R.I.P. Russell Kneebone, c.1964-2005

Necessary, but inadequate, words to follow.

The paddock bomb

A common fixture on Australian farms is the paddock bomb. In case you don’t know, a paddock bomb is a car, probably twenty years old or more, unlicensed for driving on the road, and most likely completely unroadworthy. Not to mention highly unreliable and unsafe. Its main purpose is to provide an excuse for farmers to spend time out of the house, tinkering around under the hood and generally undertaking a course in Experimental Mechanics, when there is no actual productive work to be done.

There was no particular means by which a paddock bomb might be acquired. In our case, it coincided with the demise of a large black bullock. It was a dark and stormy night (of course). One of our cattle, as a result of a late-night episode of extreme boredom, managed to breach the boundary fence of the property, and found itself in the unfamiliar environment of the main road between Fish Creek and Meeniyan. Notwithstanding the very infrequent appearance of cars on that road in the wee small hours, a poor unfortunate local happened upon the animal. History does not tell us which of the two received the bigger surprise. The cow, a solid, purpose-bred beef-laden beast, made acquaintance with the bonnet of the car, upon which it was then carried for some distance, balanced precariously, as the driver struggled to come to terms with this new reality, applied the brakes, and the cow, by now quite dead, rolled off the bonnet and onto the road.

The driver, who had a fair idea of the animal’s provenance, walked up the hill to the farmhousewhere my uncles lived, and woke them up.

“I’ve run into your cow.”

“Right. Let’s go and have a look, then.”

Arriving at the scene, the uncles did a quick bit of prioritising: first, they checked the cow to see if it was too late to salvage its carcass for meat. (It was.) So, with the help of a tractor, they dragged the corpse off the road, and towed the car up to the house. In the spirit of the pre-litigious 1970s, a deal was reached whereby we paid a sum of money to the other party, and became the proud owners of a seriously dented black EH Holden.

My uncles were of perhaps the last generation of human beings to be capable of doing almost anything they set their hands to, whether it be milking cows, making folk art, baking, converting a refrigerated truck into a fully appointed mobile home, conducting a home slaughterhouse and butchery, darning socks, constructing large-scale irrigation systems, or playing lawn bowls. They set to making the car operable again, most likely with help from my city cousins, who enjoyed nothing more than being surrounded by car parts and grease.

Actually, my cousins did enjoy one thing more than being surrounded by car parts and grease: they also loved to get into the paddock bomb and hoon around the farm, either (in the daytime) for the sheer heck of it or (at night) for the purpose of putting a spotlight on the top of the car, grabbing a couple of guns, and trying to shoot as many rabbits as they could scare out of their burrows. Goodness knows what the cows (not to mention the neighbours) thought about all of this. But one thing I do know is that it appalled my mother. This activity all took place at my uncles’ part of the farm, which was some miles away from our place. So I was for the most part sufficiently removed from it that she didn’t much need to worry on my account. But always when my cousins came to visit, we would go over there for a barbecue. I spent most of these visits wide-eyed with amazement at the kinds of things my cousins would get up to, while at the same time being too scared to actually get involved (and anyway, mum was usually not far away, making sure I didn’t get led astray). But my cousins, and Heather in particular, who was three years older than me and very persuasive in her own way, seemed to have a knack of getting me to do things that I didn’t really want to do (like the time they took me out for a walk in the dark one night, for the sole purpose of getting me to walk into an electric fence, just for a “laugh”), or that would get me in a heap of trouble if my mother ever found out.

Which is how I found myself one afternoon in the back seat of the paddock bomb, laughing uncontrollably, out of fear and exhilaration, as my cousins, screaming and carrying on as only they knew how, spun around and around one of the paddocks just up the hill from my uncles’ house: forwards, backwards, sideways, stopping, starting, skidding the wheels. Of course there were no seatbelts, and the entire back seat of the car was not attached to anything, so we were flying around the inside of the car at about the same rate as the car itself was flying about. I may have been too scared to contemplate going on the legendary Mad Mouse at the Melbourne Show, yet here I was, doing something that was at once more frightening than that, several times more genuinely dangerous, and, because it was actually happening, the most fun I had ever had in my entire sheltered life. I was in paddock-bomb heaven.

What I didn’t know, and only found out because my cousins’ mother, my aunty Betty, told me many years later, was that this was, in fact, happening right under the nose of my mother, who was watching the goings-on from the kitchen window with my aunty (who knew that I was in the car). “Well, would you look at that,” said mum, with all the disdain she could muster. “At least Stan isn’t out there with them.” (I don’t know where she thought I was. Probably my cousins had spun her a yarn about me playing cricket up at the nets behind the old house, or swinging on the makeshift swing under the cypress trees behind the house (actually the hook my uncles hung freshly killed cattle on until they bled dry), or fishing for eels in the creek.) Betty said nothing, but smiled quietly to herself as she went on drying the dishes. And as far as I know, mum never found out.

Digital mixtape: May 2005

Anton Karas, “Third Man Theme”: Trinity College, Melbourne University, 1982. A number of us were in love with Kris McKie. Kris was small, had short dark hair, an endearing way of saying her “r”s as almost-“w”s, and was from Coventry (ie, “Coventwy”), England. She was, in other words, from the mythical land of the Punk Rock explosion, and had some firstknowledge of the scene. The other particularly nice thing about Kris was the way she would walk around singing the theme from “The Third Man”, in a “doo-be-doo-be-doo, be-doo-be-doo” style. I wonder where she is now.

Marcos Valle, “Garra”: Brazilian music from the late 60s/early 70s is a recent obsession. This is a good example of why. Winter in Canberra serves to make the inherent sunniness of this music more profound.

Would-Be-Goods, “Le Crocodile”: girls singing in French has been a much older obsession. This, again, is another good example of why.

Emiliana Torrini, “Sunny Road”: I thought this might have been a guilty pleasure. Then SFJ gave her a good write-up in the New Yorker. It’s a sure sign of my own inadequacies that I have always been much more comfortable when things I latch on to get endorsed by reputable third parties.

Claudine Longet, “Love Is Blue”: not much I can add here. If the brief had been open ended I would have followed it up with the discofied “Love Is Still Blue” which may or may not have been recorded by Mr Mauriat himself. But we have only 80 minutes, and we must move on.

Paul Mauriat (or perhaps not), “Love Is Still Blue”: a disco-and-harpsichord interpretation of the above. Surely you can’t be serious.

Bobby Hughes Experience, “Season of the Witch”: a funky, electric-piano groove, based on a song that we have previously used in one of these mixes in a much different guise. This song must be endlessly adaptable, like the “Autumn Leaves” (or “Nature Boy”) of the rock’n’roll generation.

The Camberwell Now, “Working Nights”: prog rock rears its no-longer-ugly head. Is this the real thing, or is it just fantasy? (Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.) Or is it a crafty simulacrum of the Camberwell scene, updated to Now?

Sondre Lerche, “Two Way Monologue”: it was a toss-up between this and “On The Tower”. I think if I was doing this now I would have opted the other way. There is something timeless about Sondre Lerche, which is why it sits well in this particular place, between maybe-genuine-maybe-not psych-folk and the real thing.

Harpers Bizarre, “Witchi Tai To”: mmmm, lovely.

Bill Fay, “Be Not So Fearful”: if this was a hymn, I would be a regular church-goer. It covers similar sonic, and perhaps thematic, territory to Nilsson’s sublime “All I Think About Is You”. And it may even be as good. (Readers, that is a very big statement.)

Crosby, Stills and Nash, “Dark Star”: David Crosby did some lovely, although sometimes disturbing, minor-key work with the Byrds. He also got very fat. Here, in a minor key again, is another extremely tasteful piece of work, in a kind of jazzy, funky, smoooooth style. Break out the swizzle sticks.

Rättö Ja Lehtisalo, “Valonnopeus”: what drives me to say that this is the musical equivalent of an Aki Kaurismaki film?

Barrington Levy, “Murderer”, “Version”, “Tell Them Nah Ready”: otherwise known as Dub 101. (Not, I hasten to add, Dub For Dummies.) The song, the version, the dub. See how it all fits together. Or, rather, falls apart.

Arthur Russell, “Kiss Me Again”: and finally, my last most recent obsession (my next most recent being Popol Vuh), Arthur Russell. Different versions of his many different songs abound. This claims to be the version from “Disco Not Disco”. It appears to be identical to what is called the “Version” on the b-side of the 12-inch, although with a brief spoken intro. With Arthur Russell, who knows? What is indisputable is that David Byrne scratches his way through the 12 minutes-plus like an agitated madman/genius. I hate that until 2005 I had no idea that this existed. It is perfect in every way.

2005: And another thing ...

Obviously, the single of the year is "1 Thing" by Amerie. Oh man, those drums ...

Ape Mon

I don't remember the context, but it went something like:

Julius: "It's going ape!"
Carl: "It's going more than ape!"
Julius: "It's going super ape!"

At which point the muesli I was eating almost leapt out of my mouth in surprise.

"Super Ape" by Lee "Scratch" Perry is one of the cornerstones of Jamaican dub reggae. Obviously, my efforts to provide the boys with a proper musical education is even more successful than I had hoped. (I thought we hadn't got much further than learning to play Jonathan Richman's "Egyptian Reggae", with one finger, on the piano and/or the melodica.)

2005 erratum

Owing to a failure of intelligence (i.e., mine) it appears that Boards of Canada's "The Campfire Headphase" was left off of the previous, somewhat haphazard, run-down of the current year's music.

I would like to know, apropos the blanket of negativity that this record was greeted with, by what definition the phrase "sounds like their previous records, but with guitars" could be a bad thing. (Reminds me of the time several of us huddled around Anthony's Bose speakers circa 1982 and debated whether that was an actual bass guitar being doinked on Kraftwerk's "Tour De France" single, and whether, on the - seemingly misguided - assumption that it was, we would have to thereafter forever abandon our loyalty to Ralf und Florien.) Purism, kids, will get you nowhere. Look at the Americans in Iraq. (Whoops, where did that come from?)

2005

I absorbed more music this year than in any year since, let me think, probably the golden years of 1987-1988, the time before Punk Broke, before Adrienne appeared, before my father died and a lot of things went pear-shaped for a long, long time. Those were the days when I was young, single, earning money, and thanks to Maria, Bart, Darren, Doctor Jim, and others I was able to furiously indulge a passion for seven-inch singles, fanzines, and mail-order catalogues from the USA.

[sigh]

Now, of course, thanks to the miracles of the Internet, one no longer needs huge amounts of money to spread one’s musical wings far and wide. We are living in a geek’s paradise. Which is, as a geek might say, Way Cool. The interesting thing, though, is that contrary to what the music “industry” would have you believe, those of us who actually care about music are not in any way transferring our acquisition programme from the legal to the free and illicit. If I am any guide to anything, the situation is actually quite the reverse: not only am I listening to more music than I have in a long while, I am also expanding my collection of actual, bought CDs at a somewhat alarming rate. (There is, obviously, a wider and more significant debate to be had in this area of discourse, but this is not the place to have it. I am one, possibly not representative, case study. Heck, I’m just this guy. But: example: downloaded Kate Bush’s “Aerial”; listened, twice, astounded; bought it within a week. If not for having downloaded it first, I can’t imagine that I would have bought it at all. Which would have been both my loss and EMI’s. Have I done something wrong here? Not unequivocally no, but also not unequivocally yes, either.)

But I digress. Again.

What music pushed the right buttons this year?

Not all of it came out in 2005, but most of the following is at least fairly recent. Without doubt, the most important release of 2005, and surely the one that I will still be listening to when I’m 61, is “Aerial”. Like “Tour De France Soundtracks” a couple of years back, it is the record we didn’t dare imagine we would ever see, much less hope that it would be as good as it is. I haven’t followed Kate closely since “Hounds of Love”. There is much about the new record that situates it as that one’s spiritual successor. Anyone who carries “Hounds” close to their heart has a duty to immediately acquire “Aerial”.

Beyond that, there has been much goodness floating around. Records by The Juan Maclean, Lindstrom & Prins Thomas, Vitalic, and Superpitcher have all rekindled my long dormant interest in electronic music, last seen in 1982. This year’s Black Dice record demonstrates the usefulness of noise. Tom Waits’s “Real Gone” is getting under my skin the way every Tom Waits record does: slowly but inexorably. “Margarine Eclipse”, atypically for a Stereolab album, has taken a while to work its charms, but work them it has. (Thanks are due to Jon Dale - link at right - for his perceptive write-up of this record in his belated 2004 roundup, without which it may still be in the too-hard basket.) Whereas the ’Lab’s “Oscillons of the Anti-Sun” and “ABC Music” collections adequately satisfy a Stereolab obsessive’s obsession. Meanwhile there is much beauty in Antony and the Johnsons’ “I Am A Bird Now” and The Arcade Fire’s “Funeral”. Also, I finally stumbled upon “Frozen Orange” by David Kilgour, and the unexpected "Stand By" EP from Martin Phillipps’s reconstituted Chills. (And if I had found the new discs by the Bats and Cakekitchen (if the latter even exists) I have no doubt they would be mentioned herein, too.) Not to mention Beck’s “Guero”, which was treated with inexplicable indifference by the press, The Fall’s mammoth Peel Sessions collection, and of course the double live Kraftwerk set, “Minimum/Maximum”, which I don’t play as much as I should but which is an indispensible artifact of an indispensible group.

Well, that’s quite a lot, really, when you think about it.

But the Record of the Year? Without doubt [drumroll] it has to be “Tender Buttons” by Broadcast. Where “The Ha Ha Sound” was cold and distant [editor’s note - this is not for a minute to suggest that “The Ha Ha Sound” is not a work of greatness], “Tender Buttons” is warm and welcoming. Everything about it shows a pair of musicians in full creative flight. The use of a drum machine, forced on them by no longer having a real drummer, is actually an inspired touch. “Michael A Grammar” features a gorgeous four-note descending guitar line that would not have been out of place on either of the last two Sonic Youth albums, while the title song carries the distinction of giving Adrienne the opportunity, for only the second time in her life, to say the words “this sounds like the Velvet Underground”. (And on both occasions she was spot on.)

I can’t really say why I would choose “Tender Buttons” ahead of “Aerial”, given that the latter is the more important release (and probably even the best record of the last 12 years). But it’s my party, and I won’t cry if I don’t want to.

Coming soon to a hospital waiting room near you ...

We are now the proud owners of a trampoline.

Whether it will take any of the strain off our long-suffering couches and beds is another question.

Boing, boing.

Panic! (as pernicious virus crosses species barrier)

The “difficult third album” syndrome. Did it ever really exist? The idea was, a band would labour away for however long it took to put its first album out, gathering together a collection of songs drawn from a fairly well-developed list. Then the second album was kind of easy: the songs followed from the first bunch of songs, may even have been left over from the first album. It often happened, though, that the second album would be somehow more serious, or darker in tone. Or something. Think “Secondhand Daylight”, think “Heaven Up Here”, think “17 Seconds”. (Don’t think “Closer”: there being no third album, no pattern of development could be retrospectively discovered.)

But by then, or so the theory went, the well was dry. Perhaps the second album was not as well received as the first, or, if the band was English, maybe the inevitable critical backlash had taken hold. What to do? You could perhaps imagine Franz Ferdinand in this position right about now. Or the Strokes. Or even, if you imagined for one minute that they cared about such things as fans, Liars.

But was the third album actually “difficult”? The Ramones didn’t think so: they just kept doing what they had already honed to a sharp point. Magazine put out their best album (and thereafter kind of faded). The Clash threw out the rule book and produced “London Calling”, to this day a breath of fresh air from the first chord of the title track to the last note of the “special hidden mystery track”. Talking Heads chose a radical new direction, having saved all the darkness for their third album (which itself would, in retrospect, be seen as a period of transition, but which was at the time a stunning creative departure). (This last example may suggest that the success or otherwise of the third album can only be seen through the rear-view mirror; but isn’t that true of any band’s career arc, be it third or thirteenth album?)

The point, if there is one, is that the “difficulty” of the third album may have been that of the band concerned, wondering whether they should find a new corner to turn, or whether to give the punters more of what they fancy. None of the third albums mentioned above are necessarily “difficult” (and obviously the list could be extended exponentially if one’s brain was functioning better). But it seems to me that there is something to it, from the fan’s point of view. Third albums often do seem to be awaited with nervous trepidation. The fan has invested so much in the first two albums and fears that investment will be thrown away if the band tanks at the third hurdle. Or the second album hasn’t quite delivered on the promise of the first, and all bets are off until further progress is shown.

All of this was mulled over by me in the shower as I was thinking about David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”. This is Mitchell’s third novel. Close readers of this journal will recall that I very much enjoyed his first two novels, and I have a feeling I held him out as being the New Thing vis a vis British novelists. Anyway, I was excited about “Cloud Atlas”, but also anxious, much as I remember feeling before The Cure dropped “Faith”. And I have to say, my feeling, one-third into “Cloud Atlas”, is that Mitchell has succumbed to Difficult Third Novel syndrome. He is certainly no slouch with the language, and has no shortage of stories to tell. But my overall impression at this point is that what we have here is an exercise in creative writing that has grown into a novel that it has no right to be. It may well be that the labyrinthine, Russian-doll plot strands will tie themselves together, but I fear that I might be wondering by then what the purpose of it all was. This reader’s expectations have been confounded. Which may have been the author’s purpose. Difficult third albums can be used to that end. Shake off the shackles of a “following” and strike out afresh next time. (Liars come to mind again, although they did it with their second album.) But an album takes forty-five minutes to listen to (or used to, before bands succumbed to CD Bloat - although that trend seems to have been profitably reversed in more recent years) and a book, especially a long one, takes (at least for a slow reader like me) a damn sight longer than that. The punishment needs to be rewarded. (Whereas an extended-middle-finger musical statement can be more easily forgiven.) The rewards of “Cloud Atlas” are taking a little too long to reveal themselves.

(And finally: now that serious music nerds - like myself - are almost unbilically connected to favourite bands or to communities discussing/analysing/arguing over said bands, and music distribution, at least for said nerds, comes down more and more to individual songs (and to seemingly infinite remixes of individual songs, often raising the question of what exactly is “the song” and what the stand-alone status of a “remix” might be), albums themselves are starting to be revealed as the historical, artificial construct they have, in reality, always been, so that if there ever was a “difficult third album” syndrome, it may have vanished into the ether.

The Decline of Western Civilization

How is it that Link Wray can be in the cold cold ground before news of his death reaches the English-speaking world?

Man is only the guitar god's guitar god, after all.

Thanks to the combined good works of the ILM massive.

Sheesh.

Edward De Bono Stikes Back

Five-year-old: "Dad, where is the hammer?"

Dad: "What do you want the hammer for?"

Five-year-old: "The ball has gone a long way under the deck."

Dad (processes this; realising what the five-year-old has in mind): "You think you're going to smash a hole in the deck with the hammer so you can get the ball out."

Five-year-old (recognising that this idea perhaps isn't playing too well, adopts knowing smile): "Umm, yeah?"

Dad: "No."

Kids these days.

My problem with authority

Episode One: the Sydney ferry disaster.

We were riding the Sydney ferry. Shortly before our arrival at Darling Harbour, Adrienne noticed that someone had left on a seat the case for a digital camera. Feeling like the out-of-town do-gooders we were, we decided to hand it in to anyone we could find who looked like they were at least to some degree in charge. A woman had told us we had invalid tickets when we boarded. We charmed her, and kept ourselves out of prison, by doing a closely observed impersonation of hickdom. But she had vanished. Then, Carl managed to cross the yellow line, notwithstanding our repeated requests for him not to do so, as the boat was coming in to the jetty. “Excuse me”, I said to the man who was tying up the rope, as we were being swept off the boat with the rest of the crowd. “We found this on the boat. What should we do with it?” No response. “Excuse me?” No response. “Sir? We found ...” Then came the response: “Look, just shut up, all right? Don’t talk to me.” Not quite what I expected. There had been nobody else around whom I could give the thing to, and I didn’t particularly want to take it off the boat. So, taken somewhat aback, I said “Oh, okay, I’ll throw it back on the boat, then.” Which I did, into the path of the oncoming passengers, whose eyes I felt burning up my back.


Episode Two: the JB Hi-Fi security guy run-in.

There I was, one afternoon after work, coming up the steps out of the late, lamented Impact Records store, now JB Hi Fi, in Civic. Carl used to like it when it was Impact, because it was a basement space and he had a thing about the underground (as does his mother, although that is not this story). Now it is just another JB Hi-Fi store, nobody likes it. At least, nobody that I know; and one goes there now out of the lack of any sizeable alternative. I had spent 15 unfruitful minutes in there trying to convince two uneducated staff members that “The World of Arthur Russell” was not “World of Echo” by Arthur Russell. I was looking for the latter. I had already bought the former from them, filed inexplicably under “jazz”, some months earlier, and yet they didn’t seem to know anything about either.

Anyway, as I made my way up the steps, the shop’s security apparatus went off. I hate these things at the best of times. I always feel guilty when I walk through one, as if they have been lying in wait for a likely victim and are going to go off just because they can sense that I feel uncomfortable. (I hasten to add that I have never given, and would never give, one of these things any legitimate cause to sound the alarm. I am always setting off the ones at the Canberra libraries, but the staff there wave you on as a matter of course, which makes you wonder why they bothered going to the expense of setting them up in the first place.) “Excuse me”, said the gruff voice of the man who was standing there, motionless, at the JB Hi-Fi exit. (Go to any store, at any time, and he will be there. They must have a nice cloning operation happening somewhere.) This, I could tell, was the moment he had been waiting for. “Empty your pockets.” I had, what, work keys, home keys, work lift pass, wallet. No watch: the battery died some time before and I had got used to operating watchless, quite enjoying the simulated freedom actually (pathetic isn’t it?). And a bit of change. I tried to hand my keys, wallet and change to him to hold, but he indicated, mutely, that he didn’t want to handle my soiled personal belongings and that I should sit them on the box of 3-for-$20 CDs just in front of the entrance. People were coming in and out, looking at me like I was guilty as charged. I was concerned someone would nick my wallet or keys. I didn’t think Mr Security Man would be too concerned to protect them. I was the quarry, as Morrissey almost said.

“Walk through.” I did as I was told. There didn’t seem much choice. The beeper went off again. I walked back into the store. It went off. “Why didn’t it go off when I came in?”, I meekly, and perhaps stupidly, given the assumed reason, asked. “That’s what we’re going to find out”, he said. (Which was the longest sentence he used in my presence. I believe he paused briefly afterwards, admiring his verbal handiwork or maybe just having a little rest after all that mental exertion.) He was by now practically rubbing his hands together with glee. It crossed my mind that he might be paid on commission, based on the value of goods recovered. Or that something had been planted on me, Schapelle Corby style.

“Again.” It went off when I walked out but this time it didn’t go off when I came back in. This gave me some small flicker of hope. A-ha!, I thought. An inconsistency in the evidence! Then came the fun part: the body search. In full public view, no less. “Lift up your trouser legs.” There were holes in my socks, but at least they were a matching pair. “Lift up your shirt.” “Turn around.” A line from a long-forgotten movie came into my head - “I didn’t ask for the anal probe” - but I wisely kept quiet. “Turn around again.” He could find nothing. (Obviously; there was nothing to find.) He got me to walk through again. The beeper went off on my way out and on my way back in. “Wait there”, he said. He called for “the manager”. “The manager” came out. Neanderthal Man explained the situation and wanted to know what to do next. Clearly he was hoping that he would get to take me out the back for a bit of rough stuff. But he was to be disappointed. “The manager” simply said, “They’ve been playing up lately. Let him go.” He didn’t look at me. Cro-Magnon, with an expression lodged somewhere between hatred and disappointment, pointed to my things, said something that might have been “okay”, or “get out”, or maybe even “you cunt”, and off I went. As fate would have it, as I headed out this time, the beeper went off again. In another life I might have taken the opportunity to turn around, smile and wave back at my new friend. I didn’t look around. I didn’t smile. At least, not on the outside. It crossed my mind that if I had been shoplifting I would at least have had something to show for my pain and suffering.

Joe Strummer said it first. Know your rights.

Slow Slow Music

(In which the author can’t seem to figure out if he is an “I” or a “we”.)

Okay, we seem to have fallen behind in our regular collocation of hypothetically downloaded songs. This bunch was put together back in March. That would be March of 2005, obviously.

1. NAMCO, “Katamari On The Rock”: rollicking bongos, female “choo choo choo” vocals, male “la la la” vocals, a rich mix of instruments; irrepressible; a jaunty 60s mindframe. Not a million miles from Pizzicato 5 (which is somewhere we like to hang out). Thus we start off on the front foot.

2. Inner Dialogue, “Yesterday The Dog”: as in, “Yesterday the dog ate the turtle.” Anti-war propaganda (Vietnam, that is) dressed up as a soft-focus Seekers-esque fairy tale. Just as you are lulled into a trees-and-flowers comfort zone, you get king-hit with “Yesterday the gun ate the people.” Sneaky.

3. Can, “Turtles Have Short Legs”: possibly the only time we will ever be able to run a segue from one song about turtles into another song about turtles. This may not be the most earth-shattering moment Can ever committed to tape, but how can you resist Damo Suzuki singing, English-as-a-second-language-style, “Turtle have a short regs, not for da walking.” One is put in mind of Roberto Benigni’s star turn in Jim Jarmusch’s “Down By Law”, wherein he delivers his lines almost phonetically owing to his then lack of understanding of English. “Not enough-a room to swing-a a cat.”

4. Holger Czukay, “Cool In The Pool”: more Can-related hilarity, as dictaphone-wielding Holger creates a new genre, Teutonic tropical. Hmmm, perhaps this was the precursor to Uwe Schmidt’s Senor Coconut project.

5. Eurythmics, “Never Gonna Cry Again”: forget what they did later, this early Eurythmics track, with no small involvement from the boys from Can, is sublime, understated motorik pop.

6. Cluster, “Heisse Lippen”: of course we know Cluster from the work they did with Eno, and we recently fell upon “Cluster 71”, a not immediately scrutable album but one we feel sure we will go back to. This is closer to the former: all melody, echo, space, drift.

7. Jeans Team, “Wunderbar”: more synthy, drifting, pop ambience. Not much motorik here, but somehow solidly krautrocky, nevertheless.

8. Michael Rother, “Stone Cold”: Rother was in Neu!. Over the summer I surreptitiously made a copy of Rother’s “Katzenmusik” which was buried in our good friend Doctor Jim’s expansive collection of stuff. That album is full of nice stuff; this is a totally nice track, too. Is “motorik” really a word? If you were attempting to give it a precise meaning, this track might be a good place to start.

9. Gary Numan, “Cars”: Mr Numan’s finest moment. Sampled almost to death, but clearly works best in its original, undiluted form. Some kind of debt clearly owed here to Numan’s krautrock forefathers, but paid back handsomely, even if he did wander off into his own black-leather-and-makeup Neverland from about this point on.

10. Stereo Total, “Ich Bin Nackt”: something like what “Ca Plane Pour Moi” might have sounded like if concocted by Germans. Carried along by a slightly out-of-tune analog synth line straight out of the DAF songbook (we still await the DAF revival). Also borrows generously from “Turn Up Your Radio”. And throws in some really nice guitar right at the end. I have my suspicions that “Nackt” should be “Nacht”, but what would I know?

11. 2raumwohnung, “Spiel Mit”: more perfect German electronic pop. I never thought I’d say this, but the singer reminds me of ...

12. Fox, “Sssingle Bed”: ...Noosha Fox! Mainstay of every Countdown-watching boy’s dreams in the 1970s. The surprising thing is how great this song sounds today. The other surprising thing is how the suggestive nature of the lyrics completely escaped this farmboy. Vocoder!

13. M83, “Don’t Save Us From The Flames”: no real segue here, but earlier this year I could rarely be found not listening to this (German? The vocals are definitely coming from the mittel-European end of things somewhere) big-screen pop masterpiece. Everything is turned up to eleven, we have excessive contrast between sustain and release, and it still takes this listener into the stratosphere every time he listens to it. As with many other of my short-term favourite songs, this probably couldn’t have existed in a world without My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless”, but could you pick a better template?

14. Out Hud, “One Life To Leave”: this is one example of (loosely) post-punk-funk exhumation that gets it perfectly right.

15. Psapp, “Rear Moth”: I have always thought squeaky children’s toys have been sadly underutilised in pop music. I know nothing about this band. I have no idea why I (hypothetically) downloaded the song. Serendipity rools!

16. Barbara Morgenstern, “Aus Heiterem Himmel (Dntel mix)”: at which point we slip into yet another example of what we assume to be the dreamy world of German electronic-inflected pop music of the present day.

17. AK-MOMO, “Greasy Spoon”: now that CocoRosie have gone all pretentious on us, this is where we must turn for our faux-naive faux-folk faux-girl-pop fix. Actually, there is no small resemblance between the backing music on this and the Michael Rother, Jeans Team and Cluster tracks appearing further up the page. And furthermore, it strikes me now that the singer here also reminds me of Noosha Fox. No, I must surely be imagining it.

18-21. Marine Girls, “Love You More”, “Lazy Ways”, “That Day”, “Seascape” (John Peel sessions): we feel comfortable putting these four tracks together on a mix CD because (1) they are inseparable and (2) we have included individual songs with longer running times than these four put together. One song is a Buzzcocks cover. Our good friend Russell (get well soon, Russell) owns both of the Marine Girls albums. We have always been insanely jealous of him for this reason, although we have never told him this. The real question, however, is: whatever happened to Jane Fox, the Marine Girl who wasn’t Tracy Thorn?

22. Yoshimi and Yuka, “Elegant Bird”: we are gently brought down to earth by this brief instrumental interlude from the girls of Cibo Matto.

User profile

Mood: caffeinated.
Listening to: Tony Bennett.
Reading: Art Speigelman, "In The Shadow of No Towers".
Thinking about: Clare Grogan. As usual.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

In between moments of reading Bob Dylan's "Chronicles: Volume One"; watching the "No Direction Home" DVD (courtesy of Kateena at work, whose lasting achievement has been the naming of my office as Stan's Den Of Funk); attempting the impossible task of looking through every page of every issue of the New Yorker from 1925 to 2005 (seemed like a good idea at the time until its overwhelming nature, erm, overwhelmed me); trying to give at least a cursory listen to the currently 1,069 songs that I have downloaded but not listened to; and discovering that gardening really is the new rock and roll, I have taken the time to update the links that appear at the right of your screen.

In related news, I have decided that the key to Dylan is early in the song "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", where he sings "If'n you don't know by now": he could have just as conveniently and conventionally said "if", but chose "if'n" instead. This is so clearly the mark of greatness I can't believe I have overlooked it until now. Didn't fIREHOSE [sic] put out an album called "If'n"? Obviously Mike Watt was hipped up to this long before I was.

I went to the library and I borrowed ...

Francis Lai, “Bilitis”: what better place to start than soundtrack music for a late-70s "erotic" movie with plenty of girl-on-girl fun. The cover shows two barely clad females in the early stages of "sexual awakening". The inside cover shows one similarly unclad girl up a tree and-or in the early stages of some arboreal action. Don’t ask me about the music ... (Actually, do ask me about the music, which is sometimes gorgeous but too often stuck in a seventies soft-focus timewarp. Francis Lai wrote “A Man And A Woman”, one of the most-covered songs in our expansive collection of old easy-listening records. It sounds perhaps best on the Hammond Organ but can be profitably adapted to many different styles.)

Interpol, “Antics”: unlike the DFA crew, and bands like Vive La Fete and Out Hud, Interpol are content to take elements of the post-punk sound/ethos and do absolutely nothing with them. It’s a bit like the umpteenth mod/ska/rockabilly/garage-punk revival, where the object is to stay as close to the original template as possible without breaching any intellectual-property laws. But post-punk was never about respecting the past. It was about either smashing the display cabinet into a million pieces or skirting deftly around it. So, to me, this both misses the point and is pointless.

Bloc Party, “Silent Alarm”: as above, so below, only more so.

Billy Bragg & Wilco, “Mermaid Avenue”: on the other hand, if you are going to exhume Woody Guthrie you might as well choose people in the nature of Bragg and Wilco, artists who both, in their own ways, forged new paths through the witchy thickets of established musical genres, maintaining a healthy scepticism and a lot of ’tude while at the same time paying the best kind of respect to their elders.

The Hives, “Tyrannosaurus Hives”: on yet another hand, The Hives show that, in certain situations, sounding like the past isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. I probably wouldn’t choose to listen to a record like this too many times, but each time I did I would smile, which in this rotten world is no bad thing. In any event, I can't get enough of that gloriously counterintuitive riff on “Walk Idiot Walk”.

Camera Obscura, “Underachievers Please Try Harder”: the hazards of random downloading of music, part 225: you stumble unexpectedly upon a song as astoundingly good as “Teenager” by Camera Obscura. You know nothing about them, but the song quickly worms its way to the deeper recesses of your central nervous system. You find a copy of the album from which it sprung. Your expectations are high. And yet. And yet. You work hard at it. Perhaps a little bit too hard. Each time you listen, you can’t get past “Teenager”. Of course, you feel guilty. “It’s not me, it’s you”, you say. But you can’t really be sure. The rest of the album seems pale in the shadow of that one song (as would a high proportion of pop songs released in any given year, admittedly). But where would the rest of the album be without it? It’s impossible to tell. You are already too badly smitten to be able to take a step backwards and admire it from a sensible distance. So you give it a “fail”. And hate yourself for that. But you keep listening to “Teenager”. And you will continue to do so.

Buzz or Howl

Stereolab vs LCD Soundsystem:

LCD Soundsystem is your record collection.

Stereolab is the record collection you wished you had.

The Story of Creation

Man worked for 14 days straight.

On the 15th day, he rested.

He looked back on his works and said, "At least I get paid some overtime. Now I can go and buy the Laughing Clowns box set, which looks like it might finally be seeing the light of day. Oh, and the new Broadcast CD."

And it was good.

You bought it, you couldn't wait, could you?

At some deep, (hopefully) unreachable level I think I have always known that the first time I saw the Fall's "Complete Peel Sessions" box set I would have no choice but to take it home with me. So it transpired. It was probably a combination of fortysomething unbidden nostalgia, still missing Peel, still missing the idea of Peel, a recurring itch to hear the Peel version of "New Puritans" (the most seething recording by any band ever, surely, and if memory serves it took place just after they discovered that Mark's (or somebody's) house had been burgled) and wondering what Mark E Smith could do with/to "Grooving With Mr Bloe" (not there yet; just reaching for disc 4).

And yet I hadn't bought a Fall record in a decade and a half. Thus I thought my interest would fade by the end of disc 2 (of 6!: could this have really been a sensible purchase?) and am rather surprised that here I am at the end of disc 3 and There's No Stopping Me. Can't get over how gorgeously dark "Realm Of Dusk" is. I don't think I took to it at the time; and as for "Kurious Oranj", well, what was my state of mind in 1987 that I failed to appreciate the "Guns of Brixton"-esque skank of the guitars? (Or maybe the recorded version lost those?)

Heads Up!

Chris Ware can now be found in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. This is undoubtedly Good News.

Equally good, and unexpected, news is that there is, according to Douglas Wolk, a brand spanking new album out by the Bats, a mere decade after "Couchmaster" (which is my personal favourite Bats record, although competition is, admittedly, stiff) and long after I had stopped checking the Flying Nun website on the "off chance". (Curious timing, too, as I was in Sydney on the weekend, where I acquired, finally, David Kilgour's "Frozen Orange" as well as the new Chills ep "Stand By" (itself a small miracle).)

Distress signals

Alex Chilton are you out there?

Spring Is Here

And so is coughs-and-colds season.

A certain five-year-old, at breakfast this morning, had this to say about the suggestion that he might perhaps like to have some cough medicine:

"It electrocutes me. It tastes like poisonous snakes."

Typo of the Week

Amongst our junk mail was a flyer for a new Chinese restaurant. Intriguingly, it claims that it "catapults Chinese cuisine into the 21st Century". (Oh, look, there it goes.)

Even more intriguing is a dish (truth in advertising?) they have called "Fried Bean Crud in Oyster Sauce". Mmmmm.

Dread Inna Mi Kitchen

Those of you with an interest in things Rastafarian (and if not, why not?) should give thanks and praise to music polymath Andy Beta over at Moistworks and download the 13 tracks he has put up under the clever if not particularly relevant in an Australian context title "Trust-A-Farian". [Editor's Note: a couple of the tracks don't download as right-clicks but if you just click on the link to either of those tracks you will be taken to a veritable treasure trove of past and present Moistworks hits du jour, including the offending tracks. Of course, the problem may have been fixed by now.]

What you get is a singularly fantastic and well-thought-out set of reggae tunes, gravitating, necessarily, towards the 1970s end of the spectrum, and the bass-heavy end at that, but with the odd foray into more recent variations on the theme (not my own cup of tea, but also not in any way detracting from the flow). Some listeners will know Linval Thompson's ode to the medical benefits of inhaling (which appears on Don Letts' trawl through the vaults "The Mighty Trojan Sound") but one listener at least had never heard the version by Ranking Dread. He also throws in a dub of Dennis Brown's "Man Next Door", which also appears on "The Mighty Trojan Sound" but might be more recognisable to technogoths as performed by Massive Attack (and sung by Horace Andy) on "Mezzanine". I am particularly intrigued by Ranking Dread's "Bom Dub", which features a solid metallic guitar sound that may be viewed as the precursor of Konono No 1. The whole thing ends by dragging you so far down into the echo chamber that you may not emerge with your mental health intact. The perfect soundtrack for the depths of a long hot summer (or, for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere, a long cold winter).

Gimme Danger

I haven't seen the new Rhino reissues of "The Stooges" and "Funhouse". But I am wondering if they are calling them "Deluxe Editions".

A "Deluxe Edition" of "Funhouse" would be like describing someone as having "deluxe head injuries".

Bird Noises

This morning I was woken up by a bird whose call was identical to that bit in "Pressure Sway" by the Machinations where the singer (whose name I forget - forgive me) goes "call ... me up".

But before that, I was dreaming that I was walking through unrecognisable streets of Melbourne with my old school friend Mark Eddy, the person in those days whom I so much admired, some might say worshipped, some might even say followed along behind like a faithful but pathetic puppy. Mark Eddy, aka Doyle, aka the Albino Afro, aka Rufus Vasco da Gama, aka Eddie Dyer, aka the White Clive Lloyd. Where are you now?

Watch The Skies

It looks like the ILMiXor (link at right) rollercoaster may be cranking back into action. There is something about the whole concept of a collaborative mixtape that I find very thrilling, even if the results can sometimes look a bit like a dog's breakfast. Of course, I don't consider myself worthy of participating, as my collection contains nothing that is either new or obscure enough to justify a place.

On an unrelated note, Canberra is heading once more into its annual magpie swooping season. Better get the hat out. It seems to keep them away.

Addendum

Debate raged over the title to the previous post. "Porno For Pyros" might have been the obvious choice, but I have always thought it was one of the dumber band names going. We could have chosen "Pages"; or "Mere Pseud Mag Ed" (not really relevant, but my favourite song title of all time); or "Dirty Mind"; or "Picture Book". Or "Don't Save Us From The Flames". It would have been nice to call it "Five Foot One", after the Iggy Pop song, on account of its containing the line "I wish life could be Swedish magazines". But in the end the terse simplicity of The Cure won out.

Pornography

Pictures of naked women loom large in the imagination of a 15-year-old boy growing up on a farm, with a complete absence of females in his life except for his mother, his dog, a hundred or so dairy cows (oh, those big brown eyes) and his slightly older cousin, Heather, who in her infrequent visits from Melbourne had him wrapped around her little finger and who once ate a year’s worth of lollies and chocolates that he had been diligenty squirreling away for no purpose that can now be recalled.

Of course, for a boy such as this, pictures of naked women were as elusive as the idea of them was all-consuming. Hence, the day that persons unknown, but whom this boy perceived to be the Good Fairy of Dirty Magazines, dumped a large heap of periodicals, with names like Penthouse and Oui, at the start of the long dirt road that led to his parents’ farm was a day for rejoicing.

Or so he thought.

Convincing himself, contrary to what was fairly obviously the case, that his parents wouldn’t have noticed this large pile of colourful papers, even as they proceeded to blow around in the otherwise pristine rural landscape, fortuitously lying open (at least in his imagination) at pictures of enticing nudity, he commenced to hatch a plan to retrieve them for himself before they were too damaged by weather and car tyres, but more importantly Before Someone Else Did.

Physical fitness, he decided, would be the cloak beneath which this daylight raid might best be concealed. “I need to train for the school cross-country run”, he said, one day after school. This, in fact, was not a totally outlandish notion. Long-distance running was one of the few sporting events in which he demonstrated any talent or potential whatsoever (although he found negotiating the barbed-wire fences that always seemed to appear in at least one place on the courses set by the school a challenge of a different order), and he had a pedigree of sorts: his cousin Murray, who had attended the school some years previously, held (and perhaps even still does) the record for the event.

“Drive me up to almost the end of the road and I will run home”, he said to his mother. Note, especially, the use of “almost”, as if this would be enough to distance him from the coincidental disappearance of the magazines, on the off chance that his parents had in fact noticed them at all in the first place and would also notice their disappearance. He felt entirely confident they would never make that connection. All he had to do was run around the bend in the road to where it met the main road from Fish Creek to Meeniyan, surreptitiously gather up the magazines, and run home with them under one arm, striding out majestically in the unlikely but not impossible event of his meeting any cars, tractors or other passing humanity along the way.

At some point along the run home, his over-developed guilty conscience switched itself on, and for the first time the reality of what he was doing crept to the front of his thinking. He would be, if not killed, severely chastised and ritually degraded, perhaps even removed from his (neglible) social world, if he were to be found out. This also caused him to realise that he had failed to think through the completion of his plan, beyond the act of picking up the magazines and running home with them. Where would he put them? When would he look at them? Would he grow hair on the palm of his hands through the mere act of turning the pages? Would his eyesight become even worse than it was, through the deep and profound act of gazing at the skin-filled images? Had he, in fact, made a stupid mistake?

He contemplated turning around and running back to where the magazines had been, and skilfully, like a master flower arranger, scattering them in a naturalistic manner so that nobody would ever think they had been touched. But that would triple the length of his journey, which, aside from being more exercise than he thought he could handle, would most likely give rise to other complications, such as the impending nightfall and his mother’s inclination to panic whenever he was more than five minutes later than she expected him to be.

So he pressed on. He knew that nobody ever used the overgrown track that continued straight on from where the road did a sharp and steep right-hand turn past the truncated cream can that served as the mailbox and went up the hill to his parents’ house. So he determined to find a suitable hiding place there, and come back for them at a later date. Like the next day. An old wombat burrow beneath a fallen tree did the job nicely, and provided some shelter from the weather. He could also camouflage the hole with other sticks, leaves and things. All would be well. He jogged smartly up the hill and, breathless, collapsed on his bed.

This gave him time to think about what he had done, and particularly about what might be inside the magazines. In fact, he could think about nothing else. As he understood it, there were likely to be not just pictures of things he had never seen, but also stories about men and women doing things that seemed so unlikely, they couldn’t possibly be true. It was the hint of the exotic, the lure of the unknown. But with that came the guilt. He couldn’t concentrate on his homework. He couldn’t get to sleep that night. He would have to confess to his crime and face the punishment. He had been such a fool. And yet perhaps he could just spend a few hours pawing over the magazines before he gave them up. If someone else didn’t find them first. Had he hidden them well enough?

In this way the night was passed. In the morning, as is the way of these things, a more optimistic mood found him. Everything would be alright. That day at school he kept the secret to himself, which was a major struggle. How much cache would he have been able to get from the simple sentence “I’ve got 20 girly mags”? Nevertheless, by the time the school bus had dropped him off that night, curtains of doubt had once again started to fall. He was in a torment that was only heightened by his lack of sleep.

As the day reached a close, he could stand it no more. He knew what he would have to do, no matter how much it hurt. He stood in the kitchen doorway. He probably looked very pale. “Mum, I’ve done a bad thing”, he said. He then went through the whole story, making it plain that he hadn’t actually looked at any of the magazines. “Let’s go and get them”, his mother said. “And we’ll burn them.” So they walked down the hill, past the mailbox, and uncovered the illicit treasures. Then they carried them back up the hill. His mother lit a fire in the incinerator and, as the flames were taking hold, took the time to flick through a couple of the magazines before throwing them in, making sure to keep them away from where he might see what was on the pages, but making clear her disapproval of the contents by making peculiar little noises. They threw them onto the fire, one by one, and watched them burn. It took a long time because of the density of all that paper, and the dampness they had collected during their time outdoors. Neither of them said anything. They didn’t need to. His humiliation was complete.

I Could Be So Lucky

Yesterday I donned my overcoat, hat and dark glasses and ventured, perhaps unseen, into the Kylie Minogue exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. My observations are as follows:

1. Judging by the many costumes on display, Kylie is tiny. Like, actual little kid tiny. I had always assumed she would be larger than life.

2. The real Kylie Minogue may not exist. The overwhelming impression given by this exhibition is that “Kylie” is a cipher, a blank slate upon which photographers, music producers, video directors and magazine editors can project any kind of fantasy they can imagine. You want Liza Minelli? Kylie’s yer man. Marilyn? No problem. Motor mechanic? Too easy. (This may be why her career has been able to run and run. She has never had an image; she is an image.)

3. I have now seen, close up, an actual Gold Logie. You know what? It is a genuinely nice piece of (presumably late-60s?) design; if you won one, you would be happy to have it on your shelf.

White Town

Well, it snowed in the 'berra.

And it snowed in the 'burra (see the lovely photo on the front page of yesterday's Melbourne Age).

I wonder if it snowed in the 'gatha?

Up There Cazaly

We took the boys to the last quarter of the Kangaroos-Port Adelaide game at Manuka oval on Sunday afternoon. Having grown up in Canberra, they are not being sufficiently indoctrinated in the tribal rituals of the Sherrin worshippers. We are, clearly, failing as parents and felt it was time to make amends.

Match-wise, the signs were not good: when Adrienne left home to come and collect me from work (pity the poor wage slave who must work on Sunday) the Kangaroos were 40 points behind. But by the time we got let into the ground at three-quarter time they had crept back to within 10 points. So it looked like we had a game on our hands.

The crowd was larger than I had expected. We found four adjacent seats right behind the goal the Kangaroos were kicking towards. The boys were instructed to cheer for the Kangaroos, on account of our friend Nik who is the latest of several generations of mostly long-suffering North Melbourne/Kangaroos supporters. Carl was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of a number of Port Adelaide supporters sitting right behind us, and he politely asked one of them if they could be a little bit quieter please. It was a nice try. Then the football came sailing through the goal posts and into the knee of the man sitting beside him. Adrienne and Carl then moved to the front row, where it was a bit quieter if no safer from the football, especially as the Kangaroos were beginning to attack the goals with some purpose. It all became very exciting. I had been explaining to Julius important aspects of reading the game, such as, How many flags is the goal umpire going to wave? and How to read the clock beside the scoreboard to see how long the game has to go. Jules was getting quite wrapped up in the excitement of the game. He jumped up and down when the Roos hit the front, went quiet when they lost the lead and jumped up and down again (as we all did) when they kicked the winning goal and the siren went. The best moments: Carl in his tiny voice saying "Go Roos", barely audible beneath the roar of the crowd; and Julius, who had obviously been taking in the general nature of the comments and abuse being sent from the grandstand in the direction of players from both sides and umpires alike, taking a deep breath and shouting out in his five-year-old's foghorn "Don't you know anything?!" to nobody in particular.

After the game Julius and I joined several thousand others on the ground to have the traditional after-match kick-to-kick, in which Jules Nailed a Set Shot for Goal. Being on the ground then, with footballs flying all around us, felt a bit like it must have been in London during the Blitz. At any minute you could have had your glasses knocked through to the back of your head by well-kicked football, and yet you kept on playing regardless. Carl meanwhile had befriended a television cameraman who let him aim the camera at Jules and me. It was a good day to be alive.

Walking back to the car, Carl said something about Port Adelaide being losers. We glanced around to make sure no tough Port Adelaide supporters had heard him. Then we pointed out to Carl that there could only be one winner and that it was important to spare a thought for the losing team, who had travelled all that way and tried so hard, only to go home with nothing. It seemed like the least we could do. It would be a long drive home for them.

The Jehovahs In Their Pullovers Are No Casanovas

Off to the library again. Is it really three weeks already? After last time’s superb haul, my expectations were low. What did I find?

Beach Boys, “The Very Best of the Beach Boys”: I am confirmed in my opinion that I have no real need to venture far into this territory beyond where I have already ventured, viz “Pet Sounds”, “Good Vibrations”, and the curious fascination we all have with “Smile”.

Antony and the Johnsons, “I Am A Bird Now”: can’t see the Nina Simone comparisons, actually; early Brian Ferry is more on the mark. Which (obviously) is not a criticism. This is a spellbinding song-cycle, best listened to late at night with the lights down. I will be spending a lot more time with this record. A lot more time.

Jens Lekman, “When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog”: two Secretly Canadian releases in one week (see also Antony and the Johnsons above). Mr Lekman has been leaking his fluids all over the Internet of late. A number of songs have seeped into my own hardware, quickly becoming unexpected favourites. And here is an album. An album with a title that suggests a location somewhere between the twin pillars of “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me” and “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog”. Lekman combines the lyrical dexterity of Stephin Merritt with the innocent charm of Jonathan Richman, and adds to that his own ability to spin both a tune and a yarn. There is so much to enjoy about this album. I wish I could keep it. That’s all I want to say.

Solomon Burke, “Make Do With What You Got”: there will always be room on my hard drive for “Don’t Give Up On Me”; a fine collection of songs from a fine group of writers; a fine voice and fine arrangements. Just fine, really. So this follow-up never really stood a chance. What I do know is that he shouldn’t have tried to meet Doctor John on the good Doctor's own turf; it only reminds me of those white boys of the early 80s or thereabouts who tried to "do" reggae: step forward Men at Work; step forward 10cc (obviously, The Clash are exepted). Make do with what you got, indeed.

Esquivel, “More of Other Worlds, Other Sounds”: hard to believe it is ten years now since Lounge Music got the revival treatment. Of course, for some of us, our love of exotic music both pre-dated and lived beyond that revival. It will be interesting to see the reissues of Martin Denny, Les Baxter etc filtering back into second-hand stores, to replace the originals that were greedily snapped up in the mid-90s (and then re-sold to the gullible at exponential mark-ups, but that's a road I've been down before). Meanwhile the late Mr Esquivel still stands tall in his own field. In my naive early days I didn't understand why Esquivel failed to rate a mention in Joseph Lanza’s book on the subject; but of course Esquivel was really anything but “elevator music”: if anything, the relentless frenzy of his arrangements is closer to John Zorn’s more choppy works. The best fruit to have dropped from the Esquivel tree may well have landed on those two Irwin Chusid collections, but that is not to say there is nothing else out there to be enjoyed. This disc, a straight reissue of one of the original Esquivel LPs, is as good a way as any I can think of to spend 35 minutes of your valuable time.

De Phazz, “Natural Fake”: maybe I have been listening to this the wrong way; or trying too hard. I guess the German pedigree had me expecting something a little more interesting, but after three spins of this, all I hear is lowest-common-denominator pan-European “new soul”. A little too close to Sade for my liking.

Goldfrapp, “Black Cherry”: ditto. At least the beats and blips on this one give it a little bit of traction; but one wonders what this is doing on Mute.

LCD Soundsystem, “LCD Soundsystem”: the LCD Soundsystem parlour game has probably gone on for long enough. Oh, look; it’s Talking Heads’ “I Zimbra”. Oh, look, it’s Mark E Smith. Oh, look, it’s “Another Green World”. And so on. But does it stack up on its own? Yes of course it does. It’s like having your own record collection melted down and reconfigured into one convenient, easily digestible package. And there can’t be anything wrong with that, can there? Disc 2, the singles collection, stands on its own and is indispensable. “Losing My Edge” may, in fact, be the greatest song of all time. And as for the person who put the annotated lyrics up on their web site, with links to song fragments from every band mentioned in the song: dude, I am so not worthy.

Walking On Thin Ice

Buried in the middle of Jane Mayer's long and compelling report in the New Yorker of interrogation techniques that may or may not be being employed at Guantanamo Bay (by the end of which you will be, if you are not already, unsure as to exactly who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in this "war" - and, if American doctors turn out to have been involved in monitoring levels of torture so as to make sure detainees almost, but don't quite, die, then heaven help us all) is the fascinating insight that one of the methods of don't-call-it-torture that has been found to be most effective is the playing of Yoko Ono records.

Memo to my future captors: if you keep me in a confined space and put Eric Carmen's "All By Myself" on an endless loop, I have no doubt that I will, before it gets to the third repeat, be inventing all kinds of classified Australian military secrets.

People Who Died

So, now that we in the southern hemisphere have become aware, thanks to a recent obituary in the London Independent, of the existence and identity of Gretchen Franklin, do the various lyrical elements of the song "Telephone Thing" by The Fall coalesce into a coherent and unified whole? [brief pause] Err, no, actually.

Just like spring rain

You go into Revolution, Canberra's only serious second-hand CD store, once every week or so and trawl through the "Just Added" bins. You go for months without finding anything worth a second look. (It's a useful barometer, though: the shelves at the moment are full of copies of the latest Coldplay.) Then you go in one day (viz.: yesterday) and leave with not one but six purchases. In a moment, what you bought and why. But first, what you left behind:

Robert Wyatt, "Rock Bottom": because you picked it up, put it down conspicuously at the front of a heap of other discs so as not to forget about it, and then forgot about it. It is more than likely still to be there next visit, however; you can't imagine the post-Canterbury scene to be a hot topic of conversation in Canberra this winter.

David Bowie, "Stage": because something had to give, and because you are punting on it turning up, as did the contemporaneously reissued "David Live", at the local library.

On the other hand, you bought:

The Sea and Cake, "One Bedroom": because, even though you know nothing about this one, you once borrowed their earlier album "Oui" from the library and quickly fell in love with it. (Cue voice from back of own head: so why didn't you buy the copy of "Oui" that was also on sale?)

Ron Sexsmith, "Retriever": because it's Ron, and no further explanation is therefore required.

"Hustle: Reggae Disco": because it's on Soul Jazz, and because it dovetails two of your passions. To be honest, you aren't expecting all that much from it, but you are secretly hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

Beck, "Guero": because Sasha Frere-Jones is more often right ("Entertainment"; "Madvillainy"; "London Calling"; "Remain In Light") than wrong (M.I.A., Keren Ann); and because you have learnt long ago not to trust "critics" regarding Beck. To this day, almost nobody gives "Midnite Vultures" the credit it deserves, and you need to see why this new one should be any different.

The Meters, "Good Old Funky Music": because the Meters are sadly absent from your collection, and this looks like as good a place to start as any, in that it includes "Look-Ka Py Py".

Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban, "Mambo Sinuendo": because your wife couldn't get enough of this when you borrowed it from the library a while back, and because of the close-up cover photo of the tailfin of a big, late-50s American car.

Which should keep you occupied for a little while at least.

Let's Active

The scene: driving in the car, towards home.

Julius (aged five): can we stop at that playground?

Dad (aged forty-one): no; we have to get home. Anyway, we just did a whole lot of running around at the park.

Julius: but dad, I'm still activated.

Miscellaneous

1. For those of you, like me, suffering from Marcello Carlin withdrawal, he can be found here, writing with typical astuteness, perception and openness about Pink Floyd's Live8 set. I have also discovered that his thoughts can be found from time to time in the comments box over at the popular Popular. (Mind you, some of us are still suffering from Ian Penman withdrawal. Every so often, just for the sheer futility of it, I click on over to The Pill Box just so that I can gaze once more upon those indelible words “NB: AEON VOID SHATTERS”.)

2. Out goes James Ellroy’s “The Cold Six Thousand” (which I cannot recommend highly enough; for whatever reason I took to this much more than I ever took to “American Tabloid”, even though at face value they are very similar in structure and in subject matter; but crikey it’s a monster of a book, 700-odd pages of sentences of seven words or less, not an adjective or adverb anywhere, nothing in the nature of descriptive scene-setting: it probably expands to a “normal” novel of a length far exceeding a thousand pages); in comes Philip Pullman’s “Northern Lights”, the first in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. This is being devoured extremely quickly; Pullman, leaving aside any views he may have on politics and/or religion and their place in what may or may not be “children’s literature”, he is a cracking storyteller, and it is impossible to put this book down. It’s particularly pleasing to think there are two more books to come.

3. We were wrong dept: I seem to have made the following mistakes (among many others).

(a) Some months ago I unthinkingly slighted a band called Joy Zipper, whom I had never at that stage even heard of, because Alexis Petridis, in the Guardian, had suggested that they were better than Yo La Tengo (nobody disses YLT in my presence and gets away with it). I have now heard a few songs that they have done and they do seem to have something going for them, noting in particular a terrific song called “Baby You Should Know”, which has a languid charm all its own (well, the ghost of My Bloody Valentine lurks, but where doesn't it?).

(b) I once flicked through a book called “Epileptic” by David B, at Minotaur bookshop in Melbourne, deciding that it was, and I quote, “Not the sort of thing I'm into”. Late last year my comic book pusher-man, Peter Birkemoe at the Beguiling in Canada, foisted upon me a copy of David B’s first book for Drawn and Quarterly, “Babel No 1”, which I devoured over Christmas at a cafe on the Geelong waterfront. Give me more, give me more.

(c) In a similar act of spectacular misjudgment, I passed on Mr Birkemoe’s earlier recommendation that I buy a book by Ron Rege Jr. At the time, I had a quick trawl around the Internet and didn’t take instantly to what little I found. (To quote from one of the memorable, but unnamed, characters from "Little Britain", "Computer says ... no".) Having now been exposed to his work at some length, thanks to the mini-comic attached to “McSweeney’s No 13”, a page of his work in “Kramer’s Ergot No 5”, and some of his stuff that I have latterly discovered lurking in the pages of the “Comix 2000” anthology, I am now Ron Rege Jr’s number one fan and would be proud to call him "dad".

4. It is nice to welcome back Gabba, although I am not entirely sure that too much democracy is necessarily a good thing. When the usernames after the songs were either "jk" or "krg" you knew where you stood. Now, it can feel a bit like having a total stranger coming up to you in the street and saying "drink this, it will change your life". At least two people have put up work of their own (at least they were honest enough to admit it). Still, free off-peak downloading allows one to discard the non-starters at little cost. (Also, some of the entries seem only to allow me to stream, not download, the track, but I assume this is something peculiar to the Macintosh?) And it's unfair to be critical of jk, who might just as easily have abandoned the entire project after the loss of his partner in crime. Better this Gabba than no Gabba at all, what?

Shredded wheat

Given the paucity of non-chain record stores in Canberra, it is surprising what turns up on the shelves at the local libraries. Here’s the latest selection:

“Better Shred Than Dead: The Dick Dale Anthology”: the first disc of this two-disc retrospective rocks (although Link Wray is my artist of choice in this department). The second disc, covering the Dick Dale renaissance of the 1990s, adds not much to the first disc except higher fidelity; it also can’t help but suffer from the presence of one Stevie Ray Vaughan, much loved by bearded men who use words like “chops” and “licks”, but who in my opinion was strong on craft but sadly lacking in art.

Lisa Gerrard and Patrick Cassidy, “Immortal Memory”: not the first time I’ve borrowed this. At previous attempts I hadn’t been able to see past the idea of this being an extension of Dead Can Dance. And I suppose in some ways it is: you wouldn’t mistake Lisa Gerrard’s voice for anybody else’s. But reading it in that way, it fell short of expectations. This time around, I have been able to appreciate it for what it is: a compelling song cycle in the classical tradition, but with a definite Irish feel to it. Which, obviously, tells you nothing. This record is a delicate, precious thing, which quietly convinces you to give it the time and attention it needs for its beauteous charms to slowly unfold before you.

The Free Design, “You Could Be Born Again”: undoubtedly the pick of this bunch. The Free Design are mostly known, of course, for their purported influence on Stereolab; a theory which is parrotted so much that it is as if, if you had all the Free Design records, you would see nothing at all novel in the ’Lab. Which is, of course, a load of cobblers. You can hear plenty else in Stereolab, from the minimalists to the Swell Maps, from the Velvet Undergound to Suicide. None of which, by any stretch, have any connection, musically at least, whatsoever to the Free Design. At least, not on the strength of this record, which I think was their first, from 1968. This album sits fairly comfortably inside a circle bordered by, let’s see, the Seekers, Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66, Os Mutantes, and any number of records under the banner of Phase 4 Stereo, but with a touch of Van Dyke Parks thrown in to keep it just difficult enough to have remained slightly under the radar of popular consciousness. The arrangements and harmonies are unfaultable. And their version of “California Dreamin’” is up there with the best. But to come back to this whole Stereolab/Free Design straw man, the more I listen to this disc the more I suspect that a better modern comparison would be Broadcast, and in particular “Ha Ha Sound”, in which that band postulate a world in which 60s nostalgia would bypass all of the usual suspects in favour of the early electronic artists, Stockhausen, The Fifth Dimension, and European soundtrack music.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, “The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion”: JSBE, I find, are much like a visit from your in-laws (note: I didn’t say my in-laws). It’s good to have them around, but it’s also nice to see the back of them. And yet when they’ve gone you kind of wish they’d come back again. Weird.

“The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered”: disclaimer: I have always been a bit uncomfortable with the whole notion of outsider artists in general, and with the cult of Daniel Johnston in particular. Is it okay to derive pleasure out of the product of someone else’s mental illness? And yet the roll call of the great and the good on this tribute album surely speaks some kind of volumes about the quality of his songs. And in the hands of “actual musicians” they do scrub up rather well. The packaging suggests Johnston’s full blessing, so I am putting aside my misgivings for the time being. It’s nice to hear Calvin Johnston’s basso profundo again after all these years, for example; while Beck, M. Ward, Tom Waits, Bright Eyes and Eels are there for the benefit of the hipster cogniscenti. “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience [sic]” is a gorgeous song no matter what its provenance.

Hood, “Outside Closer”: having listened to this four or five times, I find myself unable to commit any of it to memory. Where does it go? I can’t say I dislike it. Quite the opposite. Maybe I have reached saturation point. Influence corner: the gold standard of post-rock, Tortoise’s “djed”; The Sea and Cake; Four Tet.

Pulp, “We Love Life”: in this busy world in which we live, “Hits” is all you really need of Pulp. No more - but certainly no less, I hasten to add, in case you took this as some kind of put-down.

Mission of Burma, “Signals, Calls and Marches”: over the years I have probably discarded more Mission of Burma records than you have ever owned. Unlike most records I have gotten rid of, I haven’t yet lived to regret having done so. Once again I can’t pinpoint the problem. If I said that the CD version of their live album, “The Horrible Truth about Burma”, was the one record of theirs that has ever come close to being indispensable, would I be saying anything?

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, “Twinkle Echo”: if I hadn’t spent much of the second half of the 1980s lost in a world of K Records, the Cannanes, and Wayne Davidson’s mostly cassette-only Toytown label, I’m sure I would find CFTPA fresh and exciting. (Plus I would now be able to lead some kind of normal life. Thanks, fellas.)

It Takes All Sorts To Make A World

Do I attract weirdos? Or am I, in fact, a weirdo?

I left work last night around 5.30. It was dark, and cold, and raining. There were no people around. I was walking to my bus stop. This involves crossing King Edward Terrace, a fairly busy road, at a pedestrian crossing. (The crossing is clearly signposted and well lit, but it occasionally becomes invisible to motorists, and I cross my fingers each time I step out onto it.) There was no oncoming traffic on the near side of the crossing, so off I went. I got almost half way across when a car coming the other way drove through the crossing just in front of me. The driver slammed on the brakes at about the time I would have been under the back wheel of the car. The car then drove off again, with its horn blaring incessantly and the driver’s arm waving out of the window. I thought it must have been someone I knew, apologising for almost killing me, so I waved back as I continued walking to the bus stop, shaken somewhat.

The next thing I knew (by now I was at the bus stop, calling up some Bill Fay songs on the iPod), the sound of the car horn was getting louder again, and the car, having done a U-turn on King Edward Terrace (itself no mean feat at that time of the day, on, as I have already said, a dark and wet evening), was doing a right-hand turn into the street where the bus stop is. “Here we go”, I thought to myself, as the driver, in the one motion, leaned across to roll down his passenger-side window, and started to drive his car off the road and up onto the footpath. For a moment I thought the object may have been to finish the job and actually run over me, but the car then stopped. By now I was very conscious of the fact that there was not another living soul around. The driver, who seemed to be a pretty large bloke in a small car, stuck his head almost out the passenger window and started screaming at me, and gesticulating wildly. In the split second in which I had to weigh my options, I thought: if I start to run, he will get out of the car and come after me (or even perhaps keep driving after me - I mean, the car was already up on the footpath pointing in my direction), in which case I don’t stand a chance, and it’s not as if there was anywhere that I could run to. On the other hand, it would be faintly ridiculous for me just to ignore him: he was as in your face as someone could be when they are in a car and you are standing at a bus stop, and anyway there was nobody else around that I could pretend that he might be talking to. So the only life-extending option I had, I figured, was to engage this guy in rational conversation.

As it turned out, that was fairly easy to do, because he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgeways. And he threw me with his opening line. I was expecting “What is your problem?” (easy answer to that one: I’m standing in the rain at the bus stop, without an umbrella, watching rain pouring over the brim of my hat, and wondering if you are going to pick up an iron bar and kill me with it); or “What the hell do you think you were doing?” (easy answer to that one, too: I was crossing the road at a designated and well-lit pedestrian crossing, giving me the right of way, and you had more than enough time to see me given that I was already almost half way across the road; okay I was wearing dark clothing, but after all I am an aging post-punk and wearing black is like an article of faith, not merely a uniform, and in any event the dark clothing would be offset by what was visible of my pasty white skin).

No; the first thing he said was: “What fucking country are you from?” Huh? Before I had time to come up with some kind of smart response, though, he had the answer: “Are you Italian? Are you from fucking Italy? That’s it, isn’t it: you people. What’s your father? Is he fucking Italian? Is your father Italian? Of course he is. Why don’t you back to your own fucking country you fucking wog. You wog. I hate you. You fucking wog.” (I am perhaps not recording this verbatim, but I hope you are getting the idea.)

Before I could explain to him that my father had been dead for some years and that I am at least fourth-generation Australian on both sides of my family, he took a new tack: “Where do you work? Where do you fucking work? You work over there don’t you? [looking back in the general direction of the High Court of Australia] Yeah I know you fucking do because I seen you [sic, obviously] coming from there. You people. You fucking people. I’m going to report you to the police. You people think you can get away with anything but I’m going to report you to the police and they’re going to come down there and they will fucking report you. You fucking people. You think you can do anything. Are you fucking Italian? Where’s your father from? You idiot. Why don’t you go back to Italy you fucking wog. Fucking dago.” (I was kind of wondering if my hat, a 1940s-era fedora, of the kind favoured by Canadian comic-book artist Seth, was some kind of obscure signifier of an Italian origin, but I didn’t have the chance to ask, I was drowning in this guy’s verbal torrent.)

At that, he drove off, but not before winding his driver’s side window down so that he could continue screaming at me as he drove back whence he came, turning left onto King Edward Terrace and leaving me, standing in the rain, to ponder what exactly had just happened.

Accidents Will Happen

The story so far: a few days ago, Orbis Quintus posted a song by 60s NZ band The Avengers, which prompted me to put up the Pop Art Toasters' cover of the same song (scroll down a couple of entries). Now, in the way of these things, the ever reliable Moistworks has posted "I Won't Hurt You" by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, a song which is also covered by the Pop Art Toasters on their one and only EP (which only has five songs: is this an unlikely coincidence or something more sinister?). The good news is, this gives me the chance to post the Pop Art Toasters' version, which I think is the best song on their disc. The better news is, it gives you a chance to hear this song, which so fully captures the essence of the Chills that it continues to come as a surprise to find that it's not a Martin Phillipps original.

Pop Art Toasters, "I Won't Hurt You".

Splash Your Jewels

And while I'm on the subject of things New Zealand, a big shout out to me old mucker Alun Breward, who was kind enough to take the time to send me a nicely photocopied (reduced to save paper- we like that) article from NZ magazine the Listener about David Kilgour. I can't recall ever having actually read much about Kilgour, believe it or not, so it was good to have the opportunity to vicariously catch up with the man for a few minutes.

And if anyone has earned the right to spend their days sitting on the verandah of their secluded weatherboard house, contemplating whether to take the board out to catch a few waves, or whether to strum a few chords instead, it is David Kilgour, founder member of the Clean, perhaps the most influential band this side of the Velvet Underground; shortlived Chill; part-time Pop Art Toaster; part-time member of Yo La Tengo; and one of the finest guitarists and tunesmiths I can think of. His latest solo release continues to elude me, but the previous four come highly recommended. You can (and should) start anywhere, really.

Mind you, I am somewhat puzzled by a quote in the article from film-maker Bridget Sutherland (who is making a documentary about Kilgour), who calls "Here Come The Cars", Kilgour's stripped-back, sparkling solo debut, the closest New Zealand has come to a "Blonde on Blonde". How so? It's nowhere near double-album length; contains no canine-trauma-inducing harmonica solos, and is not (yet) a certifiable stone cold classic record, instantly recognisable by anyone anywhere. Yes, perhaps on one or two songs Kilgour sings in a style that might be called "Dylanesque", except that more often than not "Dylanesque" is merely a code word for "can't sing". Which isn't true at all in Kilgour's case; his voice might be limited, but he knows his limitations and works them to advantage. (In fact, a closer reference point than "Blonde on Blonde" might be "Electrical Storm", the first solo release by Ed Kuepper, someone else whose voice might sink more ships than it launches, but for whom that doesn't mean a damn.)

Oh what the heck, here is "You Forget", taken from "Here Come The Cars", just to give you a taste of the superior Dunedin sound:

David Kilgour, "You Forget".

Released on Flying Nun, at least in New Zealand, in 1991. Try Smoke.

Things We Learnt Today

I can’t believe that I have lived my entire life until today not knowing that Martin Phillipps was responsible for the cheeeeezy (in the nicest possible way ...) organ on The Clean’s “Tally Ho”. Crikey, the Dunedin music scene was even more incestuous than I thought.

And in case you need to refresh your memory, here it is:

The Clean, "Tally Ho".

While we’re at it, why don’t we bow our heads in gratitude to the good folks at Orbis Quintus for exposing us to three tracks by the little-known 60s NZ band The Avengers, including “Everybody’s Gonna Wonder”, the only Avengers song known to us, thanks to its being covered (under the title "Everyone's Gonna Wonder" - go figure) by possibly the only supergroup ever to have come from New Zealand, Pop Art Toasters, a one-off project which included Martin Phillipps and David Kilgour (who, believe it or not, was a member of the Chills for a period of a few weeks in 1983, during which time the band neither recorded nor played live).

Right-click here if you need to hear these two pillars of Dunedin society going all 60s on us:

Pop Art Toasters, "Everyone’s Gonna Wonder".

And, for a perhaps more recognisable idea of how well these guys feel that decade, here is their version of The Who’s “Circles”:

Pop Art Toasters, "Circles".

CONSUMER ADVISORY: the two Pop Art Toasters tracks are from their only release, a self-titled five-song CD on Flying Nun. It is believed to be no longer available, which would be a damn shame. As for “Tally Ho”, unless you are one of the lucky few to have the original Flying Nun 7”, your best bet (an excellent bet all round, actually) is the two-CD “Anthology”, which just happens to be a Flying Nun release.

youth in translation

Youth: "That is not totally sick as."

Translation: "That isn't exactly the greatest thing ever, but it is pretty good."

Things I wish I had remembered that I had once known

Number one in a continuing series:

That the first album by Eurythmics was largely the work of Can. It's funny how you can allow the awfulness of later works to obscure your knowledge of a band.

Stacks o' Wax

Meanwhile, the quest continues. Having not been to the local library for a little while, I came away with a large pile of CDs. Viz:

Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Jack DeJohnette, “Inside Out”; Charles Lloyd, “Hyperion With Higgins”: Both discs were so badly scratched that they contained audible glitches and, like, scratching sounds (which kinda queers the whole concept of that pristine ECM sound). You’d think goatee-stroking latter-day beatniks would be more careful with public property, wouldn’t you? And another thing: I don’t think I will ever come to terms with the way Jarrett sings along with his own piano playing. It’s too much like people who laugh at their own jokes.

Kraftwerk, “Aubobahn”: It must be said (sharp intake of breath): No, I don’t own this album. I’ve never owned this album. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Truth is, though, I never really got over the nagging feeling that there was something a bit gimmicky about “Autobahn”, which wasn’t there in the three crucial Kraftwerk records “Man-Machine”, “Trans-Europe Express” and “Computer World”. Listening to it again, I would adhere to that view. And it’s difficult to warm to the tracks on side two, isn’t it? Or is it just me?

David Bowie, “David Live”: In many ways, David Bowie was the seventies. I first discovered him in my cousin Gay’s record collection at her parents’ triple-fronted brick veneer house in Dandenong, somewhere around 1973. (Gay’s mother, my beloved auntie Margaret, pronounced “Bowie” like you would say “bow wow wow”; with an audible sneer on account of the make-up he wore.) I got confused by the number of times “Space Oddity” got into the UK pop charts, seemingly years after it had first come out. (I thought the charts were exclusively for new things. Little did I know.) I didn’t get to see Bowie until the 1980s when he played at the now bulldozed VFL Park, Waverley, supported by the Models. It was a spectacle, sure, but given how far we were from the stage you may as well have been watching it on tv.“David Live” is from about 10 years previous to that. What’s interesting about this double-cd “full concert in actual playing order and we’ve remastered the crap out of it as well” extravaganza is that the songs are played in a style that very much predicts“Young Americans” and “Station To Station”: that smooth white-boy soul sound, which I always thought suited Bowie rather well (until he tried to update it on “Let’s Dance” in 1983 and it all went horribly wrong). Then you read in the liner notes that the band stopped half way through the tour to go off and record what would become “Young Americans”, and it all makes sense. You wouldn’t, nevertheless, want to listen to this too often, I don’t think (I’m much more interested in hearing the reissue of “Stage”, from the end of the seventies, by which time David had gone through at least one further reinvention of himself), although the cha-cha-cha version of “Aladdin Sane” will wrong-foot you every time.

Various, “Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough”: Patchy like most “tribute” records. (The six-song sampler disc of Kimbrough himself that comes with it, on the other hand, is a peach.) Still, it’s nice to hear the Stooges with Mike Watt on the bass. Twice.

Rachid Taha, “Tekitoi”: Coincidentally, while I had these discs out on loan this one received a rather positive review on Pitchfork, prompting me to give it a closer listen than I otherwise might have. I remain not convinced; it seems a bit too generic world music for me, either too Western or not Western enough (c.f. Konono No 1, I guess). Mind you, my concentration was destroyed by a knock on the door from a man from the glass company, who had been sent around as a result of a call from our builder, who had told the glass company that one of our new full-height windows had developed a crack. The man from the glass company looked at it, said, “Yes, it is cracked”, and left. I am still scratching my head. I guess the concern was that they might be tricked into replacing a window that wasn’t cracked in the first place. Customers can be so sneaky sometimes.

Alone again, naturally

There are certain records that can only be listened to in those rare moments when you have the house to yourself. Thus, those records don't get played very often; they sit in a slow-moving queue, waiting their turn.

I didn't realise that John Cale's "Paris, 1919" was one of those records. I now know that it is. (Of course, his "Music For A New Society" was one of the first discs to be admitted to this exclusive club. In fact, that record, like David Sylvian's "Blemish" and Scott Walker's "Tilt", is now a record that I almost never listen to, out of an irrational fear that whatever hold it has over me may have released its grip while I wasn't looking.)

Dennis, part two

Dennis appeared before us like a vision. With his unkempt hair, stubbly beard, Dennis Lillee moustache, lingering smell of tobacco, and shabby clothes, Dennis was taken on as sharefarmer by my father against all the odds. Against all common sense, really. Perhaps dad perceived in him some admirable quality arising out of the fact that he was getting out there and looking for work. That he could hit a cricket ball would have worked in his favour. That he was a drug-addicted boozehound was not then known. He had never worked on a farm, had quite possibly never stepped outside of the city. How on earth did he even find us?

Dennis brought with him his lady friend, Christine, their daughter, Sheree, who was four or five years old, a little yappy dog whose name I don’t recall, a stack of pornographic magazines, and, what was of most interest to me, his record collection. I had this idea that Dennis was into the kind of music I was into, although, looking back, all I can remember him owning was “Pablo Cruise” by Pablo Cruise, and the first Dire Straits album (which was then pretty new and, perhaps, exciting: at school we all thought, when we first heard “Sultans of Swing” on the radio, that it was something new by Bob Dylan - I think I had some idea that I could pick out Joe Strummer in there, too - of course, now it just sounds like a poor man’s “Marquee Moon”). They moved into the old rundown weatherboard cottage that was used as the sharefarmer’s “residence”. That house, which was built by a farmer during the depression from any materials he could lay his hand on, and had been moved twice, was at one point used as a shearing shed, and despite one of the side walls bowing inwards rather dramatically, it steadfastly refused to fall down.

Of necessity, dad adopted a more hands-on approach with Dennis than he had done with other sharefarmers, helping out in the shed at milking times and doing many of the other jobs around the place that needed to be done. Whether this was out of a sense of having to show Dennis the ropes, or because of a perceived inability on Dennis’s part to do anything by himself, is not known. I was also made use of on a more regular basis. On weekends and school holidays Dennis and I milked the cows together. I rigged up a transistor radio at the cowshed which enabled us to tune in to 2JJ during milking times, and, later, the “new thing” in radio, FM Stereo, in the guise of EON-FM, from Melbourne, which was actually a godsend for its first few months of existence, with its Lee Simon-programmed “album oriented” playlist, showcasing perfectly acceptable listening fare like the Reels, the Models, and Matt Finish, even if it did run too hard with “Stairway to Heaven”. (And Pablo Cruise.) (This Golden Age continued until it dawned on the men in suits that nobody was actually listening aside from a couple of guys 100 miles away who were up to their knees in milk and cow manure, whereupon an inevitable dumbing-down process commenced, which continued until we ended up with the appalling behemoth that we know as Triple M.)

Dennis joined my cricket team and in his first game showed himself to have a Botham-like ability to turn a match with his own bat (although this ability revealed itself frustratingly sparingly).

He had a very mild and pleasant nature (although he would occasionally explode with profanities of a type that the farm had never known, if a cow didn’t do what was expected of it).

It could all perhaps have worked reasonably well. Except that, in the end, it didn’t.

It seemed that Dennis or Christine - or maybe both of them - had trouble with headaches. Dennis would often get my father to run an errand for him: to go to a chemist (a different one each time: with dad travelling far and wide in the ongoing search for a miracle cure for his bad back, this actually wasn’t all that difficult for Dennis to engineer) and get a prescription for some kind of strong painkiller. These painkillers all had two things in common: they didn’t seem to last very long, and they all contained codeine. While it is understandable that a man who had known only clean living and moderate, lawful behaviour (no, I am not talking about Dennis here) would not have put two and two together, it was not until one morning when dad stumbled upon the makeshift chemistry lab operating in Dennis’s kitchen that the awful truth was uncovered: the painkillers were being melted down and somehow converted to pure codeine, which was then being used in ways other than as recommended on the packet. “I think Dennis is using drugs.” There were no more trips to the chemist.

Some mornings Dennis would fail to turn up for milkings, and dad and I would have to do it ourselves. Sometimes I would be late for school. Homework was sometimes missed. But the most serious consequence - it ended in tears - was when he failed to appear on the morning of the Saturday when I had been picked, for the first and only time, in the starting 18 for the Fish Creek thirds football team, in an away game at Devon, about an hour’s drive from our place. The cows were milked very quickly that morning, but we still failed to get to the ground on time, and that was the end of my football career, before it had even started.

Possibly the last thing we needed at the farm was a pet goat. But that is what Dennis brought home for us, one day, perhaps as an apology for his erratic behaviour. The little guy was even pre-named (by Sheree): “Pablo”. Pablo was an angora cross; he produced quite nice long, curly hair that, each year, was ignominiously hacked off as Pablo lay upturned in a wheelbarrow. As Pablo grew older, he took an unjustified dislike to my mother, who would be attacked by him if she ever ventured out into his territory, the holding paddock that ran around the outside of our house yard. Nevertheless, he ended up becoming another member of the family, and we all cried the day that Pablo, stricken by a mysterious illness that caused him to froth at the mouth and twist his neck around at an improbable angle, was finally put to rest.

When Pablo was still tiny, we once left him with Dennis overnight while we went on one of our infrequent visits to Melbourne. (Perhaps the cows were milked while we were away; perhaps they weren’t.) When we returned home, just before nightfall the next day, Pablo was returned to us, lying prone in his cardboard box, and struggling to breathe. Sheree had apparently been playing with him quite a lot during the time we were away, but beyond that Dennis wasn’t giving anything away. It looked bad. A vigil was maintained. In a fit of inspiration such as only he was capable of, dad said “Pablo looks a bit like a cow with milk fever.” So he raced off to the dairy to pick up a packet of the medicine we kept on hand for cows suffering from milk fever; did a quick mental calculation in the nature of the relative weights of (a) a large dairy cow and (b) a tiny baby goat dying from something like dehydration or exhaustion; fashioned an extremely small dosage in an extremely small syringe; and did the deed. We kept up the vigil until we all had other things to do. After a while we heard, like a voice from the heavens, a happy little “maa-aa, maa-aa”. By the morning, Pablo was as good as gold.

One morning we received a visit from the local constable, Mr Duffus, letting us know (although I’m not sure why, unless it was a pointed message to us that we had brought an unsavoury character into the area) that Dennis’s car had been found some way down a disused dirt road, wherein Dennis was “stuffing” someone else’s wife.

Somewhere around this point Christine and Sheree moved back to Melburne, leaving Dennis and his dog to fend for themselves. Dennis got to know a few of the locals around the pool table in the public bar of the Promontory Gate Hotel, in Fish Creek. On another occasion when Dennis had been a non-starter we received another visit from Mr Duffus, who pointed out that Dennis wasn’t milking the cows that morning because he had been found, sound asleep, at the wheel of his car, halfway between the pub and our place, having driven the car off the road and wedged it between two large gum trees in such a way that he could not open any of the doors, and therefore could not get out of the car. Not that he would probably have been sober enough to walk any distance from there anyway, the most likely outcome would have been for him to have been run over after falling asleep on the road, so he was probably safest trapped inside the vehicle.

It was clear that Dennis had to go, but dad hated having that conversation and kept putting it off. Then one day, Dennis packed up all of his gear and left. Where to, nobody knew. All that he left behind was his dog. Dad fed the dog for a few days, hoping to hear from Dennis so that arrangements could be made. But there was nothing. Eventually a decision had to be made. The dog was of no use to us. One of our neighbours, Joe, was called upon to put the necessary bullet into the poor dog’s brain. As if on cue, almost before the echo from the gunshot had faded, a cloud of dust appeared over the hill. It was Dennis, coming to retrieve his faithful hound. Joe ducked around the corner out of sight, dragging the bloodied corpse with him. Dad at least had the tact not to give any hint to Dennis that five minutes might have made all the difference.

And that, as far as we were concerned, was that. Once, several months later, after a game of cricket, I saw a severely inebriated Dennis struggling with a pool cue at the Meeniyan Hotel. I said hello to him, and perhaps sensed some slight flicker of recognition in response. But more than likely Dennis had moved back to Melbourne, where he disappeared into the populace, and that was the last anyone ever saw or heard of him.

However, the ghost of Dennis may not have left us quite so quickly, or so conclusively. Some time after his departure, Uncle Charlie, whose job it was to secure the perimeter of the property, so as to keep out unwanted ragwort and other noxious weeds, made a surprise discovery: someone had established a crop of marijuana (Uncle Charlie chose to pronounce the “j”) in a piece of bushland along one of the less accessible boundaries. And so we were visited yet again by Mr Duffus (these are the only three times I can remember us ever having had anything to do with the police), who removed the offending items and lay in wait for their owners; who never returned.