When I submitted my PhD for examination in 2001, I was all nervous energy and action, and I didn't know what to do with myself. So I started writing a memoir of my time in pop magazines.
I got a lot of stuff down, maybe twenty thousand words. I didn't know what to do with it then and I guess I lost it. Until I found it today. On a disc labelled nothing more than '2002'.
The whole idea for this memoir was revived when I published Pop Life with Marc Andrews and Claire Isaac in 2011. But I didn't know where this stuff was, so I couldn't rehash it into the book... though knowing me a lot of the anecdotes are probably the same. Just a decade less fresh and a decade more overworked. I don't know. This is the first chapter, which I conditionally titled 'Pop is Shit' (this may or may not have been a commentary on the Custard song 'Music is Crap'). The book itself didn't have a name.
This chapter explains the
first five years of Smash Hits, its ups and downs, its eccentric staff, and
recounts some incidents that throw light on the way the magazine worked.
1982: TRIPLE R AND GAUMONT
I recently met a woman I’d gone to high school with in my (and her)
final year, 1982. I only went there a couple of hours each week, to do French.
It was Camberwell High, actually, the same school Kylie and Dannii (and for all
I know Brendan) Minogue went to. But that’s not important right now. I met her
and she told me that the last time we’d spoken – the last day of school
probably – she’d asked me what I was going to do next. She said I’d said ‘I’m
going to eat baked beans in bed.’ She also said she found this an impressive
statement, and I suppose this is true, because she’d never forgotten it.
Christ.
I probably did eat baked beans in bed, it was
probably as decadent as I could imagine someone being, and I was into the idea
of being as decadent as possible. I certainly had no intention of embarking on
a career, let alone a career as a pop music journalist. Because who ever liked
pop music? Certainly not me, in 1983, fresh out of school and my head buzzing
with the exciting and angular sounds of the underground. I liked music a lot
but the music I liked was – well, not exactly opposed to the charts – I saw no
reason why the Moodists couldn’t go to number one in the charts, or why
everyone couldn’t enjoy the Red Crayola. For some reason, though, nobody else
agreed with me (I still can’t figure it out).
Even the things at the
very commercial end of my taste spectrum didn’t really hit it with the masses.
Orange Juice had a hit overseas, but it wasn’t happening here. The Undertones,
The Go-Betweens – I even had a soft spot for things like Haircut 100 – weren’t
really scoring chart action.
I was largely
unemployed in ’83. These were the days when not only was it easy to make that
lifestyle decision but also it was more or less condoned by the peer group,
because it was taking money back from ‘the man’, though we didn’t use terms
like that then (but one of my teachers, for instance, who was a bikie as well
as a teacher, told our class that he was going to quit being a teacher at the
end of the year and ride round Australia on his motorbike and ‘get some money
back from the government’ which he’d been forced against his will to pay up in
his teaching years – i.e. he was going to go on the dole. We didn’t even think
this was cool – it was just sensible.) My school years had been horrendous, a
sort of endless torture of being beaten up and spat on, by fellow students and
teachers alike. Once that was over, you’d think I’d take advantage of the
situation and go and do all those things I knew I had the potential for, or at
least climb Mount Everest for christ’s sake. But sadly I had discovered some
ultimately damaging gems of information: things like the fact that some girls
actually liked me, and that the dole when you lived at home and didn’t have to
pay for anything except your own records and magazines really went quite a long
way, and that to get a stunning degree of celebrity in Melbourne in 1983 all
you had to do was put out a stupid fanzine and do a radio show on 3RRR and that
didn’t take up much time at all. So you (I) could spend the rest of your (my)
time sitting round the house watching TV and playing records and writing
letters to the girls who wrote me fan mail at RRR, and occasionally doing some
work on the fanzine, and every Sunday doing the radio show. What a year.
Of course I still
watched Countdown and still kept my eye on the charts, as I had done for almost
ten years – since I think the beginning of ’74, when people like Gary Glitter
and Hush were big. I was in hospital in ’74 and an older boy with a broken leg
used to hobble around singing Gary Glitter songs at the top of his voice. It
was the same formative period at which I realised that Gilligan and his friends
were seriously never going to get off that fucking island. In the late
seventies at school my friend Guy Morton and I used to get the 3XY Top 40,
which was printed on different coloured paper and distributed to record shops
every week, and go through putting little symbols next to the names of records,
for ‘got it’ and ‘want it’. But even the $2 which singles cost then was
prohibitively expensive to us, so our high aspirations were not often
actionable…
I had stopped wanting to own
records from the top 40 by the time I was 17 or 18, but I still knew what was
‘going on’, who was selling records and I knew all the hits, somehow. I didn’t
listen to pop radio and I didn’t read pop magazines – I suppose it was just
something in my teenage blood which received the information and stored it away
in my poor, already overstimulated brain. I knew ‘Bette Davis Eyes’, even though
I didn’t want to know it. At all. But I knew that pop music was there in the
marketplace and that all kinds of people bought and liked it, whereas only a
few people liked the things I liked. Only a few years later, a little more
world weary and au fait with the industry, working in the Sydney GPO sorting
city mail, I could laugh when one of my co-workers, a slightly aryan fellow in
grey fatigues, threw a tanty over the commercial radio we had playing in the
workspace – ‘why don’t they play some Residents? Or Dead Kennedys?!’ he yelled
– but in truth that is kind of what I wondered, too, although the Dead Kennedys
I could pretty much do without.
Somehow during the year I accidentally got a
bit of a job. I started working at Gaumont Books. It wasn’t meant to be, but it
happened. James Manning was the presenter of the show after mine on RRR. I
thought even then he had terrible taste in music – I’ll never forget him
starting his show with that laid-back Icelandic lounge jazz prog rock record,
and I’m not kidding. Later on many occasions when I heard him sing I was to
form the opinion that he was actually tone deaf. Of course his estimation of my
taste was even more savage and funnily these days I might go a long way to
agreeing with him. James was tallish and probably only about five years older
than me though he seemed ancient, of course. He was gruff and strange, and I
was a bit scared of him. Same as now.
James had a friend
called Eddy Sarafian who did a show one night during the week, called – this
still sounds cool to me, but that’s me – Ready
Eddy Go. I knew we had something in common because once he played Anton
Karas’s ‘Harry Lime Theme’ on his show, and I’d always loved that tune. Eddy,
who was still at high school somewhere near his home in the wilds of Glen
Waverley, worked in James’ bookshop, Gaumont, which was hidden away in Little
Collins Street kind of behind the Southern Cross. I think the
Gaumont name came from James’ interest in film (it’s the title of a French
production company). He’d started a journalistic career writing about film for
the Tribune, the communist newspaper.
I don’t know when he abandoned communism (or if he has) or whether Gaumont
started out as just a film bookshop but by the time I’d heard of it, there was
at least as much music-related material. With the rise in new romantic,
so-called ‘pretty-boy’ pop, James was in the perfect position to make a mint
from the importation of overseas music magazines. In my memory the Japanese
Duran Duran magazines leap out: horrendously expensive, beautifully printed,
all in Japanese, they were much sought after by the Durannie girls of
Melbourne. But Gaumont had other attractions. They received one big shipment –
and one only, I later discovered, because the distributor Rough Trade couldn’t
get it together to respond to their requests for more – of British fanzines,
which I bought by the bagful and devoured with keen interest. They had film and
music books, videos, posters, cards, and so on. It was a fan’s paradise.
Eddy and James knew me
from my RRR show and thought I was a fucken wanker particularly because I got
more fan mail than anyone else at the station, letters that were often glittery
or huge or illustrated or calligraphically outstanding. Eddy told me later that
they revised their decision one time when one of them heard me say on air that
I actually only wanted letters to gauge my listeners’ interest in my show,
which was nice of him, though of course their initial estimate was closer to
the truth. After so long being the marginalised long-haired nerd at school I
was suddenly breaking out in technicolour with the glory of being a young white
short-haired male who all these Catholic teenage girls wanted to write letters
to and call up and hang out with (the Catholic thing was probably mainly
because my show was on early on Sunday; only Catholics got up that early on a
Sunday morning, and only girls wrote letters).
Having perhaps
identified some of the cynicism in me that would later flower like a cabbage in
my writing career, James took a shine to me and threw a bit of
late-on-a-Thursday-night work-at-Gaumont my way. Just as I have never, for
whatever crazy reason, been sacked from a job, I have made it a matter of
principle to never pass one up, even in cases like this, when I really never
wanted a job at all. It meant having to be somewhere at a certain time and do
things, and that gave me the shits; it was a straightjacket on my free and easy
neurotic life. But it did also mean I could sit behind a counter and read the
Gaumont stock for free, in the name of research. Once on my RRR show I raved to
my audience about You Don’t Have to Say
You Love Me, the autobiography of 60s pop manager Simon Napier-Bell, and
James made a caustic remark about how I didn’t mention it was available from
Gaumont. I got on my high horse about advertising on public radio; his response
– ‘well, I fucking paid you to read it!’ was really pretty correct.
At some point – it
must have been late in ’83 – James came back from an overseas trip with news.
He’d bought or been given or somehow gained the rights to publish the British
magazine Smash Hits, and he was going
to be the editor. I had never really taken an interest in Smash Hits, but what excited me was that James was going to produce
the magazine here in Australia and he asked me if I’d write for it. He said
‘Those things you write in your fanzine are quite funny…’ (he might even have
said ‘quite good’). There was the promise of money, too, which was doubly
exciting, as it meant I could perhaps buy more records or buy some books about
records or something similar.
I had already had a
flirtation with the mainstream press, or the mainstream end of the alternative
press, anyway. I’d written a review of a Models album for a new wavey tabloid
monthly called Vox Muzpaper which was
run by a man called Neil Bradbury, who I am grateful to for being my first real
editor, though he never published anything else I did after that. He did come
to my family’s house in Hawthorn one night to drop off some albums for me to
review but as he was leaving my brother yelled out ‘Neil’s a blockhead!’ so
maybe that put him off. Vox went
under [...] I wrote at least one review (of an Elvis Costello album) for the Virgin Press, an arty version of a
tabloid music mag. However most of my writing was for my own fanzine, Distant Violins, and I enjoyed being my
own editor, though I wasn’t very good at it. I just liked magazines, really, or
fucking around with them, or, let’s be truthful, playing at running a magazine.
Fanzines were and are fun, particularly when you do them more or less all by
yourself, because you can bung in anything you want and say what you want and
work out any particular weird kinks/interests/ideas you have going on, on as
many pages divisible by two as you like.
I must have had some
template for a fanzine, but I can’t remember it. Maybe I had just read about
fanzines, and figured I had some idea what they were like. I had experience on
the school magazine which was a black-and-white photocopied stapled production
not unlike a fanzine (except much, much more boring). I did know that I wasn’t
going to limit myself to anything that ordinary magazines limited themselves to
– or even anything that ordinary fanzines limited themselves to. I wasn’t going
to be always up to date, or cool (that’s why it was called Distant Violins – every other fanzine was called Attack or Communication Breakdown or Death
Throes, and I wanted to be obtuse rather than take a confrontational attitude
that smelt fake to me). The first issue featured the Moodists, who’d just got a
great review in the NME which suddenly made them massive in the minds of the
300 people who went to the Seaview Ballroom; Bryce Perrin, who played double
bass in a cool instrumental group called Equal Local; and another band who
didn’t really exist, as far as I know, but was just one of the girls who wrote
to me at RRR, pretending she was in a band. Well, it worked.
So when James
mentioned he could throw me some Smash
Hits work, I knew that I could write for any pop publication, because I
wasn’t a bad writer and even at that early stage I enjoyed fabricating
enthusiasm for all kinds of crap – pretending to be professional, or a
journalist.
Though James owned the
rights to Smash Hits he wasn’t going
to set up all by himself; he went into some kind of partnership with Fairfax
Magazines, who also ran Dolly and Cosmopolitan and a few other big popular
magazines. They operated out of a narrow building on the west side of Elizabeth
street in which all kind of crazy archaic publishing practices went on (by the
way that word was ‘archaic’ not ‘anarchic’ just in case you read it wrong).
Smash Hits had started a few years earlier in Britain and taken the
country by storm simply by dint of its ridiculous simplicity. It started out as
a fortnightly magazine of pictures and lyrics to popular songs. There was no
‘editorial’ – i.e. there were no articles or puzzles or newsy bits or any of
those things that people later came to expect. But then things got complicated.
For whatever reason, articles and factoids and puzzles and all the other bits
and pieces of ephemera that go with pop magazines started creeping in. It soon
became a very with-it, though still utterly straight-down-the-line-chart-pop-oriented,
magazine, and somehow developed its own special sense of humour alongside its
dedication to all the glitz of pop music. The magazine was already successful
in Australia as an import, despite (or perhaps, just perhaps, because of) the fact
that it featured a lot of British music and acts and ideas that didn’t get much
attention in Australia. It seemed to make sense to tailor it to Australian
readers and publish locally.
The bulk of the magazine
was, of course, generated from the Australian office. In the early 80s
Australia not only had a thriving pop scene of its own, it also picked and
chose from British and American cultures, so that there had to be recognition
in the Australian Smash Hits not only
of Australian things, but also of the American stars and songs that Australians
liked and Britons didn’t.
I was a freelancer, and not
a very frequent contributor either, in the first year or so of the magazine, so
it was a long time before I really understood what everyone did. James was the
editor, though there were sometimes attempts to install under-editors beneath
him – whether by James himself or by Fairfax, I don’t know. Eddy Sarafian was
the ‘office boy’, so-called. He rarely wrote for the magazine – in fact, he
wrote less than James did, and that’s saying something – preferring to take a
co-ordinating role. He did get his picture in Smash Hits early on, some feet protruding from under a big pile of
mail, to show the amazing response to some competition or another. [...] There was a ‘production manager’ whose name was Mick and
who played in a band called Use No Hooks. There was a secretary called Lesley,
who later went on to work for TV Week
where she had the unenviable job of deciphering Molly Meldrum’s babble for his
column. When Lesley left a girl called Ria took her place; I remember Eddy once
telling me he was doing a story at the ABC when Geisha or someone similar were
appearing on Countdown and he saw Ria
sitting outside with her friends, just a fan hanging round with some other
teenage girls outside Countdown. He
was surprised by her secret life but he was also a bit contemptous that she
hadn’t given that stuff up now she worked ‘in the industry’ as it were.
However, although I was only
an occasional, I did get in the first issue: a live review of The Cure. I had
lunch with The Cure – I remember dropping my fork – and Robert Smith told me
that mustard was really good in toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches. He also
gave me an accolade I’ve never forgotten. I gave him a copy of a one-off
fanzine called Everything’s Roses
which I’d co-produced with my friend Megan Edwards. In it there was a comic
strip in which different characters’ demises turn out to be the dream of a new
character, who then is also burnt alive, or drowned, or something. ‘Did you do
this?’ said Robert Smith. I said yes. He laughed and said, ‘That’s exactly how
I think!’ The girls who ‘always’ met him when he came to Melbourne skulked and
scowled in the background.
I also, in the lead-up to
the launch of Smash Hits, did an
interview with Beargarden. Now, that was strange. I got to Virgin records’
office in South Melbourne and Sam Sejavka – he who was later canonised via
Michael Hutchence’s version of him in Dogs
in Space – was reading a letter. ‘Hmm,’ he said to no-one, ‘this girl’s
just asked me to her school formal.’ He didn’t say if he was going to go, and I
later discovered that he didn’t, and that the letter was from Claire Isaac, who
about ten years later became the editor of Hit
Songwords. Beargarden never had a hit, and indeed for all I know they were
the first ever example of scratch-my-back-ing from Australian Smash Hits editorial; whereas British Smash Hits eschewed any responsibility
for breaking groups or records, preferring instead to concentrate solely on
what was already in the charts, the Australian market was too small. Australian
Smash Hits was always having to do
favours for Australian record companies, covering groups no-one liked, in
exchange for a chance to do a personal file on Phil Collins when he toured.
Although, in Beargarden’s case, they did look the part of a Smash Hits band, Sejavka’s incessant
heroin use being at this point either in remission or just not showing yet
(five years later when I met Michael Hutchence he started talking to me about
Sejavka, apropos of nothing. He said ‘Sam Sejavka came up to me at a party and
he looked terrible, all his teeth have come out and he looks like an ancient
junkie, and he said “You’re ashamed you know me, aren’t you?”). I suppose
Beargarden did say the following, but I was plainly just using them as puppets
in my story, to figure out what I was doing writing for the mainstream press:
Sam Sejavka and
Carl Manuell of Beargarden have a right to be quietly confident [I wrote].
Everything’s going rather well. They were the first group to sign to the Virgin
Australia label and their record company positively dotes on them… “We did
spend a lot of time in wishy-washy no-account groups,” admits Sam, “but as we
grew older we decided we’d make something of it… We’re not an art band, we’re a
pop band… I can understand an art band releasing a record and not giving a tinker’s
cuss what people think of it because they’re under the delusion that it’s
art.’… “For years my parents thought I was wasting my time totally,” says Carl,
“Lately they’re pretty excited about it because it looks like it might be
happening.”
“Oh, that’s because you’re fitting in,”
snorts Sam in disgust. “It looks like you’ll make some money – a career.”
The most interesting part of my review of the Cure show was the
description of Cure fans hanging around outside the stage door receiving kisses
and pulling Robert Smith’s hair and asking him if it hurt. Other acts covered
in this issue included Icehouse, Stephen Cummings (a friend of James’, who
occasionally worked in Gaumont), Alison Moyet and Paul Young.
A peculiar thing about the
early days of Smash Hits – and surely
something that James instituted, because it couldn’t have been natural – was
the evil attitude the staff had towards all the other magazines on the floor. I
can’t remember who they were – probably New
Idea or something – but Smash Hits
made it clear that they didn’t have any time for any of the other magazines.
They were better than that. There’d be no small talk or interfrolicking. Fuck Cosmo and Dolly – ‘tossers’.
Not everyone was crazy about
the new Australian Smash Hits. A girl
I knew who was totally into all English music of the time (she once said to me,
and not because I asked, ‘You’re quite good looking – but you’re no Simon Le
Bon’) was furious about the change. That was the only one I knew of at the time
but apparently many people – by and large the ones who’d been buying UK Smash Hits before ’84, Claire Isaac for
instance – were unhappy about the new version. It’s easy to see why. Primarily,
they were anti-Australian snobs – back then the Australian pop scene was scared
to death of new post-punk pop bands, and groups like Haircut 100 or the Beat
were just too radical for Australian record companies, let alone Australian pop
radio. Secondarily (though this might not have become clear for a while)
anytime Australian Smash Hits tried
to be like the British version the results were always awful. Australian
writers didn’t understand the British humour very well, and fair enough, why
should they? But on top of that, Australians weren’t ready (yet) to take a wry
view of pop stars. Probably a lot of British Smash Hits readers found the
humour hard to take, too – a lot of it was pretty dense. That thing about
asking Joey Tempest from Europe if he’d ever grown cress in a gumboot, for
instance, which was mainly anyway poking fun at how poor Tempest’s English was,
always sticks in my mind (if not my craw). Ha, ha.
But the Australian version
of this queer* magazine was a big success, I think, almost instantly. This might
be gauged by the fact that an imitator sprung up immediately – Murdoch brought
out an Australian version of Smash Hits
UK’s competitor, No. 1. It died soon
after, whether because it seemed to consistently, week after week, feature
Mental as Anything on its covers (why? why? we never figured it out) or because
it was just a bad version of Smash Hits
based on a bad imitation, is hard to say. A friend of mine had a younger sister
who had embraced No. 1 with gusto and
told her family ‘this is going to be my
magazine’. A harsh education in publishing pragmatics for her, when it went belly-up.
Another pop magazine – Countdown,
linked to the TV show – had a bit more oomph and, apart from anything else, it
was at least not based on a successful international product. It was, however,
full of dreadful Dollyisms which read like they were written by a distillation
of social workers and elder sisters. It was a pretty embarrassing production.
When we moved to Sydney Fairfax already owned Countdown and we were placed in the office behind them. If you
think Smash Hits staff were going to
treat Cosmo’s staff with contempt,
imagine the kind of treatment Countdown
got. When Barry Divola started work at Countdown
and came down to the Smash Hits
office to say his name was Baz and hi, the office didn’t get over it for six
months. ‘Baz’? Wanker.
The Smash Hits office was almost instantly a boy’s club, and if women
were working there, they had to act like boys too. The irritating thing was
that this was so seductive. I really enjoyed it. Having always shied away from
sports or in fact anywhere I’d have to deal with men at all, really, the fact
that this was the most politically incorrect workplace on earth was a thrill.
Details would do the situation a disservice, as well as offending too many
people in the name of putting in words situations that don’t even deserve being
remembered. The racist, homophobic and sexist comments that were made every day
in the office environment – a combination of a desire to shock and horrify
fellow workers with the ordinary everyday fears and anxieties of the average
white Australian male. I know how much I sound like a dobber but frankly sexist
and racist comments don’t come naturally to me, and I tended not to join in – I
can’t think fast enough anyway, and it took years to get the hang of the
assumptions behind it – but I did laugh and engage with the whole atmosphere.
James could be hilarious, and the way in-jokes developed was just a pleasure to
observe. I only remember segments. I don’t know why ‘noof’ became a stand-in
word for ‘poof’ or how different ways of saying ‘bloke’ or calling each other
‘bloke’ (‘be-loke!’) became hilariously funny, but they did. Similarly
hilarious – I’m sure it’s already clear that this isn’t an atmosphere you can
describe – was the use of the exclamation ‘nothing!’ to indicate
disappointment. I was in a privileged position to enjoy the shock humour of it,
of course, because I was a straight white male, so none of it was directed at me.
How the gays, or the women, or the non-anglo staff members felt about it I
don’t know, because I don’t remember discussing it with them.
I did get my share of
ragging, because I was supposed to be Mr. Indie, or Mr. Rough Trade i.e. I was,
in the Smash Hits office stereotype,
the one who liked records released on the British record label Rough Trade. It
was true, I did like some records released on Rough Trade, but if you think
that’s a pretty slender premise to base teasing on I would have to agree with you
– but then, I would, wouldn’t I. I tried not to give the office too much to
tease me about, for reasons that I hope by now are obvious, so I tended not to
talk much, which was easy enough in that kind of environment, particularly
before I worked there on a regular basis. When you’re a freelancer you’re just
part of the passing show for the regulars, any time you show up in the office
you’re just a new input to factor in to a running gag amongst a group of
drudges united in boredom.
James was also hilariously
naïve, and held a lot of the same attitudes he presumably formed when he was a
kid growing up in Gippsland in the 70s, when he’d travel into Melbourne on a
Saturday to attend concerts at Billboard that later became legendary… except
he’d have to leave after the first support band to go home.
His naivete always took me
off guard. He once came and visited me, after I’d moved to Sydney, in a terrace
house in Cleveland Street Chippendale, and expressed distaste for my living
conditions. He asked me if I smoked a lot of bongos, and became annoyed at my
intransigent inability to understand what he meant. You may now have guessed
what he was referring to. I didn’t even want the word ‘bong’ to pass my lips,
so ascetic was I (it was a hippy word), so we never resolved that one.
The bizarre aspect of all
this was that it was behind a very cheery, hearty, pop magazine; a magazine
which hoped to appeal to an age group somewhere between 9 and 15. It was all
about big, bright pictures and fun and dancing. Smash Hits in the UK – the Australian version tried to do the same
– had this amused, slightly wry aspect to it; pop stars were a funny old lot,
and they said funny old things, and George Michael and Andrew Ridgely were a
couple of mates touring the world on a lark. You’d think the attitudes espoused
in Smash Hits said a lot more about
the comics its staff read at boarding school than it did about the go-ahead
world of pop music in the 80s. But it was staggeringly popular, and the
Australian version proved to be as well.
I think I had moved to
Sydney even by the time the first issue of Smash
Hits came out. I was a reasonably regular contributor, and established
myself as a bit of a Sydney correspondent – interviewing left-of-centre people
like Samurai Trash, Johanna Pigott, Kam Sha… Kam Sha were a funny bunch, a
group of New Zealanders who steadfastly refused to tell me what their band had
been called back in New Zealand. Even when I turned off the tape player, and
promised not to publish it, and insisted I was just interested… if only they’d had a hit with their single ‘Work Until
You Drop’, someone would have cared enough to do some in-depth research and
find out. I interviewed the Models after eating more of a housemate’s hash
coookies than I should have (for some reason I got very hungry once I started)
and spent the whole interview extremely distressed because I believed that when
I thought I was speaking I actually wasn’t saying anything at all. But then I’d
think… but they’re answering my questions, so I must be speaking… then I’d
start being scared again. The strangest thing was listening back to the tape
afterwards and finding it all sounded incredibly normal and boring, the most
interesting thing being listening in to Sean Kelly on the telephone to his
mother, and Sean saying ‘Mum, I’m a bloody pop
musician!’ She was probably trying to discuss the merits of the latest Red
Crayola release. By the way if you think that it was hypocritical of me to eat
a massive swag of hash cookies but not to want to say the word ‘bong’, well, I
guess you weren’t around in the mid-80s.
My work for Smash Hits diminished in ’85, and I got
a job in health food, where I continued to mingle with the stars; whereas Peter
Garrett, for instance, was surely too serious a musician for Smash Hits, my new role enabled me to
sell him a piece of banana cake. In April, I went to Britain and on returning
later in the year I found myself at the crossroads. Well, perhaps not a
crossroads… maybe at the junction of a lane and a street.
I had always felt uneasy
about the fact that I was in a band and writing about music at the same time. I
knew a lot of groovy musicians, people I appreciated, started out writing about
music and then gave that up and started making music instead. That was the
point, to me – they gave up writing about it to do it. I felt that if I really
wanted to be pure in my music, I should give away the easy life of a music
writer.
So I got a job in the post
office.
The post office is another
story, and even more horrible than this one. Even though I was only there a
couple of months, I could write a tortuous epic about the torture I endured at
the Sydney GPO, as a mail sorter. Just the sketchy recollections of the agony
involved in staying up all night listening to light AM radio, sitting in long
rows at ‘frames’ of pigeon holes, sorting the mail for the CBD, make me feel
weird even now. The one excitement we had while sorting was when a postcard
came through; it was passed down the line so everyone could look at the
picture. The excitement for some of my workplace comrades extended to busting
open any parcel that looked interesting (like, if it was addressed to Playboy), taking what they wanted and
throwing the rest in the ‘to be repaired’ bin. But I don’t want to give away
too much of mail sorter life, in case it spoils my chance of selling a
filmscript on it sometime later.
(Proof that at least part of this story is true)
The point was, the
post office was a great illustration to me of how wretched suffering for your
art could be. And anyway, I convinced myself, it wasn’t as though the music I
was involved in was the same as the kinds of things Smash Hits featured – it was music, and it had drums and bass and
guitar, same as some of the people you saw in Smash Hits; but that was about the limit of the connection. Smash Hits had moved up to Sydney, and I
started topping up my Australia Post salary with little bits of freelance work;
before long, I had a day job there.
Smash Hits in Melbourne had been located in a great old narrow
building in Little Burke St. Smash Hits
in Sydney was in the Fairfax Magazines building in Waterloo – a massive 60s
orange brick horror which stretched out for a mile on an industrial estate. Smash Hits was right up the back where
it could bother no-one and, hopefully, no-one could bother it. James and Eddy were
there, as were Neal Moyse, an English designer prone to burst into snatches of
popular song which I can still hear in my head: ‘Baby, now that I’ve found you
I won’t let you go’, or ‘when the war is over, gonna start again’. He also
liked to sing ‘I’ve got aids babe’ to the tune of ‘I’ve Got You Babe’, and
‘I’ll never forget the smell of the sweat from under your armpits’ to ‘Magic
Moments’. Yeah, we heard all those and more… a lot. Back in England, Neal had
been drummer in a Beach Boys cover band called Breaker, and we heard a lot
about them, too. Darren, a super-efficient, soft-spoken
secretary with sculpted hair, was on his way out as a staff member when I
showed up again, and Diane took his place, seconded in some way from
another magazine. Andy was the Features Editor, a New Zealander who was
related to Janet Frame and couldn’t believe anyone had ever read any of her
books, as she was ‘mad’ (he found this very aggravating and would rant about
it). Andy was a lot like me inasmuch as he couldn’t stand pop music; he seemed
to see Smash Hits as his step up the
ladder, though where that ladder was going to lead was anyone’s guess.
In the wider Fairfax
world, there was Steve Bush. Bushy (as he was known) had an office much closer
to the front of the building where someone had done an immaculate poster for
his wall in gothic script proclaiming him to be Lord Stephen of Bush.
Theoretically, Bushy was a designer – he’d done the cover for the first Orange
Juice album, to his credit – and had ‘started’ (who knows if this is true?) Smash Hits in England and then gone on
to become a big shot at EMAP, then for some reason come out to Australia to
give Australian magazines a shot in the arm with his Bushy magic. He’d also
once managed a band called The Cigarettes who had once supported the Buzzcocks.
Bushy was and probably
still is very charismatic, quick-witted and amusing. James couldn’t stand him,
and both men later made veiled references in my presence to a time when the two
of them had gone to New Zealand on a Smash
Hits-related trip, which was apparently when they completed the process of
falling out with each other utterly. I don’t know any more details.
Eddy would demand that I rewrite even the smallest
articles a number of times, and present my copy back to me covered in comments
and arrows showing where particular paragraphs should go for maximum impact and
reader interest. This is exactly the sort of thing I later came to enjoy doing
to other people, but I didn’t care to be on the receiving end of it, especially
since I couldn’t see where the science was in Eddy’s reasoning. When he left, whatever his position was, Andy Fyfe moved into it, and I moved up a notch somehow – to features
editor or staff writer or something.
Smash Hits was going through a rough patch at this stage – we have
leapt ahead to somewhere like 1988, incidentally. Although the fate of the
magazine was linked directly to how excited the kids of Australia were about
pop music generally, as well as particular pop stars, the staff couldn’t help
beating themselves up over sales slumps. The lowest selling issue, in my time
at the magazine, was one with a picture of Pete Burns on the front – the
cross-dressing, bisexual lead singer of Dead Or Alive. The second worst selling
was a Pet Shop Boys cover, upon which James had run the cover line ‘It’s got
brown carpet’, an inspired, almost dadaist concept which had the extra
excitement of sounding like the punchline to a dirty joke – it was, in fact, a
quote from the Pet Shop Boys story.
One of the things I
enjoyed the most about Smash Hits was
the post-mortems. Every time a printed issue came in – our lead time was
something like a month, so we were two issues ahead by the time the ‘new’ issue
showed up – we would sit round in a group, going from page to page, criticising
it and blaming each other for the errors, the poor judgement, the ‘whose shitty
idea was that?’ and so on. Design faults, spelling errors, ‘dodgy trannies’
(i.e. poor-quality photographs), all leapt from the page. James would always
come out with ‘don’t you worry about that’, and other jokes about how ‘naff’ we
were. It was a moment of real cameraderie, Smash
Hits against the world, and against itself at the same time. This was when
James’ catchphrase of the time – ‘near enough is good enough’ – really came
into its own.
A
lot of the fortnight-to-fortnight running of the magazine was just
housekeeping. Writing the ‘flannel’ (for some reason the introduction to the
magazine – outlining all the great stuff the reader was about to encounter –
was called the ‘flannel panel’). The flannel was something we always took great
care with though we all assumed that nobody ever read it.
Yoiks! Tally ho! And other stirring
noises which indicate how excited we arll are, getting ready to gallop into
this extramarvelliscent issue of the notoriously cuddly Smash Hits! (11 Jan 1988)
Last night (well, just before lunch, actually) The Smash Hits Office
Staff had the most gruesome dream. We got the new issue back from the printers,
you see, and we leapt up with excitement to see what it looked like. Well, it
was like a smack in the face. It was APALLING! Lubricated Goat leered
at us from the cover, most of them partially or completely unclad, and Brett
had… well, anyway… the top left-hand corner panel announced “Pseudo Echo in
tour bus horror exclusive pix” and a small picture of James Leigh in a coffin.
Then, as we turned the pages, we saw the Bitz “Match the popstar with his/her
armpit” competition, the Kings of the Sun Replay,
the Incredible String Band mini-mag and the
pin-up of King Snake Roost and we
WAILED in despair! “Oh no! It’s all wrong! We’ve
been sabotaged! The readers will kill us!” Then, suddenly, we were aware of a
pounding in our heads – it got louder and fiercer and we realised! It was the
Ed. stamping
on our head
with his big desert boots. “Wake up, you morons! Snap out of that dream!” he
gibbered.
“The new issue’s come back from the printers!” Could it be – could it possibly
be a reprieve? We grabbed the new issues and – yes! There was the Iva Davies cover we’d so lovingly
prepared, the huge, pervy, poster
with “beaut” bodies on it, the Skate
Mini-mag! The Jason Bateman
feature! Get Smart, RSVP, Bitz, Film, TV,
Video… the Charts, Snoop! And
even the singles reviewed by Guy Pearce!
When we told the Ed. about our awful dream he laughed merrily. “Ho! Ho!” be
bubbled. “What a very funny dream!” and with a merry twinkle in his eye he made
huge deductions from our pay for sleeping on the job. What a scallywag! Well,
enjoy the issue, readers!
Reviews
were important. We generally tried to be uncontroversial, which was hard at
times when the things we were reviewing touched on our own
Typing up the
‘RSVP’ section (the penpal section of the magazine), doing ‘Bitz’ (newsy
pieces, short interviews), or running the letters page.
The Letters page was
amazing fun. James had tested me for this job in the magazine’s early days,
when I petulantly eliminated a huge sack of mail probably heavier than myself
down to about three letters. One of these was a reader’s anxious enquiry about
whether David Bowie was gay, and my response was ‘If he is, so what?’, a reply
which James thought was unacceptable, and certainly it wasn’t very
entertaining. However a few years later, either having forgotten my previous
mishandling of the position or just not caring, he handed me the letters page
again.
The letters were
answered by a character called Black Type, whose origins went back to the dark
ages of Smash Hits UK; obviously, it was simply a personification of the bold
type that the answers to letters were set in. I set about crafting a Black Type
persona who, utterly unlike myself, was awkward, sad and studious. I also began
to realise the power at my fingertips, when it became clear that essentially
readers did not send in letters because they had something to say, but because
the idea of seeing their letter/name in print was exciting to them. Therefore,
they wrote the kind of letters they thought would get printed; it was as easy
as that. A gentle guiding hand was all that was required, an indication that
here was a chance either to respond to something provocative, or to imitate. To
boost the amount of letters sent in to the magazine, you only had to publish –
that is, fabricate – a risible letter about how the members of Bon Jovi had
such long hair they looked like girls, or that George Michael was talentless.
Suddenly you’d be inundated, and a lot of the letters – being written by
children who were angry, or excited about being in a debate – were eminently
publishable.
Other letters took on
lives of their own; like the letter from a reader in New Guinea complaining
that the only band he/she could go and see were a local group called the Bluff
Inn Soles was allowed to develop into a running joke about how magnificent the
Bluff Inn Soles were, the future of modern music. This in turn prompted more
letters from New Guinea wondering what the hell we were going on about (though
none from the Soles themselves, unfortunately). Letters occasionally trickled
in from agitated music fans who thought that Smash Hits was a lackey of teenybop capitalism (which of course it
unashamedly was) and that what we should really do is run a big story on the
Cocteau Twins or Nick Cave or something similar. I always took much pleasure in
compiling a parcel for these letter writers – if they condescended to include
their address – of the lamest pop singles and promos in the office, and send it
to them with a bald ‘thanks’ note.
For some reason I was
asked to draw a picture of Black Type, which I did – he was, apparently, a
black glove puppet. The sketch was produced on badges, given out to hapless
letter writers over the years, replacing the old badge that proclaimed ‘I’m a
black type type’.
I continued running Letters
for years, until I got bored, and then at least another six months more, after
which it was handed over to Di and, fuming over her terrible writing
skills, I had to subedit it anyway. Ostensibly the reason James relieved me of
this duty was that I had been trying to move it away from pop and into some
kind of sociological survey about teenage life. One girl wrote in asking how
she could arrange to get tooth decay (she said ‘in case you don’t know what
tooth decay is, I do, it’s holes in the teeth’). Another wrote in explaining
the intricacies of playground arguments.
We’d always got bizarre
letters, of course. Very early on in the magazine’s history we got a bizarre
letter from ‘two twins, Bib and Bub’ who detailed their incestuous relationship
with their father. Eddy and I joked about that one a lot, I think because we thought it was so
ridiculous that it started off with the idea of two twins called Bib and Bub.
There were, of course, also cruel letters written by schoolchildren about – often
ostensibly by – a classmate they’d rejected. I tended not to publish these, if
I could actually read between the lines and conclude that’s what the letter
really was. This was also an ongoing problem in RSVP, along with the perves, of
course. Kids would pick on some kid in their class by writing a letter from him
or her saying ‘I am very sexy and popular, please write to me…’. James was
right in this case – you can spend too long in one position and you get sick of
reading the letters about ‘Band Z are poofs’ after you’ve read the ones
claiming the same for Band Y the previous year and Band X the year before that.
Diane was a
remarkable person. She was a westie of some sort, and, when she came to work
with us, she was recently divorced. My nerve-wracking introduction to her world was the first and last time I, being young and pretty drunk myself,
accepted a lift from her after a Smash Hits Friday evening
celebration because I thought it was better that I did so rather than let her
drive alone in case she had an accident. Well, who hasn’t done that? On the way
(we were going to Bondi, I have no idea why) she started telling me about her
former husband and what an arsehole he was. She got quite animated. It affected
her driving. We lived.
Diane had a punk rock
past (I remember her being very excited when the seminal Sydney punk group
Rocks reformed, as it was obviously a little piece of her youth) and a hard
rock future. She was basically a secretary with typing skills and so on but as
time went on James started to encourage her to write for the magazine. This she
did with gusto and she even ultimately got good at it. Not because of my
frustrated whining about her punctuation, though (which incidentally had no
significant effect).
This was one of James’
strengths as an editor, though superficially it might not have seemed like a
strength; he preferred to work with people he knew, rather than people who
could write. In his experience, I think, writers were ratbags. I remember his
irritation when Frank Kogan, an American writer who I’d engaged as our US
correspondent, reviewed the first Batman
movie for us, an exclusive in which Frank described the film as sucking a big
turd in the mud. Professional writers so often had a point to make, and didn’t
understand the rationale of the magazine – that every issue had to take the
world with – sorry to sound so soppy, but this is the way it was – a sense of
wonder. We had to explain everything to our readers, as though they’d just been
born. We had to explain George Harrison when George had a hit, and we had to
explain John Farnham when John Farnham came back on the scene.
The other big name at Smash Hits in the late 80s was Marc. Marc was an enigma to us all. He was a little younger than me, and
probably taller. He was incredibly reticent about his background, or even where
he lived. He had obviously had a bad experience once, perhaps he was kidnapped,
on a bus because he never took public transport to anywhere he could walk, and like
me, he couldn’t drive.
Marc was an ardent
lover of pop music, and I imagine that working at Smash Hits was a bit of a dream to him. He was also a real
professional, in that he was learning the ropes and doing things right, and
though very conservative in his approach to his work, he worked hard and had no
shame about asking the hard, nosey questions. He was personally fairly rigid
but he was also a socialist, which was good.
In 1988, Fairfax
Magazines got sold off by young Warwick, the bulk of it to Packer. Packer’s
people had visited us in our little room out the back, but Packer himself never
liked pop magazines and didn’t want us – or Portfolio,
which wasn’t a pop magazine but was a magazine for working women, so about as
bad – or Countdown. So we hung around
in limbo for a while, until Countdown
went off on its own, soon to disintegrate (the TV show had already gone off the
air, so it was only a matter of time) and Portfolio
and us were bought by Mason-Stewart Publishing. Neale was upset because he’d
heard that the staff at Mason-Stewart had to go down every Friday to the
loading bay and unload the magazines when they came back from the printers, an
admittedly unpleasant and demeaning prospect, though it proved to be untrue.
Mason Stewart was an odd
business though. It was presided over by Philip Mason, a man who looked and
spoke (and for all I know sang) like Bryan Ferry. He was English middle-class,
and married to Alexandra Joel, whose father Asher was rich. Philip (Mr. Stewart
had disappeared in the company’s early days) had created a stable of specialist
sporting/recreation magazines, like Skating
Life and Tracks; he’d also
started up, then sold, RAM. The
company’s offices were in Crown Street, Darlinghurst.
We retained the usual
aggressive outlook to the staff of other magazines, though in this case in our
first weeks at Mason-Stewart this was reciprocated in an unusual way, when
someone stole into our office and defaced a cache of John Farnham CD singles.
After Fairfax, it has to be said, Mason
Stewart looked like an amateur outfit. Both companies had employees who’d been
there so long no-one could remember what they did, but Mason-Stewart was so
small people seemed able to use this fact as a leverage position in itself; so
that, for instance, one admin staff member who threatened to leave unless given
a magazine to run, got exactly that, at massive cost to the company
(particularly when – after at least one false start and a staff overhaul even
before it went into production – it went belly up after a long, drawn-out
demise).
We were effectively
Mason Stewart’s flagship, inasmuch as we were far and away the biggest selling
magazine there, though irritatingly to us all the publication Philip thought of
as his flagship – his ‘labour of love’ was, of all things, Australian Playboy. Playboy was, for obvious reasons, continuing in a downward spiral
that nothing short of killing it off was going to prevent. I have never liked
porn and had no particular interest in Playboy,
but in the odd times when torn up issues surfaced in the men’s toilets at Mason
Stewart (I wonder why) a quick leaf through would reveal that it was straddling
a much more bizarre demographic than we were – the bulk of its readers were
young boys under 15, and the cream on the top which the advertising was pitched
at was a sad little bunch of moustachioed men over 50 who still equated Playboy magazine with sophistication in
wanking. The staff of Playboy tried
to hold their heads up basking in the glow of Philip’s approval but it was a
case of the Emperor’s old clothes, or lack of.
One of the problems
that came to the fore at Mason Stewart was Philip’s concern and interest in our
ability to attract advertising money. We had no qualms about any old con we
could pull, as far as cross-promotion or attracting sponsorship was concerned;
there was, however, a massive battle over tampons. Smash Hits had something like a 40-60 ratio of male-female readers.
The boys who read Smash Hits were
younger – probably up to 14 or so – than the girls, who stayed with us until 16
or 17. James was certain (this was not based on research any more than anything
else we did was) that young boys would be disgusted if we ran ads for tampons,
and they’d stop reading the magazine. Up to a point, I agreed with this –
inasmuch as boys would be unlikely to read a magazine if there were any
suggestion that it was a girl’s magazine. We all thought this was where Countdown screwed up, being too girly.
As to whether young boys were, literally, appalled by the idea of girls
menstruating, I wasn’t going to try and imagine what young boys thought about
anything, let alone that. In any case it wasn’t my call. Philip and James
battled it out over the years, and Philip eventually won – perhaps in part
because the rest of the world got over its unease, and tampon ads started
running on TV.
More annoying than the
tampon debate was the attitude of the record industry. The late 80s was a
frustrating time for those who worked in pop music; it was the early 70s all
over again, except the early seventies combined a healthy teen market with a
healthy (using the term advisedly) ‘worthy’ rock market. In the late 80s, the
media were absolutely scathing about pop music – StockAitkenWaterman, soap
stars making records, ‘manufactured’ pop, all those things that were our bread
and butter – and only people who went to dance clubs or who bought records knew
if they were right to be scathing, because there was no such thing as pop radio
in Australia at this time, only horrible old FM with its endless Cold Chisel
back-to-backs. What this meant in practical terms for our advertising budget
was, strangely enough, that even the record industry didn’t want to advertise
with us. When they did put some money into promoting a pop record – say, when
Madonna had a newie – they’d advertise with Rolling
Stone.
Rolling Stone was a chronic anomaly at this time – possibly even
more than it is now. It retained its vintage US 60s look, like each page had been
handcrafted on a slice of log by a benevolent hippie craftsman. Having been
dragged kicking and screaming into the 70s by the advent of the late 80s, it
was now featuring ‘new wave’ acts who’d been around about ten years as ‘new
faces’ on the scene. What it had – then as now, and christ knows why – was
street credibility. Well, no, that’s not strictly true. What it had was what
the music industry thought of as street credibility, which is of course the
reverse of street credibility. But what counted was the record industry knew
that other members of the music industry read Rolling Stone so, when they wanted to advertise within the industry
how serious they were about a particular act, they would advertise it in Rolling Stone, regardless of the
demographic the record was actually to be pitched at.
We suffered a lot from
this elitist attitude at this time. Johnny Diesel was the worst offender.
Johnny Diesel burst onto the rock scene in 1988 and was an instant hit with our
audience; in fact, people were talking about his good looks before he’d even
had a record out. Andy interviewed him for the 11 January 1988 issue and,
finding he had nothing interesting to say about someone who had nothing
interesting to say himself (except ‘I went through all that bonking stuff at an
early age… I just can’t stay with anyone for more than a couple of days or I
start feeling caged in’), ended the article with an ironic ‘yum!’ (was it
ironic? It was like most of the things we put in Smash Hits – we just didn’t give a shit. He could have ended it
with ‘bum!’ or ‘hum!’ or ‘bonzai!’ or
‘Glurk!’ Unfortunately or fortunately he ended it with ‘yum!’). Johnny Diesel’s
management, and JD himself, instantly announced an embargo on all pop magazines.
This was one artist whose work was not going to be reduced to a mere yum.
Johnny was not going to talk to us again.
This is where the fun
began. As our readership, for whatever reason and certainly not for the reason
that he made good records because he really didn’t, was hankering for material
about Johnny Diesel, we went to all kinds of lengths to circumvent the embargo.
We bought pictures of Johnny when he was plain old Mark Lizotte and playing in
some tinpot group in Perth a few years before. When the Sydney Morning Herald did a story on Johnny we bought
its story and its pictures and ran them in our magazine. When Johnny went to
the UK to try and kickstart a career there – apparently in the UK he was dying
for the press to say anything about him, and ‘yum’ would have been fine – we bought
stories and photos from UK magazines about him. All the time we were cackling
fiendishly about how aggrieved Johnny and his management were going to be that
he kept popping up in Smash Hits.
There is still to this
day a perception in the industry that a ‘serious’ band will get hurt by contact
with the teen market; that if you want your career to have legs, you aim not
for Smash Hits-style success but for Rolling Stone-style success. On one
level, you can see how this might be the case; mainly because of the snobbery
inherent amongst those who’ve only just, in the last few years, grown out of
being teens themselves, and don’t want to be reminded. But Smash Hits, for all its willingness to embrace pop music, was
certainly in those days far more iconoclastic than old warhorses of sycophancy
like Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone’s unwillingness to
criticise its core advertising market is apparent in every issue and, no matter
how good its editorial staff – and I have liked all the Rolling Stone editorial people I’ve known – their wish to be
cutting edge or even witty, let alone to cover good music in any kind of
spirited way, seems to have constantly been frustrated by commercial reality.
God knows, Smash Hits was never a
beacon of independence or taste; we covered only the things that were already
guaranteed popular with our readership. But then, Rolling Stone did exactly the same for their readership. They just
had a sense of humour about it all that was pretty much a million times
smaller. I did drop in there once when John O’Donnell was the editor. The only
thing I recall about the offices was that they had a cardboard model of Jason
Donovan which appeared to have been shot at, had fangs drawn on, kicked, etc.
Maybe the person who destroyed our Farnham CDs worked there.
An event at Smash Hits that I can’t treasure is the
time I accompanied a competition-winner reader to the USA to meet New Kids on
the Block. This competition was hammered out with big fat record company
hammers between CBS (I don’t think they’d quite become Sony yet) and James some
time around ’89 or ’90. The original competition idea was that the reader would
go to New York with a Smash Hits
writer to meet the New Kids, and they’d play a show, and the reader would get
his or her picture taken with the New Kids, and they’d have dinner together.
Fuckin’ ridiculous.
Marc had previously
taken a reader to the UK to meet someone or other (you know I do believe it was
Brother Beyond, a British group who CBS in Australia had been attempting to
interest the Australian public in), so it was my turn to do this one. I was
happy to go somewhere for a week for free – it seemed like a perk – although
there was going to be a lot of organising to do, and CBS for some reason were
insisting that part of the trip was to be devoted to interviewing Jeff Beck. It
would’ve made more sense to interview Leonid Brezhnev for Smash Hits – at least
some of the readers might have seen Letter
to Brezhnev – but he was dead by that stage so, Jeff Beck it was, guitar
hero from the 60s. If Beck – you know, ‘Loser’, Odelay Beck – had been famous at that time we could have done the
story and made it amusing, pretending we thought Jeff Beck was Beck or
something. Yeah, that’d be a hoot. About as funny as Bushy’s joke where we
wrote an article about Mick Jagger referring to him throughout as ‘Mike’.
A-a-nyway…
There
were thousands of entries – everyone wanted to go to the US and meet New Kids
on the Block for god’s sake – and we selected one more or less at random (OK,
in truth we eliminated a lot of the really young ones – I was not even sure how
legal it was to take any minor out of the country for a week, even with
parental approval, and what my responsibilities were. Imagine explaining to a
US policeman why you were travelling from hotel to hotel with a 12 year old
child… ‘well, the kid won a competition’. Why didn’t Humbert Humbert think of
that?)
By the time a winner
was announced, the circumstances had changed. No-one was going to New York
after all. New Kids were going to be appearing live at – what a crazy
coincidence – the Pyalup Fair, near Tacoma, a few hours’ drive from Olympia
where a whole lot of my American rock ‘n’ roll friends lived. So, I figured I’d
get to see them, and that’d be fun.
The winner was a
15-year-old girl with a haircut like Marie from Roxette’s, and she was from
Shepparton. Her ambition in the long term was to be a policewoman. She had
entered the competition in the hope that, hanging out on the streets of New
York, she might run into Madonna. She accepted with equanimity the fact that
the prize had changed. Her short term ambitions now were to get the New Kids'
autographs – because a girl in Shepparton had said that it would be
exchangeable for a life membership of a club in Shepparton – and to buy some
shoes. She obviously imparted this information to me verbally, but for the life
of me I only remember her speaking once, and it wasn’t to talk about Shepparton
clubs or the police force or shoes. It was towards the end of our trip, when we
went to Century City and wandered around aimlessly as she searched for
something to eat – ‘something normal, some Australian food’. Here we spent some
time in a toy shop, and somehow I ended up telling her – a ridiculous lie
created to get a reaction – that I’d never seen a cow in real life. This made
her very lively and excited and wide-eyed. Wow.
We, and New Kids, were
staying in a huge hotel in Tacoma. Why Tacoma needed a huge hotel wasn’t clear
at all. The city was a dump, and probably still is. We were accompanied by a
very attractive young PR person from CBS in LA, who was the first person I ever
heard refer to blood sugar. Candace, Lois, and Al, friends from my other life
in independent pop music, came up from Olympia to see me and we had dinner or
something. The girl of course said nothing.
New Kids were as bored
as we were. I ran into them hanging out in the street outside the hotel (as was
their hard gritty wont). I gave them copies of Australian Smash Hits. They had a joke amongst themselves about the idea of being
‘large’. ‘Are we big in Australia? Are we large?’
Whatever. They all looked much scarier in real life, and drained and haggard.
Particularly Joey MacIntyre, who had rings under his eyes that looked like
mascara. We had a desultory lunch with them. I had nachos. The girl had
nominated Donnie as her favourite, so she got to sit next to Donnie, but said
nothing to him. The group asked the pretty PR woman up to their hotel room. We
never saw her again.
The show at the Pyalup
fair was extraordinary. Not because it was very good. Candice and Lois came to
see NKOTB do it for the kids. While the group went through their choreographed
paces, they had big bouncers who wandered through the crowds pointing to the
pretty girls and gesturing for them to come backstage. The whole huge audience
were screaming their hearts out. Afterwards there were fireworks and people
parachuting out of aeroplanes. Candice said to me ‘I always heard there were
fireworks the first time you have sex’.
The girl and I travelled to
LA and spent a day there, some of which had to be taken up with interviewing
Jeff Beck. He had a new record out, called Jeff Beck’s Guitar Workshop. Yeah,
Jeff Beck. The woman we liaised with at CBS wasn’t the pretty woman, who had
apparently been eaten alive by New Kids. It was a grody rock chick in leather.
She couldn’t have been less interested in this Australian Smash Hits writer and his silent companion. I started making small
talk about Jeff Beck. She said, ‘what the hell are you talking about? Jeff Beck
never leaves England. You’re interviewing Terry Bozzio.’ It wouldn’t have
mattered, of course, if I was interviewing Maisie the Mouse – except that story
would have had a chance of running. The week after, back in the office, I was
looking for a blank tape and found only the one labelled ‘Terry Bozzio’. That
was a hard choice to make.
TBC...
* obviously a 2002 use of the word queer even though the use which later came into favour existed.
