At the top of TISM’s Hindley Street Music Hall show – their second Adelaide concert of 2026 after headlining July’s Beer & BBQ Festival – the group’s backing band began the night with the schmaltzy 1974 Barry Manilow hit ‘Mandy’.

Although the song choice was clearly ironic, it sent the message from the get-go that the punk-infused TISM still rebel against being categorised. Indeed, with a setlist ranging from ‘Mandy’ to ‘Defecate on my Face’, TISM’s show ran the gauntlet of love-inspired emotions and motions.

But of course, many TISM songs aren’t love songs. TISM also performed some of their best-known non-love songs, such as ‘Greg! The Stop Sign!!’ and ‘Whatareya?’ They also performed multiple songs with particularly clever lyrics (‘All Homeboys are Dickheads’) and amusing wordplay (‘Lillee caught Dilley bowled Milli Vanilli’), but in a live setting, much of the brilliant wordsmithery was hard to make out.

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One of the band’s solutionswas to occasionally hold up signs with words. In the song ‘Death Death Death’, for instance, they invoked the old Bob Dylan routine of holding up signs with words to match the lyrics as per ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. But when the words to ‘Death Death Death’ include “murder, murder, murder” and “rape, rape, rape”, such gratuitous use of language to shock probably doesn’t warrant being displayed on signs. Thankfully, when TISM recited a poem satirising One Nation and Barnaby Joyce, the words were clear, amusing and pointed.

Although not all of TISM’s words were intelligible, the level of visual theatre in the show was high energy and highly entertaining throughout.

Apart from the band’s signature balaclavas, they also donned glittery gold disco suits and crowd-surfed the front rows. On each occasion, people in the audience pulled off the crowd-surfer’s mask, to which the TISM member would cover his face with his hands while the bouncers valiantly put the balaclava back on. Continuing the interactivity, during the song ‘’70s Football’, band members kicked Sherrins across the stage and into the audience. At one stage, two TISM members even ran up to the top balcony of Hindley Street Music Hall, singing and high-fiving concert-goers in the process.

Sure, TISM’s choreography would never feature on ‘Dancing with the Stars’, but their goofy and amateur dance moves – on the level of a local footy cub talent night – were part of the charm, and it made the slightly sinister-looking men in masks and gold sparkles more relatable. During ‘Whatareya?’ the onanistic dance moves predictably matched lines from the song. And an advantage of TISM doing a cover of the Village People’s YMCA was that the dance moves were very simple for both the band and the audience.

After the encore, a singer from the backing band staged a fight with one of the bouncers, and suddenly the show became like a wrestling match (perhaps TISM’s masks are partly a nod to those in Mexican lucha libre wrestling).

The final song, ‘Give Up for Australia’, ended on a patriotic – albeit absurdist – note, with an inflatable kangaroo being twirled around the stage as a dance partner before being repurposed as a guitar.

In all, TISM worked hard to work the crowd (which it did successfully), with a highly physical and theatrical show. Combining the anger of punk, (mostly) clever lyrics, and sweary humour with an Aussie spin, TISM showed that they’re an engaging vehicle for modern satire. With their use of dance music, pop, rock and literary allusions, TISM aren’t exactly a punk band, yet they take the punk attitude to the next level, by defying easy labelling. In the process, they deliver something edgy and unique.

TISM performed at Hindley Street Music Hall on October 16