"I've Got A Plan", by My Friend The Chocolate Cake. "My Friend The Chocolate Cake" is not a good name for a band. It tells you nothing about what to expect. Maybe that was its purpose. MFTCC evolved out of Not Drowning, Waving. "Not Drowning, Waving", aside from the difficulty of having a comma in it, is a good name for a band. Easter, another (brief) NDW spin-off, I'm not so sure either way as a band name, although there was a perfectly good band (now mostly forgotten) called Christmas, and a Melbourne electronic musician called Ash Wednesday, and neither of them was crucified (sorry) for adopting the names of religious festivals in the provision of secular entertainment. MFTCC took David Bridie's vision in a different direction, from the electric, ambient washes and Australian outback evocations of NDW and the semi-prog digressive stylings of Easter, to a more grounded, domestic, earthy place, where jaunty Irish jigs and Hungarian wedding songs could rub up against quiet suburban melodramas, all centred upon Bridie's more than useful piano playing, and the strings of the very glamorous Helen Mountford and Hope Csutoros. Giving such a venture a signifying, or meaningful, or even ironically distancing name might have been asking for trouble. So, for better or worse, we were left having to say, when friends enquired who was responsible for the lovely music they were hearing, "My Friend The Chocolate Cake", and trying to suppress an involuntary cringe.
I put them on in the car this afternoon because, well, because they have fallen somewhat out of our lives in recent years, and more specifically because I have just been reading Martin Flanagan's piece in yesterday's Age about people who support the Melbourne Football Club (of whom I am one). David Bridie and Andrew Carswell, both members of MFTCC, featured in the article. I knew Bridie was a Demon supporter. It was nice to read of the two of them breaking out the footy while on tour for some kick-to-kick. It turns out that Bridie's daughter also supports the Demons, which struck me as perhaps inevitable but also a little unfair (oh, the burden of having to justify supporting not only a frequently losing team, but also one that has the vestigial reputation of being the silvertails' team of choice - when they are not off skiing or down on The Peninsula).
Martin Flanagan is one of the great sports writers, because, like other great sports writers (A J Liebling, Roger Angell, Garrie Hutchinson, Brent Crosswell, Gideon Haigh, John Harms), he sees the larger-than-life narratives, and the poetry, that permeate sport without losing sight of the fact that it is, after all, just a game, and thus his sights are frequently aimed beyond the boundary fence. That he will be following Melbourne this season, as he did the Western Bulldogs a couple of years ago, is one of the few bits of good news to have fallen from the pages of a newspaper in recent months.
Anyway, back to "I've Got A Plan": I should be more careful, in my fragile middle-aged emotional state, listening to music that has deep personal resonance, especially something I haven't listened to for some years, while in charge of an automobile. That's all I’m going to say.
