Song of the day

“Holiday House”, by Peter Lillie And The Leisuremasters.

 

I first became aware of what might be called the “Carlton scene” when as a young boy I bought a copy of “Horror Movie”, a seven-inch single by a band called Skyhooks, who had captured the attention of some of the more adventurous boys at Fish Creek Primary School (a pretty small number), largely on account of their smutty lyrics, but, in my case, on account of the sound of the guitars. “Horror Movie” to this day gets my pulse racing, but it was the b-side, entitled “Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo)” that really captured the imagination of a farmboy dreaming of a life of adventure.

A few years later, when I had started to listen to Melbourne’s 3RRR-FM, I found myself drawn to unknown (to me) entities with names like Eric Gradman’s Man And Machine, Whirlywirld, and Tch Tch Tch (easy to pronounce, typographically fiendish to denote: see the embedded graphic below), 

 

under the direction of one Philip Brophy, who would, even later, be an important part of my weekend routine as co-presenter, with Au Go Go Records impresario Bruce Milne, of a wonderfully free-form afternoon radio show on 3RRR called “Eeek!”.

By the time I moved to Carlton, in 1982, direct from Fish Creek, the Carlton scene, if there ever really was one, had already fragmented into several of the many tiny shards that made up the Melbourne post-punk contingent (if Pete Frame was still around to do his Rock Family Trees, this would give him an enormous challenge), and in turn started joining hands with the above-ground.

(For example, at that time there was still a piece of graffiti on a wall in Carlton proclaiming the greatness of The Jetsonnes, who had by then reinvented themselves as Hunters & Collectors; and Ian Cox, who was our Nicholson Street neighbour a couple of years later, had moved away from bands like Essendon Airport (along with Robert Goodge) and Equal Local in order to provide saxophone support for Kate Ceberano in I’m Talking.) (Further research reveals how chock full of Venn diagrams the Melbourne music scene of these times was: Cox also appeared on one song on an album called "Skippy Knows", by Whadya Want?, which also featured, on another track, Michael Sheridan on guitar, thus demonstrating that there was one degree of separation between the pop music of Kate Ceberano and the noiseniks who were released by Dr Jim’s Records (the titular proprietor of which label once appeared on an episode of Rockwiz with, you guessed it, Kate Ceberano). (With one further degree of separation, we can even trace Ceberano to Sydney trio The Necks, as Sheridan also played with Necks drummer Tony Buck in multinational “underground industrial” (it says here) group Peril, another of Dr Jim’s stable of stars.) (Whadya Want? also included David Chesworth, part of the "Clifton Hill scene" and (yet) another member of Essendon Airport, and Philip Jackson, who was in Whirlywirld and Equal Local. I think I'm getting dizzy.) (It goes on: Adam Learner, of International Exiles, who shared a seven-inch single with The Jetsonnes, went on to play with Blue Ruin, one of my gig-going staples of the later 1980s.))

But before I disappear up my own bum entirely -- What? It's too late? Hey, you should see what I edited out -- I should probably get to the point.

Somehow, Peter Lillie And The Leisuremasters make up a disproportionate share of my seven-inch-single collection. (Admittedly, it’s not that much of a collection; it fills a shoe box.) But the two records of theirs that I own continue to get a regular spin at home. It gave me more of a thrill than I expected when I convinced Number One Son to play “Holiday House”, the b-side of one of them, on his own radio show on 2XX a couple of weeks ago. (It was like stumbling upon a photo on the Internet of the Henry Maas-era Black Cat Cafe. I have also done that.)

A little fossicking around reminded me that Peter Lillie, sans Leisuremasters, had already taken up space in the inner recesses of my brain with a song called “Samurai Star”, which, I recently discovered, featured everybody from The Birthday Party who wasn’t Nick Cave or The Paunchy Cowboy. It’s a curious song, sounding, unexpectedly, more like The Sports than like “Hanging Round The House” and “Holiday House” (or, for that matter, “Homicide/Division 4”, the other of their singles that I own). Looking a little further back, it turns out (surprise!) that Lillie was a part of the Carlton scene in his own right, being a member of The Autodrifters with Johnny Topper (another 3RRR lunimary), and, not only that, but being the author of a song that might also lay claim to being the quintessential 1970s Australian song: “The Birth Of The Ute”. And before that, he and Topper were in the Pelaco Brothers, one of the few groups I can think of named after a neon advertising sign, and which also included, amongst its members, one Joe Camilleri, and one Stephen Cummings. (And, while we are here, we should also mention the High Rise Bombers, a group that fragmented into, on the one hand, Paul Kelly and the Dots and, on the other, The Sports (with the aforementioned Cummings).) (A handy musical compendium of the Carlton scene was released a couple of years back under the title “(When The Sun Sets Over) Carlton”, which, over the space of two discs, manages to take you all the way from Daddy Cool to Eric Gradman.)

It wasn’t actually all that hard to convince the lad to play “Holiday House”. I mostly just needed to point out to him its use of the 1970s slang expression “it’s grouse”, meaning really good; and to note that this is the only song I can think of that uses the word, and that I can’t recall “grouse” ever having made a come-back. (It's long overdue.) That, I think, helped make it the type of marginal historical time capsule he seems to find fascinating. The cover design is also of its time; Melbourne’s arty types then were seemingly obsessed with a rose-tinted idea of pre-Whitlam Australian culture, all beach houses, EH Holdens, seashell ash trays and Laminex furniture: essentially, nostalgia for a time that may never have actually existed. (See also the paintings of Howard Arkley.) Musically, too, it harks back to a kind of pre-Beatles Eylsian Field of simpler and better times. But that, too, was the tenor of those times: a post-punk fairyland where former hippies were moving to Belgrave to make experimental music; rockabilly rebels and bluegrass throwbacks crawled out of the least expected corners; and a lanky and intimidating fellow from Caulfield Grammar sat on the steps of the Missing Link record store in Flinders Lane, scaring away potential customers.

Sorry. I’m drifting off again. 

You could have saved yourself a lot of time by just reading this Facebook tribute.

But you should listen to this song. It’s grouse.