professionals and iphone wranglers – Ladyhawke did a complete reversal and let her audience do a pose as she took a photo from her Polaroid camera.

Her final two songs ‘Gone Gone Gone’ and ‘My Delirium’ both showcased the best of her two respective albums. But more pointedly, after the initial success of her debut has died down, her show at Billboards consolidated Ladyhawke as an artist with a strong fan base that will long outlive her summer hit appeal.

– Corey Tonkin

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