don't go breaking my heart

I was ten/eleven when 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' came out in 1976 and of course found it very enjoyable indeed, and I still really like it. It came into my head that I wanted to see that weird film clip one more time so I watched it on youtube this morning. The chemistry between Elton John and Kiki Dee is - not off, at all, but nor is EJ in any way connecting to KD on any level other than a 'come on, luv, we've got a job to do we've blocked out 45 minutes this morning to make this video and then I'm off to Paris' kind of vibe. For her part, KD seems even less into the whole schemozzle. 

I'm not saying they should work on their craft at all and I never needed to believe that they were in love or anything, but even as an 11 year old I could very clearly see that they were not trying to project that in any way, and that was interesting. You can watch it yourself any time. They are just miming in a recording studio (or a mock up of one) with a single microphone. They do a few goofy, surely entirely unrehearsed actings out of bits of the song, very inexpertly for professionals, almost awkwardly really but it's fine. The very weird bit is when EJ grabs hold of a strange little pocket? pouch? on KD's overalls and kisses it. That really is when we get into Mork from Ork/ ALF/ Uncle Martin kind of territory, and I'm not saying that as a gay man EJ doesn't understand how to caress a lady's overalls augmentation, but I am saying that it's so odd that everybody thought this was an adequate visual and fine to include in the clip even though it's just so perversely unlike the acts of humans. The attempts of KD to follow Elton's cheesy dancing at the end is even more crazy, you're like, all their inadequacies are laid bare for the world to see!!!

That said, it's a great few minutes, apart from anything else, what an incredible pop song and so buoyant. EJ wrote it with Bernie Taupin under a pseudonym (for some reason) and everybody involved has a right to be proud. It is a really strange clip though. 

Also I note with interest that EJ mimes the backing vocals some of the time, but KD never does, I wonder whether this means she didn't do the backing and she's just being literal, or whether, once again, the whole thing was so unrehearsed they just didn't even think about/talk about this. 

I think this song popped into my head because I am in a fb group called I grew up in Australia 60s 70s and 80s, and someone posted this: 

Lot of Elton in there. Well, I had to get out my The Book: Top 40 Research and check up on some of this shizzle because I just knew it was a US list. At least four of these songs didn't even chart in Australia, let alone make number one (Staple Singers; Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds; Doobie Brothers; Ohio Players). Additionally, there are at least three Australian releases that did make number one (Skyhooks, Bill and Boyd who by the way had two hits in Australia that year!!!) and Bob Hudson with the very unlikely chart-topper 'Newcastle Song'), obviously not on this list. 

So, another travesty of justice thwarted. The balance is restored to the world and we are safe. God bless me.

everything must be recorded

If you told me some stat like that there were more photos taken in 2022 so far than were ever taken in the history of the world before 2000 I wouldn't be at all surprised (though I would ask you how you knew that, and also whether you meant photos taken and developed, or photos taken). Anyway. I have just spent a drab half hour looking through photos on my phone from when photos on my phone 'started', i.e. 2017, and I've been trying to figure out what to do with them, about half of them are photos of Nancy, who is a very photogenic cat but what do you do with a photo of a cat? You don't show them to the cat, and it's not like Nancy has any children or anything who will want nice photos of things in her life e.g. when she slept on the couch etc. The fact that Nancy probably has another decade of life to go (I hope!) only means there are just going to be tens of thousands more pictures of Nancy. She is beloved, that's for sure. 

I deleted about three of the photos when they were obviously mistakes (but none of Nancy). It was kind of surprising I will say to see pictures of people in some instances who I thought were recent acquaintances but who were actually people I knew five years ago, and contrasting that with people from five years ago who I now not only no longer speak to (their choice) but who I haven't spoken to for a long, long time. I know that sounds maudlin but I don't care about those people or miss them, I'm just commenting on the weird tectonic plates of memory. 

What is most important really in looking at that old stuff from 2017 (random date, I'm not that interested in 2017 per se) is how disparate my experiences were, and unfocused. I was certainly doing a lot of random travelling around the western suburbs, primarily on my own, which now seems odd. Anyway, it's breakfast time. 

This post is a lot about what I'm not feeling or doing which I realise seems like projection but it's actually just me going into battle with my old self I think. Nothing wrong with that. Don't want to be a sad old dog who can't change. My life is presently extremely good, and it was on reflection very shit in 2017. 

late night movie

I am staying up to try and get the dogs to sleep (I know that's pathetic... anyway it's only one dog, Charlie is not the problem, Barry is restless). There are two films on - Britannia Hospital, which I think was Lindsay Anderson's last film,* and a 2003 film called Dying on the Edge. Actually there's a third, also from 2003 (oddly), known as The King and Queen of Moonlight Bay.

Britannia Hospital was released in 1982, when I was 17, so it doesn't quite fit in with the stuff I'm generally speaking talking about, but I do recall staying up really late to watch it, and being kind of horrified, bored and disgusted all at once - it was so nihilistic and sickening. It's a satire of Britain using the metaphor of a hospital. I loved Lindsay Anderson's If... so I was dead keen to see this, but it repelled me. I tried to watch a bit of it to see if the more mature me could make more of a film that I know many find impressive, but no, it's the same still (for me).

But this did all remind me of my early teens when I would stay up all night - or to 4 am or whatever - simply to watch some film or another that I had heard of or which starred an actor I really liked. For instance, you got a lot of great Hollywood noir late at night (and not so great, of course) with actors like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney. I had a Halliwell's and would check out the films in the book beforehand. There were times I just couldn't bear the thought of going through the subsequent day knowing I could have seen (for instance) Dark Passage but not having seen it! I would also supplement whatever I could see freely on tv in the middle of the night with trips to various revival cinemas around town eg the Valhalla (in Richmond) of course but also The Ritz (North Melbourne) and others may come back to me.

I didn't drink coffee then, so I don't recall how I'd keep awake at all other than by the sheer excitement that I would add a little piece of cinema knowledge-experience to my palette. Just as I wanted to own every canonic album, I wanted to have seen every canonic film which mainly meant every Hollywood and Australian film made, new and old. I now don't believe I will ever, or will ever want to, attain this goal.

The films were (have I told you this before?) often hosted by minor celebrities of earlier eras, such as Issi Dy and Ross D. Wylie, two men whose pop music work I have later come to appreciate but then I had no idea who they were. They were very comfortable in front of the camera and they would often pad the films out seemingly forever with quizzes and games (spinning the wheel, etc), also advertorial (Michael's Corner Store). It was infuriating at the time, I got the sense Issi Dy was high, but he was probably just pretending to be to engage what they thought of as their core audience.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, then my father got a VCR in about 1980 or 81, then my mother probably got one too, then came other ways of seeing films in your own time rather than when cinemas or tv dictated it, and that was the end of that, though also I got friends and figured out the pragmatic concept above i.e. I didn't need to see every Humphrey Bogart film just because Humphrey Bogart was in it, because most of them were terrible. That said, I am really glad I got to see Dark Passage, because it's a great film and I wish I could see it now.

PS: At first glance I appreciate this might seem like a sentimental reminiscence, with mention of old TV and things one did as a child, these are usually cast in sentimental light whatever they are, however, I have to say this was a pathetic thing for me to do - I could have spent my time far more wisely - and once ways of taping and/or watching films at home came along, it was much better.

*No, that was The Whales of August, 1987. I saw that in a cinema in Sydney, it stars Bette Davis and Lillian Gish. The beginning of the film is very quiet, and I remember a lady in the audience saying to her companion loudly, 'Is it a silent film?' the answer was no and she said 'Oh, I thought... because...' (Because what? Because Gish had been in silent films she infected any film she made with silence?)

go team

We saw the Go-Team last night at the Corner and they were exceptional.
The months leading up to last night, as far as a G-T show was concerned, was like an angsty dream, as I kept forgetting to buy tickets and then, once I had bought tickets, I kept forgetting the show was on and didn’t remember until midway through the day yesterday. Tuesday night is actually a better night for me than most – I am generally a spent force by Friday, even Thursday – but for some reason it just never stuck in my mind or I couldn’t take it seriously. Then I remembered properly and factored it in.

Once it was factored, I realized I was actually really looking forward to seeing something different from the usual kind of thing I saw when it came to bands, which is almost always friends’ bands, friends of friends’ bands, or ‘who they fuck do they think they are’. I don’t know anyone aside from me who likes the Go Team (Mia would concede the songs were catchy, so she is more in that ballpark than anyone else I know, but she was not really a fan). I had no idea who would be there. That was fine, I was relishing the unknownness.

It comes in the context which I probably spend too much time railing against, most recent manifestation of which was a work drinks where talk unfortunately turned to music, at which I had a little rant re: the recent Gang of Four tour and the more recent use, which I had only just seen a day or so before, of a Gang of Four tune in a TV ad, from an album which I had bought 30 years ago along with, I guess, about 3 or 400 other Australians. It’s a great album and everyone should hear it who likes that kind of thing, but the time, as far as I’m concerned, to revel in that stuff and the people who recorded that album is not now. Musical sentimentality is a crock. No two ways about it. The thing that made bands of 30 years ago good is now gone.

On the way to the Corner we had dinner at Raffles (note to self and you: don’t get the vegetable curry if you are hoping to experiment away from the usual laksa, because it’s just the laksa without noodles) and then a beer at the Great Britain. At that point I said to Mia I thought there was every chance the night could even be inspiring (I was really jinxing everything let’s face it). I was about as pumped as I could be, though fortunately no-one noticed (and that is not very pumped).

Once there waiting for the G-T to come on, I asked Mia what the best show she ever saw at the Corner was. She mentioned Bailter Space, Pere Ubu and Palace. I don’t think I was there for the first of these (but I think I saw BS at the Punters - ?) and I agree PU were brilliant and Palace was just an incredible show. I also mentioned Love (which was sadly a reunion show, and I despise those, but still pretty fine), Sleater Kinney, Low, and Operator Please. I mentioned Low but in truth I don’t rate them at all – I never understood the appeal, sorry Low, why should you care. I am sure we’ve seen a hundred other acts at the Corner but that was what we could remember off the cuff. Also, I saw Ian Moss at the Corner once and that was an amazing show, it has to be said.

Anyway with the G-T I was really uncertain of what to expect. I knew that their records were kind of made to the auteur model, a la Tame Impala or… Pet Sounds Beach Boys? I also ‘knew’ because I read it online that their live shows were kind of like a separate strand to what they did, not an attempt to replicate the records. I was very fine with that. But while I had long enjoyed those records, whatever else I’d read about them online or wherever it had been very difficult to make that information stick. So I was contentedly in the dark.

The curtains parted and there were six people onstage, two drummers, two guitars-bass and keyboards no-one was playing, and it just went into an onslaught. The whole thing was a barrage. (I didn’t realise how loud it was, at all, until it was over, and all I could hear sounded like it was being transmitted on a dodgy shortwave radio inside a copper box. I think it’s getting better…). The instant they started playing, I realized, I love this band – they have amazing songs and now I appreciate they are really stylish and great fun! They swapped instruments constantly – I don’t think they played one song in the same configuration, certainly not consecutively. Three of them (only the women) sang. There was clearly something (mainly keyboard lines I guess) being triggered, probably by a drum machine/click track, but everyone was totally in synch and tight in the messiest way imaginable.

I don’t know. Maybe there are a lot of bands like this, and I’m just stuck in the ghetto of the kind of worthy dross I mentioned above. I never really expect a band to put on a visual show, and in fact barring the jumping around of Ninja, who sang most of the G-T’s songs (she was the only one not on stage all the time, though, oddly) the G-T were concentrating on playing like a rock band, but it gelled extremely well, it sounded amazing, and it was that rare, rare occasion where a show ended and I was like, already? Because most of the time, shows end and I’m like, at last!!! Recently I was at a show where the band, who I will not name but they had one, ended their set with a monotonous dirge wherein I am sure they took pleasure in the unrelenting appalling extreme attenuatedness of the song, that always seemed about to stop and then went into another cycle of torpor. It was the musical equivalent of a taunt: you have to endure this not because it’s our art or we like it either but just because you know us or know people who know us and you’re stuck here out of obligation and there’s nothing you can do about it, you have to hear this ghastly racket specifically calculated to distress you.

So after the G-T I said to Mia, that was actually probably quite inspiring. If nothing else, it inspired me to walk out on the next glum, dull, ponderous piece of crap indie nonsense I am exposed to, and the rest thereafter if I have any gumption. That’s a revelation.

my 2c on hey dad

I have no opinion of course on the whole Hey Dad! child molesting accusations that are currently circling though there are lots of things around that controversy that strike me as weird. I do have a tiny connection to the whole shambles, however, as I visited the set in (I’m guessing) 1989 to do a story for, I suppose, Smash Hits and now I look back on it, it wasn’t a happy place.

It was in the late 80s when what I might now think of as the Diesel factor was heavily in play (Craig Mathieson talks about this quite a lot in one of his books though I can’t actually remember which one; he’s talking largely about Ratcat). The Diesel factor comes from when we ran a story on Johnny Diesel, a tiny little story, which wasn’t written by me but I know who did write it (it was published without a byline because it was in the section where stories had no bylines) where the last line was a simple ‘Yum!’. Johnny Diesel’s first album was entirely unmemorable rubbish (the second one was quite good) and he had that Angels guy managing him and there was all this bollocks about recording in Memphis or something similar, and it was all about stonewash jeans ‘n’ Luke Perry ‘n’ 50s red petrol pump-style authenticity, and anyway Diesel and his management were so horrified by the ‘Yum!’ that they decreed they would never talk to another pop magazine again. And at the same time FM radio was dominated entirely by horrible classic rock, to the degree that I well remember a radio ad for a club that played house music or something and the approximation of house music that was manufactured for the ad was so bullshit it was hilarious. Anyway. The point being our supply of pop music people to write about was drying up so we decided to switch at least in part to TV, at least as an experiment, on the reasoning that really our readers were at least as much into TV as they were into pop and we’d have no trouble accessing TV stars, right?

So I went off to interview the cast of Hey Dad because as we kept telling ourselves it was a really successful show and our readership surely really liked it. Now I’ve built up to the whole thing I wish I could better remember what transpired, but I only recall a vibe. I went to an afternoon’s reading, in a hall in Glebe or Balmain or somewhere, and then I went to a taping at Epping. I didn’t see anything weird happening that I could now sell to NW, fortunately or unfortunately. What I did see was a pretty unhappy place, or at least put it this way, I thought the show was chronically unfunny, anyway, but I was surprised that the cast were so unwilling to pretend they enjoyed being there. I remember Julie McGregor being fairly sardonic about Smash Hits but being abstractedly friendly to me, and perhaps it was around this time she was involved in that bizarre Farmhouse thing with Michael Horrocks? And I remember Robert Hughes musing, I thought rather comically but a bit poignantly, about how his character had been working on the same architectural drawing for the entire length of the series (which hadn’t been going that long, considering how long it ultimately did go for, but I guess there was a feeling in the industry that surely they’d rung every possibility they could out of the premise of Hey Dad whatever that might have been and that feeling probably infused the production too). And I remember trying to challenge Simone Buchanan about whether she found the scripts funny and she wasn’t that willing to commit one way or the other, I think she claimed to occasionally chuckle at something the first time she read it but the imputation was clearly it was just a job.

I’m not going to push it any further, that’s all I remember, the other guys (both called Chris) were friendly enough. I imagine the story I wrote is around somewhere. I don’t even know why I brought it up. Well I do but it’s not like I have anything interesting to say about it, except it wasn’t a hilariously happy production the week I visited. I just put that down to it being a fairly bad show.

oh yeah, last week

I finally wrote the last three sentences of my review of the Ears show from last week.

lunch in the country

What could be more pleasant than lunch in 'the country' (actually a regional city) with a select collection of some of my favourite people: Fran, Hairy, Kylie, Bren, James, Miranda, Felix, Shane. I was going to alphabetise them but instead I kind of went round the table of my mind. The food was delightful, the cake my goodness, the coffee sublime, the music remarkable (hmm... Kings of Leon sound more like U2 than I had anticipated, then in the same song they kind of morph into some kind of odd post-punk thing rather funky, and that new royalchord album christ! And all that mazung Bob Welch music...) I wasn't taking notes so until Hercules Poirot comes and tells me a terrible thing happened that night and wart deed yew tock abeaut, great Belgian accent Hercules if that is your real name, I can only remember the definition of 'piss fit' and discussion of a certain individual and a certain other individual and how one is apparently obsessed with the other, and discussions regarding retirement (good lord!), the concept of how a chocolate cake might 'shit all over' another cake and what form such shit might take and japanese bowing competitions, but I daresay there was a large amount of even quite erudite discussion like what about Felix's drawing a big F for Fran and the like?
One odd thing no doubt the first indication of my impending appalling nervous system disease that will rapidly spread and claim my life in two weeks for now ('look he even joked about it, little imagining the pain') was that at the end of the evening I rose from my seat tripped on a chair leg and fell flat on the ground. I did put a hand out to stop myself I think but essentially I just went down. It was one of those odd things that you think about as it is happening, though not much (come to think of it I had a similar experience on the Calder going up when I saw, too late to do anything about it, that I was about to drive over a pillow; the effect was, actually, minimal). I scraped my knee and that was about it, my beautiful face was untouched. But it was a most interesting experience. I was not at all drunk (one beer all day). Anyway, that was mentioned only as a point of interest it did not at all mar the day (for me at any rate) which was marvellous. What a good idea, let's do it again next weekend.

the internet... promises so much, delivers so little.

Sitemeter continues to dazzle me with information about why the heck people visit this site. Imagine the baffled Hungarian who on a perfectly innocent search for 'Werry young girl porn' happened up on this.

i always thought this was a great record

and I still play it occasionally. It never occurred to me until just then, though, that there was a video etc.

I don't really know the Reynolds Girls' story though and neither this rather patronising film snippet (I have to say I agree totally with Pete Waterman in the stuff he says around 2:07 about the arrogance of the program this is from - even if he doesn't really bother to say what he means properly - and totally disagree with him that you can't sell people stuff they 'don't believe in' though I have no idea what that means) nor the Wikipedia entry help much.



Their fan is an interesting man though. He seems to live in quite a posh house.

I also always enjoyed the fact that even though it's about teenagers pissed off about not hearing 'their music' on the radio, it was written by a man in his thirties.

Love the quote 'You just wish they would jack off and didn't ever come on the scene'

this kind of stuff will pass before my eyes just before i die i guess

...because it was my life. Yes, here I am having a quiet night at home after a large Warrnambool jaunt which I probably won't ever blog about, and thought why don't I get the old photo albums out and have a look at the good old days and blow me down they were a very strange bunch of pictures that really made me wonder what the hell sort of person I have been. Here are some of them. When I say strange, by the way, I'm not being like some teenage girl saying 'me and my friends are mad', I'm saying why did someone take those photos, why did someone choose to put them in a photo album??? And that someone is me.