Genre Music

Dead Set (2008)

Item: Dead Set
Rating: 4.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★★ — Dead Set (2008)

Dead Set is a 2008 Australian music documentary, running at a lean 70 minutes, that sets out to capture the energy and character of a particular moment in the country's rock and alternative scene. Directed by Rob Payne, the film is built around interviews and live performance footage drawn from a roster of bands that defined the Australian garage and indie sound of the late 1990s and early 2000s, among them You Am I, Spiderbait, Regurgitator, Custard, Grinspoon, Jebediah, Something for Kate, Frenzal Rhomb, Ammonia, Crow, and Bodyjar. The tagline, "From the Garage to Glory, the Rise and Rise of the New Australian Music", sets the tone neatly: this is a celebratory piece, a document of a scene with its own identity, its own humour, and its own stubborn independence from whatever was fashionable elsewhere at the time.

The production sits firmly within the tradition of scene-specific music documentaries, a format that tends to work best when it has genuine access to its subjects and lets the performances do the talking. Films like Amazing Grace and Style Wars show just how much mileage a documentary can get from trusting the camera to sit still and watch something real unfold, and Dead Set arrives from a similar instinct. The principal faces on screen are the musicians themselves: Richard Kingsmill, Tim Rogers (the frontman most closely associated with You Am I), Phil Jamieson of Grinspoon, Dave McCormack of Custard, and Bernard Fanning, best known as the voice of Powderfinger. These are not manufactured pop figures but working musicians with genuine histories in their bands, and their presence gives the film a credible, lived-in quality. Australia's film and documentary output has always had a strong streak of irreverence and directness (as anyone who has spent time with other Australian productions on this blog, such as Mad Max: Fury Road, will recognise, even if the genres are worlds apart), and Dead Set fits comfortably within that tradition.

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I'll be honest, I came to this one without much prior knowledge of half the bands on the bill, and I suspect that shapes the experience considerably depending on where you're coming from. What I can say is that the film works best as a time capsule, the kind of thing that rewards a viewer who either lived through that Australian scene or is curious enough to go digging afterwards. It's a modest, unshowy piece of work, polished but unremarkable in its construction, and it doesn't pretend to be anything grander than it is. Sometimes that's exactly enough.

Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2008 | Watched: 2025-07-15

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