Review: King Missile at Buffalo Club
King Missile at Buffalo Club
w/ Andy Burns
Saturday, September 27, 2025
The upstairs room at the Buffalo Club may be a low-fi, grungy affair, but it proved the perfect setting for an intimate and absurdist evening with beat-poet art rockers King Missile. Touring Australia as a duo, John S. Hall and Dogbowl treated new and old fans to a set that blended early-’90s nostalgia with an unexpected wealth of new material in advance of a forthcoming album.
Opening the night was Perth’s own Andy Burns, the man behind importing musical oddballs like Jim E Brown and the Space Lady to our shores. A one-man band with a penchant for synthy backing tracks and soulful crooning, Burns swerved from drunken salaryman karaoke to lo-fi bedroom confessional. Picture Richard Cheese by way of Fremantle, exuberantly dancing in stubbies and curls; a lonesome teen singing their heart out to Magnetic Fields while leaping about their bedroom, blissfully unaware of watchful eyes.
There were moments of sweetness—like a love song seemingly dedicated to his pussycat—offset by quips such as, “I sound like a demonic Elvis, that was abhorrently shit,” before restarting. Roadrunner invited Future Islands comparisons with guttural throat-clears punctuating otherwise upbeat, danceable tracks, while a cover of The Magnetic Fields’ The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side was a charming nod too. Quirky and vulnerable indie pop that veers enough away from uber-twee, it set the tone for what was to come.
That “what” was King Missile, here in Freo for the last show of their Australian run, and possibly their last ever, as Hall himself ominously hinted. Brandishing his trademark pork pie hat and thick frames, Hall’s voice hasn’t aged a bit: still matter-of-fact, still dry as the deadest pan.
From the Violent Femmes-esque opener Invisible Dog, laughter rippled through the crowd. “I’ve got them howling already—that’s a good sign,” Hall observed. What followed was a set that swung between brief absurdist ditties and cult-classic charmers. Early tracks from 1988’s They—Now, I’m Open and When She Closed Her Eyes—proved the duo’s mix of punk vitality and playful innuendo was intact, Dogbowl’s charm and romance tempering Hall’s black humour.
Following a brief segue into Dogbowl’s offbeat Leather Clown, the band ripped into Take Stuff From Work, as fresh a manifesto as ever, eliciting cheers of recognition from an audience who’d clearly been waiting for it. Someone get this song on TikTok already: we jest a little, but seriously, this song deserves more traction, and just picture King Missile taking off like some of their contemporaries (see Slowdive, Duster and the like).
How to Remember Your Dreams (with its “Here kitty kitty” chorus) had the room joining in, while Sensitive Artist became a moment of vulnerable beauty. Fittingly, Hall grumbled straight after about chatty punters down the front until they took the hint, but this precious gripe was tempered by his accessibility and self-deprecation throughout the night: checking his phone mid-song or taking the fall for Uber ratings plummeting during the tour, he reminded us these guys weren’t untouchable cult heroes at all.
Moreso, they revelled in stepping off the pedestal and laying their quirks bare. The “saddest song of the night,” Hall declared, was The Last Time, a heartbreakingly deadpan croon about the end of a lover’s enthusiasm for golden showers. Delivered without shame, it captured the strange tenderness at the heart of King Missile’s catalogue.
Of course, the crowd’s anticipation for Detachable Penis was palpable, and when those guitar chords began, that telltale murmur of excitement rippled. Far from a novelty song, its skewering of masculine anxiety remains oddly timeless. Follow-up Her Cock Is True (or their “other detachable penis song”) pushed further, twisting gender norms with gleeful provocation.
The encore brought Cheesecake Truck—nihilistic and absurd, a slacker anthem that tempted our own cake-fuelled joyride—before closing with Martin Scorsese, a furious, expletive-laden send-off that harked back to the wild times of 1992’s Happy Hour.
Across the evening, King Missile balanced deep cuts and old faves (Hemophiliac of Love, Jesus Was Way Cool) with sharp new material (Oklahoma, Hate Fuck Yourself), each landing like a beat-poet vignette. Short, sharp and darkly comic, the songs reminded us that King Missile were always more than novelty—they were poets of the absurd.
If this really was their final bow for Perth, the Buff was lucky to play host. It was a night of cult poetry, offbeat humour, and performers firmly off their pedestals—handled with more wit than you can shake your detachable genitals at.
CAT LANDRO
Photos by Adrian Thomson
