Creativity Quote by Santiago Durango

A “first gig” is supposed to be origin-myth material: scrappy, joyous, a little chaotic in the lovable way. Durango detonates that expectation with one word: confrontation. It’s a blunt swap that instantly reframes live music not as entertainment but as contact sport, where the crowd, the venue, the scene, even the city itself can push back.

The line also carries the traveler’s paranoia that touring bands learn fast: you don’t just arrive in a new place, you enter someone else’s ecosystem. Melbourne, with its famously opinionated music culture, reads here less like a backdrop and more like an opponent. Durango doesn’t specify who confronted whom, and that ambiguity is the point. It suggests the whole situation was adversarial: a band testing its identity in public, locals policing their taste borders, promoters enforcing invisible rules about sound, volume, attitude, authenticity. “Very first” makes it stingier; the band didn’t earn the right to be difficult, didn’t even get a grace period.

There’s a savvy self-mythologizing at work, too. Punk and indie histories are full of gigs that double as trials, moments where rejection becomes proof of seriousness. By calling it a confrontation, Durango invites us to hear the noise as an argument: we were here, we took up space, we refused to be background music. The subtext isn’t just that it went badly. It’s that the friction was the story, the baptism, the signal that something alive had entered the room.