Review: Kirin J Callinan at Mojos Bar

Kirin J Callinan at Mojos Bar
w/ DogWash, Romeo Walker
Friday, July 10, 2026

The dick in the room was always going to be difficult to ignore.

More than eight years after Kirin J Callinan pleaded guilty to wilful and obscene exposure at the ARIA Awards, the question of what supporting him now might constitute—complicity, forgiveness, curiosity or sufficient distance to reassess—still lingers. This review needn’t become a retrial. In my view, cancel culture can operate as a heavy-handed trial by media, leaving little room for proportion or evolution; where consent is concerned, however, the line is less murky. With a giant prosthetic penis now winding through Callinan’s live show and appearing across social media ahead of the tour, the old incident inevitably frames the new spectacle: performance art, bad taste, punk gesture or another joke resting on male licence?

At Mojos, the audience was not ambushed. Indeed, drunken punters began demanding the cock trick long before Callinan was ready to deliver it. “I probably will show you my dick,” he replied with near-exasperation, “but it’s uncouth to ask.” The room wanted spectacle; he retained the right to decide when and how it arrived.

A corrupted Ode of Remembrance arrived over a sleazy sax line, Callinan’s deep, emphatically Australian voice hovering between sultry and mock-solemn. In beret, Elvis-embroidered jacket and leather chaps, he greeted us with a suave “bonsoir” before opening with …In Absolutes, alone with guitar and backing tracks. His croon was recognisably Australian without collapsing into caricature, carrying traces of the pub-rock tradition inherited through his father. Across the night, that lineage surfaced in the ocker declarations, broad physical gestures and instinct for turning eccentric solo performance into communal ritual.

Mary followed with controlled vocal pullbacks and sudden industrial ruptures, his wild-looking Roland G-707 synthesiser guitar seemingly dreamed up somewhere between RoboCop and Wyld Stallyns. On Chop Chop, sticky-floor smut and wang-bar squeals tipped towards deliberate cringe before snapping into punkish staccato. Young Drunk Driver had him orchestrating the crowd’s “oohs,” already conductor, crooner and comic host at once. A “Why I’m Single” shirt—its checklist including a dick so large it might kill someone—kept the gag circulating, yet the show itself was tight. Backing tracks entered almost invisibly, rhythmically dynamic enough that the performance never felt canned.

My Moment inflated ocker banalities about nights on the piss into transcendent club music, Callinan shifting from gruff exhalations to a laser-like falsetto. Its maximalist lift clearly prefigured Big Enough, waiting at the far end of the night. Embracism, meanwhile, stripped masculinity back to its playground foundations: circles of boys, fights and bodies tested against other men, delivered over Suicide-like menace.

The room’s familiarity with Callinan was striking. Several audience members addressed him as though speaking to an old friend—whether genuinely known to him or caught in the parasocial blur. Yet he encouraged intimacy rather than maintaining rock-star distance, entering the crowd during his beloved cover of The Whole of the Moon and transforming its widescreen romanticism into something hearty, theatrical and built to be bellowed back across a sticky floor. At the merch stand later, he was almost apologetic about his limited wares: humble, personable and far removed from the shock-jock impression his public image might suggest.

Earlier, the supports had divided Callinan’s musical instincts between them. DogWash, the masked duo of Benjamin Witt and Malcolm Clark, offered confrontation: distorted, pitch-shifted bass, deconstructed drumming, cowbell chonk and percussive static. Their difficult-listening excursions sat somewhere in the Hella and Lightning Bolt vicinity, if without quite the same ferocity or discipline. Still, flashes of hardcore, jazz-funk and alien noise revealed an instrument-led disregard for genre. Clark’s drumming was the most compelling element: patterns assembled from every available surface, a cymbal flicked sharply from beneath in a John Stanier-like detail before being struck from above with brute succession.

Also featuring Witt, Romeo Walker occupied the opposite pole. Beginning alone at the keys in lounge-crooner mode, Witt initially struggled against a loud Friday-night crowd before expanding into drum-machine rock, affected guitar loops and subdued funk. The act’s best moments arrived when convention fractured: glitching beats beneath tender keys, intricate guitar interplay and a late flash of bluesy possession. Together, the supports anticipated Callinan’s fluid code-switching between difficulty and accessibility, raw noise and calculated showmanship.

The encore began with new track The Squeeki Wheel (Gets the Grease). Reframing the idiom away from its loudest complainer through a lens of heartbreak and loss, Callinan suggested that “love or light or God” might still find its way through: even the most battle-scarred might receive a salve. The song bubbled like soda-pop, Callinan strutting with a little Jagger twist before disappearing to prepare the promised costume.

Then came Big Enough. Now donning a colossal prosthetic schlong, Callinan faced the crowd with an air of vulnerability before tenderly handing himself over to the punters. What could have read as comedic gimmickry and poor taste instead rose into absurdist art: his cock making a full circuit of Mojos, passed among smut revellers and objectifying hands, before one woman held its end tethered back to Callinan—less phallus now than umbilical cord. Compensatory coding, perhaps, but wasn’t that precisely the point?

Yet the night’s sharpest statement followed. Sung a cappella, The Toddler reduced masculine bravado to its developmental beginnings: the child demanding attention, testing volume, posture and authority before he can properly speak. Callinan’s elastic body and shifting Australian inflections held the room quieter than any exposed flesh could.

The giant dick got the lap of honour. The Toddler had the final word.

CAT LANDRO

Photos by Linda Dunjey