Number 10 - At last

Modern Giant - The Band Has Broken Up (2007)

There have been two occasions in my life when I have heard a song on the radio that I thought was so blindingly good I was compelled to ring the station straight away to find out what it was. Funnily enough I can remember making the first of these calls but cannot remember what the song was. Perhaps it wasn't that good. The second time was The Band Has Broken Up. It was being played on FBI and I am sure I can remember where I was: in The Brown driving out of a carpark in Randwick. Perhaps you would make up a more rock'n'roll locale if we were working with fiction but these are the mundane recollections of my life remember.

Not that long ago I would have mounted a very strong argument against the possibility of what is essentially spoken word poetry ever becoming an important part of my musical life but I had never heard of Adam Gibson. Any man that starts a poem with the line "Midnight Oil, The Hummingbirds, The Clash" is going to grab my attention. The fact that it is backed by a great little rock tune, incidentally produced by Simon Holmes of the aforementioned Hummingbirds, doesn't hurt.

I am a sucker for nostalgia and what Gibbo does in this 4 and a half minutes is tell a story familiar to those of us that were in our 20s in Sydney during the 90s. I can recognise the life I did live, of parties in the inner west where "girls were enticing and pale" and lamentations for all the nights spent watching guitars that I should have spent playing them, and also the life I wanted to live, a life where I actually spoke to the girls at those parties and found out what was at the other end of the plane trips that all of my friends went on.

Most of all I wanted to meet a girl at The Hoey and disappear with her into the Burke St night just like Gibbo's character does at the end. Alas that never happened but who cares because I have had the pleasure of disappearing into the Burke St night with Girl O'Sea and that is all I need.

I like editors

Here is a piece that I wrote for one of my subjects this semester. Chris Scanlon, my lecturer, has kindly edited it for me. It flows so much better

The Future Of Newspapers

Not sure if I am comfortable with the "journalist" tag yet but I'll get used to it.

Number 9 - The difficult one

The Lucksmiths - Camera-Shy (2003)

As I feared, this has been the most difficult post to write. I spent two hours last night puzzling over it and working myself into quite a state of frustration. Girl O'Sea was well puzzled by my mood. The problem is that Camera-Shy isn't one of my Top 10 favourite songs of all time. I had chosen it to be representational of The Lucksmiths catalogue but when I went to write about it last night I was lost. It is all jangly guitars and cardigans and I love it for that but something is missing. Part of that something can be found in Great Lengths which evokes in me memories of a girl with whom I was in love but could not be with and all of the tears that flowed. And also in Untidy Towns, the first Luckies song that I heard and how finding their music changed my life in such a pleasurable way. And in The Music Next Door and how the inclusion of Louis and his guitar made a great band even better.

Need I go on? I think you can see where I am going with this. There is no ultimate Lucksmiths song for me but they have been so important to me for so many years that there was no way they were not going to make the list. So please indulge me and consider this to be like those times when an actor gets an Oscar for an OK role but you know it was really recognition for a whole career's work. But it still is a bloody good song.

Number 8 - On the home stretch now!

Weddings Parties Anything – For A Short Time (1997)

When a song makes you cry the first time you hear it then there is a good chance that it will take a special place in your heart. I don’t know if this is Mick Thomas’ best song but I cannot ignore it for the emotional impact it has every time I hear it. I first heard it at the Metro in Sydney and it must have been ’97 because the album was just being released.

Thomas is a storyteller in his songs and, almost as importantly, in his introductions. He sets the scene for each of his new songs. He lays out the bones of the story so that the listeners can build their own understanding of the lyrics. This has always appealed to my forensic nature. I am not one to ponder hidden meanings.

The story he told on that night affected many because we could see ourselves in it. The band had met an Aussie girl while they were touring in Canada. They had spent a drunken evening together and as they were all heading to Holland had organised to catch up there. The girl had not shown up and they had just assumed she had made other plans. They returned to Australia and on a subsequent tour had played in Newcastle, the girl’s hometown, where they were handed a letter. It was from the girl’s family. She had been killed not long after meeting them and her last communication with her family was all about how she had met the Weddoes and how excited she was.

Which of us couldn’t imagine ourselves playing pool with Mick and Wally in Halifax or Calgary and then ringing our mates and family back home to tell of the tale? Maybe, for us in the audience, it was some sort of notice that despite the feelings of invincibility that you have in your 20s fate could play a hand? A decade on and now my emotions are driven by thoughts of what her family must have gone through. Mick’s lyrics:

Tell me how long is a short time, is it longer than two hours,
Or a bit less than a weekend. Is it shorter than a year?
Is it the time it takes to not complete your business with a person,
With a friend you make in transit,
To a daughter held so dear.

I knew I would struggle to fully express how this song affects me. Somehow it touches a bit of my soul that I don’t have the abilities to describe. Perhaps to fully understand you would have to be standing there beside me at one of Mick’s gigs. A part of the choir of Weddoes tragics. I’d even teach you the extra chorus that’s not on the original recording. I’ll be the big bloke with a tear in my eye.

Number 7 - Anybody reading these things?

Painters and Dockers - Nude School (1988)

Oh dear. I’ve just spent 15 minutes Googling the subject “nude school” and now I am expecting a knock on the door from a nice man from the Federal Police. But what will he charge me with? Will it be a suspicion of searching for inappropriate images of kiddies or liking the music of a bunch of pretentious art school types from the 80s? Guilty as charged your honour, on the second count that is.

As I perused RAM, that’s Rock Australia Magazine for you uncool or young people out there, during the mid to late 80s there were two bands who always caught my attention: TISM and Painters and Dockers. I had never heard a single song from either of them but something in their attitudes always appealed. I too wanted to be in a band full of patronising art school smart arses that produced pop songs laden with in-jokes that only other art school smart arses would understand. How I dreamed… and then one day I did get to hear a Painters and Dockers song and it was very witty and a bit punk and it had a horn section. A bloody horn section! I’ve love brass! And then I saw the clip and it was fantastic. And then I bought the album and it was very average, but that doesn’t matter because I got one song out of them.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I am a horrible daydreamer. Ok, that is probably not a secret for some of you but one of my favourite daydreams is about being invited on stage by my best mates (insert appropriate band here) who are headlining Homebake. They want me to do the final song of the night. You now the type I mean, the cover that will send the crowd absolutely berko. The one where members of every other band that has played end up onstage as well and that shit hot guitarist from Band A plays on the same song as that great drummer from Band B. And I do the singing and I stage dive and I am adored. 9 times out of 10 that song is Nude School and I rock the joint. I love that daydream. Might go there right now.

Thank you and goodnight!

PS – for the info of Penthe it was the ‘Rockin’ The Rails’ initiative that saw them play at Ringwood station. I can’t believe you didn’t love them. You big city kids were so spoiled.

Are we up to 6 yet?

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Deanna (1988)

What a gloriously shambolic few minutes of sonic pleasure this is. I romanticise its production in my head. It is very late at night in the studio. The last of the horse has been jacked up. Nick suggests they give that new tune a shot. Harvey is together enough to play drums and bass and acoustic, perhaps not a once. Not even he is that good. Blixa sits in the corner and does what Blixa does best – just makes up cool noises. Kid Congo whacks out some riffs and Cave weaves in some great organ sounds and makes up the lyrics as he goes along. They have a big sing-a-long, often out of key, and get it done in three takes. Cave collapses unconscious into the drum kit and sleeps there. A classic is born.

I’m sure there is probably a more accurate account of proceedings out there somewhere but I like my version. The H must have played some part. How else can you explain a line like “I cum a deaths head in your frock”? WTF??? Somebody might be able to point out my ignorance by showing that it is a homage to an obscure French poet from the 19th century but again I like my rock’n’roll version.

For me Deanna marks the beginning of my favourite period of Cave’s work - his angry preacher period. To see him prowl the stage proselytising made you understand the power of the revivalists. He converted me every time. I lit his cigarette one night and for the second I looked into the eyes of the man I was a part of it all. And then he turned away and I think I giggled like a schoolgirl. And so it goes…

Number 5 in this series (but number 1 in my heart)

Billy Bragg – Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards (1988)

The yellow of the cassette’s cover made it stand out on top of the pile. I picked it up to have a look. “Billy Bragg. Yeah, I’ve heard of that bloke. Worker’s Playtime. Any good?” It was Brisbane, 1990, and I was finally beginning to broaden my musical tastes away from the standard MMM Oz rock fare. JJJ was still a few months from starting and I had never really connected with ZZZ, so the street press and the recommendations of friends drove my musical explorations. The aforementioned pile of cassettes was in the home of a girl I worked with and had a crush on. As she was deeply smitten with someone else the love remained unrequited but she did lend me that tape. I remember it was a Friday night and as I got on the train for the trip back to Ipswich I popped it in my Walkman and pressed play. For a lovelorn young fella being given a tape that contains songs such as She’s Got A New Spell and Must I Paint You A Picture by a girl on whom you have a crush, well, it can lead to some moments of fantasy. “Maybe she does have feelings for me after all and this is her way of showing it.” I was driven to writing some bad poetry there and then. I still have it somewhere.

Somewhere towards the end of the train trip, and the end of the tape, an electric guitar starts up, that unmistakable Bragg sound, and is soon joined by piano. Billy’s lyrics are almost spoken as he starts discussing life, love and politics (again). Eventually a beat is added when someone starts tapping a drumstick on the edge of a snare. The playing steadily builds in volume and then what had seemed to be an introspective manifesto becomes a joyous celebration of the possibilities of life. The band, the backing singers, Billy shouting at us “that in a perfect world we’d all sing in tune but this is reality so give me some room!” I must have listened to Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards three or four times in a row before I got off the train that night and hundreds of times since. It never fails to make me smile. That girl never did fall in love with me but she is one of my best friends 20 years later and I wouldn't change that for the world. And she gave me Billy. “Baby I’m struttin’!”