cop shop, first four episodes

So I ripped off the bandaid of mourning for D4 by jumping straight into Cop Shop.

Here, we're heading into terrain I actually personally remember. I was 12 when CS started in 1977 and we watched it in our household, though whether we started from the first episode I don't recall (in fact, I don't recall much). Now, I'm looking at it from the POV of Crawfords having all their police shows cancelled on them in rapid succession (for no particular good reason) and then three years later they start another one up, now with everything they've learned about soap opera laid upon everything they already knew about police/crime shows. It's a good blend of cast members with the old (George Mallaby as a very key figure) and the new (OK, not much of the new, really, so far). The actor who might feel the most jangled by the new show is Rowena Wallace who was the rookie WPC in the final year of D4, all youth and inexperience and idealism, and who is now three years later in CS the bored housewife mother of a 14-year-old (and married to George M's character). 

Peter Adams is the firstnamed actor in the credits, perhaps because his last name starts with 'A', but his JJ is a major character from the outset. Adams had quite a bit of tv presence in the 70s including a lot of petty crim characters in Crawfords shows. One thing I found intriguing was that JJ was generally called 'Double J' in the early episodes, presumably at some point (once the show went to air perhaps?) someone told them about 2JJ in Sydney. 

Double J is an interesting character because he brings elements of the wisecracking vaudeville star and he's also on the make like a British tv comedy character with the bizarre added extra that he does actually succeed, well, he has sex at least once in the first couple of weeks of the show. That's a fine balance - he's a comedy figure, you're not meant to envy him (I don't think so, anyway), it's not women want him men want to be him exactly... hmmm... I'll think about it further. 

Meanwhile, just want to note a marginally interesting element of the first show. The poster for the Saints' I'm Stranded on the wall. 

I continue to be intrigued by the dichotomy between Ed Kuepper's testimony that the Saints never had any profile in Australia and the fact that this kind of thing happened. I admit in and of itself this kind of thing (blink and you miss it promo albeit on a major mainstream show) is probably pretty minor. The fact that they were on big K-Tel style hits compilations in the mid-to-late 70s is more of a challenge to that narrative. But it makes me think. 

Oh also, that picture above with Adams, Mallaby and Tommy Dysart. Dysart is playing an evil gangster and guess what his name is? Dimonicus. Brilliant.

Oh and also also, the storyline in the first couple of episodes features a policeman named Tom Foster (the eminent Peter Sumner) who is bashing gay men trying to find the teacher who seduced his son Gary  (played by Andrew McKaige). It's just sign-of-the-times stuff - Mallaby's character Glenn Taylor tells Tom at the end of the storyline that ultimately he's unlikely to be charged with bashing all those men, and Gary is of the opinion that his teacher shouldn't be blamed for anything because he (Gary) started it. All pretty gross really.

Also #3: This show debuted in November 1977. November?! 

ugh why do I care

'Punk rock had caught fire, establishing strongholds in England and America, and eventually reaching X's native Australia. Drawing on its predecessors for inspiration, this music is burning with a primal intensity that is vintage 1979.' So reads a review reproduced on a website for a label which is releasing the umpteenth reissue of the wonderful X-Aspirations (or is it just called Aspirations?) by X. Australian X. The best X, let's be fair, because while the US X had their moments, they also had a lot of noments.

The line is from a review by someone called Nathan Bush. I don't know who that is but when I googled that name I got a lot of hits about a podcaster whose speciality is e-commerce. I don't know if it's the same person. 

Why do I care? I'm not a patriot and I don't even really see myself as flying the flag for Aust culture at all, though I suppose I do. I just want to say, if it's a competition about 'who invented punk rock', then there is an extremely good case for The Saints as the first, and the admittedly terrible-sounding (until Peter Jackson's audio technology gets onto it and we can hear everything inc. the kettle whistling in the house over the road) Most Primitive Band in the World album recorded in 1974 shows that punk did not 'eventually reach' Australia but was created in Australia as much as anywhere. 

Anyway as I said it's stupid but I guess I just hate lazy claims about 'influence' and assumptions that Australians just sat around twiddling their thumbs for people in other places to give them things to do. I will ultimately cope though. 

By the way that X-Aspirations is a massively great album. Just so you know. 

100 reviews # 7: The Saints, King of the Sun

If you had told me a few weeks ago I’d soon be enjoying with gusto a new album by The Saints, I would have said something like, what a strange thing to say or perhaps ‘really? How interesting’ while thinking, ‘that is exceedingly unlikely, and also, who are you to tell me what I will and won’t like’. But the fact is a few weeks ago on RRR I heard a song that I thought was terrific – angular and lyrically strange verse punctuated by odd bells, followed by a rousing chorus with lush brass orchestration, and I was most surprised to discover that this was a song from the new Saints album. It struck me so solidly I actually went to JB and bought the album – with very little expectation that any of the rest of it would be anywhere near as good as that one song (I just don't trust old songwriters, you see).

I am not one of those people with that boring obvious attitude to Chris Bailey’s Saints. I don’t care that Bailey continued on with the Saints after he and Ed Kuepper ended their creative partnership. I care as little now, in 2013 as I did in 1979 or whenever Bailey made that decision, or it was made for him. Kuepper couldn’t have continued the Saints without Bailey because everyone knew Bailey as the singer. Bailey might as well have had the band name, especially since no-one else could have it. But why anyone in the world thinks it’s any of their business now or at any time in the past 34 years to pass judgment on that arrangement I can’t imagine.

Of course, what a lot of antiBaileysainters will tell you is that they think Bailey is soppy and derivative and not punk and Kuepper in the punk Saints tempered that and gave it an edge. I have to admit I’m very au fait with the first three Saints albums and that after that (there have been 11 albums) my knowledge is patchy, though I think The Monkey Puzzle, which was the first real album after Kuepper, is excellent and I would listen to that anytime. The 80s singles (‘Ghost Ships’ etc) I like well enough, but I could live without hearing them again for a while longer in fact possibly the remainder of my life. I have some of those 80s albums in a little box set that Stewart Anderson gave me because he bought it on spec and was repelled by its unpunkiness. Didn’t want it in the house! There was another album they did about seven or eight years ago (OK I checked – 11 years ago) with the nonsense title Spit the Blues Out, which I also thought was more than tolerable, but it didn’t really take. I had been pretty oblivious to the records since then. Now this.

Like the song I heard, the album is called King of the Sun. The copy I picked up has a picture of a small posh boy from the century before last on the cover – why, why, why? 

Doesn’t matter. The album opens with the amazing title track. Which itself opens with a piano, then a somewhat plaintive and very esoteric series of couplets (which sound like a disconnected sequence of random lines) and into the rousing chorus, then rather than returning to a vocal verse, just a version of the verse with a solo and so on in it, and what can I say, then it goes back to the chorus then it ends. You don’t need this kind of recommendation, building your hopes up and so on, to make you like the song (you may already have heard it, particularly if you clicked that link) and it’s ok with me if you don’t anyway, but of course what you really need to do is happen upon it without knowing it’s this 40 year old band (or at least a permutation thereof – there’s no-one left of course from the original group except Bailey) you probably already have an opinion of.

So the other odd part of this story is that the rest of the record is largely pretty amazing too. I don’t know who the other members of the band ‘are’ (aside from their names). I don’t know if the drums are programmed, they sound like they could be but it might just be really good, precise, well-tuned pop drums. I don’t have a clue if anything on the record was just bashed out in a more or less in-the-studio, random way; sometimes it sounds like it may have been (even the great ‘King of the Sun’ sounds like it could have been a lucky studio jam, or at very least an imprecisely decided/inadequately rehearsed bash-it-out recording then fixed and/or ‘written’ in ‘post’; I’m thinking for instance of the eccentric way the drums change going back into the final verse, which do have an element of je ne sais pas pourquoi about them).

The low points include the occasional drossy lyric, or more precisely, drossy rhyme. There are bulk lazy non-sequitur couplets (the one employing the white cliffs of Dover springs to mind). We don’t need to go into them too deeply, but let’s just say there are more examples of this towards the second half of the record, which suggests to me that someone (presumably Bailey) knows when he’s doing it with one hand tied behind his back (and the hand in question is the one that comes up with the innovative or at least interesting stuff). There’s nothing that makes me want to scream, as I go towards the back half of the record, but compared to the five excellent songs at the front, it is definitely diminishing returns, with the exception of the quite funny final song.

I remember the time in the mid-80s when people used to talk about The Saints in the same breath as the Triffids or the Go-Betweens (or the Wet Taxis in their late phase or Sea Stories or The Odolites) and indeed that is sort of the space they had come to fill, as lush pop balladeers. It worked.

Here, I particularly like the ballad ‘Duty’, which, once again, doesn’t always entirely cut it in the lyrics department and then DOES, with total compunction. If I were a songwriter, and I wrote two songs as good as ‘Duty’ and ‘King of the Sun’, I would give myself free reign to fill up the rest of an album with total half-arsed rehashes of them, or ripoffs of other songs. Bailey doesn’t do that, and even if the misfires of tawdry lyric or bluesy workout rear up occasionally, that’s probably less a case of lack of inspiration, and more a case of ‘I’m just a jobbing musician, don’t take me too seriously, I’m not pretentious like some people you could name.’ Actually, I’m very, very impressed. 

*PS a few days later: The copy I bought also had a second CD in it of what I assume to be old 80s Saints music - I am only guessing because I recognised some of the top 40 hits like the abovementioned 'Ghost Ships'. It was a weird thing to find in there mainly because there was no indication on the sleeve or anywhere else that there was a kind of semi-greatest hits CD in there, so it could hardly be called a selling point. After I wrote & posted the above review I went online - no wait, I already was - and looked at a few other reviews, most of which were appallingly lame, polite and pedestrian, which is fine, I can dig that. But one or two did mention the great hits CD. For what that's worth (not a thing).