KEY POINTS:
As Tommy Lee and co were making the world safe again for hair-metal at the Vector Arena, up town it was the turn of another American rock legend experiencing its own life after career - and actual - death.
Only two New York Dolls out of the six who were part of the band's short, early-70s heyday are still alive. In 2004, singer David Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain resurrected the group with bassist Arthur Killer Kane at the behest of ardent fan Morrissey when he was guest programmer for London's Meltdown festival. Kane died later that year.
Three years later the pair have recruited three ring-ins and recorded a solid album, last year's One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, their third studio long-player.
One of the godfathers of punk Malcolm McLaren managed them into the ground as a dry run for the Sex Pistols and glam metal which gave us Lee's Motley Crue and others.
Now they've reapplied their lipstick logo and headed out into a rock world which has since embraced them.
But all that history didn't exactly fill the St James for the first show of this week's series of acts on their way to the V Festival in Oz.
Though it made for an entertainingly split personality of a show as the band veered from their platform-boots era to largely unfamiliar but engaging stuff from that new album via a ropey cover of Janis Joplin's Little Piece of My Heart and, in tribute to all the non-living Dolls, a blast through original guitarist Johnny Thunder's anthem You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory.
Up front, a beaming and skinny-hipped Johansen again looked like the bemused guilty guy between Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger in a police line-up. Under his very big cap, Sylvain was clearly a man energised by his band's odds-beating reunion.
After a roaring start which served notice of the high-decibel set that was to come, things slumped a little in the mid stage only to regather for a closing which encored on their best-known song, Personality Crisis.
And while the show fired hottest on sleazy oldies like Trash or their take on Bo Diddley's Pills, the new stuff showed wit and riff-power. Especially Dance Like A Monkey in which Johansen manages to give Intelligent Design a withering and tuneful put-down.
If there's one band who know something about the survival, or otherwise, of the fittest, it's the New York Dolls.
