Mum on the drums

On Saturday Michael and Elf and I went along to see Mum's ukelele band play. We sat with Sally and Marcus's girlfriend Miranda … we’re keen to keep her close to the family while he's away for three months.

The band is called the Fuschia House players. I didn’t know why but the leader explained it started with a small group who would meet at the Fuschia House in the Botanical Gardens to play. There were about 25 regular ukeleles with a ukelele banjo in there somewhere; accompanied by a pianist, a bass ukelele and our dear mum on the drums. Mum also played ukelele and sang a solo!

The program hummed along. It included Down Along The Dixie Line by Gillian Welch, a beautifully sad song which they sped up and made quite jolly. Mum introduced herself singing and playing Whispering Grass. I think this might be mum's first time ever singing solo for a crowd. She was a little wavery while speaking, but from her first note she sang loud and clear as a bell. Sally and I were so proud.

On the drums she was in her element! Mum has always had great rhythm – she bought herself some bongos way back in the sixties during the international bongo craze, which are still in the family. During her years as a potter she also made her own ceramic drums. She is always drumming around the house, as long as I can remember. In the last year she bought herself a 2nd hand snare drum and some other gear. On Saturday she presented a very Charlie Watts figure as she held down the beat with the brushes, beaming, low key but faultless.

These are stills from Sally’s short video of the encore, Blue Suede Shoes. We love ya mum!

IDLES

This is the best new band I have heard in ages. I learn about new music mostly from this series on YouTube called the NPR Tiny Desk concerts. Always immaculately recorded.

IDLES are British sensitive new age punk. [They insist that they are not punk. They ARE punk like The Clash were punk.] They are blokes who love each other and are happy to show it. They speak about their feminism. They are pro-immigrant. Their lyrics are ingenious, full of punk imagery and life and great turns of phrase. 

Me, oh me, oh my, Roy / You look like a walking thyroid / You're not a man, you're a gland / You're one big neck with sausage hands / You are a Topshop tyrant / Even your haircut's violent / You look like you're from Love Island / You stood and the room went silent 

- Never Fight A Man With A Perm

They have fun on stage and love their audiences. They believe in expressive flouncy dancing. One of the things I found really impressive was their refusal to be "cool". At this concert at Glastonbury, the front man Joe Talbot has a little cry as they come out to play; he's dreamed of this and can't believe that he's really on stage at the festival he's been to before as a punter. I think that's really charming.

Oh, and the rhythm guitarist seems to mostly get around in his underpants.

Review: Place Without A Postcard by Midnight Oil (1981)

I am supposed to be packing for a week away but I promised I would do this, so I have to get it done now while I have internet. For fairness I will again pick apart the songs and try to ignore the overall deep attachment I have to this record. I sing this album right through to myself sometimes, on a long walk or during a long wait for a train etc. I once had a mildly hellish ride back to Cuzco from Machu Picchu on a crowded train, riding in the toilet cubicle the whole way; and my memory of this album got me through it. 

Don’t Wanna Be The One Jim Moginie on the organ is the spine of this track. Kind of dull 4/4 from Rob Hirst until the big finish. 6/10

Brave Faces This is the real start of the album for me. When I sing it my recitation always starts with “I’ve seen faces in the window”. The bridge has another great walking bassline that returns in the coda paired with a great guitar solo, tied in a bow at the end. 8½/10

Armistice Day Very unusual song to release as a single. Slow and menacing. I have never been a huge fan of it - it is almost too spare. Full instrumentation kicks in after nearly 2 minutes. Lyrically and in tempo a cousin of Short Memory on 10 9 8. 6/10

Someone Else To Blame Short sharp and perceptive song. “See me suffer see me pain - must be someone else to blame”. Busy bass, great solo. 8/10

Basement Flat Hell is other people - a song about the rental market. First chorus seems to come from somewhere else entirely, but the second one fits better somehow. About 1:50 someone starts playing a stapler. Good but not great song. “What can I do - there must be some solution” - not one of their most rousing calls to action. 5/10

Written In The Heart The chorus suffers a little from the words-don’t fit music thing, but the music is terrific although the dreaded harmonica appears near the end. 7/10

Burnie This is about my hometown, so I have always pricked my ears up to the lyrics. Burnie is an industrial port town - in 1981 especially it would have been pretty ugly. This song is unflattering but has empathy - it says you don’t have to accept it or leave it - you can stay and change it. I have a feeling the “surfing priest” was Fr Jim Souley, who took over our parish shortly before I stopped attending mass. Musically its a bit slow and has an unconvincing chord change going into the chorus. 6/10

Quinella Holiday A cracker - a Paul Kelly-like short story in a song. And the beginning of a wonderful Abbey Road-style medley 9/10

 as it rolls into … Loves On Sale Catchy uptempo powerpop number about conspicuous consumption. Some Reg Mombassa-sounding whammy in there 8/10

If Ned Kelly Was King A really mature and complex song. 17-year-old me thought Ned Kelly as king was a fine idea. Summary justice for Christopher Skase, Alan Bond, politicians who tee up legislation for miners then retire as paid consultants. Quinella Holiday sneaks in again at the end. 9/10

Lucky Country Really taut and balanced rock song up to 2:40 when the “helicopter” keyboard pulse comes in (Koala Sprint/Outside World style) .Garrett goes into an extraordinary spoken word rant over acoustic guitar before the electrics return. Garrett chants “small talk, small talk” as the boys sing “lucky country” behind him. 8/10

Average mark 7.3 = ★★★★

Review: Head Injuries by Midnight Oil (1979)

I am going to review a couple of old Midnight Oil albums in order to measure them against each other and justify my preference for one over the other. In fairness, I have only ever had this album Head Injuries as a muddy-sounding home pirated cassette. Clearly I am not an audiophile - and I would never criticise music for it's production values so it's not going to influence me I don't think.

I don't really get into anything Midnight Oil recorded after Red Sails In The Sunset (1984). They made some good and rightfully popular music but it didn't grab me the way the early stuff did. I was at Joe Crawford's house, one day in grade 10 I think, and he was playing some albums his cool young Uncle Max had sent them from Sydney, including Place Without A Postcard. I was hooked immediately. One of my formative experiences as a 17 year old was taking off to Launceston with a gang of schoolmates to see them play at the Velodrome (not an especially charismatic venue) and about ten of us staying that night in a holiday cabin nearby that accommodated 4.

Cold Cold Change opens the album with what I think of as a dumb riff, like Feeling Kinda Sporty by Dave Graney is. The best part of the song is the chord at the end. It was released as a single. It's common to start an album with what you think is the strongest track; but I think they were wrong. 5/10

Section 5 (Bus to Bondi) On this record quite often the lyrics don't scan very well, just ill-suited to the musical space provided. Here is an example "Push start this car tomorrow, I'll take it to the tip yaaaaaaaard, and I'll leave it as a memory for cats.to.sleep" 5/10

Naked Flame - This works. Like a lot of their songs at this stage I have no idea what this about. It's got a nice Sherberty harmonic chorus near the end. 7/10

Back on the Borderline opens with great drum solo and settles into a good tempo. Very catchy 4 word chorus. "The only place is Laminex" - nup no idea what this is about either. Much more straighforward rock without tempo changes etc of first few tracks. 8/10

Koala Sprint opens with a spoken word bit over a choppy keyboard something like a distant helicopter (which returns on Outside World on a later album). Part 2 is a quiet instrumental prelude then Garret screams and it turns into road song, about a surf trip going north. A bit like Houndog by Cold Chisel. Then for the outro the helicopter comes back. End of side 1. I can hear the needle lift on my home taped cassette. 6/10

No Reaction is back to four on the floor rock, nice spidery guitar solo in the middle. "You're almost but not quite more than we deserve" was a bit complex for me as a teenager and I still don't think I have nailed it. 7/10

Stand in Line  The standout track. No Reaction sets it up well. Deals with unfairness of mining riches, unevenness of wealth distribution. Killer bassline, one of their best. Appealed to my teen sense of the world being unfair and the first step on the ladder being deliberately put out of my reach. Well, I was relatively well off and had nothing to whinge about really but out of *many people's* reach. Good guitar solo then some vocal gymnastics for a big angry finish. Must have been a roof-raiser live. 9/10

I was actually in Sydney when this concert on Goat Island happened, simulcast on Triple J and ABC TV.

Profiteers does some tricky time signature things, starts waltz, then goes 4/4, it's lost me if I'm honest. Vocals sound like they were done via a pay phone; a bit of a singsong nursery rhyme thing about recruiting boys to be soldiers. Back to waltz at the end and some military drums to help the thickies like me who haven't worked out it's about war. 6/10

Is it Now. I am feeling a sense of relief when a new track starts and it's simple rock. They were such a good tight rock band. The riff reminds me of Mental As Anything’s Possible Theme for a Future TV Drama Series. 7/10

Average mark: 6.667 which you could say equates to ★★★.

EDIT!!! 

I have come up with a new system for converting marks out of ten to star ratings. 2.5 or below is one star. 9 or above is 5 stars. On that basis Head Injuries is worth ★★★½

The Rees Marks-to-Stars System

Massive organ

We just attended half an organ recital, at the urging of Elf's mother Felicity. She has returned to Canberra, but urged us in her absence to take the boys to a couple of free concerts.

Tonight's was at Scots Church in town, home of a massive Romantic organ. That is, constructed expressly for playing the music of the great Romantic composers, such as Bach. I did not recognise any of the pieces except Mr Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, and as usual when I hear it, I thought how much more I would enjoy listening to Sky do it.

So here it is. When we got home I played it the family and everyone loved it.

(Sky were a classical/rock fusion experiment who were around from 1979 to the nineties. I used to have  this on tape, it was on Sky2 which came out in 1980. They are the sitting-downest rock band I have ever seen. The drummer is having a whale of a time and appears to be well-known deranged millionaire John Hodgman.

Go Between Bridge

In 2010 the Brisbane City Council named a new bridge the Go Between Bridge, after a public vote. Obviously any bridge allows you to go between one place and another, but the name is also a tribute to the great Australian band The Go-Betweens who hail from this steamy sub-tropical city.

I just found out about this today, and I am delighted that major civic infrastructure is now being named after alternative cultural icons of my youth. I am hoping to hear soon about the Eurogliders Aerodrome and perhaps the Mental As Anything Secure Health Facility.

Enjoy a little Go-Betweens, won't you?

Mikhail Gorbachev and The Police

I have been listening to some eighties music lately. No - not hair metal or Roxette or Kylie - I mean the good stuff. I took music very seriously from about 1981 onwards. I'm not saying I was hanging out in smoky dancehalls or swapping deep cuts outside allnighter soul clubs - I was watching Countdown in the beanbag with my sisters, at home in Burnie. I was 13. But the stuff that appealed to me was almost never the stuff that was Top Ten. Some pretty far-out acts got a run on Countdown. We also used to watch Sounds Unlimited late on Saturday morning with Donny Sutherland, which was a much safer laid-back show that always seemed to have Richard Clapton on. And I believe it was the first home of Agro the puppet.

My first record was Glass Houses by Billy Joel, but soon after that I was buying Madness, Devo and Midnight Oil. In 1984 I discovered Talking Heads, and ended up owning everything they recorded (and side projects) by the time they broke up. Meanwhile Sally was the family Blondie, Cure and Culture Club fan, while Jacki was obsessed with The Police. At the time I had to pour scorn on all these try-hards, but fairly soon I was playing the girls' records when they weren't around. (Except Culture Club).

Now - the point I am labouring towards is - there is quite a strong current running through a lot of fairly mainstream 1980s music, when you listen to it now. And it's fear. No-one could really write a protest song any more like the very direct stuff of the 1960s, but just about every rock act felt the need to put into words their fear of a nuclear war. Global warming has neatly taken its place in recent times as a shared thing to fret over, but (the Maldives and Palau aside) it doesn't have the edge that a term like Mutually Assured Destruction gave the nuclear panic.

Midnight Oil made it one of their central themes. Frankie Goes To Hollywood had a very catchy dance anthem about it, Two Tribes, complete with a stagey video showing Reagan and Chernenko giving each other bloody noses. (Fun fact - Chernenko was as old as Methuselah when he succeeded to running the USSR, and only lasted five minutes, so I can date Two Tribes quite precisely).

I have just got around to buying a few key tunes (because you can do that now) from the early Police albums. Later, on Synchronicity and Ghost In The Machine the music got all prog-rock and gloomy, and Sting let his conscience-of-the-planet thing go wild. On the first few albums he was still trying to sound Jamaican with his "TCHA!" and his "yo yo yo", and the music was punchy and bright. But (and I had forgotten this) it often deals with apocalyptic imagery. Poppy but doomy.

Devo's Beautiful World was one of many, many music clips that borrowed heavily from archival Civil Defence programs on nuclear fallout, wind tunnel modelling of effects of blasts etc etc. It was a very, very pervasive theme in popular music. I was a keen collector of 7" singles, and I even have an example by Men At Work called It's A Mistake - the sleeve art shows cartoon US and Russkie generals with their thumbs on The Button. I and my fellow CND-badge-wearing earnest young people would all think to ourselves "if only Ronald Reagan and this new bloke Gorbachev would listen to Men At Work, maybe they would see some sense."
 
My kids have asked me lately about the Soviet Union. They are quite interested in history, and they see the name on old maps, and read about in the history of World War II. Now it's gone, and there are about a dozen -stans and the like, plus Russia, in its place. So I have given them a potted description of how that came about, which brought the whole period to mind again.

Having done that, and listened again to the music of the era, my conclusion is - thank you Mikhail Gorbachev. He was next in line after three Soviet leaders in succession expired and were slowly wheeled off to mausoleums. He could see the USSR was on the slide, and needed to make big changes to survive. He introduced market freedoms and freedom of expression in his country, and allowed travel abroad. He ended the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. As eastern Europe started to wriggle free of Communism, he refused to send Soviet troops, which would have been automatic only ten years earlier. That was a huge change.

In his 6 July 1989 speech [...] Gorbachev declared: "The social and political order in some countries changed in the past, and it can change in the future too, but this is entirely a matter for each people to decide. Any interference in the internal affairs, or any attempt to limit the sovereignty of another state, friend, ally, or another, would be inadmissible."

[...] By the end of 1989, revolts had spread from one Eastern European capital to another, ousting the regimes built in Eastern Europe after World War II. With the exception of Romania, the popular upheavals against the pro-Soviet Communist regimes were all peaceful ones. The loosening of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe effectively ended the Cold War, and for this, Gorbachev was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold in 1989 and the Nobel Peace Prize on 15 October 1990. - Wikipedia

Above all (from my point of view in Australia), he went to talks with Ronald Reagan with a positive unilateral approach, proposing nuclear disarmament by 2000.

On 11 October 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan met in Reykjavík, Iceland to discuss reducing intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe. To the immense surprise of both men's advisers, the two agreed in principle to removing INF systems from Europe and to equal global limits of 100 INF missile warheads. They also essentially agreed in principle to eliminate all nuclear weapons in 10 years (by 1996), instead of by the year 2000 as in Gorbachev's original outline. - Wikipedia

 That's pretty huge, no? I almost feel like we should have a Gorby Day where we make an effort to remember what the world felt like before he came along.

Stevie Wonder does Superstition on Sesame Street, 1972 or 1973

Someone else has commented on youTube that they blog this song every Halloween. Not a bad tradition - I might do that myself. This amazing rendition starts slow and builds like crazy. One particular kid is really digging it. The band are great looking - could they have found three whiter white guys?

Michael reinvents music

 

Michael did some interesting genealogy diagrams recently - showing how half each of Elf and I became half of he and Marcus. It was beautiful, although it might not exactly reflect the latest science.

 

In any case - Michael has now been repurposed this diagram to be a kind of music notation. Like so many creative things he thinks up, this has been co-opted into his parallel world of "Noogets" - this is how Nooget music is written down. Apparently all Nooget music "starts with a quadruple note [chord] and finishes with a unaple note".

The sound of the square root of -1

Yesterday Marcus and I went north to Launceston with the school chess team, to compete at the State Finals. Rodney and Avon picked us up at 6am. I had practically no sleep, due to my DTCR sleep disorder - known to the layman as Don't Trust the Clock Radio. At some primitive crocodile-brain level, I have to wake up and check the time about every twenty minutes.

Rodney is a very nice and interesting guy. We listened to music on the way up, and on the way back, he and I subjected the boys to a quiz which turned into a maths lecture from Rodney. After each bit petered out, Avon would actually say "Dad, can you give us another lecture?" By the time we approached Hobart he was expanding on the nature of unreal numbers, such as the square root of -1.

I enjoyed Rodney's taste in CDs on the 3 hour drive. He's into primitive blues and the White Stripes. He actually took his 3 kids and partner Beck to see the Stripes. Which made me wish I was a rock dad, pogo-ing to The Dirty Three as my admiring family look on, thinking "Dad is the coolest".

I am keen to introduce my kids to the music I like. When I was a kid, I could go through my parents' LPs and learn something about music without even listening. By the age of 11 if someone said "Dave Brubeck", I could namecheck at least four albums. On a much less cool level, I was an admirer of the packaging design exhibited by Mum's Nana Mouskouri boxed set. I didn't know much about the music itself, its true. Of course you could fake it thanks to liner notes. Albums then had a whole essay on the back. Especially jazz CDs - without actually putting the record on, you knew that on track 3 "Bones on alto and Red on tenor kick it off in 3/4 with a solid backing from Jackie, who then moves up front with one of his smoking solos. Joe takes over with alternating bars of 7/8 and 4/4 before Bones brings it on home in 3/4, riffing on Tiger Rag and the theme from Huckleberry Hound".

My CDs are not hidden away, but they are still up out of easy kid reach, where they were moved when Marcus was about one. I have put some music on his iPod, and he has favourites, but he tends to use it more to play games than listen. In any case, having someone select an "appropriate" playlist for you is a far cry from just being let loose in a lifetime's collection of vinyl. Marcus may have heard Slop by Charles Mingus, but he hasn't pored over his album sleeves, seen his funny little beard or wondered at his penchant for crazy titles.

I think Rodney is doing a much better job than I in communicating his love of music to his kids. The music I like has a similar status in our house to that which Dad's pipe smoking had in when I was little - it's a weird, hard to explain and somewhat secretive indulgence. Just now Elf came upstairs and caught the last minute of Leave Them All Behind by Ride. To my ears, those sixty seconds are a triumphant culmination of one of the great thumping noise-fests of the longhair shoe-gazing Brit guitar era, circa 1995. Maybe the sound of the square root of -1. Whereas Elf thought there was something horribly wrong with one of our appliances somewhere.

That's Super-Duper

Here is a list of various good things, to balance out my somewhat whingey list from the other day.
1.    Marcus is officially Australia's 12th ranked under 8 chess player. He is practically unbeatable at school now.
2.    Today I bought the Assassination Vacation audiobook with my iTunes voucher from my birthday in March (thanks Sal and Matt). It is John Wilkes Booth-tastic.
3.    In related news, the World Book encyclopedia (1979 edition) calls confederate general Stonewall Jackson "the bible-quoting lemon-sucking infantry genius". How much work do I need to do before I die, to earn a description like that? Lots.
4.    I like the quiet moment when you drive under a bridge in a rainstorm. A hiatus.
5.    There She Goes by The Las - perfect pop song from 1988
6.    The Devil With the Green Eyes by Matthew Sweet - perfect pop song from 1993
(I have tried and failed to embed little samples of these tracks - I'll try again when I am not doing it over dial-up).
7.    Hattie is a very predictable miaow-er. If she hasn't seen you for a while, you get a miaow. Pat her on the head - another miaow. Pat her again - another miaow. This goes on for about another 4-6 pats, with diminishing returns. Lately I have been taking advantage of her predictability, and dueting with her on Downtown by Petula Clark.

8.    I like the fact that "cyborg" sounds a lot like "sideboard". I can see a day when I have a long, low cyborg, maybe with beautiful walnut veneer. When someone asks 'where are the salad servers?' I will say "top drawer in the cyborg there" - and they probably won't notice a thing until the cyborg's drawer opens automatically, and it maybe does a bit of a dance.

Pizzicato abuse

Desperate Housewives - have you seen it? Elf watches it occasionally and I love to hate it. Even being in the same room with it, I find it offensive. Since our living area is just one big room, I sometimes resort to headphones to get away from it.

The synopsis is: affluent neighbourhood full of people stealing each other's money, adulterising and plotting to murder each other. Pretty standard really, pretty Melrose Place. Except - every time someone is up to no good, looking in someone else's rubbish bin or slipping off their wedding ring on their way into a bar, there is a little 8 bar vamp of pizzicato strings. Someone has asked themselves "what is the sneakiest music there is?" and that's what they came up with.

I put myself in the shoes of the session violinists. Granted, some of them may believe that the end justifies the means. Some of them may be proud of having slept their way to the top in the incidental strings world. Some of them may believe everything is relative, you've got to look out for number one, and there's no free lunch.

But what about that one straight-edge, clean living, upright citizen, who turns up at the office with his viola every day, plays the sheet music he is handed, with care, energy and brio - perhaps he's a pizzicato specialist, flown in to LA from the East Coast for a big job lot of pizzicato work. Calls his wife and kids every day while he's away. Dedicated. Caring. A moral beacon in this increasingly Paris Hiltonised world.

How is he going to feel when he sits down to watch Housewives and realises that his dedicated plucking is the soundtrack to ugly suburban depravity?

Fun Fact: In Vietnam the show is just called Những bà nội trợ kiểu Mỹ - American Housewives.

Birthday part B - bad coffee, Pixies, racism.

My last birthday duty was a quick trip to Melbourne on Saturday to see the Pixies play. I say duty as I'd been shouted a ticket by Alex, and although I wanted to see them it wasn't exactly my idea. Left to myself I would have had a quiet, low-cost Saturday night at home in Hobart, probably reading an encyclopedia and eating toast. I flew over still feeling like I'd rather be spending the time in beige seclusion.

Airport coffee. I know there are few original observations left to be made, but why are there so many cafes and the coffee is all bad? Is there a bylaw that the price of coffee goes up and the temperature down when you drive onto Federal property? It really seems like although airports are still 70% about moving people and stuff around the country, they are about 30% about bad coffee.

Alex picked me up. I whined about the coffee, and he humoured me. When we got to his place in Windsor, and walked in through its hip arid-zone backyard, I was amazed to see a toddler fence. Etta is walking! Etta is 19 months old now and just unbelievably supercute. She is very friendly and will just walk up and ask for a cuddle. Pretty winning. Suparna is a full-time mum now, and its very hard work. She has tried to blend traditional Indian and western child-raising techniques, and to my eyes it looks like Etta is a bit spoilt. She won't sit in a high chair and isn't happy in a stroller, so she eats on someone's lap, and is carried around the streets a lot, although now she can walk when it's safe to.

Michael Lean dropped in with a few beers and we had a very nice low-key catch-up. He also just walks up and asks for cuddles sometimes but it never does him any good. He is exercising a great deal and looking sleek, like an Eastern Suburbs seal. Alex is getting fit too, and he and Michael talked a lot about BMIs while we ate fatless snacks.

Then Alex and I caught a train to the city to stuff ourselves with cheap Chinese dumplings before the gig. The place we were headed to had a line out the door, so we found somewhere else, and it was excellent. I love having a bunch of condiments and being able to add hot chili, sweet chili or soy sauce and whatever else as the spirit moves me. On the wall of the laneway outside the dumpling place was an old sign saying COMMIT NO NUISANCE.

At the nearest pub to the gig we stopped to whet the whistle. Already there were signs this was going to be the biggest gathering of Indie-Rock Dads since Indie-Rock Dadfest 2000. Many grey-haired and/or balding men in casual shirts, all of them wondering what you are supposed to wear to a rock gig once you turn 40, nervously drinking expensive micro-brews. The Pixies, for anyone unfamiliar with their work, put out 3 magnificent albums of surf-punk country-thrash black-humorous sci-fi guitar rock, in 1988-89-90, then stuttered and broke up. They reformed 3 years ago and toured to wide acclaim. On this tour they had planned one gig in Melbourne, but after it sold out in 4 minutes they added another, and another, until they had 4 solid sold out nights in a row, at creaky old Festival Hall.

Our tickets said to enter through Door 14. We found it after a while - in fact the sign said it was Door 14 and 17. We were patted down - a big Maori fella asked, his nose about touching mine, "How you going, alright?" I had never been inside here before - in fact, I had never been to any indoor gig this big before. We were way off to one side and about 5 rows from the back, but we could see OK.

I had not really done any homework on this, but it turns out this is the Doolittle tour, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that album. And after starting with a few B sides, they cranked into track 1 and worked their way through to track 15, in order. It was brilliant - I just enjoyed it so much. After a lot of stamping and yelling they came back on for a short encore, then went off again waving.


They were selling discs of the gig afterwards, so at this point we went down near to the stage and Alex paid, and was handed a coupon. There was still heaps of yelling and stamping but we were pretty sure it was all over. Then suddenly they were back, and started in on "Bone Machine", from my favourite album Surfer Rosa. To our amazement they just kept going through that album, skipping forwards and back, and throwing in just one song from the last album Trompe le Monde.

They really played the house down, and there was no sense at all that these were old guys saving something up for another show tomorrow night and the night after that as well. This is not a review exactly, but more an account of how my birthday got back on the rails. I felt totally magnificent afterwards and so happy to have been there.

Afterwards we waited in a queue for ages to pick up the CD, the walked back into town, with a lively little sprint at the end to get onto the train back to Windsor. On the same night in the same part of town the national league soccer grand final had been played. A sprinkling of Melbourne Victory fans walked past us in the opposite direction. Judging by their faces I said to Alex "Melbourne lost on penalties" - turned out I was right.

The next day not much happened! Alex, Suparna, Etta and I went down to St Kilda pier and got blown sideways. It had been cloyingly hot and humid the day before so I was pretty pleased to get big lungfuls of cold sea air. There is now a swan viewing platform there, and we viewed two swans who were sleeping standing up. They had uncomfortable-looking tags around their necks. These two were S45 and S76. Alex and I walked along swinging Etta and counting "Ek, Do, TIN!" We are both very proud of our small amount of Hindi.

There has been a lot in the news about anti-Indian violence in Australia in the last 12 months. I have always planned to ask Suparna about it, so I did. I wanted to know if the incidence was growing quickly because the Indian migrant population was growing quickly, in other words the percentage of Indians being bashed/stabbed was actually not changing. She thought more that the growing population was scaring xenophobic people with a propensity to violence, and they were lashing out more as a reaction to seeing more Indian faces. It's unfortunate that the State government, who are financially benefiting from the Indian student boom, are not in a position to give an unbiased answer to the question "is this racist violence?". This is possibly getting in the way of successfully dealing with the problem. While we were discussing all this Etta said very clearly "racism". Sigh.

Alex also told me about their honeymoon in Malaysia, which I hadn't heard about. As Suparna is brown and he is white, they were abused here and there by Muslim men, who assumed he had picked her up. Mostly people were very kind to them, particularly when they saw the henna wedding patterns on their hands.

Alex dropped me at the airport yesterday afternoon and I flew home down the back of a very bumpy plane, dozing between two people who I both knew very slightly. That's just what you get flying in and out of Hobart. It's great to be home.

This Too Shall Pass by OK Go

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

I had never even considered buying a DVD of any band's clips, but last birthday I asked for and recieved Oh No by OK Go. They are visually clever, really likeable guys, and that's before even discussing if the music is any good. This one is from their new album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky.

Orchestra

Elf took the boys and I to the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra on Thursday evening. They have a series of family concerts, where each adult ticket gets two kids in free. I haven't been to a classical concert since I was at school in Burnie, when the TSO toured. [I lie - I did once go to a TSO recording session where you got in free but had to sit on your hands the whole time]. One day I will go to a normal concert like a normal person, rather than a special "outreach" concert where the programme is specially designed to convert newbies to the cause.

It was raining and parking was tricky, so while Elf parked the car I took the boys in to get tickets. I had just paid for them with plastic when Elf jogged through the crowd, and gasped, Pheiddipides style, "I've got a free ticket - only buy one." She missed it by that much. Tickets for two adults were $76 - about twice what I was expecting. I guess that's standard for a one-hour classical concert?

The concert was programmed on the theme of "fire", so there was a bit of Stravinsky's Firebird, some Handel composed for the royal fireworks, and a couple of contemporary pieces by Australian composers. I really enjoyed the music, and watching 46 dedicated professionals working so tightly together is pretty fascinating. At times there was a beautiful seamless drone, and I could not put my finger on where it was coming from - maybe strings and oboe together.

The musicians tend to slenderness. I imagine them picking listlessly at their food in short breaks from practising, mind elsewhere, going over and over that tricky run of demisemiquavers in that requiem by Bach, or something. I couldn't picture any of them with a burger. All dressed in black, but in getups of their own choosing, ranging from very formal to fairly laid back.

The mood onstage though was uniformly intense. The conductor was a youngish chap called Matthew Wood. The power relationship and etiquette is quite interesting - he obviously runs the show, comes out last, orchestra stands for him and waits to be invited to sit etc. He, however is a visitor, and does a lot of showy shaking hands with the principal violinist, who is the captain of the home team so to speak. He left his podium to shake her hand three or four times.

At the conclusion there was a lot of bowing and responding to bows (a lot like an Easter service we went to at the very "high" Anglican church where we were married), more handshakes, then flowers were brought out to the conductor. He brandished them, bowed some more, then presented them to the principal violinist. Handshakes and a kiss. More bowing. All of this after a one hour performance.

The presenter of the concert, that Christopher Lawrence off of the radio, had asked the audience to go wild at the end, cheer and stamp a bit to get an encore. He came out waving his hands wildly to say "come on, give it up, I want some wolf whistles". This was predicated on the idea that playing an extra piece is a reward for the audience. Although I enjoyed it very much, and all the kids in my earshot did also, a better reward would possibly have been to let us go 5 minutes earlier.

Levi Stubbs Tears by Billy Bragg.

You can look at my nose and say "Billy Bragg,what is the answer to all the world's problems". Now, it's impossible to have one song that answers all the problems of all the world - except this next song I'm going to play for you now...which answers every single problem in your life whatever that problem may be. It may be that someone here's building a nuclear power station at the end of your road or it may be that when you get up in the morning and go for a piss it hurts. Whatever your problem is, this is the answer to it. All you have to do, all you have to do boys and girls is go home, put a kettle on, make yourself a nice cup of tea, sit down, put on a record by The Four Tops - everything is going to be alright.

Billy Bragg, Malmo, Sweden

10th October 1986.

Music Channel

I have just started a tumblr page, just for music videos. The videos don't even have to be all that great, its really about the music. Please pop across to Lost Cassettes and tell me what you think.

The Right Instrument for Your Child by Atarah Ben-Tovim and Douglas Boyd

This is a terrific book. It is full of common sense, which often seems to be me to be a bit lacking in the field of music. Sample quote:

If you feel, after the Readiness Test, that your child is not quite ready to to start formal lessons, it is always better to wait. But this waiting period does not have to be an empty one, for there is a suitable interim activity between playing at music and starting to learn an instrument properly. You can teach your child basic recorder technique.

Before you say "Who, me? But I can't..." the answer is that you can. If children of six or eight are capable of learning to play simple tunes on the recorder, it stands to reason that any adult can teach him- or herself, in order to teach the child.

They authors say that for each child there are three kinds of suitability that have to be considered. Are they physically suited to the instrument? Are they mentally suited to the instrument? Are they emotionally suited to the instrument? The advice is blunt and opinionated. I love the idea that there are trombone people and violin people, and they are very different. Here are some more excellent quotes:

The keywork on a modern flute may look complicated, but the golden rule with instruments is: the more complicated they are as machines, the easier they are to play.

Clarinet children tend to have different hobbies or interests and flit from one to another. They are bright and alert, whereas a flute child may seem dreamy and forgetful.

If your child is vaguely thinking of taking up the oboe, or the school is trying to persuade her to take it up and play in the orchestra, there is only one word of advice: Don't!

Oboists tend not to mix well but have one or two close friends.

Many slightly overweight children who do not have a lot of spare energy are very happy on the tuba.

Drummers are often thin, wiry. They often have a huge appetite but never seem to put on weight. They often have more stamina than larger, apparently stronger children.

More people have been musically crippled by the piano than by all the other instruments put together.

The required rapid eye movements and changes of focus [while playing the piano] demand quite good eyesight. This requirement is rarely borne in mind.

I think at this stage Michael is looking at an inca nose-flute and Marcus the tenor triangle.

Spinning some vinyl rec'rd albums

It's the eighties (and early nineties) all over again, every evening, at my house. Sally came by for the afternoon on Sunday, and has lent me a little rec'rd player. I have hauled the crate of records out from under the stairs and I am working my way through them.

There is my collection of Australia debut records by Mental as Anything, INXS, Midnight Oil, The Church, and, er, Peter Westheimer.

Who remembers The Gun Club? Adam and the Ants? Bughouse? Echo and the Bunnymen? It all came after punk but before grunge. There is a solid representation of the careers of Devo, Madness and Talking Heads (as previously discussed). But also Curved Air, a violin-led prog rock band. The Style Council! The Young Fresh Fellows! (All I can remember about them is that they are mentioned in a They Might Be Giants Song). Severed Heads! Celibate Rifles! Dead Kennedys! All on shiny black vinyl, with glorious 1 foot square cardboard sleeves!

I was explaining the technology to the boys, and it all sounded so far fetched. "There is this spiral groove, and it goes around and around, its just one groove, and the record spins 100 times for every three minute song, so that's, er, 500 spins for the average side of a pop record, all in the one groove, then you turn it over. If you were really kitted out with gear, you might be able to copy it onto a cassette and play it in the car." They were already glazed over.

Sorry, Talking Heads

When I was about 16, the New York band Talking Heads were everything to me. My mate Joe and I were staying on his uncle's farm at St. Marys. We caught a lift into Launceston to go to the Basin Concert (Mental As Anything headlining) and while we were in town, we raided Wills Record Bar. They had a lot of far-out stuff that you never saw in Burnie. I came away with Remain In Light and Joe snared Fear of Music. After the concert we hitched back to St Mary's. That night we commandeered the stereogram and introduced the Fingal Valley to New York art school new wave music.

Through the rest of the vinyl era I steadily gathered all of their albums, and the various wierd side projects of David Byrne and occasionally the others. I played them on my Radiola portable record player, so small that the LP hung over the side and obscured most of the controls. Choose the volume you want before you put the record on.

Then CDs came to town. This was my first experience of technological redundancy. CDs were so easy. They didn't need to be turned over. If you fell asleep listening to one you didn't wake up to "..thrrrp.....thrrrp.....thrrrp....."

Of course I didn't buy CDs of things I already had on vinyl. After a while my record player disappeared the way things do when you move. No great loss, didn't play the records much anymore anyway. Etc etc. I feel so guilty recounting this now. I was asleep at the wheel!

So - only now do I realise I have lost a good ten or twelve years of Talking Heads listening opportunities. I've got one CD and a few mp3s that crop up occasionally, and that has been enough to dull my senses to the reality that I have let a really great band effectively slip out of my life. And particularly this one album, Remain in Light.

We visited Matt and Mem and Edie and Callie yesterday, and in talking music with Matt I blurted out my feelings on the matter. He sent me home with all his Heads CDs. Today I felt quite emotional as I listened to this great, great album again for the first time since about 1996.

David Byrne actually played in Melbourne a couple of weeks back, and my friend Alex met him. Alex was at the right hip 3rd floor warehouse bar when DB stepped out of the lift right in front of him. (I'm not jealous because I met Don Lane at Mascot airport in 1979.) I think hearing about this might have been what woke me up from my dreadful slumber.

So - sorry about that Talking Heads. I'm back on board again now.