thought crimes

Come Fly With Me; The Funny Side Of Air Disasters.

2011-06-13T06:52:00.000-07:00

Feb 2010

I really, really like aeroplanes. As a kid, I spent day after day building models of them, and identifying them and reading about them, but I’ve always thought that the most interesting thing about planes is that they sometimes stop flying at the worst possible moment; ie, quite suddenly, when they’re up in the air. The failures of aircraft to make it home is addressed with engrossing detail in my favourite telly program of all time, Air Crash Investigation.

ACI has got everything; horror, drama, thrills and spills, derring-do, technological mindfucks, forensic investigation, mystery, existential near-death (or genuine death) experiences, blind terror and, in one memorable case, a ghost popping into the galley to warn some stewardesses that their plane is an accident waiting, impatiently, to happen. (They made a telemovie about that incident, with Ernest Borgnine as the earnest apparition of the dead pilot. ‘Beware of fire in this aircraft!’ Hey, don’t have a cow, man.)

Not a lot of romance or sex in ACI, I grant you, although there’s plenty of humour, which, of course, couldn’t be less intentional. But when a distracted pilot lets his fourteen-year-old son drive an Airbus A320 into the Siberian tundra, well … can’t you see the funny side?

You’d imagine that when aeroplanes hit the ground off-airport, or off-off-airport, into the sea or a forest, or over eighty kilometres of mountainside, in most cases the cause would be unfussily self-evident: vicious unbearable turbulence, running out of gas, double duck strike (we’ll get to the miracle on the Hudson shortly), poor aim or pure lack of ability on approach, bad luck (as in hitting another plane – the universe is a big place, after all), elderly death traps coughing out some ancient rivets from vital superstructures.

These are reasons most of us are familiar with. But for every crash there is left in its wake a fascinating trail of mistakes, acts of kindergarten stupidity, and previously unannounced faults in mint condition aircraft. Why did the autopilot do that? Why did the pilot do the other thing? Why did the service guy forget to screw in some nuts? Why did the guy who worked with the pilot and first officer try to kill both of them with a huge hammer? (True.)

In 1974, at Tenerife airport in Spain, a 747 belonging to the Dutch airline KLM steamed down the runway straight into a Pan Am 747 taxiing the other way. Five hundred and eighty-three people died. It wasn’t a good result. Obviously, it was due in part to pilot error, but how that error occurred, the plethora of events that led to the crash, and its achingly simple preventability is the sort of thing that ACI is tremendous at exploring and revealing, not to mention magnificently re-enacting in shit-scary detail.

We learn about micro-bursts, windshear, and how, as a pilot, you can get sucked out of the front of the plane (when a window blows out), and still be all right if you are held on to by two guys clutching your belt. This is because your body freezes in the very, very cold air, and when whoever is now landing the plane brings it to a halt and they drag you back inside, you can be re-animated. Now, there’s a story for the grandkids.

Am I morbid? Am I watching disaster porn? I figure this stuff interests everybody. Doesn’t it interest you? My housemate has to put on headphones when I watch ACI. She doesn’t want to know. Nervous flyer. Me, I can’t get enough of it and yet – paradoxically, to say the least – I am terrified of being in a plane crash.

I’m better these days. I fly four or five times a year. On a clear day, I can enjoy it very much. I look forward to being pressed back in my seat as the engines get angry, and I love that first slight gut-challenge of uplift. I could stare down over that beautiful vast worldscape all day. It’s the only chance, isn’t it, for us to pretend that things are really nice down here, because everything looks so nice from up there?

But I used to fair near shit myself getting on a plane. Valium was only prescribed (and with admirable impunity) for stressed-out MILFs, not for thirteen-year-olds, in the seventies. And nobody would buy me a bottle of Smirnoff, so air travel for me back in the day was about the worst thing in the world. And yet, I would have watched ACI if it had been on then, anyway. I couldn’t have become any more alarmed than I already was, even when looking at a plane disaster highlights reel.

Unlike your regular whitey TV drama or blanched soap, ACI is, as well, a program where the careers of actors of many ethnic persuasions receive a bump. It depicts plane crashes accurately and without prejudice (the body count, staggering or small, is not really a factor), so actors of various colours and creeds get to play pilots and co-pilots, which is a bit of a double-edged sword, because they’re portraying fellow countrymen who either can’t fly, or who work for an airline, their country’s airline, which can’t fly either. There’s screen work, too, for actors who can play investigators, cabin crew and passengers. It’d keep a casting agency on its toes; ‘Can you get me seventy-five Indonesians, an Arab and a Turk, or similar, by Thursday?’

We’ve all watched enough Star Trek to know that when the crew are chucked from left to right and right to left as they scrap with aliens in their fuck-off, space-hoon muscle-ships, the camera provides the opposite angles, to mimic the full effect of a big hit. On set, of course, this would look completely ridiculous but that slapstick stuff is small fry compared with the sort of synchronised chaos and violence required to simulate the effects of a plane doing tight spirals or backflips as it falls from the sky. And having to sit in a fake fuselage as fans the size of trucks blow air at you to demonstrate what it’s like to be in a plane with a no roof is a tough gig. The reconstructions and re-enactments are scarifying. Forget Avatar and check some of this shit out. A white-hot 747 engine cowling coming at you in 3D is not something you can easily forget.

Most of us have never enjoyed the adventure of cruising along in a plane suddenly transformed into an open-top bus. But we’ve all had our little moments up in the sky. I experienced an emergency take-off abort one day, the plane coming to a screeching halt just as we were about to take flight. That was kinda cool. The last time I went home to Tassie, my plane did a mysterious lap of the airport just as we were on a final approach. ‘We missed,’ said the girl sitting next to me. And we had. There’s not a lot of traffic at Launceston airport at 10 pm on a Sunday but, the thing is, flights to Tassie are usually fobbed off on slightly wet-behind-the-ears pilots who still have a bit of ‘If at first you don’t succeed …’ about them.

For most people, the aircraft they’re on is ‘the plane’, much as you would speak of ‘the tram’. For me, the machine is never anonymous, not merely big or small. It’s either a Boeing 737 (the drone, the dull default people mover) or an exciting 767, or an even more exciting big-arse Airbus A300.

But best of all is the new Airbus A380, which is the two-storey one, and which is clearly too big to get off the ground. Surely that will become evident at some point; that sort of luck never lasts. So, I should try to get a ride in one before there are problems – Airbuses (or Airbi?) collapsing in on themselves, or flopping indelicately in fields the way Howard Hughes’s under-powered air tanks used to.

At the cute regional level, Rex flies the Saab 340, a little aeroplane with propellers, and a vehicle, you imagine, that doesn’t do much for a pilot’s self-esteem. Cops on horses being passed by fellow officers in V8 pursuit cars probably feel the same.

What you primarily feel at the end of an episode of ACI, beyond fascination and the boffins’ mind-boggling determination to know exactly what happened, is real sympathy for the passengers, who are the only participants in these sagas who are never culpable. Except for the ones with bombs, that is.

Every accident leads to ‘recommendations’, which are implemented in order to prevent another prang. And the alterations are generally minor, addressing insidious little Achilles-heel problems that shouldn’t have needed such catastrophes to happen in order to make them apparent.

The black box flight data recorder was invented by an Australian guy in the nineteen fifties and began to be installed in commercial aircraft in the mid sixties. It’s been an invaluable asset to crash investigators, but both the cockpit voice recorder and instrument info boxes are heavy, can still be damaged, and are a bitch to find when they end up at the bottom of the sea. Why haven’t black boxes been miniaturised into small digital failsafe computer transponders relaying information every minute to the ground, to be checked over later if necessary? I don’t know.

And you know what else planes don’t have? (And I have researched this.) They don’t have rear-view mirrors. So, if an engine flames out or is being torn apart en route by a sky devil, like in that episode of The Twilight Zone, the flight crew can react in two ways. One is to look at the panel in front of them that has lit up and is suggesting with urgent blinks that an engine has failed, in which case, in the pilot’s mind, it’s the light rather than the engine that’s faulty, so might as well ignore it and get back to the crossword. Or, just to be safe, send one of the crew down the aisle to look out the window, searching for visual confirmation. Well, hey waddya know? The light is not faulty. The engine is engulfed in flames. Wouldn’t a rear-view mirror be useful? Yes, of course it fucking would. Do I need to write a letter to my local member?

At the foot of the unsettling ACI web page, there is, I swear, an ad for, and a link to, a website where you can go about conquering your fear of flying. Because if you weren’t afraid when you started reading about the accidents, now that you’ve gotten to the bottom of the page, you surely are. (And advising you to eat the in-flight food to distract you from thinking about fireballs screaming down the aisle seems a bit lame.)

What is of some comfort are facts such as this: most planes get hit by lightning and they’re designed to neutralise it. So, if you are flying through a storm and can see nothing out the window except the flash, every six seconds or so, of blinding storm activity, a preview of a day in hell … everything’s fine. I include this information for the benefit of a friend who recently found herself praying to god on a routine trip from Sydney to Melbourne. The late conversion to religion is a common occurrence on bumpy rides. So, get to know your deity.

Of course, you are far safer, we’re reminded constantly, in a plane than in a car – yeah, so what’s that supposed to mean? Anything is safer than being in a car. You’re more likely to win millions of bucks in a lottery than be in a plane accident. Yeah, well, I’m not sure the maths on that works out.

I want my pilots strong-jawed, confident, dedicated, clean living and brave. Svelte, tall and clean-shaven. Steely, calm and reassuring. Men, or, if absolutely necessary, women (I know, I know, I’m sorry, flying a plane just seems like it’s a boy thing, like starting wars), who have no outré sexual proclivities or undiagnosed illnesses. Guys who don’t wear women’s knickers. Women who don’t wear strap-ons. I want cartoon heroism. I want that guy who landed the 767 in the river.

As if New Yorkers hadn’t already had enough terrible plane action happening outside their office windows, imagine the sight of a heavy-duty airliner coming down quite gracefully and, you could be forgiven for thinking, deliberately, out on the river. An early end to the PowerPoint sales presentation, you'd imagine.

Pilot ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, the Sullster – or, as I like to call him, Ned Flanders – pulled off an absolutely freakish trick when he glided a big aeroplane deftly onto the Hudson. All well and good, but I’m of the opinion that there has to be a fall from grace. Perhaps the Sullman, the Sullmeister, and his criminally unheralded first officer falling asleep and waking up over some country they can’t recognise, for example. Or something to do with flight plans being discussed in toilet cubicles. I can see over his shoulder his infuriated wife, just holding it together as he delivers the mea culpa to the press. I see homophobic survivors of his gallant landing burning their Sullbooks. The potential sullying of Sully has already started for me. I mean, read this, for god’s sake.

New York, Nov.23 (ANI): A pilot who landed a jetliner in New York’s Hudson River, has said his heroics have led to ‘rock star sex’. In an interview with NBC’s People of the Year TV, Chesley Sullenberger and his wife, Laurie, said the famous incident had done wonders for their marriage. ‘He doesn’t know I’m gonna say this, but I had joked the other day that … the hero sex really helps a 20-year-old marriage,’ Mrs Sullenberger said. To which Sullenberger added: ‘Rock star sex.’

To which I add: Shut the fuck up.

‘Hey, baby …who’s your hero pilot? Oh yeah, I’m your hero pilot. Oh yeah, right there on the reverse thruster.’

Australia’s safety record is disturbingly impeccable. Qantas has never lost a passenger; not in the smear-of-bloody-pulp-on-a-rock-face way, at least, even though they seem to have been trying to for a while. It’s lost passengers who have deserted them for better service elsewhere, but there has never been a jet passenger crash in Australia … ever.

This should further ease all our anxieties about flying, but surely that big fat zero can’t last forever? And, I can assure you, when that day comes, when Channel Seven gets the monster breaking-news story it’s waited patiently for, when every blonde reporter from the Channel Nine news heads out to the crash site, when The 7pm Project has to work out how Hughesy will deal with the disaster, I will be part of it, a passenger dying for the cause of future safety improvements, part of all new episodes of Air Crash Investigation.

If you can find any bits of me, scatter my ashes over the Melbourne airport car park walkway. It seems only right.

The Bells! The Bells!

2011-06-06T22:20:00.000-07:00

July 2010

A few weeks ago (funny how many articles begin like that) … anyway, a few weeks ago I attended a literary speed-dating event at The Wheeler Centre, a huge and ancient building that stops Melbourne Central from spreading beyond Little Lonsdale Street. It was once a Roman amphitheatre or something. These days, though, it’s where writing happens. They sent me an email. I don’t know how they got my email address, but perhaps they were alerted by the folks who offer me things like ‘CilaisSoftTabs--_someFueIlForTheSexMacihne’.

It was a free event, and they were short on men. Yeah, all right then, I thought, I’ll help you out.

Preliminary instructions were sent: everyone was to take along a book they really dig. Or a book you figure might help you pick up.

Would I be able to pull off the ruse of being not as strange and moody and nervous as I usually appear if in a place full of strangers? Well, not every place. At soccer games I will hug strangers and scream obscenities at players who can’t hear me, whilst sitting next to families who surely can. I’m fine singing on a stage or doing stand-up, which I did for a little while. It’s the mingling that kills me. It’s out of my control. Small speak. Will computers, should they become self-aware, then become self-conscious? Just a thought.

To make this work I needed an urbane book: a witty comment on contemporary mores; a questing, beautiful, exciting work. A transcendental, godlike, universe-swallowing book.

So I approached the bookcases. John Banville? Tom Wolfe? Cormac McCarthy? What an educated charmer I must be. Then I thought that maybe I should take something a chick wrote, to lend me some equal rights cred. Helen Garner? Helen Zahavi? (Essentially a one-good-book writer, but it was a very good book, and that’s more books than most people write, particularly car detailers and boilermakers.) Austen? Too clichéd. The Woolfe? Wolfe? Hmm … no, back to the masters. Gustave Flaubert? Graham Greene? Salinger? Matthew Reilly? Max ‘Tangles’ Walker?

Suddenly I had it. The Bumper Book Of Insults by Nancy McPhee. (‘An amiable history of insult, invective, imprecation and incivility.’) All the great wits are in there, and they really hate one another.

From the gently jovial ‘I like your music but it just doesn’t sound right.’ (anon.) to the more fervent, such as William Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan) on a foe, ‘No-one can have a higher opinion of him than me, and I think he’s a dirty little beast.’ Very cool. But I got the book from a two-dollar shop, and it looks like it, so I suppose I didn’t want to look that cheap.

I like reading 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die more than I like reading more than a few of the 1001 books. The problem is, there’s not much to discuss with books like that – fact books, biographies, non-fiction; books not of ideas, but of things. But I like facts, and things, and something like The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge would suit. The problem is, I would have needed a wheelbarrow to take the weight of that baby, one of the great super-heavyweight tomes of publishing history.

But I think I knew all along what would be in my bag: Experience, the somewhat premature autobiography by Martin Amis. Why? Because it’s the best book I’ve read. Not necessarily the most entertaining, but the most impressive. Hands down. Also – and this is embarrassing – it borders on inspirational. Look what words can do!

When I arrived at The Wheeler Centre – or across the road from it, at least – a gaggle of about ten people was loosely huddled outside the extravagant glass frontage. I went to the toilet in Melbourne Central, dropped a Valium, and got lost trying to get out. When I rebooted my bearings and exited, there was across the road something resembling a queue, which I joined.

I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to talk to anyone else. Would that defeat the purpose of talking to them later, at the allotted time in the allotted location? I had been reading (at home) Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, and her name came up in a conversation going on beside me and, oh wow, what a coincidence, etc. Did the lady want a Mintie? ‘Why not?’ she said, so I gave her one. Was I hitting on someone before I’d even got into the lobby? I spotted, as well, two people clutching copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. This was the literary equivalent, I suppose, of turning up wearing the same dress as someone else.

By now I was padlocked in one of those inert lines, which begins to piss you off because someone who is obviously ill-prepared for what they’re there for is holding everything up. I was sensing a simmering book-event rage. There’s always some cu— oh, okay, here we go, now we’re moving.

My name crossed out and the featherweight bouncer allowing me past, I entered an ice-rink-sized room, trestle-tabled, and nametagged for each punter to find their seat. I wrapped my parka around the back of my allotted chair, and headed off for booze, swilling down several glasses of the white before the seats were even warmed.

As we attendees settled in our places, a very pleasant young woman called Catherine sat down opposite me, and we started chatting in a general ‘What brought you here?’ kind of way. About five minutes later, the MC, Jane Clifton, called us to order and explained the rules: 1. talk for five minutes; 2. write the name of the person you’re interested in on the sheet provided; and 3. the ladies do the shifting, moving one to the right as the men sit there like lazy bastards. MC JC rang a bell. We were off!

So … Catherine and I … did we break the rules by talking before the bell? Had we jumped the start, like bookish Olympic sprinters? What now? Well now, five minutes with Catherine of course, and that was fine, so a good start, I felt. It helps if you’re interested in people. I don’t understand people who are not interested in people, and yet intensely fascinated by, and usually very pleased about, themselves.

A vaguely bohemian woman with sharp black hair and art gallery glasses was next. She’d forgotten to bring a book but said it would probably have been Austen. Which is a pretty prosaic choice, as mentioned. Austen’s devastating talent is inarguable, but aren’t we all a bit Austened out by now? Enough with the film adaptations. To my mind, something more idiosyncratic would be the go for an occasion like this. I was pleased, mind you, not to have had to talk about vampire books.

Briiiiiiiing …. Next!

Then opposite me, a woman in her fifties, altogether nice. So, what had attracted her to this? I knew the answer: you’re single, you like books, and might meet other book persons with whom you might sense a ‘chemistry’, as they say. I had a chemistry/ fart joke thing prepared but let that one go … let it go! See what I just did? Turns out her husband had died, and there’s no good way to respond to that, except change the subject pronto.

Ting a ling a linnnnnnnng. Next! This was going quite well. I felt all grown-up.

Next was bloody Melissa … ooh, she really pissed me off, that one. She was either drunk, stoned or high on paint. We’ve all been there, confronted with the shit-faced sot and, with no way out, copping the dull stare, the absence of presence and, worst, the slightly contemptuous air that suggested in this case that her being whacked out was my fault. Bye, Melissa, sorry you couldn’t make it.

Susan and I talked about shopping at Dirt Cheap Books with a basket to load books into. Nice to meet you, bye. Shelley had brought along Ian McEwan’s Atonement. A barometer book, in my opinion. The object most people there might have held at some point (if not The Book Of Insults). We at speed-lit read a little more than most people, therefore we have read Atonement. A bit posh and yet not undemocratic. Quality upper-middle-brow. ‘Wasn’t Keira Knightley skinny in the movie?’ I said to Shelley. We agreed she was too skinny.

But what of me and Martin Amis? Jaw-dropping delight from my chat pals? Not quite. Several women had no idea who he was. Two women had an idea who he was. One woman claimed to have read a Martin Amis novel but, after I’d nominated almost every one of them without seeing any glimpse of familiarity, I thought she must have imagined it.

Then there was a finger-food, wine-swill intermission during which, ironically, I met a brassy mid-twenties girl who, like me, was there mostly for a laugh. She complained about the several men at her table who resembled Woody Allen. I checked them out and saw a couple who looked more like Goebbels. We arranged to meet at evening’s end but by then I felt like one of the dancers in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. A merry-go-round gone exhausted-go-round.

No bewitching eyes, no carnal signals, no leftfield books. No Mensa member hellcats. My last new-best-friend-for-five minutes was Lucia … well, Lucia, she accused me of being drunk. That one stung, particularly having been tormented earlier by the flamboyantly smashed Melissa. Unless she’d actually seen me get a few under my belt in the early stages, Lucia had no reason to presume such a thing. I was perfectly coherent and alert. I mumble a bit but that’s just me. And my protests were cut short because, all of a sudden, that was that. Last bell. Fuck off, the lot of you. A final sour note sounding on what turned out to be an evening almost as precisely wishy-washy as I’d imagined.

People who had met people who they liked, and had indicated so on their cattle sheet thing, dropped their paper, ballot-style, on the way out. Should two persons be interested in one another, contact details would be delivered. I screwed up my sheet and binned it.

I was unhappy Lucia got away scot-free. Where was my book of insults when I needed it? Melissa too … she deserved a caustic slam-down, but she was probably asleep in the toilet. Hey, Melissa – how could I better sum you up than to quote Christopher Fry, whoever he was, who described someone whose fan club he was not a member of thus: ‘You slawzy poodle, you tike, you crapulous puddering pipsqueak.’ Are you listening, Melissa?

To the rest of you, I can only echo the words of Groucho Marx. I’ve had a wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

There Goes My Hero

2011-06-06T22:11:00.000-07:00

Derren Brown is the coolest guy on earth. Way cooler than Keith Richards or David Bowie or … House. Who is he? He’s an illusionist/mentalist/psychologist/sceptic and unprepossessing genius whose TV shows, from first minute to last, teem with drop-jaw, freaky amazements. He’s a guy, yeah, but you have to understand that he is not a regular-human-being-type guy. He is some sort of wizard from the future, gone on holiday to twenty-first century earth to amuse himself for a while, fucking with people’s heads. I can’t prove it but since almost everything he does is plainly impossible, it’s the only conclusion I can draw.

Now, look over there in the opposite corner – that’s American ‘psychic’ John Edward, the biggest douche-bag in the universe. He was voted thus on an episode of South Park. (And there were some mighty big douches from many distant galaxies nominated.) When talking about that episode recently, South Park’s Trey Parker said, ‘We literally did decide this guy was the worst. He was the worst guy in the world. There’s nothing you can do right now that’s worse than this.’

Blowing up innocent people is worse, but I know where he’s coming from.

I see a heart problem with a father-figure in your family, a father, a grandfather, an uncle, a cousin... I'm definitely seeing chest pain here for a father-figure in your family.

Edward pretends he’s talking to dead people – specifically, the relatives of the depressingly gullible who go to tapings of his TV show, or attend his concerts, under the impression that they might get to catch up with the late lamented.

I sense an older male figure in your life, who wants you to know whilst you may have had disagreements in your life, he still loved you.

It’s called cold reading; fishing about until one of your suggestions somehow strikes a nerve with someone in the audience.

Did anybody lose someone they loved with the name Andrew or Anthony … I’m getting an A. It may be a relative, maybe a friend.

When a hand goes up in the air, Edward will home in shark-style, prodding and poking until he’s virtually telling the person what the person has just told him.

He makes this shit up, of course, and the amazing thing is, he’s not even that good at it.

I see a woman that isn’t a blood relative. Someone around when you were growing up, an aunt, a friend of your mother, a stepmother with blackness in the chest, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer...

Here’s a perfect Edward moment. Enough already.

The audience is, to a man, and to a woman, credulous of course. And it’s fucking hard work for Edward, by the look of it. Agonisingly concentrated, he’ll maybe guess that your gran is either dead or not very well, or that someone called Rob or Robbie lived down the street. ‘He passed away, yes?’ ‘Yes, John! He passed! How could you know that?’

Oddly, and this is something sceptics find especially risible, including me, these wafting spirits hanging out in Edward’s incredible supernatural mind don’t seem to have surnames.

Numerous Marks, Mikes, Martys, Marys, Steves, Stefans, Staceys and Stans. But psychics have an answer for the surname conundrum, and here it is: ‘It doesn’t work that way.’ It doesn’t WORK THAT WAY! Could anything be more bogus? Could Edward undermine his abilities more comprehensively? He is a fucktard. A smarmy, snake-oil peddling, exploitative piece of shit. On every level, he is obnoxious. If he were here in the room with me, I’d smack him in the face with a frying pan.

Now, back to the personable Derren Brown and his cheerful, astonishephenomenality. Depending on how interested you are in the incredible weird talents of Derren that are revealed on the links herewith, you might lose a day watching him on the YouTube.

So, let’s peruse a few quick clips to whet your appetite. Here’s Derren cold reading. He makes Edward look ridiculous. If only they could go head to head.

So, how did he do it? That elevator thing! What the fuck? Well, he ain’t gonna tell us. Now, witness this minor, lo-fi moment in which he ‘reads’ David Frost’s mind. And, remember, there are quite a few cities in the world. Milan? Milan!

Derren Brown could probably sell himself as an overlord, and rule a large part of the planet. The more superstitious the folks he’d talk to, the more Godhead power he’d accrue. He would make Christ’s interventions (especially these days) look like the shonky work of an underachiever. A guy who said he’d come back soon, but just keeps everyone waiting. ‘It’ll be ready by Tuesday.’ Yeah, right, JC.

Here’s Derren in a nightclub being a bit sleazy. (It’s okay, he’s gay.)

What he’s demonstrating here is super-hero power. Spider-Man might be able to walk upside down on the ceiling but he wouldn’t get laid half as much as Derren could if he wanted. Spider-Man couldn’t knock on your door, look into your eyes, ask for your car keys and drive off in your car.

What about money? In one Derren night, he could bag a million at least. Check this out. The lucky guy he takes under his wing is having the time of his life. He’s not a bad thief either.

Unlike that carping twerp James Randi and other over-excited doubters on the many geeky poorly-designed sceptic sites on the web, Derren Brown is able to debunk and mislead and frighten, I mean, really frighten, people routinely, and with ever more entertaining set-ups. Randi might have been able to show how Uri Geller bends a spoon, but that’s it. Derren can tap you on the shoulder and make your legs stick to the ground. Then tell you your mobile number. But that’s chickenfeed.

On a trip to America several years ago, Derren tricked, baffled and exposed the buffoonery of many an aficionado of ghostly paranormal activity, as well as various church leaders, UFOlogists and other wack-jobs. He says at the start of that USA program that if ANYBODY asks him if something fishy is going on, he’ll say, ‘Yes, I’m just an illusionist.’ Not once … NOT ONCE was he asked if he was cheating, or doing the stuff of a showman. Not once was he asked if he were possessed of the very earthly gifts of advanced hypnotic manipulation. No sirree, Bob.

Here’s the US show in eight parts. For the VERY fascinated only, I expect.

Now and then and, of course, far too infrequently, Derren explains how he does stuff. A rare example of him fessing up is when he challenges to play against him nine mega-boffin chess heavyweights, including two grandmasters, and some other champion egghead boffs. He sits them down and plays them simultaneously, wandering around from game to game with a louche nonchalance, sliding pieces into places the poor bastards who are so used to winning haven’t thought of, or prepared for. It’s here that we discover just what a phenomenal memory Derren has. So, check out how he whips the chess champs. Oh, and in case he feels we’re leaving with some knowledge of his tactics, and that it might give us some ideas with which we can begin to decode his tricks, Derren caps the exercise off with a coda that is, as always, casually, staggeringly, scarily and completely impossible. I feel like my brain might detonate like that guy in Scanners if I watch too much of this. What a fucking smart-arse.

Here are a few more highlights of Derren Brown on the net.

1. Co-creator of The Office Stephen Merchant is made thoroughly depressed after succumbing to a very simple and incredibly frustrating ruse involving two cards. And a thousand quid.

2. Almost cruel, this one. You could hardly fuck with someone’s head more comprehensively.

3. Now, of course you and I would see an abandoned wallet on the footpath with a big yellow circle around it. Wouldn’t we? Surely we would.

4. Derren makes a chap drunk sans alcohol. It’s laugh out loud, readers. A good hypnotist can make a volunteer act drunk while in a state of suggestibility, sure. But this guy’s wide awake.

5. Here, the kid taking the penalties knows less about where the ball is going than Derren does. When he predicts the ball hitting the post … for fuck’s sake. Boy might have taken fifty penalties? Nah, too easy. He is far too impressed for it to have been a handful of guesses.

6. ‘The System’ was a hugely entertaining special episode where Derren set out to prove there’s a system that can be used to pick winners at the races. It’s in eight parts on YouTube, each about six minutes long. If you can’t watch the lot, then parts two and three should just blow your minds. He tells us how he did most of it but, of course, the really weird bits he won’t share at all. How did he know which horse would win the last race.

At some point I intend taking Derren hostage and, while waving a hot poker in his face, enquiring about how his dazzling set pieces are achieved. In a microsecond, of course, he’d have the poker in his own hands, and I’d be tied to a chair in a busy street with no trousers on.

All I want in life is to know how Derren Brown does this stuff. I want to know this more than I want to sleep with Monica Belluci, more than I want Australia to win the World Cup. Have me resemble the Elephant Man, but just tell me how he does it.

Ultimately, I’m forced to concur with Stephen Merchant, who, after his card debacle, says, ‘I’ll be emotionally scarred, for a few days. I’ll be angry, frustrated, then I’ll just go back to my sad, pitiful life.’

Mate, if Derren Brown calls, JUST … SAY … NO.

Regrets? I've had a million

2011-06-06T22:01:00.000-07:00

Edith Piaf had a pretty shitty life. Abandoned as a kid by an absent mother, brought up in a brothel, a mother at seventeen to a girl who died, aged two, of meningitis, she was smashed about in two bad car accidents, and one very bad one, which shattered bones all over her body. (She was sitting next to Charles Aznavour, a bad scene even before the prang. You simply shouldn’t go driving in France. Albert Camus and Isadora Duncan tried it and paid big time.)

Taking all these bone-breaks and heartaches into consideration, Edith was still proud to declare ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’, which in English is, of course … hang on, I’ll look it up. Okay, that’s right, which in English is ‘I Regret Nothing’.

But was she serious? No regrets about the car wrecks? None for her doomed lovers? No angst about having seen very little of Marcelle before the child’s terrible death? Non! Mon dieu! Talk about ‘I’m a glass half-full kind of person’. (I’m a glass half-full person too. But it’s hard to drink that much cow vomit in one sitting.)

Unlike Edith, I regret pretty much everything. Don’t you? I spend long, languid afternoons sipping cider and examining, in forensic detail, those special painful and upsetting moments. The ‘Man, what was I thinking?’ ones.

Here’s a new regret I prepared earlier: I buy about two CDs a year these days, and otherwise steal online with impunity. The last album I bought was OK Go’s Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky. Wicked singles and startling film clips, including this, the best rock video in history. The record’s just not as good as I expected. But in JB Hi-Fi it was as though I were divested of my free will, somehow destined by philosophical determinism to buy a record that was not really worth the money.

Another typical example: if no other ciders are available at a pub, I’ll order a pot of Coldstream, a bat-piss stinker of a cider, abnormally opaque and containing only homeopathic traces of apple. I’ll buy it because I haven’t got the message from the last time I tried it, which was to avoid that stuff from now until the end of time.

The first thing I regret having done was deliberately pissing my pants in Grade Two. I was hit by a violent crampy stomach pain in class, so they fetched my brother (Grade Four) to take me home. At the school gates he asked me if I’d peed. No I hadn’t but, rather than go back to the school facility, I just stood there and, yes, pissed my pants. Saturated them. End of cramp. Problem solved. It was all fine until I got home. Then it wasn’t fine. And I learned a life lesson. Use a toilet. Don’t take a slash in your shorts. You don’t want to ruin your Bata Scouts or get a slap from your dad.

In Grade Five my neurotic teacher, Miss Page, took us up onto the netball court for a rare P.E outing. (I have to say she looked amazing, Miss Page. Like Himmler.) We all stood in a circle and two netballs were introduced, the idea being that every second person was in the second-person team, and would try to catch the first-person team and overtake them. So, every time the balls caught one another up, some poor soul would be called on to catch both simultaneously. Can you see what was happening to create this problem? The numbers were uneven. There were twenty-seven or thirty-one students, not twenty-six. So the first team and the second team would merge and the whole house of cards would collapse. I knew what was going on. Everyone else knew what was going on. Miss Page didn’t. She lost her rag after the third unavoidable fumble and we all trudged back to class. I wish I’d told her what was going wrong – in order to stay outside in the sun but mostly to make her look like the fucking idiot she was.

In Grade Eight I managed to get Kay Wallace to ‘go with me’. I didn’t know what to do now that I was going with someone. I knew what I was supposed to do. And to further emphasise my inability to do it, I spent an afternoon in somebody’s pool room sitting with Kay, watching my brother and his friend Robert pash their respective girlfriends, only stopping to sit upright and laugh at me. The closest I got to necking was putting my arm around Kay’s shoulders and keeping it there until it was numb.

Back at school, Kay dropped me. And fast. As the months passed she blossomed into a beauty the likes of which you would only find in a Botticelli painting at a gallery in Florence. Her lack of interest by now, of course, was complete. She started dating thugs.

Naturally I couldn’t let that experience teach me anything. Two years later I more or less repeated the same thing with Kate Wall. She was a willowy, posh English girl who was unambiguously keen on me, but once more I was frozen. Kate was personified in my novel Buzzed as Susan Cake, a girl so English she may as well have had a tattoo of Churchill above her butt. I was fourteen. It was just a little bit too early still for me to confidently take a deep breath and … DO SOMETHING.

The next year, Kate appeared at the college where I was studying for the HSC (she was a year behind me, so new to the co-ed college scene, where you could smoke and play pool and do nothing much else at all). Now achingly stunning, Kate made Kay Wallace look like Queen Victoria. I happened upon her sitting in the autumn sun, and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation, during which I sensed I was being toyed with by a young woman well aware of the heartbreaking power she could wield over young men by doing nothing except sitting there. It would make little difference if she puked all over herself, or dribbled when she laughed. You could still fall in love with her if she were in a coma.

But that was it with me and Kate. By now I had finally worked out that striking while the girl was hot was essential. With that knowledge under my belt, I spent the next few years crashing, burning and humiliating myself in the name of love. One doleful romantic travesty followed another.

I regret, too, not having superpowers, particularly the one that would allow me to travel back in time to beat the shit out of some people who bullied me.

My greatest regret, though, the one I still ruminate over daily, was played out on a soccer pitch in Brisbane in 1978. We (Tasmania) were playing the scummers (New South Wales) in the national under 16 tournament. We were the best team Tassie had ever sent. We actually won games. Halfway through the second half, we were not only leading 3-1 but I’d scored two of our goals. This was dreamworld for me. Tasmania doesn’t beat New South Wales or Victoria and, yet, here we were. How could anything possibly go wr— .

With about fifteen minutes to go, and in a moment of perfect madness and total auto-sabotage, I attempted to tackle one of the blue guys, but mistimed my challenge and struck the ball firmly and with pinpoint accuracy into our own goal, past the desperate dive of our goalkeeper. That brought it back to 3-2. Sniffing a change in the wind, they deployed the bully-state after-burners and rapidly knocked in another couple. The final whistle. I collapsed, begging that someone would plunge a garden pitchfork through my chest. A punishment our coach would have been entitled to mete out himself.

Many years later I saw Barry, the coach, at a state championship soccer soiree, and it was made apparent while we chatted, almost before we chatted, that my fateful mis-kick had destroyed two lives. Mine and his too. It had cloaked the sunshine of his days, just as it had mine, and it had probably cost him his marriage.

I regret almost every review of every record I ever critiqued. I could be very mean-spirited. My piece on The Cult’s Sonic Temple, for example, began like this: ‘It is, of course, crap.’ I asked Kim Wilde what she thought about Thatcher. I interviewed Steve Cropper. Steve! Cropper! The piece was held over for a week but then dropped off the radar. Never published. If you’re going to waste someone’s time, try not to make it that of the man generally viewed as, next to Hendrix, the most important guitarist in history.

My ‘if only’s are filed and organised and always being expanded upon. Big regrets, little ones, silly ones, costly ones. None can be undone. You think I should get over my ruminating and fulminating? You don’t understand. I coulda had class, I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody. And I coulda pashed Kate Wall.

Falling down where you left off

2011-06-06T21:50:00.001-07:00

I did my back on a recent Sunday, picking up a guitar speaker box to put in my car. It wasn’t an especially weighty thing, and most people wouldn’t be troubled if asked to carry it around for a few minutes. Even one handed. My legs, though, began to quiver at about the thirty-second mark, and then started to fold in and lower slowly, like a hydraulic car compressor. You win, gravity.

Having reached the car, I leaned over momentarily, but with poor posture, to put the thing in the back, which was when something went twang.

Were the rock gods trying to tell me something? I haven’t had any active involvement in music for a decade now. An encroaching middle-aged decrepitude, coupled with a general laziness, has pretty much done the trick. I don’t really have anything to say as a songwriter these days, and the theft of my bass guitar was a crushing and terminal blow.

The last band I was in, Jacuzzi Suit – and there are two other bands also called Jacuzzi Suit, I shit you not – required a serious commitment of which I was growing weary even back in 2001. We spent week after week honing songs we’d written, and wanted to eventually record. We had all made records in other bands, with varying levels of success. ‘Success’ being not very successful at all. Not compared with, say, Spiderbait. But listing our previous bands made for a reasonably strong CV, if judged on the venues and the other cities we played. The band I was in in 1991, The Fish John West Reject, was on tour quite often. Several trips to Perth; many, many drives to Sydney. A lot of gigs in Tasmania. The money dried up. The band’s second album sold less than its predecessor and, oh, baby, that’s a bad sign.

Long and arduous tours are just what you do in indie music land. Most often it’s a recipe for fiscal disaster. It costs thousands of dollars, either yours or the record company’s, and you might not sell enough CDs to in any way cover the costs.

Having a hit – like, let’s say, Frente – can make it worse. The follow-up release stiffs, and the costs accrued and owed to record companies are multiplied due to the choice of a far more expensive studio, and expensive, hyperbolic ad campaigns. That’s what you’re looking at, and what you expect. It’s the most cost ineffective of all artistic pursuits. But the impulse to create and make permanent will almost certainly override caution when you have a bunch of songs you like.

Jacuzzi Suit played half a dozen shows, then our drummer moved to France. His name was Frank. It was only later that I found out his name was Francois. He was a lovely guy, though sporadically violent if aggrieved. We auditioned a few other drummers but they were rubbish, and couldn’t punch out a bouncer either, so we gave up. And I retired.

I missed playing from the moment I stopped doing it. But it was never enough of an itch to require scratching. I’m playing now, though, due to exceptional circumstances. Exceptionally exceptional.

My friend Murray has been messing about with guitars and stuff over the last few years, and is a member of a cow-punk outfit that may never play a gig. He asked if I wanted to jam with him. I’d had this vague idea for a covers band that would do bubblegum tunes of the sixties, like ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’, ‘1, 2, 3 Red Light’, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, ‘Five O’Clock World’, etc.

But I had no guitar, no amp, no microphones; no money to pay for the beer-drenched mouldy, smoked practice rooms that you have no choice but to hire; and no inclination to be lugging various heavy objects to and fro.

A visit to Murray’s warehouse – he’s a surveyor – changed everything. It’s a band’s wet-dream chocolate-flavoured heaven. One large office has been transformed into a practice room and studio. Luxurious drapes soak up the noise, and there are so many leads and microphone stands hither and thither that you can easily trip over them. The walls are lined with amplifiers and guitars. Murray also has computer recording software, so we can multi-track every practice, to be examined when we debrief.

Murray has an expensive Ibanez bass guitar, which looks a bit like a purchase from Cashies but makes a beautiful noise. It’s mine to use when I wish. Mine to take home if I want. And the place is a five-minute walk away. All I need to take from home are some sheets with chords on them and a plectrum. Well, I don’t even need a plectrum, actually.

You’ll find a beer fridge offering several choices of brew but also replete with fruit juices. There are scattered bean bags for loafing, an Italian coffee machine, and central heating. The various indulgences that I would have demanded before I even thought about falling back into music can all be ticked off. And then some. Murray is plugged in to the electricity grid for the whole of the warehouse precinct, and he doesn’t even have to contribute to electricity costs. His only outlays are on guitars. The whole thing is just completely brilliant. Presented with this, it was more or less impossible to find a reason not to do it, other than just not wanting to do it.

And so it began. Soon enough I coaxed a couple of proper musician friends of mine to join in and the four of us began to learn very fiddly songs: things like ‘Telephone Line’ by ELO. Initially, the idea was to get on top of tunes like that and, through hard work, add them one by one to our set, leaving audiences stunned by our talents. But as the weeks passed, the less inclined we were to try to polish this stuff, so even songs we’d sweated over for a month or more were jettisoned, to everyone’s relief, and replaced by thrashier stuff: glam, seventies new wave, as per The Undertones, Buzzcocks and Cheap Trick. One by one we built up a set. A smattering of Big Star, the MC5, and our one concession to ‘the Fitzroy sound’, Neil Young’s ‘Cinnamon Girl’.

(The Fitzroy sound – and the Brunswick one too, to some extent – is rootsy, and country-themed. Miller and Lee check shirts, tatts and The Band, Gram Parsons or Townes Van Zandt covers. Always played very well, and moderately enjoyable … up to a point. But the newest addition to our set is ‘Shout It Loud’ by Kiss. Enough said.)

We are called The TV Set. We’ve played four gigs, each much better than the one before. It’s fully sick rad. Last Sunday we got 300 bucks for two forty-minute sets at the Marquis of Lorne (it was worth soldiering on despite the back thing). This is a remarkable result. As much as Melbourne is lauded as the rock capital of the world by many a self-congratulatory band or punter, and as much as the pressure on the suits to leave the venues alone has brought some changes, the fact is that bands get fuck all money. It never changes. You got ninety bucks for a support slot in 1996? It’ll be eighty now.

There are venues that cry foul about noise complaints, etc, and fair enough, but some just know they can get away with giving enthusiastic young bands peanuts. If you’re new, it’s quite a triumph to get any kind of place on a bill. But that’s part of the whole thing. It verges on pay to play.

Michael, one of our mighty duo of guitarists, plays with Kim Salmon in various projects (in the studio and at gigs) and when I informed him I had seventy-five bucks to give him, he emailed me, saying, ‘Wow, I’m a professional!’ He was joking. But he could mount a pretty good argument that he wasn’t.

So many groups and singers these days. They seem to proliferate as rapidly as Australia’s population. Brumby’s pre-election Music HQ grant scheme was a double-edged sword. With a bit of money to spend, any self-respecting young band should be blowing the cash on booze and drugs, should be chucking up in clubs, should be infamously mad, bad and dangerous to know, and ready to go to rehab. But now, if a band fancies the money (so that’s everyone), they have to be sensible and polite, and fill in one of these application forms with more pages in it than War and Peace.

Come on, a bit of sedition, people. I never got a grant when I was a boy. I paid my dues and I’ll tell you this: I’m ENTITLED to be well paid for banging out some fun tunes for old people. (Both our drummer, Jamie, and guitarist Michael are in their early thirties, which makes them laughably young for Murray and me to be hanging about with.)

The kids are alright, I suppose… just alright … not great. It’s up to we the elderly, it seems, to be insulting and anarchic and reckless and … y’know, situationist and shit.

I dare you to come and see us. Come on, have a go if you’re hard enough.

I’m now consciously and deliberately choosing songs to play from the set list of my first band, which was playing in 1983. I’ve been playing ‘Surrender’ by Cheap Trick now and then in bands for almost thirty years. It might seem ridiculous for The TV Set – or the two members over forty-five, anyway – to be playing ‘Teenage Kicks’ but the smiles on the audience’s faces prove that loud guitars, good tunes and valuable, indestructible friendships will never die. What does that say about me? About us? I’m just not sure.

That Sunday I went for the Pete Townshend mid-air power chord, and gravity, once more and cruelly, dumped me back down on a pair of stiff legs and arthritic knees, which crackled noisily in complaint.

I’m not sure what the definition of old is these days but I still hope I die before I get to it. If I haven’t already. I will rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light. I will not go gently. I will rock. I will RAAAAAWWWKKK! Just as long as I can have a bath and a cup of tea straight after.

Christ On A Bus

2011-06-06T21:50:00.000-07:00

As a person whose atheism is sturdy enough to make Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens sound like men who are not quite sure about the whole God thing, I do like to indulge in one Easter ritual with a connection to the main event, rather than just dribbling crème caramel egg down my chin.1

Every April I turn on Fox Classics and settle in for another re-run of Norman Jewison’s 1973 film of Jesus Christ Superstar. Now, the distaste for anything composed by the twitty Lord (‘muck’) Andrew Lloyd Webber (the face from the Planet Gonad) is justifiable, as the mere mention of pretty much every halitosis-exhaling, dung-steaming musical he has ever composed can shoot puke up into your mouth. Evita, Cats, Starlight Express, The Phantom of the Opera. Burrrrp. Bleeuugh.

But long before all those ‘mum and dad tourist’ horrors, he created Jesus Christ Superstar, which is entirely brilliant, and one of the most erroneously slandered musical works of all time.

As a rock opera (a genre in which only Tommy by The Who can also claim any merit) Superstar benefits hugely too from Tim Rice’s lyrics. He’s a whiz with political satire, a keen examiner of the torments of hanging on to religious faith (and fraternal trust) when everything is turning to shit, and masterfully understands Mary Magdalene’s terrible devotion to a man (just a man?) she knows has too much to deal with due to his global-saviour diary to invest in something as earthbound as one-on-one love. For all this poignancy, Rice has been mostly accused of writing ‘schlock’, as though the story can’t possibly be reduced to entertainment, and told that he should stick to the heft and divinity of the King James version of Christianity, like Nick Cave does.

After Evita, Lloyd Webber’s musicals are Riceless and all the worse for it.

The Jesus Christ Superstar movie was made in 1973. Norman Jewison’s directorial CV is close to impeccable: The Cincinnati Kid, In the Heat of the Night, and then, after JCS, Rollerball, …And Justice For All and many more. So, there was no Richard Attenborough softcock approach here. Jewison wasn’t going to skimp on the sex and violence.

The film opens with a slow and ominous guitar intro swelling into the soundtrack’s overture, as a psychedelic Ken Kesey-type love-bus bumps its way along a rocky desert road and up a hill, at the top of which it disgorges a bunch of hot-looking young hippies, all frilled and fringed in leather and suede, and bootylicious in tight denim flares. Gleaming helmets are distributed to bad guys wearing Bonds singlets, while swarthy breastplated scary bearded dudes swish black capes and adjust bizarre giant hats (Caiaphas and his High Priests. Boo! Hiss!). The cross itself is handed down from the bus roof rack. Far out! Then the grooviness kicks off with a bit of a tribal dance, at the end of which our Jesus, Ted Neeley, is hoisted aloft to the symphonic crash of the opera’s signature tune. Uplifting stuff.

Ted was a very attractive man. He made Daniel Johns look like, well, one of the other guys in silverchair, and Johnny Depp someone likely to find roles only as Quasimodo or Richard III. (Disclosure: I’m exaggerating.) Ted’s been playing Jesus onstage for decades now and may well become the first stage messiah to need a walking frame to get to Calvary.

There actually isn’t the slightest sliver of evidence to suggest that the Christian lord and saviour had long hair, or was at all photogenic. More likely, he resembled the guy at my local kebab shop, a profoundly unhandsome bloke with chest hair up to his ears. (Here’s a forensic version of what Christ may have looked like.) This rather rougher, swarthier version of Jesus would in itself, I’m sure, deal Christianity a glancing blow.

As the bus passengers set off to follow Jesus on foot towards Jerusalem, Judas, portrayed (somewhat controversially) by African-American Carl Anderson in an awesome pink cheesecloth ensemble, climbs upon a spectacular craggy tor, to belt out ‘Heaven on Their Minds’, his thinking-out-loud warning to Jesus that the whole Hosanna carnival is getting out of hand and that he, Judas, intends checking out. The riff would do any band of the era (Deep Purple2; Humble Pie; Led Zep, in particular) proud.

Filmed in Israel, Jewison’s movie makes great use of spectacular ancient ruins, and vast desolate mountains and plains as locations, but mixes the whole thing up with some present-day props, the magic bus being just one. Herod hangs out on a modernist pontoon on the shores of the Dead Sea, and the Pharisees loiter on builders’ scaffolding. The best of the contemporary props, though, are military rentals. When Judas is out in the desert, wondering about whether or not to dob in Jesus, five giant tanks rumble over the hill and bear down on him. Having been made an offer he can’t refuse, Judas runs like hell to tell all.

Interestingly, Israel was at war with the tag-team of Egypt and Syria for some of 1973, the latter two countries seeking revenge and face-saving after a bad result in the Six-Day War of 1967. (Operation Shock and Crème Brulee, I think it was called.) It’s possible, I suppose, in that case, that the tanks rumbling into view in the movie were, in fact, looking for Arab insurgents and got lost, following Judas only to ask for directions.

The movie gets seriously adults only, and incredibly seventies, when Jesus arrives at the temple in Jerusalem, a terrifically holy place, where, against regulations, all manner of wickedness is going down. Cameras zoom in on the gyrating crotches of hookers, while drug dealers home in on teenagers, and bookies take bets on bird races. Spivs energetically barter with hookahs, whips, and machine guns. Talk about your moral turpitude.

I got things you won’t believe,
Name your pleasure I will sell.
I can fix your wildest needs,
I got heaven and I got hell.

Jesus is ropeable to say the least and, vibrating with disgust, he gets straight to kicking some sin-soaked ass: tearing the market apart stall by stall; upturning rotating postcard displays; smashing some expensive, high-quality gourds; and destroying a display of Franco Cozzo bedside mirrors (in Brunzawick, Footezgray and Izzyrail). Angry Ted hits some high notes here that could break up an Arab missile in mid-air. It’s just a classic bit of cinema.

It’s impossible to find a crap song in JCS. ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’, as sung by Yvonne Elliman (and no one else, especially Helen Reddy3), is heart-wrenching. I even like the slight ‘Could We Start Again’, but that may be because much of it is sung by Paul Thomas, who went on to star in, and then direct, hardcore porn. So, he had trouble staying on message God-wise, and was probably already framing his first money shot.

To my delight, I’ve discovered that there are still protests against Jesus Christ Superstar when it rolls into certain towns. Most determined of the placard-waving loopers are the Reformation-inspired Calvinists and Presbyterians. For those whose quality time consists of a couple of hours of godly genuflection, and then a cold shower, Superstar is blasphemy of the kind where cooking the offender with a flame-thrower and eating their heart is merely to issue a slap on the wrist.

What they dislike most, these determined and doggedly orthodox Christians, is that the opera is not very religious. There’s no indication within it that Jesus could perform miracles, or wake up and not be dead anymore. (Part of the reason for that is because the show ends at the crucifixion. Der.) The Jesus portrayed by Lloyd Webber and Rice and Jewison gets fed up with the lepers because they won’t form an orderly line; he argues with his father about all the forsaking; and may be fornicating with Mary Magdalene, who’s maybe a hooker.

The Free Presbyterian Church of Cork uncorked various complaints about the opera’s arrival some years back, one of them being an allegation that the apostles were drunk at the Last Supper. I’m sure the apostles would refute those allegations completely, and, as for that other incident, Matthew thought she was eighteen.

The FPCC didn’t stop with a slanging match outside the theatre either. Their bellicose leader went on local radio to froth and foam about the horrors of Superstar, but he found the announcer less than sympathetic to his objections. This collusion with Satan wasn’t appreciated by the church rep, a Rev Colin Maxwell, who, the day after, posted on their flashy website, ‘I rebuked him live on air as a blasphemer and told him that his mouth was an open sepulchre and the poison of asps was under his lips. (Romans 3:13)’ That number again is Romans 3:13.

At the movie’s close, all the flower people (minus Ted/Jesus, who is dead/in heaven) shed their characters, re-load the bus and head into the sunset to whatever West Coast, or New York City stoner communes they came from.

No theatrical versions of Jesus Christ Superstar, no matter how handsomely mounted, will ever match the movie. So often when a musical is adapted for the screen, the director is the same person who helmed the stage show, and the results are amateurish and one-dimensional. Norman Jewison could probably conjure up a dark, sinister adaptation of Mamma Mia!.

Go hire Superstar for the holidays. Get some hot cross buns in and invite all your Calvinist mates round, but mind the asps.

***
1The Easter Bunny is a symbol of pagan fertility; therefore, his visit might be better celebrated at a time not quite so fraught with religious torment, self-flagellation and slow death, and more in tune with joyful fucking in the countryside.

2Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan played Jesus in the first London production of the opera. Much to the snooty disdain of the balding critics.

3Whilst Tubing various versions of ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’, I came across a rendering by Susan Boyle, recorded in 1984, in what looks like the very vision of hell: a small, noisy pub sullied by a useless house band, sitting on a stage draped blindingly at the back with strips of silver glitter, and all made worse by an MC in a kilt. Now, since I’ve already blown all my cred, I may as well say that the Boyle version is pretty good. Her current stardom is stuff and nonsense, and nothing but the ongoing exploitation of a showbiz fairytale, but even this early in the piece, she does, you have to admit, have a feel for a tune, which well and truly transcends the West Lothian Gasometer talent night.

Definately Independantly Intelectual

2011-06-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

Even if you’re in a grown up relationship and have no plans to ever look at it, you’ve probably heard of the internet dating site RSVP. Maybe you have friends who are members. Maybe you have friends who were members and were driven to throw themselves off the Eureka tower. Perhaps you’re in there yourself.

The dark overlords who control RSVP from their Blofeld-style death bunker have created a monster. RSVP is really big. Big like space is big. I know because I signed up last year and boy howdy there sure are a lot of people searching for someone- special-in-inverted-commas.

Before I start poking fun at RSVP I should disclose that I have been involved in two rewarding but ultimately not quite right relationships (god how I hate that word) via RSVP, and have had plenty of casual and amusing to and fro email contact with witty and friendly sort-of-penpals. I do think internet personal sites are a really good idea and RSVP is not too expensive should you buy stamps with which to contact those who look like they might be goers. (I’d be cautious though about those smutty adult meet sites. When secret threesomes go wrong, loitering around the less than salubrious Adultmatchmaker may lead to your murder Snowtown style. An embarrassment and a waste of stamps.)

For someone like me who cherishes the English language (not to mention others I don’t understand, like New Zealandian, a strange impenetrable dialect spoken by the incomprehensible Tony Martin) as a gilded treasure, RSVP is a ghetto of vandals, and bovine rampagers through china shops. Yeah, I’m fussy and I completely understand that my objections might be scoffed at as churlish, but I won’t go out with someone who splats an ampersand down in written conversation instead of the word “and”. How could you buy a drink for someone who does that*? RSVP is Manglish central.

I should say that if someone rarely writes anything in their day to day life, and is simply a poor speller, and has no pretence to be a good one, well that’s life. It’s the ones who want to come over as all sophisticated and switched on who give me the shits. Linguistic lawlessness amongst thelattesippingchatteringagereadingsocialist classes is rife. Nothing riles me like words being made to look stupid.

When you join in and knock up a profile, the first task is to write a bit of general info about yourself. Let me straight away share some highlights with you.

I think the most thorough and concise self-description I have read is from the person who said, “I like to go out, but I like to stay in too.” Often you have to read something twice, just to ensure it makes no sense the second time either. An example; “I am a happy classy outgoing fun.” Was this person harpooned before they could end the sentence, or is there such a thing as a fun? I came too upon someone who was evidently “intelectual”.

You get breathless and experimental stuff in the vein of Jack Kerouac; words bashed out in a great rush of Nescafe Blend 43 (and maybe ketamine - you know how it is with divorcees). No edits or corrections, or revision or reading back. It’s authentic gritty writing, symbolistic, visionary, expressi- no okay I’m being silly. It’s rubbish. And if it HAS been checked over … lord have mercy.

One member dismissed life’s problems as nothing but “water on a duck’s back.” A brilliant screw up and one I’d have liked to have pointed out. It might have been the start of something beautiful. But I’m not made of stamps. You are, after all, encouraged to contact people you think you might get off with, not ones you’re tittering at. When I read "A wasted day is a day without laughter," I tried to convince myself that this was no idiotic mistake, but in fact a deliberate thought-provoking upside down take on a Hallmark card bromide.

Everyone lives life to the fullest and punctuates information with screaming exclamation marks!!! Half the sentences end with a detonating LOL!!!, (so a lot of professional women in their 40s and 50s are evidently smoking weed when they get home from work). It’s best to be “comfortable in your own skin”. I don't know what that means. Who’s skin do you look for if you don’t like your own? Some mandatory gear: a thirst for red wine (white wine is unfashionable), DVDs by open fires, walks along the beach, walks into the bush, “arthouse” cinema, the ABC and SBS only, and invariably very fine dining.

And things I don’t like, I now like even less. Nick Cave is a biggie. Talk about the relentless namedropping of the allegedly cool guy. Leonard Cohen is a staple. You can feel how pleased people are with themselves when they list Café Del Mar, Nina Simone and Van Morrison. The most infuriating prejudice is against country music – C&W as it’s always written. You know where this is coming from. It’s a fear of appearing redneck and unsophisticated. So that removes George Jones, Dolly Parton, The Byrds, The early Eagles, Emmylou Harris, Hank Williams. Ask Nick Cave what HE thinks of Johnny Cash. Heavy metal is absolute anathema too. Hip Hop is about as popular as paedophilia. These music listings never fail to lower my heartbeat.

Books? “I love reading” is a common cop out for those who don’t really like reading. The magic realists are popular.

There are fans of The Lemon Heads (sic), Cold Play (sic), Trueblood (sic). There are women who are “conjected” (sic), and if I had a buck for every appearance of “definately” (sic) I’d have about a hundred and twelve bucks. As for “independant”(sic), I could buy a pair of Puma runners on the proceeds of that.

The fad at the moment is Salsa Dancing. People relish salsa dancing … see what I did there? The photographs tend to be predictable too … surprisingly. Usually there’s the close up at home or in the garden, and the one taken at a ‘do’, (sometimes with an “ex” photoshopped into oblivion) and most popularly, the overseas snaps: sitting outside the Taj Mahal, playing with a monkey in Indonesia, on skis and on the piste in the alps. Travel is a badge of honour on RSVP. Wordliness works.

Again I emphasize that none of this is to say there are not gems amongst the RUBBISH. Talented writers and comics. Insightful and admirable thinkers. And total hotties. Don’t you hate when people are smarter and more attractive than you?

My current profile – I pop in infrequently these days - is, for want of a better word, and there is no better word, sarcastic. It’s my guide for new members who might be struggling to suss out what to say about themselves. I list the safe and popular clichés: acceptable spelling blunders, blatant lies, the kind of pics you should use, interesting interests, how you must avoid mentioning anything to do with sex. All the dispiriting nonsense that seems to get results. (I should say here that, from what I’ve seen, the men and women are pretty much the same. In fact the men I’m sure, ape the women in order to gain kudos. One correspondent thought I was talking to the men, which proves my point.)

My profile’s been really popular, because it’s not hostile per se. A lot of people have enjoyed a laugh. I don’t know how it slipped past the censors mind you. I’m tempted now to see how I’d go with something entirely carnal, but I don’t want to get barred.

Oddly enough, several women whose profiles are perfect storms as far as my gripes go have said hello, which is kinda touching, and proves they’re happy to have a laugh at themselves.

Creating a profile for myself consisting of nothing but comments on other people’s profiles has enabled me to steer well clear of any admissions about my own life. That would entail a choice between a comprehensive subterfuge, a fudging of the facts to re-invent myself as a bit of a high-flyer (perhaps literally – an international pilot!) or the awful truth, which goes something like this: I’m an unemployed freelance writer with a fairly low hit rate. I was working in a warehouse but it closed down. Sometimes I DJ at pubs. I am 48 years old. I play in a covers band. I am almost 49 years old. I have only had two proper relationships and have never lived with a girlfriend. I have never been to Thailand. My car is twenty years old. I don’t like bushwalking. I used to be good at soccer, but now I can’t keep up. I’d like a tennis partner but no-one here plays tennis. (That is a genuine disappointment.) I’m profoundly self-conscious until I know and trust someone at which point I begin to act like a 12 year old. If I had to describe myself in one word I would say autocontrarian. Probably not a good choice of word. … line up ladies.

In spite of myself, I’ve met some lovely women for whom a man with a scarce income and an inability to mend a latch on a shelf has been no impediment to searing romance. In the “I am looking for” box of her profile, my last ex wrote “Someone who can spell”. That was it. And it was perfect.

So perhaps less is more. Be mysterious and enigmatic, like Stalin. And don’t sign up until you’ve got a photo of yourself with a monkey.

*I have a very dear friend from RSVP who uses ampersands. I buy her drinks.

Just Add Meatwater

2010-08-16T23:08:00.000-07:00

The table sat in a kind of lobby between the kitchen and lounge. A place to check in , get your mail, read the paper. It was always liberally covered in stuff, and the veneered and phoney wood-grain of the surface (1972-1975) would sink, unseen under the detritus, the stuff of everyone’s day. And other stuff, stuff which no-one owned. Little bark and Styrofoam owls, plastic cups, satee skewers, junk mail.

‘Are these yours?’ ‘What are they?’ ‘Bark owls with styrofoam under them … I’ll throw them out I guess.’

‘Who does this notepad belong to? It’s little, with a few groceries written on it.’ A pause as we all stared for a few seconds without recognition and then binned the item.

Unattended, the desk rubbish would begin to rise like a papier mache representation of Mt Fuji, or the mountain which drives Richard dreyfuss nuts in Close Encounters. We were messy, but it was when the table was cleared that the fear would kick in. The torn envelopes and filthy tea-towels and mugs would vanish, which meant only one thing. Anthea was cooking. An extra chair brought in as customary, and then the arrival of placemats … oh god, here we go again.

I thought I was a bad cook … well I am a bad cook, no doubt about it, but back in the nineties in this share house in Elwood I happened upon someone who was even less talented than me, and this discovery, sad to say, came from first hand experience.

She was a housemate , a well-meaning cheerful person always keen to have a crack with meal ideas, but a girl of little expertise in the kitchen. In fact she was possessed of an outrageous anti-talent with food, somehow enabling staples such as potatoes, pork chops, and lamb mince to taste so deplorable you couldn’t imagine that eating the stuff raw, or even frozen and raw, would be any worse.

One of her glittering triumphs was a dish I christened meatwater. It consisted of some sort of dead animal (I think she rotated between chicken, pork and beef to display her variety of skills. It was all a cadaverous grey anyway) boiled and soaked in its own stock, a foodstuff I’m a bit suspicious of at the best of times, because it looks like a kind of fatty detritus marinated in the sweat of a slaughtered farm animal.

With these sort of concoctions on the cards, I would excuse myself from dinner at home as often as possible, having eaten earlier or about to go out with friends (mostly fibs).

I’m not that interested in food. I just grab stuff; tins of soup or beans, packet pasta, Birds-Eye fish, raw mushrooms and carrot. I love bacon and eggs but I’m too lazy to bother with that even. In light of this philosophy it might surprise you, but when I finally get off my arse and put some effort in, my spag bol is the best in the world. So I do know that preparing food is nowhere near as difficult as I pretend it to be.

And oh how pleased I was of myself as I presented my bellisomo Italiano food. The housemates seated, the plates arriving over their shoulders, and then the bowls with several choices of cheese, the garlic bread from Pizza Hut. That would be me done for a few months.

But back to the food on offer. As well as meatwater there were pasta dishes, the various dry packet spaghettis and fetuccinis cooked by her not so much al dente as al dentist. I have eaten from gluepots of indistinct vegetables collected together in something not quite leaky enough to be soup, but far too soft to be recognizable by names – Potato? Pumpkin? Some other manner of recipe from the gulags of Stalinist Russia? Another presentation was Slopkettle, and you really don’t want to know about that.

And in close quarters, our mouths only a few feet apart, the onus was on me to make ‘ooh delicious!’ noises. The other member of the household, Dan was such a wonderful person, he would eat without complaint, and would genuinely accept Anthea’s dishes as food, and not consider the vast demerit points I always tallied.

And every so often of course, there would be afters. The blurring of ingredients was even worse here. Apple crumble was the recurring dessert. The gritty crumble at the top appeared to have been flame-grilled, while the apple at the bottom was a kind of sauce. In between was a two centimetre layer of spakfilla stodge. Coming out of the oven, the prepared dish would have shrivelled at the edges so as to resemble an island in Bangladesh suffering a sudden monsoonal erosion.

When she prepared dinner, I’d peer down on some sort of object on the stove and do my best to ‘ sausage it’: i.e don’t think about where the stuff came from or what it consists of – just pile on the HP and tomato sauce, and shovel it in. Because what I was eating was technically food, and much of it had nutritional value even if was unidentifiable.

Why then did I so often accommodate the topographically challenged chocolate cakes, and the rice-gravel? Well it’s like this; the other member of the household was an absolute genius in the kitchen. But in order to enjoy his delights, I had to also suffer her atrocities. I had to balance it out. Not ask her to stop and also ask him to proceed.

Dan was extravagantly skilled, and would routinely knock up the best food I have ever tasted … ever. Dinner would never be mere tasty stuff on a plate. There were dishes; mix and match salads, chilli prawns, chicken curries, lightly pastried pies, green things which tasted better than green things should, and conjured so briskly. He’d come home, enter the kitchen and about five minutes later, aromas would waft into the lounge and almost bring me to my knees. It was cuisine.

My saving grace of course is takeaway; vindaloos from Singh’s in Nicholson St in North Fitzroy. Chilli prawns bagged from Coconut Palms in Smith St Collingwood. Sushi when I walk past a sushi shop. I don’t eat genuine junk. No Maccas or Hungry Jack and very little pizza (and gourmet pizza in any case). Mostly I eat stuff which doesn’t need a plate.

When Dan moved out to marry, we got a new tenant and during the interviews I was sure to insist tha, in general, we didn’t have an organized food regime.
If you like cooking for others then that was good, but me? “I tend to be out a lot.”

An all new culinary set up now. Alex worked in a restaurant and often brought home mouth-watering Italian fare. Not long after he moved in I noticed another delicious Italian meal he’d brought home in the fridge, begging to be eaten. He’d shared some of this food with us before, but only sometimes. I gazed at the squid and mussels and surreptitiously stole a few bites. The next night the meal was still in the fridge, which surprised me, and the next day too. Alex didn’t come in until later but by then … look I was very hungry, and how long could you leave a dish like this in the fridge before things started to go wrong with? So I just ate it.

The next day as I walked past his room Alex (who was a twat incidentally) said to me those words I had dreaded; “Michael, did you eat my dinner?”

“……..Yes.”

I immediately engaged in some spectacular genuflection, and made out I was confused about the etiquette of not eating food which is clearly not for you. He sat implacably at his computer, his back to me as he talked. It was creepy, him doing that. But while he lived in the house he painted two rooms without asking, and waxed only the top half of his torso too. He used terms like “chilling out” and “kicking back” constantly. He was a bit of a twit.

Which of course brings us to Masterchef.

Actually it doesn’t … I have Herbert Adams pies to prepare.

The Bill

2010-08-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks for chatting with me Bill

Great to be here.

Q:How’s the art going?

Well I’m still presenting a cogent defensive argument about why I photograph kids. But the art freedom angle just isn’t getting through to some people … still!

Q.That was an interesting point you made about consent, about kids consenting to kick balls and fall over and hurt themselves. That photo shoots are”harmless” in comparison.

Yes well kids can make their own decisions of course.

Q.With parental advice?

Sure the parents are cool They’re kinda arty too.

Q.So this consent thing. 11 year olds consent to smoking don’t they? Some engage in unsavoury sexual contact with boys, bullying, stealing. Should we pat kids on the back for being clever and liberal enough to have crafty fags after school behind the sheds? I think you’re being a little disingenuous here Bill. Why kids? Any particular reason?

Kids are beautiful and smooth and soft and I wanted to convey their innocence by getting them to undress so I could poke cameras at them. Haven’t you heard of the expression art for art’s sake?

Q.Yes but I don’t see art when I look at your photos. In fact I think the stuff’s a bit crap. Perhaps art should make you feel disturbed and call you to engage with disquieting themes, but should people be allowed to express their emotions by hanging up a big canvass with “I hate fucking Jews” painted on it?

Of course. The artist is making a statement about anti-semitism. You have to put these things in context.

Q.Yeah the context thing’s slippery isn’t it?

I still regard myself as being fortunate because the people that I’m in contact with are all supportive.I spent quite a time convincing them not to come forward in 2008.

Q.I imagine you would. Was that all the kids in the snaps, the ones you’re in contact with?

I’d have to check. Almost all. Look at Lolita. Banned. And who doesn’t beieve the book is a classic?

Q.Yes a classic, but it’s a book Bill.. There are no real people in it.

The ability to appear transgressive and radically unreasonable is part of the cloud of unknowing that comes with the territory.

Q.Q.Unknown knowns or unknown unknowns?

Both, knowns and unknowns, and truths of course. Truth is what it’s all about.

Q. The truth to my mind is that you are an artist who courts a contrived controversy, and that you are also an old perv who can get away with both.

Yeah … I can see your point.

Pic Of The Day

2010-07-02T04:46:00.001-07:00

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before.

2010-06-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

This piece was written before Men At Work got stitched up by Larrikin's lawyers.

Of all Australia’s ‘unofficial’ national anthems, ‘Down Under’ is the one from which there is no escape. If something not quite so ‘girt by sea’ as our actual dismal anthem is called for, the omnipresent Men At Work monster is first port of call. So, what should we make of the recent accusation by music publisher Larrikin that the signature flute riff integral to the never-ending pandemic ‘Down Under’ contagion was lifted from one of our more historical cork-hat classics, ‘Kookaburra (sits in the old gum tree)’ – that tune about the merry, merry king of the bush … laughing.

Larrikin have founded their plagiarism argument on just two bars of the song, a motif that pops up prior to the vocals and then returns a handful of times afterwards, in between the Kombis and the Vegemite sandwiches.

‘Kookaburra …’ was written in 1934 by a woman called Marion Sinclair, as an entry in a Girl Guides talent quest. Larrikin reckon they bought the rights from a trustee who took possession of the song when Marion died. Sony BMG and EMI are arguing that the song was never properly assigned and is, therefore, up for grabs to be twisted, mangled, dismantled, or copied note for note. No charge. These are the legal battlelines, but what will happen when the songs are actually compared in court?

Some might say that Colin Hay and Ron Strykert from Men At Work, as well as the lawyers at their behemoth record company, know very well that bits of ‘Kookaburra …’ were nicked so as to stir a bit more classic kitschy Australiana into ‘Down Under’s foul mix. In fact, if you watch the video for the song, flautist Greg Ham can be found sitting IN A GUM TREE, next to a KOALA on a string, while playing the (allegedly) RIPPED-OFF BIT.

Still, the contentious riff is fleeting; not much more than an interlude. Also, it took an episode of Spicks and Specks for the tunes to be compared and Larrikin to be alerted (by some guy sitting in front of his telly while eating dinner) to the similarities of the two songs, even though, presumably, a lot of people recognised the homage on first contact with ‘Down Under’, decades ago. For this daftness, and ignorance of their own area of business, Larrikin don’t deserve any credit or reward at all. As for Men At Work, their primary misdemeanour, as far as I’m concerned, is writing the fucking thing in the first place.

Copyright case failures from the past have tempered the enthusiasm of music business complainants to point the finger. Even in these joyfully litigious times.

Coldplay were accused last year of filching large blocks of music from guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani’s instrumental ‘If I Could Fly’ for the title track of their last album, Viva La Vida. The melody, rhythm, speed and inflections are, indeed, identical. And, since only one song features vocals, and because they’re both in the key of G, it sounds quite cool when you play them simultaneously in a mix (refer to YouTube).

The Coldplaygate case (or Colgate, as I prefer to term it) was chucked out, and the band were cheeky enough to suggest afterwards that Satriani’s song ‘lacked originality’. No, I don’t get it either. Interesting then, that Chris Martin, the one married to that hippie actress, had already confessed long beforehand that the debut Coldplay LP was forty minutes of borrowing without asking: ‘Listen to the album more and more it’ll become apparent just how much we’ve plagiarised,’ said the stripey-handed singer, happily adding, ‘To me, at the end of our album we should have had a bibliography, or a discography, or references.’ Oops.

Back in 1985, John Fogerty released his debut solo album, Centerfield, and was promptly sued by Asylum Records heavyweight Saul Zaentz, who owned most of the rights to Creedence Clearwater Revival stuff.

Saul and John don’t get on, so there was a bit of malice aforethought at play here. Zaentz claimed Fogerty’s ‘Old Man Down The Road’ was a cynical rewrite of Creedence’s ‘Run Through The Jungle’. When the defendant took to the stand with his guitar and played both songs to the jury, Zaentz must have known the jig was up. It was pre-Twitter, of course, but had it not been, messages along the lines of ‘OMG!!! John Fogerty is playing a gig in the courtroom!!!’ might have been posted by elderly fans of proper rock’n’roll. Fogerty, to no one’s surprise, won the suit. He was, however, instructed to alter the title of his song ‘Zanz Kant Danz’ to ‘Vanz Kant Danz’. Like that was going to bother him, when he’d just destroyed his loathed ex-boss’s claim for 140 million dollars.

George Harrison famously defended himself in court against ex-Beatles manager Allen Klein when ‘My Sweet Lord’, the first post-Beatles solo hit, whiffed a bit too much of The Chiffons’ fifties doodle-wop pop song ‘He’s So Fine’ – a song owned by publishing company Bright Tunes. The irony here is that, although he was initially batting for Harrison, Klein actually bought Bright Tunes while the case was being heard and, having done so, promptly crossed the floor. Not a popular move with the presiding judge.

The case went on for years. I’ve read through some of it: the preposterous arguments; the evidence of musicologists called on to technically dissemble note v note; the mutual spitefulness of both sides; the interminable nitpicking. George was eventually adjudged guilty only of subconscious plagiarism, or cryptomnesia, which is the term, apparently, for a person who composes or steals music in their sleep. The judge ruled that ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘He’s So Fine’ shared ‘fragmented literal similarities’. George got little more than a slap on the wrist, but the verdict effectively allowed that if you could prove beyond a reasonable doubt (or just artfully pretend) that you were asleep when you came up with a strangely familiar melody, you got off with a warning and a packet of NoDoz.

The Chiffons went on mischievously to cover ‘My Sweet Lord’ themselves and gave it a spot on their greatest hits LP. More peculiar still, and not long after the case was closed, Harrison bought the rights to ‘He’s So Fine’ and wound up coining it for both songs.

Last year, veteran indie power-pop band The Rubinoos trained their crosshairs on Avril Lavigne for allegedly thieving considerable sections of their 1978 single ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ for her 2007 hit ‘Girlfriend’. As The Rubinoos sat down to strategise, they were contacted by The Rolling Stones, who advised both parties to cease and desist, pointing out that each song suspiciously echoed their own sixties hit ‘(Hey You) Get Off Of My Cloud’. The Rubinoos were politely warned to pull their heads in, or else. And when the Stones talk, you listen. Avril Lavigne, you’d imagine, might have phoned Mum to ask who Mick Jagger is.

When The Flaming Lips released their Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots album in 2002, many older folk noticed that the melody to the song ‘Fight Test’ was spookily similar to that of Cat Stevens’ 1970 hit ‘Father And Son’. The Lips’ Wayne Coyne pleaded that he hadn’t ever heard ‘Father and Son’, and I don’t think he was being disingenuous, but the trouble was brief, in any case. Both parties had a convivial chat and royalties were thereafter split between Sony (Cat – or Yusuf Islam) and EMI (The Lips).

It only takes a clever tweak for any band to easily put you off the scent. The Ramones built a career on one song. It was a good song, mind you. Oasis are flagrant lifters of Beatles songs. But their best effort was, in fact, when they had a crack at ‘Get It On’ by T.Rex and called it ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.

Chuck Berry was the maestro of the just-different-enough-from-the-last-song approach. It’s why he never employed a permanent band; any bunch of pick-up musicians capable of playing one Berry song could, theoretically, play the lot. This also cost Chuck less, and for a man who demanded cash in a briefcase before he took to the stage, it was win-win.

‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’, and dozens of early rock’n’roll tunes, were unashamedly the same. No one cared. Rock was only expected to last as long as the hula hoop. Was it even supposed to have any delineations?

It was Led Zeppelin, however, who will forever be the unchallenged kings of plagiarism. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is a slightly noisier upload of ‘You Need Love Woman, You Need Love’ by Willie Dixon. Not until 1985, did Dixon have his day in court for overdue recognition and royalties. ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, was written by blues singer Anne Bredon but she wasn’t acknowledged or paid royalties for decades. The uncredited borrowing by Zep of ‘Bring It On Home’ and ‘The Lemon Song’ also resulted in legal wrangling and expensive settlements. Quite a few songs ‘written’ by Page/Plant during the seventies are now credited on sleeves as Page/Plant/The person who actually wrote it.

Led Zep’s zenith in its perpetration of all of these copycat crimes, though, was undoubtedly ‘Dazed and Confused’, a bona fide classic and a piece recognised by any self-respecting rock fan from the moment its lumbering bass line sounds off. Great song. Thank Jake Holmes for that. He’s the dude who wrote it. Jimmy Page heard the song when Holmes supported The Yardbirds (of which Page was a then-member) one evening in London. ‘Dazed and Confused’ surfaced eighteen months later, credited to the Zep lads, as … ‘Dazed and Confused’. No confusion at all, then. No subterfuge or fudging. No renovation or blurring. Just pure daylight robbery.

Writer Chris Welch, author of a song-by-song biography of Led Zeppelin, has arced up and claimed that a) everyone was doing it, so who cares?; and b) it’s only because the band became so popular that anyone made a fuss. He’d have a re-think, you’d imagine, if he found large chunks of his own work, uncredited, in a different book.

I don’t envy new bands questing to write original music these days, because most great music has been written already. Are there any riffs left? Any angles? New bands encounter a weighty postmodern dilemna at their first practice. Where do you go? How do you minimise derivation? Ah, stuff it … steal as much as possible from Led Zeppelin and see how they like it.

Stop, Thief?
Influence? Confluence? Stolen goods?

‘Taxman’ by The Beatles v ‘Start’ by The Jam

Paul Weller never tried to pretend that The Jam single was anything but a masterly ‘homage’. It was a pretty accurate one too, because the jagged George Harrison riff in the ‘Taxman’ intro is one of The Beatles’ most ubiquitous and quirky moments, and not the sort of thing just to pop into the head of a modish young man years later.

‘All Day And All Of The Night’ by The Kinks v ‘Hello I Love You’ by The Doors

It’s one of those baffling cases, where, with only a few years between the records, the laughingly obvious similarities didn’t prompt litigation. Primarily, it shows that The Doors were lazy. And that the Kinks were somewhat charitable.

‘In The City’ by The Jam v ‘Holidays In The Sun’ by the Sex Pistols

Punk was about energy, attitude, aggression, and, in the Pistols’ case, the dishing up of sharp social satire. In his book, The Jam’s Bruce Foxton claims to have had a conversation with Sid Vicious in which he admitted that ‘Holidays in the Sun’ was ‘heavily influenced’ by ‘In The City’. Allegedly, there was then a bit of a punch-on.

‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’ by Jet v ‘Lust For Life’ by Iggy Pop

Yeah, it’s legendary already but Jet don’t deserve quite as much vitriol as they’ve received. The beat is too good to be used for just one song and Jet’s own contributions justify their having a huge hit record. Yes, they must have known. Not to worry. It’s the sort of three-minute pop explosion that could kickstart an eight-year-old’s lifelong love for rock’n’roll. In my mind, however, aside from that single, Jet are still a quite forgettable band with a very good singer.

‘Watching The Wheels’ by John Lennon v ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ by Oasis

I don’t know why people think the intro to Noel’s epic tune sounds like ‘Imagine’, because it’s much more like this later song from Lennon’s last album. Also, it’s an E chord to A chord, like a million intros to a million songs. The first two chords you learn when you open the cheat sheet.

‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ by The Beatles v ‘If You Want My Love’ by Cheap Trick

Cheap Trick were not uninformed about the pop music that had preceded them, especially the best of British. Welding Beatlesque melodies onto hard rock à la The Who saw them create some of the best no-wave albums of the seventies. They were shit in the eighties, sadly, but this single reached a number two position on the Oz charts in 1982. Perhaps the joke here was that poor old George Harrison had been so exhausted by the ‘My Sweet Lord’ affair that he didn’t have the energy to fight. That portion that goes ‘Lonely is only a place/you don’t know …’ is an identikit of the ‘I look at you all see the/love there that’s sleeping’ verse pattern of ‘While My Guitar…’

‘Three Girl Rhumba’ by Wire v ‘Connection’ by Elastica

Elastica are a bit notorious for some of the ‘influences’ at play in their music. The cited example is the most celebrated, but go YouTube-ing and have a listen to their song ‘Waking Up’ and then compare it to ‘No More Heroes’ by the Stranglers. I mean, really.

Every hip-hop band ever v every song ever written…

The thing here, of course, is that sampling these days is very, very scrupulously attributed to the original artist. The Australian cut-and-paste post-modernists The Avalanches listed on the sleeve of their album Since I’ve Left You every song they had appropriated for their songs. If you didn’t have a microscope, it was, simply, impossible to read. But the list was there and they were happy to pay at the source rather than hope they could get away with it. Madonna wrote a personal letter to Benny from ABBA asking if she could use the instrumental riff from ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (A Man After Midnight)’ for her song ‘Hung Up’. Benny framed the letter, apparently … oh, and, yeah, he was cool with a 50–50 royalty split. Perhaps the ageing star should be similarly polite when she steals people’s children.

Come Fly With Me; The Funny Side of Air Disaster

2010-06-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

I really, really like aeroplanes. As a kid, I spent day after day building models of them, and identifying them and reading about them, but I’ve always thought that the most interesting thing about planes is that they sometimes stop flying at the worst possible moment; ie, quite suddenly, when they’re up in the air. The failures of aircraft to make it home is addressed with engrossing detail in my favourite telly program of all time, Air Crash Investigation.

ACI has got everything; horror, drama, thrills and spills, derring-do, technological mindfucks, forensic investigation, mystery, existential near-death (or genuine death) experiences, blind terror and, in one memorable case, a ghost popping into the galley to warn some stewardesses that their plane is an accident waiting, impatiently, to happen. (They made a telemovie about that incident, with Ernest Borgnine as the earnest apparition of the dead pilot. ‘Beware of fire in this aircraft!’ Hey, don’t have a cow, man.)

Not a lot of romance or sex in ACI, I grant you, although there’s plenty of humour, which, of course, couldn’t be less intentional. But when a distracted pilot lets his fourteen-year-old son drive an Airbus A320 into the Siberian tundra, well … can’t you see the funny side?

You’d imagine that when aeroplanes hit the ground off-airport, or off-off-airport, into the sea or a forest, or over eighty kilometres of mountainside, in most cases the cause would be unfussily self-evident: vicious unbearable turbulence, running out of gas, double duck strike (we’ll get to the miracle on the Hudson shortly), poor aim or pure lack of ability on approach, bad luck (as in hitting another plane – the universe is a big place, after all), elderly death traps coughing out some ancient rivets from vital superstructures.

These are reasons most of us are familiar with. But for every crash there is left in its wake a fascinating trail of mistakes, acts of kindergarten stupidity, and previously unannounced faults in mint condition aircraft. Why did the autopilot do that? Why did the pilot do the other thing? Why did the service guy forget to screw in some nuts? Why did the guy who worked with the pilot and first officer try to kill both of them with a huge hammer? (True.)

In 1974, at Tenerife airport in Spain, a 747 belonging to the Dutch airline KLM steamed down the runway straight into a Pan Am 747 taxiing the other way. Five hundred and eighty-three people died. It wasn’t a good result. Obviously, it was due in part to pilot error, but how that error occurred, the plethora of events that led to the crash, and its achingly simple preventability is the sort of thing that ACI is tremendous at exploring and revealing, not to mention magnificently re-enacting in shit-scary detail.

We learn about micro-bursts, windshear, and how, as a pilot, you can get sucked out of the front of the plane (when a window blows out), and still be all right if you are held on to by two guys clutching your belt. This is because your body freezes in the very, very cold air, and when whoever is now landing the plane brings it to a halt and they drag you back inside, you can be re-animated. Now, there’s a story for the grandkids.

Am I morbid? Am I watching disaster porn? I figure this stuff interests everybody. Doesn’t it interest you? My housemate has to put on headphones when I watch ACI. She doesn’t want to know. Nervous flyer. Me, I can’t get enough of it and yet – paradoxically, to say the least – I am terrified of being in a plane crash.

I’m better these days. I fly four or five times a year. On a clear day, I can enjoy it very much. I look forward to being pressed back in my seat as the engines get angry, and I love that first slight gut-challenge of uplift. I could stare down over that beautiful vast worldscape all day. It’s the only chance, isn’t it, for us to pretend that things are really nice down here, because everything looks so nice from up there?

But I used to fair near shit myself getting on a plane. Valium was only prescribed (and with admirable impunity) for stressed-out MILFs, not for thirteen-year-olds, in the seventies. And nobody would buy me a bottle of Smirnoff, so air travel for me back in the day was about the worst thing in the world. And yet, I would have watched ACI if it had been on then, anyway. I couldn’t have become any more alarmed than I already was, even when looking at a plane disaster highlights reel.

Unlike your regular whitey TV drama or blanched soap, ACI is, as well, a program where the careers of actors of many ethnic persuasions receive a bump. It depicts plane crashes accurately and without prejudice (the body count, staggering or small, is not really a factor), so actors of various colours and creeds get to play pilots and co-pilots, which is a bit of a double-edged sword, because they’re portraying fellow countrymen who either can’t fly, or who work for an airline, their country’s airline, which can’t fly either. There’s screen work, too, for actors who can play investigators, cabin crew and passengers. It’d keep a casting agency on its toes; ‘Can you get me seventy-five Indonesians, an Arab and a Turk, or similar, by Thursday?’

We’ve all watched enough Star Trek to know that when the crew are chucked from left to right and right to left as they scrap with aliens in their fuck-off, space-hoon muscle-ships, the camera provides the opposite angles, to mimic the full effect of a big hit. On set, of course, this would look completely ridiculous but that slapstick stuff is small fry compared with the sort of synchronised chaos and violence required to simulate the effects of a plane doing tight spirals or backflips as it falls from the sky. And having to sit in a fake fuselage as fans the size of trucks blow air at you to demonstrate what it’s like to be in a plane with a no roof is a tough gig. The reconstructions and re-enactments are scarifying. Forget Avatar and check some of this shit out. A white-hot 747 engine cowling coming at you in 3D is not something you can easily forget.

Most of us have never enjoyed the adventure of cruising along in a plane suddenly transformed into an open-top bus. But we’ve all had our little moments up in the sky. I experienced an emergency take-off abort one day, the plane coming to a screeching halt just as we were about to take flight. That was kinda cool. The last time I went home to Tassie, my plane did a mysterious lap of the airport just as we were on a final approach. ‘We missed,’ said the girl sitting next to me. And we had. There’s not a lot of traffic at Launceston airport at 10 pm on a Sunday but, the thing is, flights to Tassie are usually fobbed off on slightly wet-behind-the-ears pilots who still have a bit of ‘If at first you don’t succeed …’ about them.

For most people, the aircraft they’re on is ‘the plane’, much as you would speak of ‘the tram’. For me, the machine is never anonymous, not merely big or small. It’s either a Boeing 737 (the drone, the dull default people mover) or an exciting 767, or an even more exciting big-arse Airbus A300.

But best of all is the new Airbus A380, which is the two-storey one, and which is clearly too big to get off the ground. Surely that will become evident at some point; that sort of luck never lasts. So, I should try to get a ride in one before there are problems – Airbuses (or Airbi?) collapsing in on themselves, or flopping indelicately in fields the way Howard Hughes’s under-powered air tanks used to.

At the cute regional level, Rex flies the Saab 340, a little aeroplane with propellers, and a vehicle, you imagine, that doesn’t do much for a pilot’s self-esteem. Cops on horses being passed by fellow officers in V8 pursuit cars probably feel the same.

What you primarily feel at the end of an episode of ACI, beyond fascination and the boffins’ mind-boggling determination to know exactly what happened, is real sympathy for the passengers, who are the only participants in these sagas who are never culpable. Except for the ones with bombs, that is.

Every accident leads to ‘recommendations’, which are implemented in order to prevent another prang. And the alterations are generally minor, addressing insidious little Achilles-heel problems that shouldn’t have needed such catastrophes to happen in order to make them apparent.

The black box flight data recorder was invented by an Australian guy in the nineteen fifties and began to be installed in commercial aircraft in the mid sixties. It’s been an invaluable asset to crash investigators, but both the cockpit voice recorder and instrument info boxes are heavy, can still be damaged, and are a bitch to find when they end up at the bottom of the sea. Why haven’t black boxes been miniaturised into small digital failsafe computer transponders relaying information every minute to the ground, to be checked over later if necessary? I don’t know.

And you know what else planes don’t have? (And I have researched this.) They don’t have rear-view mirrors. So, if an engine flames out or is being torn apart en route by a sky devil, like in that episode of The Twilight Zone, the flight crew can react in two ways. One is to look at the panel in front of them that has lit up and is suggesting with urgent blinks that an engine has failed, in which case, in the pilot’s mind, it’s the light rather than the engine that’s faulty, so might as well ignore it and get back to the crossword. Or, just to be safe, send one of the crew down the aisle to look out the window, searching for visual confirmation. Well, hey waddya know? The light is not faulty. The engine is engulfed in flames. Wouldn’t a rear-view mirror be useful? Yes, of course it fucking would. Do I need to write a letter to my local member?

At the foot of the unsettling ACI web page, there is, I swear, an ad for, and a link to, a website where you can go about conquering your fear of flying. Because if you weren’t afraid when you started reading about the accidents, now that you’ve gotten to the bottom of the page, you surely are. (And advising you to eat the in-flight food to distract you from thinking about fireballs screaming down the aisle seems a bit lame.)

What is of some comfort are facts such as this: most planes get hit by lightning and they’re designed to neutralise it. So, if you are flying through a storm and can see nothing out the window except the flash, every six seconds or so, of blinding storm activity, a preview of a day in hell … everything’s fine. I include this information for the benefit of a friend who recently found herself praying to god on a routine trip from Sydney to Melbourne. The late conversion to religion is a common occurrence on bumpy rides. So, get to know your deity.

Of course, you are far safer, we’re reminded constantly, in a plane than in a car – yeah, so what’s that supposed to mean? Anything is safer than being in a car. You’re more likely to win millions of bucks in a lottery than be in a plane accident. Yeah, well, I’m not sure the maths on that works out.

I want my pilots strong-jawed, confident, dedicated, clean living and brave. Svelte, tall and clean-shaven. Steely, calm and reassuring. Men, or, if absolutely necessary, women (I know, I know, I’m sorry, flying a plane just seems like it’s a boy thing, like starting wars), who have no outré sexual proclivities or undiagnosed illnesses. Guys who don’t wear women’s knickers. Women who don’t wear strap-ons. I want cartoon heroism. I want that guy who landed the 767 in the river.

As if New Yorkers hadn’t already had enough terrible plane action happening outside their office windows, imagine the sight of a heavy-duty airliner coming down quite gracefully and, you could be forgiven for thinking, deliberately, out on the river. An early end to the PowerPoint sales presentation, you'd imagine.

Pilot ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, the Sullster – or, as I like to call him, Ned Flanders – pulled off an absolutely freakish trick when he glided a big aeroplane deftly onto the Hudson. All well and good, but I’m of the opinion that there has to be a fall from grace. Perhaps the Sullman, the Sullmeister, and his criminally unheralded first officer falling asleep and waking up over some country they can’t recognise, for example. Or something to do with flight plans being discussed in toilet cubicles. I can see over his shoulder his infuriated wife, just holding it together as he delivers the mea culpa to the press. I see homophobic survivors of his gallant landing burning their Sullbooks. The potential sullying of Sully has already started for me. I mean, read this, for god’s sake.

New York, Nov.23 (ANI): A pilot who landed a jetliner in New York’s Hudson River, has said his heroics have led to ‘rock star sex’. In an interview with NBC’s People of the Year TV, Chesley Sullenberger and his wife, Laurie, said the famous incident had done wonders for their marriage. ‘He doesn’t know I’m gonna say this, but I had joked the other day that … the hero sex really helps a 20-year-old marriage,’ Mrs Sullenberger said. To which Sullenberger added: ‘Rock star sex.’

To which I add: Shut the fuck up.

‘Hey, baby …who’s your hero pilot? Oh yeah, I’m your hero pilot. Oh yeah, right there on the reverse thruster.’

Australia’s safety record is disturbingly impeccable. Qantas has never lost a passenger; not in the smear-of-bloody-pulp-on-a-rock-face way, at least, even though they seem to have been trying to for a while. It’s lost passengers who have deserted them for better service elsewhere, but there has never been a jet passenger crash in Australia … ever.

This should further ease all our anxieties about flying, but surely that big fat zero can’t last forever? And, I can assure you, when that day comes, when Channel Seven gets the monster breaking-news story it’s waited patiently for, when every blonde reporter from the Channel Nine news heads out to the crash site, when The 7pm Project has to work out how Hughesy will deal with the disaster, I will be part of it, a passenger dying for the cause of future safety improvements, part of all new episodes of Air Crash Investigation.

If you can find any bits of me, scatter my ashes over the Melbourne airport car park walkway. It seems only

2010-06-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

In case you're HERE for some ungodly reason ....... I haven't got properly started yet. Hopefully new stuff and layout and fab links and pics up soon

2010-06-08T05:19:00.000-07:00

Getting Decked

2010-03-08T00:32:00.000-08:00

A few months ago and at very short notice I was conscripted to ‘wax some grooves’ as we hipsters say, at the Gershwin Room at the Espy. A code red emergency had been declared. The regular DJ guy couldn’t make it. I didn’t ask why. You don’t in circumstances like those. You just do the job. You don’t think of yourself as a hero.

About twenty minutes after I’d confirmed my availability, I was emailed back with a few more details about the evening. I would be starting at 8pm, which was a strangely premature hour for the venue, and I would be up on the stage, which was also strange, because there would be absolutely nothing to see except a guy flicking through CDs and drinking cider. And obviously in that case there would no bands. No bands? Espy?

I only play CDs. I have no interest in spinning vinyl 45s of Sam and Dave when I can buy a single soul compilation CD with pretty much every ‘60s and ’70s soul hit there ever was on it. Why risk the vinyl anyway? I like my old records. So I don’t remix 50 Pence P Diddy raps. My audience is generally a bunch of over 30 inner-city wasters who have just finished watching a band somewhere (not ‘HIGH RISK!” presumably), and want to keep drinking. It’s a lovely way for me to make a few bucks. But my audience weren’t going to be there to help me tonight.

I still don’t know how it came to be at the Gersh, this function, but I found out upon arrival what it actually was. It was a piss-up for the St Kilda Road cops.

Uh huh … okay …

You can imagine how comprehensively foreboded with foreboding I was when I set myself up, in both senses, on the stage at the Espy with my expansive but inappropriate stacks of CDs.

I really want to like cops. I try, I really do. When they want to know my name for no apparent reason, I try to understand. When they push people against shopfronts for walking off the footpath, I force myself to consider whether it might perhaps have been an especially menacing kind of walk. Strolling with intent. I admit I’ve met some helpful and friendly, if dim, cops. I just have a bit of a necessary evil attitude to the long arm.

The doors opened at about 8.15 pm and in they flooded. Police officers most of them I guess. I didn’t know who was who and who wasn’t, so I just presumed all of them were cops. In my mind the girls in sparkly little dresses were as much off duty-old-bill as the boofhead boys up the back. No reason why they wouldn’t be. On the occasions I’ve had dealings with plod I’ve tried to sort of flirt with any lady cops on hand. I’m sure you can imagine how successful that’s been.

Out of uniform, police, of course, resemble any old bunch of happy drinkers at a bad Irish theme pub. Except they don’t get too maggoted, and they don’t look for fights. Well they didn’t when I was there. What a confusion that would be; off-duty cops breaking up a fight between off-duty cops, possibly over a female cop, also off-duty. And what would happen when hotel security arrived? Or off-duty hotel security?

For an hour at least I may as well have played a CD of dogs farting, such was the absolute indifference of the crowd to the music. In fact they wouldn’t have cared if it was the same dog farting over and over again. They’d have preferred no music at all. I could have gone down to the beach for a walk.

So I drank cider and pleased myself with whimsical picks from my stash. Mildly esoteric a bit of it but mostly stuff I’d hope readers of this site might dig: Television, The Roots, Laura Nyro, Franz Ferdinand, Stevie Wonder, The Undertones, Cheap Trick, T Rex, Wings, The Sex Pistols, The Faces, Otis Redding, ZepWhoMacBowie. Late in the evening some Engelbert Humperdinck or something from South Pacific. You get the drift. Generally the idea is to get, or keep, people dancing, so you try to follow whatever vibe is working, and deal out more of the same. I’d get by I thought.

Being up onstage ensured me a certain amount of shadowy detachedness (the sort of do-not-approach big-headedness favoured by chemists on their elevated mezzanines behind the counter) and I was enjoying that until I noticed tentative steps being made in my direction by the early onset handbag-dancers, who clearly wanted me to play their favourite, and so far mystifyingly absent song.

In theory requesting a song is not necessarily a bad thing. But there are minimum standards of behaviour requested.

Which are as follows: Please don’t shout or argue with me because I don’t have your song. I don’t want a debate about it. Please don’t ask for a song when I just played it. Please don’t hang around the decks hoping the name of that song you really like will pop into your head. And humming a few bars into my ear won’t help. Under no circumstances, NO CIRCUMSTANCES, should you jolly yourself into the DJ area and touch ANYTHING. These may seem like Draconian measures but they are for your own good. But I’m certainly open to sensible suggestions.

I leant over the edge of the stage and handbag dancer one shouted at me, “HAVE YOU GOT FOOTLOOSE OR GREASE?”

Somewhere in my gut a gland in charge of nausea gave me a little squirt of protest.

With patience (and a measure of charm I thought) I explained that no, I had neither and by Grease did you mean the song “Grease”, performed on the film soundtrack by Frankie Valli? Or one of the hits from Grease? Perhaps “You’re The One That I Want?” Not a bad song, but possibly the last one I would play in my life. Actually no, the least likely song that I would ever, ever play is Footloose.

So those girls gave up and kept dancing anyway, to “Miss You” by The Stones which is ace to dance to. On a par with Footloose.

But my ordeal was to escalate. A few of the party attendees decided they’d like a more participatory role in song selection, and began to come upstairs ask for songs I didn’t have. Soon enough a veritable conga line of dickwits, were popping up to see me, like students being conferred degrees. Next. “Hi …GOT ANY CHOIRBOYS!?”

It’s the sort of question asked by truck drivers as they fill their tanks at a Shell petro-megaplex in Yass. And yes they’ll have the Choirboys there, on one of those bourbon-sponsored compilation CDs racked up next to the counter. Me? No … sorry. I don’t have The Choirboys. What’s more Mrs. Police Lady, even if you saved me from a hostage drama I would still feel nothing but distaste for you. Goodbye.

The hours dragged on. I took a break when the time came for a raffle to be drawn, or confiscated grass to be divvied up or something. I found a microphone side of stage, plugged it into the PA and a cop who was probably pretty good with a gun demonstrated how uncomfortable he was with sound gear. He flapped the microphone around like a big sissy and nobody could hear a word he said. I hope he’s better with a Taser, or he might hit some woman in the belly with an ill-directed discharge and electrocute her unborn child in a supermarket car park.

He did his mumbly thing and made a racist quip about Aborigines as if that would make us all matey, and went back to his back-slapping mates.

They suck the life out of you, these encounters with the real world.

The barrage of requests progressed ceaselessly. Nobody knew what they didn’t like about the music, and none were able to point out what they thought would make it better. This made for a fair bit of pantomime as cop and guest alike juggled the air, shrugged and frowned, but failed in any way to articulate what the problem was. “Mate, haven’t you got something more … more …” I knew what they wanted – they wanted FOX FM, MMM, Video Hits. But they never expected to have to actually describe music or differentiate between styles. They wanted music for people with no love of music.

Michael Jackson was greeted with half-hearted shrugs. The lovely Lily Allen failed completely. AC/DC worked for the woman wearing the AC/DC T shirt.

Things got sillier still when a young blonde woman with paint-balled orange skin, a caricature of the average bimbo you might normally see hanging off a footy player at the Brownlow, arrived to rescue me. She said her brother was a DJ and asked me what I was getting paid so she could say her brother was paid more, said she had some CDs in the car, said she could sort it all out because she was especially qualified for this sort of thing. How could I argue when she proclaimed, with great earnestness, “It’s okay I’m a copper.”

I tend to dwell in a weightily ironic world, but she was nothing if not deadly serious. No smiles, no affability. Move aside grandad, the Police are here. But that was fine by me. I was going to get paid either way.

So she tooled herself up with some discs from her car and managed to play a few songs which might have been more suited to the occasion, but they had little impact on the crowd either. Then she began to moan that she couldn’t cue songs up because she wasn’t being fed enough monitor sound through the cans. (That’s what we call headphones – as I said earlier I’m just incredibly cool). Yeah, well it’s working fine for me Lady Nightstick. None of her discs were song-listed either so she started to struggle quite badly. Officer down!

Then, predictably, she just upped and quit the gig. The equipment was broken of course, and it was all my fault. I was evidently failing on two fronts now, in both the choice of music, and the performance of the hardware playing it.

I couldn’t imagine I’d meet anyone else as depressingly stupid as her, but then I did something myself which wasn’t too clever.

I remembered I’d downloaded a few chart hits from last year, which were sort of “crossover” and worked with my regular punters, so before I’d given the situation adequate thought, I fired up “I Got A Feeling” by The Black Eyed Peas. Biggest selling song of 2009 I believe, and a sweet slice of pop/rap/funk. Good record. Nice at the time. Don’t think I ever want to hear it again, but It was a winner at The Gersh of course. The dance floor was suddenly pulsating with girls dirty dancing, and guys who looked like they were doing stretches at footy training.

Then I played “Sex On Fire” by The Kings Of Leon. That went down a treat too. But that was the end of the music they liked. I’d run out after two songs and that just made them unhappier than ever.

And you know what? If I’d had maybe three more hours to prepare for the gig I’d have been able to download every top 40 hit of the year, and the crowd would have loved me. So in hindsight I’m glad I didn’t do that.

Eventually the cops just gave up on me. The battle had been lost. Disc Jockey 1 Victoria Police 0. Let’s hear it for the good guys.

Even better, a really lovely couple (and god knows what they were doing there) asked me if I possibly had a Pixies song or two. In fact I had many Pixies songs, and played about five of them in a row, so my new friends could dance around the stage. You have no idea how popular this made me with them. Having shown me the very impressive Pixies logo tattoed on her lower back, the girl showered me with kisses and hugs as though I’d ridden in on a tank and liberated her from the Nazis. (Is it just me, or do girls who have lower back tatts which they can barely see, even in the mirror, get them so boys can admire the results close up? If you know what I mean.)

During that unexpected happy time I was approached by a mousy looking lady who I presumed would make some idiotic request, but she was in fact a detective from the St Kilda Road complex who’d come to pay me. It was noisy so we went side-stage where it was quieter and also quite dark. As she counted out the notes I imagined it as hush money for some corrupt drug deal, a payment so I wouldn’t cause any grief for the Force. And come to think of it, that is what I was being paid to do. To shut up and stop playing songs called “Where Is My Mind?”, “Wave Of Mutilation” and “Monkey Gone To Heaven.”

As the final glorious cacophony of “Debaser” faded, and The Pixies set concluded, I’d pretty much managed to clear the room. It was a pleasingly premature end to the evening, arriving as it did an hour early. So not only had I been paid for an hour longer than I’d actually worked, I’d also been gifted bonus money for an extra hour I’d agreed to put in if necessary. As if that was ever going to happen.

The next day I was asked by a buddy how the gig had gone. I told him that it had been tough, that the police had harassed me all night, been in my face, made me feel uncomfortable, treated me as nothing more than a common criminal.

“Yeah? Typical,” he said. “Probably smacked you about a bit too?”

“Well … no they didn’t do that,” I confessed. “But I think they might have wanted to. And not just the women either.”

Back In Cack

2010-03-02T01:20:00.000-08:00

Back In Cack

By Michael Witheford

Did you know that AC/DC have never written a song called “Lap It Up”? A few minutes ago I was writing about how the crowd at their Melbourne show lapped it up, the whole AC/DC thing, and I thought that surely there was a “Lap It Up” on a record somewhere? Some album track somewhere in the Akka Dakka canon. No, said Google and when Google speaks, you listen. Anyway, I’m just saying. Bit surprised. Let’s move on.

Here they were anyway, home at last. The tickets were free so I was more curious than expectant. I quite like AC/DC’s ‘70s stuff. When I was a teenager, songs like “Let There Be Rock” were a perfect fit for a drunken Green Ginger Wine-fuelled lurch around someone’s parents garage capped off by a fulsome spew in the dark on some outside foliage. (I once puked on the roses of one of my friends’ mothers and she chased me around the back of the house brandishing a metal barbecue fork. I hid under a bed, eventually offering to wipe the petals when she’d been talked down and had dropped the weapon.)

The riff to “Let There Be Rock” is a great big bowl of stupid, as most classic riffs are (and about 5% of all the best riffs in history belong to AC/DC), but the song works particularly well because of the teasing anticipation, the breaks in the song when the throbbing bass is punctuated by Bon Scott’s sermonizing of the elements; “Let there be sound … there was sound … etc … gitarzzz … let there be ROCK!” And BAM! Older Young and younger Young go fully sick on the Gretsch and the Gibson.

A masterpiece that number, but I’ve never owned an AC/DC album, so I have a diffident attitude to their stuff. (I did once borrow Highway To Hell and forgot to give it back. Sorry David.)

AC/DC could have only evolved in Australia. The Youngs were born overseas –most of the best Oz bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s were full of immigrants; most famously The Easybeats- but they were hard those boys from Scotland.

Musical aggression taken to something close to physical intimidation, is an Aussie tradition. In the early ‘70s Billy Thorpe grew his hair and became the first bogan hero. Chain took their cues from the passions of blues legends like John Mayall and Long John Baldry, but Chain’s stuff is far more coruscating and primal. “Black’n’Blue” (You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjslm31mjm4) was a number one hit in Australia. It’s a dirty crude mess of ploddy blues. No other country in the world would let a beast like that top the charts. It was primordial. Lobby Loyde and cohorts were in that mix, as were Angry Anderson’s Buster Brown and there’s a kind of ironic take on the whole tough guy thing in The Birthday Party’s stuff. Then you have a lot of bands like the Beasts Of Bourbon who might be ironic but it’s hard to say to what degree.

AC/DC germinated during this seventies Oz blues-rock surge, but they looked better, were younger, cheekier and had a grasp of pop music as it was being played by the likes of Slade and The Sweet in England. Bands comprised of ex-skins and brickies labourers spotted by record company execs at their local pubs playing Chuck Berry covers, then signed up, squeezed into glam jackets, and satin flares, and pushed out the door into popland tottering to the top on five inch platform boots. The embryonic AC/DC were watching closely.

Gave a look at “Can I Sit Next To You Girl ” featuring their original singer Dave Evans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0-Dks26h8Y.) No Bon Scott or Phil Rudd involved yet, but some of the band’s signature sound is already in place. The song is a naff 12 bar blues but it rocks; it bloke-rocks and it glam-rocks. The chorus is less of an enquiry than a rhetorical demand delivered after the girl has already been sat next to. There’s some comical satin pants action, and Malcolm Young looks like a 15th century court jester. But it’s uncontrived, powerful and the little guitarist in the school uniform looks fantastic.

With colour TV and Countdown, Sherbet and Skyhooks (both excellent bands) and others like Hush (who were shit but looked good because of their Asian pretty-boy guitarists) were gifted some astronomical star-making assistance, but AC/DC preferred to stink up their Countdown slots with deliberately crass and crude performances. They were out to upset parents, and succeeded, especially with mine. The cross-dressed, pigtailed mascared, school-dress–wearing Bon Scott, leering at the camera in their first Countdown appearance, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43PGKeq9gc) looks like a genuine menace to the moral standards of the community. He lights a cigarette for fuck’s sake!

That all went well, the bad boy thing, so AC/DC, intelligently, fucked off to Europe. They arrived in the UK in just as punk broke but the music scene was still dominated by tedious beardy prog, lazy prats like Supertramp, and disgraceful novelty hits (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAATxhOXH_A) There was one area of rock however that punk, prog, Elton John, or all the chart-targeted glitter and glam pop etc would never affect; Heavy Metal … which had only just begun thinking of itself as a genre. Cream and Led Zep begat Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, who begat UFO and Uriah Heep, and then Blue Oyster Cult and very quickly the whole thing headed off into dungeons and dragons territory. AC/DC’s timing was perfect. There stuff was 100% proof hard rock. An unpretentious no questions asked smack in the mouth. And remarkably nobody had ever tried that before. Five minutes after they’d got off the plane the band were huge. They were metal’s Sex Pistols. The rest is history.

So here I was, more than 35 years later. At my first AC/DC show. To celebrate AC/DC’s homecoming. A few warning signs on the way in. My friend got hit by a ciggy butt flicked from the second level of the Etihad Stadium concourse. Impolite sir. One guy near Gate 5 had already succumbed to the effects of too much beer coupled with too much gravity. He’d conspicuously hit the deck, and the cops were deciding whether to throw him out, or put him on a stretcher and then throw him out.

This crowd, this jungle of redneck menace, these ugly, ugly yobs. Where did they come from? You see a lot of good ol’ boys about the place when you breach the limits of any city, but I just wasn’t expecting this. Not to this extent. Where were the metal fans in their patched denim jackets? A bit of that would have added colour, class even. I can declare quite truthfully that of every man in the place I had the longest hair, and although Malcolm Young and Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams have hair longer than mine (they’re in the band, those guys), I was attracting (familiar) looks of hostility from big bastard legoheads.

And the drunk guy I mentioned would have got wankered, in part at least I’m sure, because all the bars at the stadium were open. And there were no ID checks. (There were some kids behind us, 12 year-olds maybe, who I considered paying to go for a trek and to get us some Vodkas.) This bar open policy seemed in my mind a catastrophic invitation for trouble, but in fact it sort of strengthened the argument, made quite forcefully at the SLAM March, that music doesn’t make people go all fisticuffs. Or was I just lucky? (There were scraps and intimidations in Adelaide I believe. How could there not be?)

It wasn’t until about the 50 minute mark of the AC/DC circus that I realized, fully that is –I’d known it, but hadn’t spent much time thinking about it, ever- that the monomania of rockin’ and fuckin’, the admixture for AC/DC’s dickcentric-rock riffage and mindset, could be so wearying.

There’s no shade, sway, swing, or mood, just a little veer now and then down a faint tributary away from the highway to hell, but even then the view’s pretty much the same.

For me, by the hour mark, it was mostly a noisy unvarying sonic anaesthetic. AC/DC are a band who dwell in a steady-state universe. Their immutability cannot be challenged by any group on Earth. But could that be a good thing? It’d be a fine topic for a high school debate. (The subtext of this column after all is that I have no idea about anything.)

As song after song was cranked out, there was revealed an absence just as insistent as the presence of Malcolm Young’s giant bedrock guitar. The absence? The void? It was emotion of course, of any sort. I had entered a love-stunted, blank phallic universe, unthinking, macho and delivering a lesson in the objectification of women, especially ones with big norgs.

Misogny? That’s an argument a little more difficult to prove. They don’t harbour the resentments, jealousies and violent tendencies of early blues, don’t have the cocksure threatening sneer of some of Led Zep’s stuff for example. AC/DC don’t really want to teach you a lesson. They just want to see what you got. And the bigger the norgs the better.

Boneheaded but occasionally funny innuendo has always been an art form in the hands of AC/DC. Or was until Bon died. Lesser idiots like Warrant and Poison have had a crack, but our boys are the Jedi Knights of blow job and rooting euphemism. It’s hard work squeezing that lemon these days mind you. Tits? What more can be said? Are you ready to rock? Only so many times you can ask that one. Balls? They’re big, we get the message.

I got the feeling too that having taken this leviathan of a show all over the world the band weren’t that into it. Probably because they looked too much like they were into it. Every second was choreographed as precisely as any spectacular games ceremony. This is your mark. Don’t miss the cue.

“TNT” was great. “Dirty Deeds” was good. “Whole Lotta Rosie”, with a giant inflatable lingerie-clad Rosie rising from the rear of the stage was probably excellent, but I was too distracted wondering how you can make a balloon woman forty feet tall tap her feet to the song.

I’ve never been sucked in by the deification of Bon Scott, but he was a star, and not too much of the stuff the band has recorded after he died has been as cheeky or playful. Johnson was the best replacement, but he was never going to be as lewd and dangerous as Bon. Nowhere near as smart either. But for god’s sake Bon Scott was still just a singer in a band. Art exhibitions of letters to his wife? Really? Seriously? A statue? I didn’t know he played footy.

Brian Johnson’s been in the band for 30 years yet I still think of him as “the new guy”. I still think of Ron Wood as the new guy in the Stones, even though I was 12 when he joined. Your brain gets music-fused very early.

In a way it was Angus who kinda bothered me most. Too much Angusing. His solo in “Let There Be Rock”, my song, was interminable. Up and down the catwalk. Up on top of the stage steam-train prop. Up on a hydraulic platform doing his Morteined fly on its back thing. Up and back again.

He Angused me out did Angus. But he’s such a compelling figure, a kind of musical idiot savant. There’s not much analytical brain there. His head is mostly comprised of a giant musical tumour and an enormous sense of fun.

Watch or read an interview with Angus and you’re spending time with a not too articulate chain-smoking man-child who has no interest in the outside world, not because he’s rich and selfish or molly-coddled – he’s very down to earth in a ‘good onya’ way, but he just likes playing in a rock’n’roll band, and isn’t that enough? He’s a sort of anti-Bono. Not only does he not want to be a spokesperson/activist/prat/loudmouth, he can barely be bothered talking about anything, including AC/DC. He’s been rocking for 35 years, married for 30 which is amazing for a rock relationship, and he’s still having a hoot.

From what we know of Angus and Malcolm, writing an AC/DC song with with keyboards in mind, or strings, harmonies or jingle bells would be absurd. They are the most cheerful unerring guitar ideologues of them all. And they’ve had a three-decade teenage hard-on so the lyrics aren’t much of a stretch.

Almost every hard rock band has at least one heartfelt, or even pseudo-heartfelt, power ballad. Thin Lizzy were the masters; a perfect blend of power, versatility, and heart; balls-out rockers like the Boys Are Back In Town and songs like ‘Still In Love With You’ which are genuinely beautiful. AC/DC’s audience aren’t too refined and the band’s closest shave with love’s dangers is probably “She’s Got The Jack.”

“She’s Got The Jack” is a fairly ugly slow song (the only slow one) about a girl with the clap. (I don’t know which genital disease they might be specifically referring to.) They played it in Melbourne, and as it lumbered along a bunch of girls, each aloft and astride the shoulders of a guy, were selected one by one by AC/DC TV and projected onto the giant screens either side of the stage. Each one in turn hoisted her top, with most going the full tit reveal. So … if you put the subject matter and the roaming camera together … Does that mean she’s got the jack, that girl now 50 feet tall onscreen? And that one there, she’s got it I presume, and look at her, she looks like a bit of a slapper. I bet she’s got the jack!

Look, I’m taking it all a bit seriously, but somebody has to. I didn’t object to the objectification of enthusiastically semi-naked rock chicks on any kind of moral basis; if a woman wants to show fifty thousand people her baps, or fifty million, that’s up to her. She’s welcome to show them to me, although I certainly wouldn’t request it. What I objected to was the cynicism. And also the sense that had the women thought about it, had they considered that their tits might end up on YouTube, and had they not felt obliged in some way by the arrowing camera, a few might have thought twice. Mind you most were the sort I’d guess who think ‘Sexism’ is a three-speed vibrator from Club X in Thomastown.

I admit too that my sudden dispirit when I realized the sort of people I’d be in the midst of was an unfair tarnish on the band. In my mind I was saying to the group, “Look what you’ve done you bastards! I might have had a nice evening if you didn’t encourage these primitives. I bet it’s not like this in Barcelona.”

It’s easy to over-analyze a dumb concert like this. Easy for me at least. Maybe I’m the only one who has overthink problems on this issue. I don’t care. I don’t buy this. I didn’t buy the show really, and happily I didn’t buy the ticket.

I didn’t feel fucked over, or ripped off, but I did have a vague sensation that someone had jizzed on my face.