McKee doesn’t so much namecheck that debt as build a monument to it. The track struts where it could have shuffled, swaggers where lesser songwriters would have settled for reverence. That’s the trick of it \u2014 plenty of records about a formative influence end up sounding like eulogies, all hushed tones and careful footsteps. This one throws the coffin lid open and starts dancing on it. Peter Marin’s drumming has the swing of a man who’s spent years locked into JET’s back catalogue and knows precisely when to hold a groove back before letting it snap forward again. James Ryan’s guitar lines carry the fingerprints of two decades alongside Ross Wilson, unshowy but sly, the kind of playing that serves the song rather than auditions for a solo career. Kit Riley’s bass does the unglamorous, essential work of gluing the whole thing to the floor.<\/p>
Mixed and mastered by Simon Moro at The Avenue in Cheltenham, the recording carries a location’s worth of symbolism baked into its geography \u2014 halfway between the Frankston streets McKee grew up rough in and the Melbourne he’s since made his own \u2014 but you needn’t know any of that to feel it land. The production keeps enough grit in the corners to remind you this wasn’t cut in a boutique studio with a view of the harbour. Raw rock and roll, McKee said he wanted, something with a pulse you could move to, and that’s exactly the bargain struck: the song has calluses on its hands and glitter on its shoes simultaneously, which is a harder trick than it sounds.<\/span><\/p> What makes the whole enterprise convincing rather than merely nostalgic is the lack of censorship McKee credits Reed with teaching him. Nothing here is smoothed over for radio comfort. The lyric doesn’t flinch from the awkwardness of adolescence or the strangeness of hero worship, and that unguarded quality \u2014 the willingness to admit that meeting your idol later on the “Ecstasy” tour left your hands shaking too badly to sign your own name properly, let alone hold steady for his \u2014 gives the song its emotional ballast. Hero worship rendered honestly, warts and trembling wrists and all, is rarer than it should be.<\/span><\/p> Coming off the back of “Soliloquy,” an album forged in circumstances grim enough to land its maker in hospital for six weeks, “Dancing With Lou” suggests McKee has found a way to turn private obsession into something communal and physical. It’s a song that understands gratitude doesn’t have to whisper. Sometimes it can turn the amps up and ask you to move your feet.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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