northcote folly

You know I can boast about my skills in research but I wonder if I could ever add anything to the story of this item. It's been around for a  long time and it's crazy. I wonder if there is anything in the City of Northcote archives that might explain a little. 
 

flook in the perth daily news 1-15 march 1952

 

I apologise for falling down on my Flook duties a bit, I have been distracted by work. So, not a lot of consequence storywise is happening here but the drawing is incredible, absolutely top-notch. To think that these drawings would almost certainly just be thrown away afterwards is a bit horrible to contemplate. 

You might recall some time ago I relayed the possibility that Wally Fawkes was a bit of a pot smoker when he was at work. I think the Nelson's Column stuff might reinforce that likelihood, not necessarily because it's almost psychedelic and trippy but just the general intense concentration that some people find is aided by soft drugs. 

More in a week or so... 

i was made for these times

 

I don't know who this person is, perhaps he's AI? He seems to go to some pains to keep his identity a secret, in any case, which is his business, or the business of his creator. Anyway, because I'm sixty, white, and like (or am interested in) some things, youtube shoves this channel in my face all the time, so I finally decided to watch one. Well look he might be AI, but his opinions (as exemplified here) are as rote a collection of perceptions as anyone of his age (I am a bit concerned because he's apparently not even 60, at least 1968 is in his URL, and yet he looks like that) could possibly have on as boring a bunch of records as you could imagine someone opining on. I mean obviously when you start out to compile a list of the ten worst albums ever that a mass audience (of middle aged men) is going to respond to, you naturally draw from a small pool of 60s-70s rock stars, each of whom have some extreme or other in their catalogue. So he goes in on Loaded (making the typically stupid observation that, had it been a Doug Yule solo album it might have been ok - so - fuckwit - it's actually an ok album but it's just in the wrong sleeve? That seriously makes it amongst the ten worst albums ever??!), Two Virgins, Landing on Water (admittedly I can't comment, never heard it) Down in the Groove (ditto) Cut the Crap (see what I mean about predictable as?!) Mardi Gras (Creedence, I have to admit I now want to hear that), Leather Jackets (an Elton John album) and three others, I don't remember. Oh a Van Morrison album of recent vintage. 

I guess in the present day you can always find some rarified piece of crap that will tell you anything you want to know, or don't. It's all geared to some of us. This sucked, but I watched it (distractedly) and just as was the case with the fool I caught on threads yesterday posting 'ten random songs' which just happened to all be by white men, bar one, it doesn't matter to the algorithm whether I hated it or loved it, point was I engaged with it, and so I will be getting more soon. Fuck my luck!

I wouldn't start to try a worst albums list, not because it's subjective, though that's reason enough. Frankly I just know the worst album is not the low point in a great musician's career, it's the best album by a terrible artist. Dark Side of the Moon, say, or something like that. Although most major artists aren't that terrible, even if they're bland - they still, by definition, have something to keep people interested. I can't stand Floyd or Mac but I know they, too, have the juice for many-most people at least in my age/ethnicity bracket. It's not a terrible situation. 

Anyway I hate this fake guy, I hate his delivery, I hate him constantly reading shit off to the side and I don't ever want to see his head again or hear his English voice. 

bearable sunday

 

It has been a bearable Sunday. Mainly doing a lot of writing for a book chapter I have had all the materials sitting around for for yonks now, but I haven't had the time/motivation to get it done, but now I've started it's coming together pretty nicely really all things considered. I have to write 4000 words and I have written over 2000. That's ok isn't it. It's mainly quality narrative, it's not just mapping out crap, though some is mapping out. Also, I took Perry to get some snacks and dinner food at the pet shop and have a wash in the wash place, and I combed quite a bit of matted junk off his leg (one leg is fine now, one still has a bit of stuff on it, he only has so much tolerance for the tugging). When we were in the pet shop there was a child at the counter with two rats. They seemed nice enough but I didn't know how Perry would feel if he saw them. Or what he would do. Anyway the woman at the counter - who knew Perry's name, I don't know how - advised the child to leave for a short time so I could make purchases. 

Yesterday we went to see Nirvanna the band the show the movie (I think that's what it's called) which was actually pretty impressive and funny. I would like to go to Canada someday. I wonder if there will still be much of a planet left when Donald Trump dies or if we are all going to die together, with him. At least he would then be dead but I think I've earned the pleasure of outliving that moving lump of shit. 

helmi on a pillow

Imagine being so small (and sad) that you can sleep on half a pillow at an awkward angle (I know it doesn't look like she's sleeping but she was a split-second before this picture was taken - story of my and every photographer's life, more or less, you take the picture just too late). 
 

back to d. p. nelthorpe

 

Since I can't sleep (again) I am showing you the sum total of what I know about D. P. Nelthorpe aside from the previously mentioned exhibition. There is the above, which was in a book the state library has of D. P. Nelthorpe's, called, yes, The Island of Triska. And there is the book itself, which is copiously illustrated as per below. 

Now I will try to go to sleep, again. 
 

listening to side 1 of born again on the bus this afternoon

It is odd in hindsight that I was very aware of Randy Newman's Born Again at the age of 14. It has always been a favourite of mine. I looked it up on wikipedia and the story seems to be that not many people liked it when it came out. I guess it was RN's first album after he had a hit in his own right (with 'Short People') but of course he had had other hits previously but covered by other people. 

I had a little listen. I think that really the drumming on 'It's Money That I Love' doesn't work, but it's the same drummer on 'The Story of a Rock 'n' Roll Band' and that drumming is amazing, especially all the toms after the bit about calling ELO 'The Renegades'. That song btw is still hilarious almost 50 years later.

Perhaps it's the sequencing that people didn't like, or someone should have put all the 'dark' songs on one side and the 'funny' ones on the other, that might have worked, whether they were labelled as such or not. I mean 'Pretty Boy' is such a great track in itself and would undoubtedly go on the 'dark' side though I suppose it might have flummoxed a few people at the time because its narrator is, I guess, homophobic and this was a time when that was cool. 'Ghosts' goes on the dark side too. 

I remember in 1979 or 80, whenever I heard the album (it came out in late '79) talking with a friend about the song 'Mr Sheep' and how weird it was (it really isn't) but I think possibly what we were reacting to was the unreliable narrator who is a prick, then starts to be conciliatory, then becomes a prick again. These days I really like that but then it possibly confounded me. 

'They Just Got Married' possibly troubled me as well because while it is kind of resolved, it seems to portend a terrible outcome, but it really doesn't - the first wife dies and the second one seems a bad choice but she is also very wealthy, so the second marriage might be (in the conventional way of thinking) a bad choice but it's also one that will at least end up with everyone being rich. I guess there's a kind of tossed-off feel to this too, which is not problematic for me now but might once have been, for me and everyone else. 

Anyway, it's still my favourite RN album, I will listen to it again soon (I had it playing on spotifuck while I was in the supermarket and it just cut off at the end of side one, I don't know why but it was ok as I had to go and stand at the checkout while two ladies who both worked for Woolworths one of whom was buying stuff but had some discount coupons, fiddled over the coupons for an excessively long time which I decided to be nice about because a smile costs nothing). 

not sleeping

Whatever I'm doing (trying to do some admin, trying to write a chapter, cutting Nancy's claws, emptying the dishwasher) I'm definitely not doing what I want to be doing, which is sleeping. It's 2am and I went to bed 3 and a half hours ago and got up 2 hours ago because it wasn't working. 

I can't stand sleeping, but at the same time I know it has to be done. It's a sort of maintenance thing, isn't it, like I can't stand washing my hair, but I do it every day (I just do ok?). 

So, what do you know about D. P. Nelthorpe? This caught my eye in one of those taggs. I'm interested. 

Alright I'm going to go to bed again and try to sleep properly this time. 

tagg

 

Remember tagg? Those were the days. They really had to strive to fill the blank space between the ads. If I had any sense back then I would have realised that they'd print anything at all. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice but some of the stuff they did print suggests a kind of a lack of discernment. Sorry tagg. 

 

saturday

Saturday was in many ways a write-off. I could create two columns and put the pluses and the minuses there. Pluses include I washed Perry and got quite a bit of hair off him. Laura and I had some samosas (out of a box) and she made a really good salad. We watched two episodes of The Box (#365, #366) which was good. John keeps not leaving even though he's constantly telling people he's about to leave. Max went back to Channel 12 and wants to sack Tony or kill off Manhunt, or both. I can't help feeling the discussion about keeping Tony for 'a series' and killing off the show is a kind of reference to George Mallaby leaving Homicide but coming into The Box. 

So considering the above, it wasn't a bad day really. But most of the day I have had a work task hanging over me which I feel is very onerous and troubling and it's been really hard to concentrate. I haven't even done it all properly, yet, but it's not as problematic as it was. I've also been very, very tired and it's been hot. 

Above is a picture of Nancy on the deck this afternoon. 

good neighbours

 

 

weird hitler

I was intrigued to see this magazine cover in the Heidelberg Salvo's today, because of that extraordinary thing on Hitler's face. Maybe the cover was designed by AI and AI just decided that Hitler's moustache was even better when it hung off his nose like a monkey? Maybe it wasn't AI just a really rad designer who wanted to break away from that old toothbrush moustache bullshit and instead turn it into a, well, what you see there. Anyway, intriguing. The end. 

the simpsons has changed the world over the last 35 years and you can't say it hasn't

Sydney Morning Herald 13 Feb 1991 p. 14
 

personal file

Name: Helmi aka Mittens

Age: 8ish

Likes: Sleeping, being tickled or whatever you call that under the neck, sometimes a thumb in the ear is good.

Dislikes: Everything else and Nancy

Children: Many, but I don't talk to them

Lives: Upstairs. In the bedroom 99.9% of the time, leaving only for toilet and food. 

Ambitions: To eliminate my enemies, including Nancy and even Perry if I can. 

Will Angus Taylor challenge for the leadership of the Liberal Party today? I'd say 'those are all words' but I don't know what words are. Angus should take heed of Peter Costello's and Josh Frydenburg's hesitancy when it comes to challenging; you end up looking weak. However, he should also take heed of other Liberals-in-opposition who simply held the fort for a while as the real people got into position, a la Downer, Nelson etc. Hopefully keeping both of these in mind will put him in such a whirlwind of stasis he'll run round and round and turn into butter. 

Favourite album: OK Computer

What's a secret you've never told anyone? I quite envy happy bisexuals. 

 

bake your feet this summer

Sometimes I don't have anything to tell you but still I am sick of the latest post being at the top of the list so I find something else to post. Insider trick of blogging, a peep behind the curtain if you will. 
 

a bunch of record reviews from february 2006. why???!!!

Cybotron

Implosion

Aztec Music

In which Aztec continues to reheat remnants from the great smorgasbord of Australian popular music past, showing us time and time again that a lot of dishes are actually often tastier the second time around.

There are a lot of terms I won’t use, and krautrock is one of them (you can go on using racially abusive words from the first world war if you wish, just remember that’s what you’re doing). But of course Cybotron knew their German experimentalists of the 60s/70s, and brought their own slant to the sound. The Melbourne studio group existed from the mid-70s to the early 80s having grown from the seed of Steve Maxwell von Braund’s early 70s European experiences and friendships he developed in his hometown around the imported record shops and experimental musicians. Their third album Implosion came out in 1980 to a generally pretty good response; it’s presented here remastered and very clean-sounding and featuring six bonus tracks, a number of which comprised an unreleased fourth album Abbey Moor (hey, I think I knew her!) which is a lot more clubby and frilly-shirted, e.g. their very Devo-esque ‘Peter Gunn’ theme – I don’t know what they were thinking, but I rather like it.

What you get for your unworthy buck is a great blend of prog and post-punk synth pop: think, for instance, of the beautiful soundscape stuff the Human League did in their pre-Dare days with those long minimalist instrumentals. Except whereas a lot of synth groups of that time eschewed any instrument but synths, Cybotron, by this stage, had the redoubtable Gil Matthews on drums doing some magnificent things and Mark Jones on a very expressive and responsive bass – listen to the title track for a great example of the interplay between these two with von Braund’s keyboards; they really maximised their possibilities.

Implosion is totally instrumental, and dare I say it one of the most sampleable records I’ve heard in quite some time. It also sits in an unusual place – it sounds so fresh for something a quarter of a century old, and I don’t think it’s just the fact that the old retro-synths made a comeback a few years ago. This stuff is still visionary. 

Don Walker

Cutting Back

I am not even being slightly ironic when I say this is one of the best albums I have heard this year, if not this decade. I know I am not being ironic because I can hold my attitude up to Don Walker’s attitude which is d-ripping with irony. Always having been a Randy Newman fan myself, at least since the late 70s, I gotta say Cutting Back is on a par with, and in some ways superior to, the best Randy Newman (the ways to which I allude are the performative element; Randy was never as good a comedian in his delivery as Don; the vocal element – Don has a great voice and fully knows how a voice should work on a record; Randy, who is one of the greats, has a voice like a bleating asthmatic fish-sheep; and the tenderness element). I found a lot of Don’s Cold Chisel work a little overblown and generic. I find ‘No Reason’, which is hands down the best track amongst hands down brilliant songs, to be an example of why it’s good to be alive in 2006. Overall, the instrumentation is sparse but splendid, and the tunes are generally simple but perfect hammers to hit the nail of the remarkable lyrics. My guess is Don Walker listens to a lot of Dave Graney.

Douglas Fir

Douglas Fir

(Sony/BMG)

I often like to wander the op shops of our fair city, picking up ‘interesting’ records and tapes, quite often items which I don’t necessarily expect are going to be the peak of cultural sophistication or artistic excellence but which I imagine are going to transport me somewhere, somehow, even if it’s just into a momentary world of imagination where I figure out how the hell someone thought such dreadful music was worth releasing. And, you know, when you spend a long time doing that kind of thing you can be lulled into a false sense of security about the present. You listen to crappy old records from the old days and you laugh about the hairstyles or lyrics or posey front covers and you kind of forget there are still people making truly ghastly decisions about the songs to write, perform, sing, record, release and ultimately buy and listen to. I would not be surprised if Douglas Fir, for instance, were quite a success because people with no idea are still by some freak of nature being born every day and work assiduously to make sure they never do get any idea. And if you worked hard to develop a complete lack of taste or intelligent critical faculty you might find Douglas Fir’s debut Douglas Fir appealing, in a wallpapery “I don’t like music much but I’d hate people to think I was strange so I had better buy some CDs” kind of way. They play this kind of pallid metally funk with Red Hot Chilli Pepperish thumby bass and their lyrics are schoolboy poetry bollocks which if they’re lucky someone someday might explain to them (Revolution, for instance, is a song in support of fundamental religion over the theory of evolution, but I’m not sure they know that). Anyway, like a lot of the bollocks we have to deal with in our daily life, the more you think about it the more it annoys you, so might I suggest we all ignore Douglas Fir and hopefully they will quickly dry up and blow away.*

Various Artists

Happy Man

(Off the Hip)

The Sunnyboys were one of the best groups of their era, and that reminds me of a story. As a boy I once rang a south-of-the-river venue to ask what time The Sunnyboys were playing. I can’t remember what time the guy who answered the venue gave me, but I do remember him telling me it would all be over pretty early because no-one would come because they were a terrible band. So appalled was I by the enervated negativity of this anonymous oddity (remember, he worked there) that I didn’t go to the show. I guess that kind of reflects what a pallid youngster I was, although it doesn’t explain why I went on to buy all the Sunnyboys’ records, even the later-period reformation ones. In fact, this whole paragraph has been meaningless and I would advise you not to read it.

The Sunnyboys’ Jeremy Oxley was (perhaps still is) a venerable pop songwriter. His work – most of which was released in the first half of the 80s – harked back stylistically to the mid-60s – Easybeats, Johnny Young, Missing Links, that kind of thing. But it was also made up of great love/loneliness songs filled with adolescent angst of the kind only adolescents, or at least people who were just emerging from it, are capable. The Happy Man album is filled with covers of these ace songs most of which capture the spirited spunk of the originals and sometimes add a little bit extra.

Hats off for instance to The Shimmys for attacking a post-reformation Sunnyboys track, Catwalk, and giving it additional oomph. Hats off to Cherry Smash and Even for just doing great versions of the redoubtable Show Me Some Discipline and The Seeker respectively. The Stiffies have a rank name for their band but do a mean It’s Not Me.  I love The Jennys’ Addams Family-style harmonising in the verse of My Only Friend. The Indian Givers’ Patrick Fitzgeraldish Happy Man works well, though it’s interesting that in the delightfully ambiguous line about “I’ve gotta hang up” (i.e. I’ve got to hang up – or – I’ve got a hang up) they come down decisively on the former.

Geez, you’d have to hear the original records before you heard this, and just as an aside because it’s not a criticism of them exactly, but who are all these bands? Even are the only one I was even slightly aware of. But anything that exposes these great songs further is worth it and these efforts are far from shoddy.

Scott Walker

The Drift

4AD

A decade ago Scott Walker released an album called Tilt which I never heard but which people who loved said ‘you have to listen to it for ages to start to like it’. If you’re like me, you’ll always have found this suggestion rather annoying, not least for its whiff of snobbery. Additionally, the overused (by me anyway) phrase ‘life’s too short’ does spring to mind: I have to invest time in a record just so I can start enjoying it? If there was a film you had to see three times before you liked it, and people could be bothered doing so, then its makers would have a brilliant hit on their hands, just by dint of making something so horrendously dense it barely makes sense.

OK. That was Tilt (and don’t even start on Climate of Hunter, his mid-80s album which I own and cannot fathom). We’re onto his third album in more than thirty years not counting Walker Brothers reunion records, a record presumably named with unsexy double entendre for the drift from civillisation or reason, and as part of that cagey phrase ‘get the drift?’ It starts with a relatively catchy, if rather metally, ‘Cossacks Are’, goes into a twelve-minute song about a dream Benito Mussolini has before he dies, and then before we know it a track that metaphorically explores Elvis and his dead twin as symbols of the Twin Towers, though if one of those towers was dead I hadn’t heard about it. And it’s not long before we’re enjoying what appears to be a tape loop of a braying donkey.

So, look, things move fast in the popular music world, and I want to get you listening to The Drift now, not in six months when I feel like I’ve started to make sense of it and can write about it with authority. And you do have to get over a few issues, like, the album’s spacious and at its most powerful you might start thinking ‘geez, this is kind of like a heavy metal album with a lot of silence instead of guitars’, because Scott – who used to have the most stirring deep tone – is now singing bizarrely high (for him) and very cryptically and dramatically too.

In fact, the album’s not that tough. What it is is a wild, bleak foray through a harsh landscape. It’s not dinner party music but what is? It’s not bad acid trip music either (or rather, it is, so be careful). It’s a marvellous set of portraits in black chalk on a blackboard in a dark room and you’re wearing sunglasses. Get it, become enlightened.

The Church

Uninvited, like the Clouds

Liberation/Cooking Vinyl

Starting with the title, I am reminded of Nick Lowe’s 1978 response to David Bowie’s album Low (he made an EP called Bowi). Now the Clouds don’t truly exist these days but they kind of do and Uninvited Like the Church makes a lot more sense as a title and it’s much more self-evidently interesting than Lowe’s EP title.

Steve Kilbey has taken to painting (oops, I initially mistyped ‘paining’) Church album covers. This one has the guys in a Mediterranean landscape with their guitars, something they can apparently go nowhere without (or maybe they’ve gone out to harvest this year’s guitar crop). There is a babe in the middle distance looking like she’s glad her head is just the right height so she does not block out the view of the tree behind her, and there is a 1930s block of flats that is no doubt low rent as there’s no parking. Oh and there’s that friggin’ weird eye atop a pyramid thing, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, and David Lee Roth. I imagine some of these people were uninvited like the clouds who also have a scanty presence in the picture. It’s a great cover. Maybe all recording artists should be compelled to paint their own record covers. I mean just for five years or something.  OK. Got that out of the way. I think I still have room to discuss the actual record.

It’s hot. As you know if you know anything about The Church they have made some dodgy records in their long career and why wouldn’t they, who’d want to make only gems? This album is simple and unadorned, and if ‘Easy’ is a cross between ‘Waiting for my Man’ and, hmm, ‘There She Goes’ or something similar – with a touch of the Lovin’ Spoonful perhaps and a little bit of The Bangles’ ‘Our Lips are Sealed’, well, those are all great things, aren’t they, and you can hardly quibble with such reference points (all of which are almost certainly unconscious). ‘Unified Field’ owes more than a little to Grant McLennan, and other tracks are now and again a little too stream-of-consciousness lyrically (I have been assessing a lot of history essays lately and I just know if I was marking this album I’d be circling the line ‘even Jesus was betrayed by a kiss’ and writing ‘relevance?’ in the margin in red pen but it would be fair to say this is not a history essay, except by a broad stretch of definition). ‘She’ll Come Back for You Tomorrow’ has really languid, Jeff Beck bluesy thick guitars, which I dig something chronic, and for some reason it also reminds me of another Jeff, Jeff Lynne, though I can’t really explain that one (‘Telephone Line’ or something? I dunno). ‘Pure Chance’ reminds me for a split second of that song ‘Babe’ by someone like Foreigner or Toto, I can’t distinguish between those two (30 seconds online is all it would take, but…). I could go on playing this soundsalotlike game but it’s lazy, after all, there are only a finite number of chords and orders they can go in and all it really does is show an arcane trainspotterish streak which no-one should be proud of. I just want to let you know it’s a great album, amongst their best.

Pink Mountaintops

Axis of Evol

Jagjaguwar/Low Transit Industries

Lou Reed meets Arthur Lee meets Skip Spence meets Melanie meets Lou Barlow meets Michael Hurley meets Archer Prewitt meets David Crosby meets David Essex meets David Bowie meets David Blue. Will Oldham meets Bill Callahan meets 4 Non Blondes meets Merryl Bainbridge meets Simon Day. John Cale meets Robert Johnson meets Ross Wilson meets Robyn St Clair.

The songs lyrically reference famous singles and albums by The Beatles, Ray Davies, Dylan, Stones, AC/DC. Weird that.

The Pink Mountaintops record is seven songs that seem to have been recorded after intimate affairs with some of the above. There is a song very similar in feel to the Velvet Underground’s ‘Jesus’. There is another, ‘Cold Criminals’, which is rousingly trippy a la the best Sebadoh. You will particularly like the song with the drum machine.

Kes

The Jellys in the Pot

(Unstable Ape)

The sixties had amazing folk folk like Nick Drake, Pip Proud and Joni Mitchell, the seventies had extraordinary bards like Todd Rundgren, Megan Sue Hicks and Joni Mitchell. The eighties also had people but I am getting bored with listing them all and I’m not even sure Nick Drake wasn’t really from the seventies. The point is that each decade throws up unique and exceptional musical individuals who bring a whole new plate of hors d’oeuvres to the party and reinvent the form apparently effortlessly, melding traditions while busting those links you used to think held strong between forms and ideas. At the moment we have Melbournian Karl Scullin once of the Bird Blobs and now of Mum Smokes but who also performs as Kes and whose first album is known as The Jellys in the Pot. Forget for the moment that there should have been an apostrophe in that title (subsequent pressings will assuredly correct the problem incidentally making this apostropheless one the noughties equivalent of the Velvets album with the peel-off banana) and concentrate only the fact that this album is undoubtedly one of the strangest and yet richest you are likely to hear. Listen for instance to amazing stuff like Hold on to your Legs, a song that reminds me for some reason of the way Can reminds me of seventies disco (particularly their seventies disco stuff). I think partly it’s the relentless repetitiousness of it, underneath a powerful guitar figure that has that air of Saturday Night Fever. Of course it is so far removed from disco it’s ridiculous, in fact most of the album is light and folky and some elements of Evil Twins, the last track, are overly sugary even if you allow for some kind of irony quota (I don’t know that there isn’t a law about using a term like ‘din-dins’ in a song). The track What Do You Feed It? is as musically proficient as John Williams (the Australian guitar virtuoso not the film soundtrack fellow) yet has pop ability of mavericks like Smog or Laura Nyro.

The Jellys in the Pot is pretty much the album of a lifetime. I caught Kes playing The Tote a few weeks ago – there’s a real band going on there now – and these days instead of rivalling the ten or so geniuses I’ve already namechecked herein he’s invading a different bunch of turfs – like Brian Wilson’s. But this short (half-hour) album is a nest of gems that no-one should ignore. Don’t ignore it.

2026 update: I so much couldn't remember this record I went looking on discogs for it, and it's not there.