Tony's Musical Missives

Beastie Boys Concert Flick Filmed By 50 Fans With Digital Cameras

2005-11-05T11:20:00.000-08:00

Beastie Boys Concert Flick Filmed By 50 Fans With Digital Cameras

For almost 20 years, the Beastie Boys have been experimenting with ways to fuse a do-it-yourself, punk-rock attitude with hip-hop's arena-sized spirit. Now, in the age of the all-purpose hand-held gadget, leave it to a concertgoer and his cell phone to inspire a document of the group in perhaps its ideal element: live, in New York, filmed by fans from their seats.

"It just seems like so many concert videos and films I see are done in this one style, with the flying boom that kind of swings out over the crowd," said Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA — and also a.k.a. Nathaniel Hornblower, the name under which he's directed many of the Beasties' videos and their upcoming concert film, "Awesome: I F---in' Shot That."

"I was looking around on our Web site one time when we were on tour," he continued, "and someone had filmed something on his phone. It looked really cool, just a little clip of the band running on stage at the beginning of the show, maybe 20 seconds long. There was something about the hand-held thing and the rough edge of the way the stuff looked, and I thought it might be interesting to document the show like that, by giving lo-res cameras to the audience."

And so they did. At a sold-out show at New York's Madison Square Garden in October of last year, the Beastie Boys handed 50 Hi-8 video-cameras to fans all over the famed arena — and for one evening, those fans became concert cinematographers.

"It was pretty short notice," Yauch revealed. "It really came down to just few days before the show. We thought we really should do it at the Garden, and we posted on our site's message boards asking people who had tickets if they'd be interested in filming. A bunch of people responded, and we asked them for their seat numbers. We looked at a seating chart and found people who were spread out pretty evenly around the arena — on the floor, in the nosebleed [seats] and whatnot. They had a specific place where they met up before the concert, the cameras were handed out — they left their drivers licenses as collateral — and they shot the show and gave the cameras back. One of the basic guidelines was to shoot the whole time, not to stop the camera, so they'd film throughout, right through to the very end."

Yauch — whose nom de cinema comes from his middle name, Nathaniel, and the fact that he likes the weird way that "Hornblower" sounds — said that the editing and mixing of the film is basically finished, and moviegoers can expect to see it released theatrically sometime in the "late winter, maybe early spring" of 2006.

"THINKFilm is helping us out with all that stuff," he said of the distribution firm that recently secured worldwide rights to the movie.

More pertinently, what does a band do with 50 Hi-8 cameras once they've served their purpose?

"I think we returned them to the store the next day," Yauch said, laughing. "Naughty, naughty."

The Beastie Boys' singles collection, Solid Gold Hits, drops November 8 (see "Beastie Boys Join Hilary, ODB's Ranks With Greatest-Hits LP"); the live "Brass Monkey" video — filmed at the Garden show — is included on the expanded CD/DVD release.

from vh1.com

Baiting the hook

2005-11-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

November 4, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/11/03/1130823332215.html

Spiderbait are back with the help of Black Betty.
Photo: Simon Schluter

Spiderbait has made a career out of songs about everyday things. Patrick Donovan talks to the trio about their Greatest Hits album.

"I went down to the Circle K/Saw Kieran on the way/ bought myself a sausage roll/ cost too much and it was cold" - Circle K, Spiderbait

These are the words to one of Spiderbait's first songs. You could understand if record companies didn't go troppo over their hit-making potential back then. Two of their next two songs Footy (chorus: "I like footy, I like footy, I like footy and kick that footy") and Scenester ("hey look at me I'm a scenester"), wouldn't have started a bidding war.

But those three songs have been included on the Greatest Hits CD of one of Australia's most popular bands, Spiderbait. And the lyrics to those songs go some way to explaining their endearing endurance.

Their songs are about normal people doing normal things - going to the footy, eating sausage rolls. They even covered a song by underrated Goodies music man Bill Oddie (Run).

Their sound is fun, loud and simple, with all of the retro crash-bang of a bowling alley (hence EG's photo shoot at Kingpin). They are armed with two contrasting singers and consistently play well live.

Whitt's heavily distorted fuzz guitar and power metal chords, Janet's funky basslines and teenage girl anthems, and Kram's irreverent mellifluous vocals became the soundtrack for the 1990s Australian teenager.

The band formed in the early 1990s when Kram, Whitt and Janet still lived in Finley, southern NSW. One day, Whitt raced home from school with a truly original punk-metal-country-fusion song called Old Man Sam.

"That tune was just kicking around my boarding house," says Whitt. "It was just a joke, an old folk song that no one knew the origins of. But we grew up with a lot of country music in Finley, on the radio or in people's backyards."

"It's funny, we've played that song all over the world, and wherever we play it, people who have never heard it before are amazed," says Kram. "They say, 'How do you make that work?' It's so out there. It's ridiculous but impressive at the same time."

It was frustrating for young music lovers growing up in the country with no Triple J, but their isolation helped them forge a unique sound.

"The songs in the early days were all over the shop," adds Kram, "because that's the way that we got into music. You had to go to Shepparton to buy CDs, and the radio was a little bit of country, lots of Top 40. It was a major breakthrough to be able to tune into ABC radio so we could tape the songs played on Countdown."

It came as a huge shock when they discovered Melbourne's punk scene in the early 1990s.

"We didn't know who the Saints or the Stooges even were," says Kram. "I remember when I first came to Melbourne, driving past the Tote and seeing the word 'God' painted on the wall and I thought it was a religious gathering ... Our naivete has helped us be more of a unique group, and in the long run it's helped set us apart from everyone else."

The band were so dedicated in the early days that from the tram stop outside their flat on the corner of Burke and Whitehorse roads in Camberwell, they would direct the traffic, load their gear and ride to Chapel Street for rehearsal.

"We didn't think it was unusual at the time, we just thought that's how you got around," says Janet.

"We never expected to make an album, let alone a single," says Kram, who got the highest year 12 score in the state for drumming and singing but eventually decided against music school.

"One of the main reasons I f---ed up at music school was that I wanted to do this. I was playing with all of these amazing musicians at Melbourne Uni but I was being told what to play and what to do. When I jammed with my band, there was something special about it. It wasn't as good musically but it was an indefinable special magic. For me, that is what rock'n'roll is all about - finding that thing that you are and no one else is. That search for individuality is so important, and I think we stumbled on it. For good bands there has to be friendship and something unique about the chemistry."

Spiderbait's fresh, dynamic sound, inspired by local bands the Cosmic Psychos, the Hard-ons and Tumbleweed, got them a deal with Au Go Go Records. They were part of Melbourne's alternative band scene when it was swallowed by the mainstream in the early 1990s. What was that transition like?

"It was great because we were finally offered big money," says Kram. "Anyone from any band would like to be able to make a living out of it, without having to change the way we played music or the way we were. We had been around for years and we felt like we earnt it."

"We were in a pretty unique position in that the labels came sniffing because there were people queueing up to get into our shows," says Janet. "It was a curious time, because there was a frenzy of signings, and people didn't really know what the future held."

They wrote about being the centre of a bidding war in their national hit Buy Me a Pony, which became the first Australian song to top Triple J's Hottest 100 in 1996.

"That song is saying, 'This is what they're going to throw at you'," says Kram. "It's up to you to get what you can out of it by being smart."

"It's funny reading those stories about people from Bardot or Australian Idol complaining, 'I can't believe they exploited me'," says Janet. "What do you think the whole point of the exercise was?"

Over 10 years the band evolved from loading their own gear on the tram to becoming one of Universal's biggest local bands, selling close to a million albums.

But Kram says that the band always maintained control of their operation. "The DIY aspect to our band is crucial. We've made 75 per cent of our own film clips, done all of our own artwork, wrote all of our own songs, we only have a crew of two, and we've had the same manager for 15 years. And everything (royalties etc) is split down the middle - it's not for every band, but that's why we're still here today."

The band had some success in the US, with Shazam! being featured on an episode of Sex and the City and on the trailer for the film Ice Age, and the cover of Leadbelly's Black Betty turning up on Miss Congeniality, Dukes of Hazzard, Without a Paddle and Ghost Rider. But the band weren't prepared to put in the hard yards to crack the US market.

"We're not the type of band that could tour for more than a month at a time. We get freaked out," says Kram. "So you trade in a short-term loss for a long-term gain, and we've managed to get a lot of success from strange quarters."

The best-of includes only four songs from the past four years (including new single On My Way and Black Betty), which suggests they reached their creative peak a few years back. Without the phenomenal success of their cover of Black Betty, the compilation may have been their record company's way of getting a few sales out of the band before offloading them. Kram agrees: "Our previous album, Wally Funk, hadn't done that well, and this was the last album on the label. If this album hadn't worked, we may have disappeared, so we really needed something to kickstart it."

"There was actually resistance from our label to release it," says Janet. "But we said, 'No way'."

Spiderbait's second coming has been an inspiration to other established Australian bands.

"A lot of bands have been so happy for us that it has done so well, because we've proved that it's not over for you. You can't be negative," says Kram.

"It's a really good time to be an Australian rock band. For us to be around so long is great, but to still be one of the top bands in the country is even better, because we feel like we are still relevant."

Spiderbait's Greatest Hits is out now through Universal. They play the Forum tomorrow with Neon and the Spazzys.

Misadventures in vinyl

2005-11-04T00:46:00.000-08:00

Misadventures in vinyl

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/misadventures-in-vinyl/2005/11/03/1130823332273.html

By Clem Bastow
Dusk to dawn
November 4, 2005

Far from a world of glamour, a DJ's life can be filled with punter pain, especially when indie fans are involved.

THE life of a rock DJ swirls in a deep pool of misconceptions and hearsay. If you believed the hype, you'd think it was a heady world of snorting powdered bosoms off virgins made of cocaine (though I may have something mixed up here). But just a few annoying punters can quickly turn this world of supposed glamour into a world of pain.

Any DJ, regardless of their genre, will tell you that pesky requests are the name - and the bane - of the game. But there's something about rock/indie nights that seem to suck the whingers out of their holes like salt sucks the life from slugs. In my time spinning discs, I've found that metal and punk gigs bring the nicest fans (but more cigarette smoke), and although indie/pop gigs have cleaner air, fans are among the most bothersome.

At one indie gig, a dude insisted on requesting Black Flag, Sum 41 and, confusingly, Mylo, before announcing that it was "obvious" that I was a) a man and b) didn't know what I was doing. One wolfish local drummer made a point of whining, "Like, when are you going to play some rock'n'roll?" during a Kanye West-sponsored break from a four-hour set of AC/DC, Easybeats, Aerosmith, the Stones, the Nazz and KISS. Another blunt-fringed bird yelled, "Why aren't you playing any

You Am I?" midway through said band's Rumble.

Others are fond of leaving their drinks on the ledge above my record cases and, more worryingly, the large plugs powering the decks, lights and - most terrifying of all - the mirrorball. I now carry a bottle of eye drops and threaten to give splash-happy punters a cocktail to discuss with their drycleaners if they don't keep their drinks off my 12-inch remix of Mel & Kim's Respectable.

Dare to play an eclectic set and you're sure to cause ripples among those who like their dance tracks compartmentalised. Following Haitian disco group Tabou Combo's frenetic Voye Monte with Motorhead's Ace Of Spades always ruffles a few feathers among the indie bores.

Most modern dance-goers are conditioned to a free-ranging playlist, but there are some songs that - impressively - retain their power to bother people.

The Sex Pistols' Anarchy In the UK still sends most people to their seats in worried contemplation, as does Public Enemy's Fight The Power, and Benny Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing frightens all but the most gallant pop-lockers (except, memorably, Tim Rogers, who danced a jig behind the bar while waving his fedora around).

Other tracks bring unexpected fans out of the woodwork: the notoriously "hard" Blag Dahlia and the Fresh Prince of Darkness of the Dwarves leapt up and down like schoolgirls when Keith Richards' Take It So Hard was spun. And one systems analyst-ish young man proposed marriage following Lee Dorsey's Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further.

See, it's not all doom and gloom: some punters and some requests, can make your night.

One glam lass, apparently a stripper by trade, requested "her song" so she could practise her moves on the dance floor. The track in question? Thomas Dolby's She Blinded Me With Science.

Nick the writer

2005-10-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

October 7, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/10/06/1128562927418.html

Nick Cave with director John Hillcoat.

Nick Cave has successfully channeled his creative energies onto the big screen - and it was easy, he tells Jim Schembri.

IT TOOK an intense three weeks for Nick Cave to write the screenplay for The Proposition - and there was a very pressing reason for that. "It took me one week to work out how to use the f---ing computer."

Who says Nick Cave can't crack a joke? Revelation One.

Actually, his speed at the PC was motivated by something even more prosaic.

"I didn't think the film would ever get made. Everyone knows there's billions of these f---ing scripts out there and, like, 1 per cent ever gets made, so I was determined not to waste half a year on it. 'All right, there's the script, now onto what I'm put on Earth to do!'"

Nick Cave was put on Earth to make music. At 48, he is best known as the narrow, black-clad singer-songwriter who fronted the Birthday Party in the 1980s and, later, the Bad Seeds, which is still a going concern.

Widely adored as the archetypal Goth singer, many of his songs, such as Where the Wild Roses Grow and Do You Love Me?, are regarded as Goth anthems that speak of Cave's dark, depressing view of a world where there is romance in murder, everything is miserable and the girl often ends up dead.

He hates all that. Revelation Two. Yes, he had a 1996 album called Murder Ballads - he even got Kylie Minogue on board for Roses - but he has done lots of non-Goth stuff as well. As for describing The Proposition as a Gothic western ...

"Well," he says, letting out an exasperated sigh, "it would be unfortunate because of the implications of that particular word - the G-word - which I've spent the last 25 years trying to avoid and live down. To start it all up again would be a pity."

And a tad unfair. The Proposition is certainly brutal, filled as it is with blood, violence, death and flies. But it also has tenderness, love, compassion and, ultimately, a morally positive outlook.

In the sun-scorched outback of 1880s Australia, policeman Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) cuts a deal with outlaw Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce). Stanley will spare the life of his mentally challenged younger brother Mikey (Richard Wilson) if he tracks down and kills his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), who was responsible for killing an entire family.

The film's themes of violence, love, moral conflict and redemption are, Cave contends, a more rounded reflection of his artistic endeavours than the dank "Goth" tag would suggest.

deed, hearing Nick Cave speak as a screenwriter shows a side of him that runs so counter to the Nick Cave stereotype you have to remind yourself that he did, in fact, once write a song called Jack the Ripper. For instance, his remarks about Stanley and his wife Martha (Emily Watson) contain a note of genuine affection.

"The film is a heart with many chambers, and one of the main chambers to me is the relationship between Martha and Stanley," he says, drawing on a roll-your-own.

"To me that was pretty much the most exciting stuff to write, their relationship. Without that the film would be very, very different. Ray and Emily brought an enormous amount of tenderness and Ray had such vulnerability and pathos. With him, it was exciting to take a character who, at the start of the film, says 'I will civilise this country' and just slowly dismantle him.

"The redemptive nature of their relationship within a very brutal story and the fact that, at the end, he just wants to save his wife and protect her, I find very moving."

Revelation Three is that The Proposition is little short of brilliant. With only one other screenplay under his belt - the mordant 1988 prison drama Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead - Cave was given a heap of research material by director John Hillcoat. From that he fashioned an original story that instinctively took the conventions of the western - outlaws, isolation, taming the landscape - and refracted them through a uniquely Australian prism.

Though the film was a hugely collaborative effort, Hillcoat says most of what is on the screen was on the pages Cave provided. This includes some breakthrough moments for Australian cinema regarding the portrayal of Aborigines.

More concerned with historical accuracy than liberal sentiment, there is no mollifying political correctness in The Proposition. Aboriginal people are seen as servants, outlaws, murderers and collaborators. There is even black-on-black violence.

In one remarkable scene, an armed black police tracker, played by veteran David Gulpilil, stands before a line of Aboriginal prisoners in chains and neck-shackles as he translates their words for Stanley. It's one of many unflinching scenes commenting on the oxidising effect colonialism had on the indigenous population that have never been seen before in an Australian film.

It's news to Cave.

"Is it?" he says. "For some strange reason it almost ended up as a political film, which I feel is pretty unintentional on my behalf, but the film feels like we've done a shit on Australia's doorstep and stood back. Do you understand what I mean?"

Yes, though a slightly more accurate phrase would be that it's a wake-up call about the historical portrayal of Aborigines on film.

"I think the reason for a lot of that is I don't live here and I don't actually know how buried this stuff is," Cave muses.

"For me, I just thought everybody knows this stuff! Everybody knows that there were wholesale massacres of the Aboriginals.

"But I was reading the research and I was thinking, 'F-k! I was never told that they actually resisted, that they fought back, that they tried to protect their families.' There were extraordinarily moving accounts in the literature Johnny gave me about this kind of thing, and about the black-on-black violence."

Cave didn't study any screenwriting texts, but watches thousands of movies "indiscriminately", citing The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) as favourites.

As a narrative songwriter whose songs often feel like short stories set to music, Cave found the process of writing a screenplay immensely liberating.

"It was a very different thing, it's much easier. It's much easier for me to write a film script than it is to write a song because, basically, I've been given the theme on a platter. 'Write an Australian western.' All right, well, you just get a few Aussie characters and they go off and do their shit and everyone dies in the end! (He's making another joke.)

"Writing a song, you're just on your own. The most difficult thing and the most painful thing about writing a song is working out, `What am I going to write about? What's the theme of this song, which doesn't exist in any form?' You're just in a void.

"Whereas a script, you get one idea and you run with it, you live with it and it totally fills your mind. The great thing about a script is that you can just lie in bed at night and think about having these characters do whatever you want. That's really exciting."

The film reflects many of the themes in his music - violence, moral ambiguity, the all-consuming power of love - but he considers it a fuller expression of them.

"In a script you can expand your ideas about things. Song is the opposite. You've got to bury and compress your ideas. I find it, obviously, quite difficult to compress some of my ideas and they do tend to kind of rattle on!"

There are legions of Nick Cave fans around the world - solid, fiercely loyal and all probably wearing black. Will they pore over The Proposition looking for links with his music? "I don't think fans do that," he says. "I think critics do that."

id he bear his fans in mind at all when he wrote the film?

"Uh ... no." He pauses. "I don't bear them in mind any time." He chuckles. "I haven't said that before, but what I mean to say is, I'm not sitting down thinking, 'God, what do they want now?' I'm hoping that people like what I do because they know that I'm not doing that, so the music can develop and go wherever it wants to go."

Though Cave admits he has indulged the image of the aloof musician with an aversion to the media, making The Proposition has pushed him through the looking glass.

"Suddenly, you're drawn into this huge f---ing apparatus of selling the film and promoting it and turning up to festivals and all the sort of stuff that normally I can avoid with music.

"But you can't afford to say 'no' with a film. You've got to get out there and flog the shit out of it because there are so many other films out there and there are vast amounts of money spent on the whole thing. There's a whole different pressure to front up and stand behind it."

He makes his next point emphatically.

"With music you can ... there's a certain..." He pauses, to think.

"In some f---ed up kind of way it's almost beneficial to say, 'F---k off, no, I'm not going to do this interview or not turn up'. Within rock and roll that's kind of accepted and encouraged and applauded. But you can't do that in film, so I'm responsible in some way to be available."

As he nears his half century, Cave feels happy and quips about "avoiding mirrors a little more"

As he heads off for a quick toilet break he adds " this is something else I do more often as I slide into 50."

But he still recoils at the Nick Cave cliche of lore. Suggest, even jokingly, that rather than a western, some of his songs would have had him turning out a noir thriller or a slasher film and he bristles.

"Well, I can't measure how insulting that is," Cave says with a half smile, "because I try to sing and write a breadth of different sorts of songs."

Punching the point, Cave says the 1992 cover version of the classic What a Wonderful World he did with Shane McGowan of the Pogues was a moving rendition from the heart, not a sarcastic snarl from the bile duct.

"I have always loved that song. Shane loved it, we used to get pissed and sing it together as we would walk down the street. We used to trade off verses of it, and then one drunken evening we decided to record it, and there you go. But it's a lovely song."

So, no irony intended?

"No. Heck no. Of course it's a sincere rendition. I don't do insincere renditions of anything. To come back to the film, it is not an ironic film. The entire purpose of this film is to move people. The entire purpose of my songs is to move people, is to benefit people, to make people better, to make people feel better.

"It upsets me when people say that they listen to my music and feel depressed. The thought of that I find really upsetting."

Pro Bono

2005-10-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

October 1, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/29/1127804604972.html

Bono at the GB summit at Gleneagles in July.

U2's lead singer, Bono, turns heads when he is on stage, and off it he turns heads of state onto the problems of the world. James Traub reports.

At 1:45 in the morning one day in July, Bono, the lead singer for U2 and the world's foremost agitator for aid to Africa, was in a van heading back to his hotel in Edinburgh from Murrayfield Stadium; he had just performed in, and expounded at, a concert designed to coincide with the beginning of the summit meeting of the major industrialised nations, held nearby at the Gleneagles resort.

Despite the hour, practically everybody in the van was on a mobile phone. The bodyguard in the front seat was calling the hotel to see if a huge crowd would still be camped outside hoping to catch a glimpse of their world-straddling hero. (Roger that.) Lucy Matthew, the head of the London office of DATA, Bono's policy and advocacy body - the acronym stands for Debt AIDS Trade Africa - was whispering to some contact in the States.

And Bono, who had been conferring 12 hours earlier at Gleneagles with US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, was sharing an anxiety attack with a friend. The leaders of the G8, as the group is known, were going to offer far less in aid and trade to developing nations in Africa than the activists had led their followers to expect. Thousands of bright-eyed young recruits to the cause were going to go home in disgust.

Bono, normally the most courteous of men, shouted an obscenity in Matthew's general direction, though the intended target was himself, or perhaps fate. "What's the point of coming back to talk to Chirac?" he said. "It's going to be too late then."

The French president had reached Gleneagles late, and was probably sullen given that Paris had just lost out to London in its bid for the 2012 Olympics. (This was several hours before the terrorist bombings in London.) Bono was leaving later that day for a concert in Berlin and so would be unable to see Chirac until the day after.

The thought was making him desperate: "Lucy, is it too late to call somebody with Chirac?" Matthew gently pointed out that it was, after all, the middle of the night for most people. Bono digested this unwelcome news and then said: "Look, let's call them tomorrow morning and say I'd be happy to meet with him any time he wants."

Bono did not, in fact, talk to the French president until the third and final day of the conference. But by then his despair had lifted. The summit meeting's final communique offered significant pledges on aid and debt relief for Africa, as well as new proposals on education and malaria eradication.

Bono's embrace of the package was treated with a solemnity worthy of a Security Council resolution. When I saw him the day after the summit ended, over tea in the courtyard of the Hotel Plaza Athenee in Paris, he said: "I feel like I've got a right to punch the air."

And so he did. Bono had moved the debate on Africa, as five years ago he moved the debate on debt cancellation. Later he was trying to move the debate set to take place at the United Nations summit meeting, which he said he hoped would consolidate the gains made at Gleneagles, or at least not erode them.

He's a strange sort of entity, this euphoric rock star with the chin stubble and the tinted glasses - a new and heretofore undescribed planet in an emerging galaxy filled with transnational, multinational and subnational bodies.

He's a kind of one-man state who fills his treasury with the global currency of fame. He is also, of course, an emanation of the celebrity culture. But it is Bono's willingness to invest his fame, and to do so with a steady sense of purpose and a tolerance for detail, that has made him the most politically effective figure in the recent history of popular culture.

I first met Bono last January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a gathering that answers almost perfectly to the conspiracy theory of global domination by a corporate-political-cultural elite. A core function of Davos is to mix different kinds of authority, which makes it the site par excellence of the celebrity prince and the one-man state.

Bill Gates was there, as was George Soros - figures whose global currency, of course, is currency, and who deploy their philanthropy strategically, just as states deploy their aid budgets. Angelina Jolie, roving ambassador for the UN's refugee agency, showed up, too. Bill Clinton came, as did Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia professor and unofficial economist to the Third World.

When I went to meet Bono at the bar of his hotel, I saw Richard Gere seated at a table with a gorgeous woman in a little fur jacket and a leather cap. Bono, on the other hand, had removed himself to a quiet back room, where he was keeping company with a plump, middle-aged white guy in a suit and tie.

This was Randall Tobias, head of the Bush administration's AIDS program. The administration had just announced that the program was providing antiretroviral drugs to 155,000 Africans with AIDS. Another kind of activist might have said, "That leaves 25 million more to go." But not Bono: he looked his corn-fed interlocutor in the eye and said: "You should know what an incredible difference your work is going to make in their lives." Tobias looked embarrassed. Bono said various wonderful things about President Bush. Tobias beamed.

The glamour event of the following day, indeed of the whole forum, was a symposium on efforts to end poverty in Africa. The guests were Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Bill Gates and Bono. The heads of state, leading off, candidly acknowledged the obstacles to development - violent conflict, poor governance, corruption, lack of political will in the donor states and so on.

It was all terribly sombre and Davos. Then Bono was asked what he would like to see changed. "The tone of the debate," he shot back. The celebrity prince was wearing a black T-shirt under a black leather jacket, and he appeared to have shaved the stubble off his jutting, bellicose jaw.

"Here we are," he went on, "reasonable men talking about a reasonable situation.

I walk down the street and people say: `I love what you're doing. Love your cause, Bon'. And I don't think 6000 Africans a day dying from AIDS is a cause; it's an emergency. And 3000 children dying every day of malaria isn't a cause; it's an emergency."

The crowd of CFOs and executive directors, silent until then, burst into applause. Bono had put music to the words; that's one of the things the rock-star activist can domain.com.au.

Bono gave Davos its music; but he also operated in prose. His chief goal was to win commitments, or the possibility of commitments, to be redeemed six months later at Gleneagles. A major item on the agenda for Gleneagles would be cancelling $40 billion of debt that the poorest countries owe to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral institutions; and in Davos, Bono met John Taylor, an undersecretary of the US Treasury, to try to move the Bush administration's position on the issue.

He huddled with Gordon Brown, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir presumptive to the prime ministership, to strategise on financial mechanisms. When the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, arrived to deliver a speech on aid to Africa as well as on the German economy, he met beforehand with Gates and afterward with Bono.

As soon as the Schroeder meeting ended, I was summoned to the war room in which Bono and his troops were camped. "Schroeder just agreed to 0.7 by 2015," Bono cried. "It's fantastic!" In 2002, the industrialised states had pledged to increase foreign-aid spending to 0.7 per cent of GNP by 2015, but the German economy was tanking, and Schroeder had been loath to lay out a timetable for increased spending. Now, to Bono, he had done just that. Of course, a sceptic might have noted that since Schroeder was unlikely to be in power in 2006, much less 2015, this was not a pledge he would have to honour, but Bono is not a sceptic.

BONO may be a one-man state, but he is not a one-man band. U2 is a rock phenomenon because the Edge, the lead guitarist, the drummer, Larry Mullen jnr, and Adam Clayton, who plays bass, are very talented musicians who share Bono's gift for conjuring a sense of rapture. But the voice of U2 is Bono's voice, which seems to rise out of a great pool of naked yearning.

It takes the form sometimes of an arena-enveloping shout, sometimes of a keening wail and sometimes of a piercing falsetto. The voice, like the stage presence, is easy to spoof, for as a performer, Bono generally does without the irony that he deploys as a bantering citizen.

Bono, who was born Paul Hewson, had more than enough unhappiness and loss growing up to give a sharp edge to that wail, but not too much to kill his sense of delight. He was reared by a Catholic father and a Protestant mother in Dublin's ragged middle class, a smart boy who was playing in international chess tournaments at 12. But when Bono was 14, his beloved mother suddenly died, leaving him with an older brother and a father who, he has said, "would always pour salt - and vinegar - on to the wound".

He was a very angry teenager, but at 16 he and some of his angry, barely middle-class school chums began noodling around on instruments. By the following year, 1977, they were performing in local clubs. Even then there was something fiercely affirmative in their music. U2 had a bond, a benevolent relationship, with the audience.

The band has been together ever since. Even Paul McGuinness, their manager, has been with them from the beginning. This is not only rare in the rock business, it is just about unheard of. U2 is also one of the very few bands in which all revenue is shared equally; Bono and the Edge could have claimed the songwriting revenue but didn't.

Nor do any of them appear to have succumbed to drugs, alcohol or raging ego. Religion played an important role in the band members' lives, if not always in their music; indeed, the band's survival was threatened only when, early on, Bono, the Edge and Larry Mullen jnr thought of leaving to join a Christian fellowship.

Bono remains religious, and not in the cosmic, New Age sense you expect from rock stars. He describes himself as a "meandering Christian", and his four children attend the Church of Ireland, which is Anglican (and thus splits the difference between his mother and father).

In 1997, Bono was approached by Jamie Drummond, then working with a church-sponsored campaign to cancel the debts that the most impoverished nations owed to the industrialised nations. (This was "bilateral debt", owed by one state to another, as opposed to the "multilateral debt" debated at Gleneagles.)

The movement made real headway in England, but was virtually unknown in the US. Bono agreed to spearhead the American debt-relief effort and began by educating himself on the subject. As a superstar, Bono had the advantage of being able to conduct his education at a very high level. Bobby Shriver, a record producer and member of the Kennedy clan, set up meetings for him with James Wolfensohn, who was the head of the World Bank, and with Paul Volcker, David Rockefeller and others of the financial establishment.

Bono travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to meet Jeffrey Sachs, then at Harvard. But he also asked Sachs to find him an academic who opposed debt cancellation, a very peculiar request for a graduate of the school of Rock Agitprop.

By the summer of 1999, Bono was ready to take on Washington. The Clinton administration was already committed to canceling two-thirds or so of the $6 billion that the poorest African countries owed the US, but Bono wanted 100 per cent cancellation - not only because he thought it was right, but also because you can't sing about two-thirds of something. "It has to feel like history," he says. "Incrementalism leaves the audience in a snooze." Shriver arranged for Bono to meet Gene Sperling, President Clinton's chief economic adviser, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief of staff to Lawrence Summers, who had just been named Secretary of the Treasury.

Summers himself was not about to waste precious time meeting a rock star. He did agree, however, to "drop by" while Bono spoke to Sperling. Bono laid out his argument. "He was deeply versed in the substance," Sandberg recalls. "He understood capital markets, debt instruments, who the decision makers were."

SUMMERS tried to give Bono the polite brushoff. "These are complicated issues," Summers told him. "I'll have to take it up with the G7 finance ministers." And now this earnest, impassioned rock star with the accent of a race track tout issued a call to destiny. "You know what," he told Summers, "I've been all over the world, and I've talked to all the major players, and everyone said, `If you get Larry Summers, you can get this done'." It was, Sandberg says, "a really important moment. I think we were all inspired and motivated."

It wasn't Bono's belief in the issue that was so effective; it was his belief in others. One Sunday morning that autumn, Bono called to ask Sperling if he could come to his office in the West Wing. There he put his hand on top of a giant stack of papers Sperling was working through and said: "I bet that most of the things in this pile feel more urgent than debt relief. But I want you to think of one thing: Ten years from now, is there anything you'll feel more proud of than getting debt relief for the poorest countries?"

When Bono left, Sperling called a Treasury official and said that he wanted to insert something on debt relief into a speech Clinton was about to give at the World Bank. He and Summers got a few minutes in the presidential limo. Clinton instantly agreed to call for 100 per cent cancellation of the debts owed to the US by 33 impoverished countries.

But it wasn't enough just to pierce the hearts of guilty ex-liberals, for there was still the Republican-controlled Congress to attend to. In late 1999, Bono arranged to meet John Kasich, a wild-man rock-fan conservative from Ohio who was chairman of the House of Representatives budget committee.

Kasich might not have been the most obvious candidate for the job; one of his obsessions was getting rid of foreign aid, most of which he considered, he says, "a joke". But Kasich says he was impressed by the force of Bono's argument. The congressman was also a Christian, and Bono spoke of biblical injunctions to succor the poor and downtrodden. Kasich enlisted. And this became a pattern: Bono was able to dislodge conservatives from their isolationist or free-market reflexes by reaching them as Christians.

During this period, Bono flew to Washington eight times, meeting not only legislators but also their aides - even though U2 was then in the last stages of recording a new album. In late October 2000, Congress appropriated the additional $435 million needed for 100 per cent debt relief.

Why Africa? Why not, say, global warming? Part of the answer is happenstance: Africa is what Bono got swept up into. But Africa, or so Bono feels, needs what only a certain kind of world figure can give - a call to conscience, an appeal to the imagination, a melody or a lyric you won't forget.

The cause of ending extreme poverty in Africa speaks to Bono's prophetic impulse. Rock music, for him, is a form of advocacy, but advocacy is also a form of rock music.

God knows Africa could use a song or two. The reason that debt relief required such an excruciating effort is that foreign aid has virtually no constituency.

Not only conservatives such as Kasich but also Clinton administration "neoliberals" argued that aid was powerless, perhaps even harmful, in the face of corruption, civil conflict, weak governance, self-defeating economic policies.

Whatever its merits, the neoliberal argument began to seem morally unsustainable as much of Africa retrogressed throughout the '90s. Was the West to offer nothing more than pious advice about free markets and small government while whole portions of the globe slid into misery?

Did all African countries suffer from bad values, bad governance and bad policies? Liberal economists and activists formulated an alternative argument: a combination of "natural" factors - poor soil, high incidence of infectious disease, lack of access to ports - along with disadvantageous trade conditions and wrong-headed neoliberal policies had gotten many countries stuck in what Sachs called "the poverty trap".

They could not escape, without outside help.

Bono passionately embraced this expansive view of the obligations of the industrialised world, and of the possibilities of Africa. In 2001, he went to Bill Gates and others to finance an organisation that would lobby for action on Africa. DATA has offices in London, Los Angeles and Washington, but it was plain from the outset that the real challenge lay in Washington, both because historically the US spent so small a fraction of its budget on aid - one-tenth of 1 per cent of GNP as of 2000 - and because the incoming Bush administration believed so single-mindedly in free-market solutions to problems of development.

At the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, Bono managed to wangle a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, who was then the president's national security adviser. Rice was surprised to learn that Bono took the hard-headed view that "there's a responsibility for the recipient" as well as for the donor, and after the meeting with her, the policy works at what would become DATA produced a proposal for a two-pronged strategy to "reward success" in six to nine well-governed countries and to keep others from "falling back".

The proposal might have gone nowhere, but then 9/11 changed all contexts, including development assistance. Aid became a national-security issue (if a marginal one), for it was clear that fragile states could not be allowed to become failed states. The administration vowed to put real money behind the Millennium Challenge Account, as the program came to be called.

By the third year of operation, it was to be dispensing $5 billion. But the administration wanted something from Bono in return - his imprimatur. The idea seems laughable but Bono had enormous credibility in an area where the administration had virtually none. Bono had bargaining power, and he now used it.

He told Rice that he would appear with Bush at an event promoting the president's development-assistance program if Bush would also commit to "a historic AIDS initiative". The day before the planned appearance, in March, Bono learnt that the president would not do so. In an uncharacteristic act of confrontation, he called Rice and said he was pulling out of the joint appearance.

Rice was very unhappy. She recalls telling him: "Bono, this president cares about AIDS, too, and let me tell you that he is going to figure out something dramatic to do about AIDS. You're going to have to trust us."

Bono accepted her pledge, but the Millennium Challenge Account, announced with such fanfare, sank to the bottom of the administration's priority list. Only in early 2004, two years from the announcement, did the president sign the law creating it. Congress appropriated only $1.3 billion for the first year and $1.5 billion for the second.

This year President Bush asked for $3 billion rather than the $5 billion he had promised. Many of Bono's own allies have lost what little patience they had. Jeffrey Sachs calls the operation of the MCA "a disgrace". When I asked Sachs if he thought that Bono should stop cultivating the president and start denouncing him, he said, "Even aside from him saying it publicly, I'd just like him to say it to himself."

The leader who deserves the greatest credit for placing Africa at the top of the world's agenda, or at least near it, is the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. It was Blair, who, at the urging of Bob Geldof, impanelled the Commission for Africa, whose report, released earlier this year, painstakingly laid out the case for an enormous increase in aid to Africa.

Blair seems to believe what the Bush administration only says, for he uses the same ringing tones to talk about the West's responsibility to Africa that he does to discuss the war on terrorism. But Blair also knows that his crusade enjoys broad political support. And for this he has Bono and Geldof, among others, to thank. Justin Forsyth, Blair's special adviser on development, credits Bono with making Africa an urgent issue in Britain.

The Gleneagles momentum began building in the northern spring. In May, European Union development ministers pledged to double global aid from $60 billion to $120 billion by 2010.

The following month, Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish former Pentagon official who had just left the administration to become head of the World Bank, embraced the 0.7 per cent target. The Americans and the British had worked out their differences on multilateral debt relief. But the Bush administration remained a conspicuous holdout.

ON DAY one of the summit, Bono, Geldof and key aides went by helicopter to Gleneagles from their Edinburgh hotel. Bono spoke with Schroeder and Blair about the issues that were still up in the air - financing mechanisms and trade reform. He met Bush. He finally met Chirac and Kofi Annan. During the afternoon of the third and final day, he started seeing leaks of the communique, which was drawing ever closer to his own agenda. He remembers thinking, "Oh, my God, this is really happening."

The "movement" did not, in general, share Bono's enthusiasm. Activists bitterly complained that the communique included no real progress on trade, no expansion of debt relief to additional countries, no movement by the Bush administration towards 0.7 per cent. But when I saw Bono the next day in Paris, he was ebullient.

The heads of state had promised that by 2010 they would increase aid to Africa by $25 billion a year, and aid worldwide by $50 billion a year.They had extended debt relief to Nigeria, a goal activists had long sought. They had added to President Bush's commitment on malaria, so that the number of victims should be reduced by 85 per cent by 2010. They had vowed to ensure that all children had free access to school by 2015.

Bono left Gleneagles to meet the band in Paris. That night, before a sellout crowd of 80,000 in the Stade de France, he read a text, in French - a language he does not speak - listing the brave commitments of President Chirac, a figure few in the audience were likely to admire.

The next morning, as motorcycle cops were leading Bono's van on a slalom ride through the Paris traffic, he turned to me and said, "Guess who called this morning to say he had seen the reviews?"

"I don't know. Blair?"

"No."

"Clinton?"

"No. Think what country we're in."

"Chirac?"

"Yeah. A lot of his people were at the concert last night. He said that he had heard about what I had said. He wants to work with us very closely."

No doubt he meant it. But then along came the grande vacance, and a few days after returning to Paris, Chirac was stricken with a mysterious illness that confined him to the hospital. It appeared that Chirac would not attend the United Nations summit meeting; nor could Chancellor Schroeder, who was facing the fight of his political life in an election this weekend. Things went from bad to worse.

By the first week in September, Bono's friends in the Bush administration seemed fully prepared, even eager, to scuttle the long and windy statement on development prepared for the summit meeting. The White House prepared an edited draft that proposed to eliminate practically every pledge made by donor countries - even the very words "Millennium Development Goals".

And then Hurricane Katrina scrambled everything. When Bono called from his house on the Riviera in early September, he said: "I have to be sensitive about putting my hand in America's pocket at a time like this." He would, he said, be keeping a low profile in New York.

It has been a frantic time, this year of Africa. The other members of the band love the cause but they fret that Bono's hobby is eclipsing his day job. "The band has survived," Adam Clayton told me, "but there's been a price in terms of relationships."

Bono has promised to let the world spin on its own axis for a while. But it can't be left alone for long; there's so much proselytising still to do. Bono's next target is the American people: he expects to have an army of 10 million activists signed up for the One Campaign by 2008.

He believes - he knows - that the American people would demand action on Africa if only someone would tell them the facts. "Middle America," he said to me one day. "Don't get me started. I love it."

- New York Times Magazine

A clone again, naturally

2005-09-30T19:14:00.000-07:00

By Dave Simpson
September 30, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/29/1127804596701.html

The real deal: Coldplay's Chis Martin.
Photo: Supplied

SO FAR, 2005 has been an exceptional year for Coldplay, with their album X&Y achieving 29 number-ones around the world. But it's also been a very good 12 months for bands who sound like them. Keane have gone from the back rooms of pubs to shifting 4.5 million albums.

Coldplay soundalikes Athlete (who used to sound like Steely Dan and were nowhere near as successful) have sold half a million copies of their Coldplay-lite album Tourist.

Keane and Athlete are what might be called surrogate bands, who sound and sometimes look similar to another, already much more successful, group. A surrogate band is signed by a label seeking a copy of something with a proven market. Right now there are so many it can seem as if we're approaching a doomsday scenario in which everyone is remaking the same handful of similar-sounding records.

There are numerous morose, David Gray-type songwriters (Damien Rice, Johnathan Rice, James Blunt, Tom Baxter). There are the spiky, shambolic Libertines-type bands (the Rakes, new Virgin signings Kooks, the Others, the Cazals).

Hordes of bands owe a bigger-than-healthy debt to Franz Ferdinand, including the Brakes, the Editors, VHS or Beta, the Departure and We Are Scientists. Much of the time, Razorlight are an eerie facsimile of the Strokes.

Other spinoffs include the bands being signed because they sound a lot like the Killers, as well as the boy bands because they're from the same management stable as a McFly or Busted.

''Sometimes I think the industry wants - and perhaps financially needs - a situation where a massive audience are buying exactly the same records," says Paul Weighell, a former A&R man.

"If they do want it, it's working. According to Amazon's "People who bought this also bought . . ." facility, records by Coldplay, Keane, Athlete and Snow Patrol sell to the same people."

Usually someone at a label will say, 'Have you seen how high X are in the charts? We need our own X!'" Weighell explains.

He signed the Levellers in the 1990s and watched as labels snapped up Levellerssounding groups.

"Old-timers used to say we didn't do this in the 1960s and early 1970s, but that's rubbish," says Weighell.

"They signed a slew of progressive bands, for example, because they knew there was a market who wanted 30-minute opuses about salads, surgery and brains!"

There's nothing new about replication - it's been going on in pop since Cliff Richard curled his lip like Elvis or the Beatles spawned the Monkees. The difference is degree. As the music market has got smaller, the cost of launching a new act (marketing, styling, videos, production) has soared. So labels play it safer more often by signing identikit acts with a supposedly proven market. It's a risky business and some in the industry are warning against a meltdown.

"A band like Franz Ferdinand are very interesting," says Andy Ross, Blur's Food Records boss in the 1990s, "but a band influenced by Franz Ferdinand are obviously going to be less interesting, and diminishing returns set in until you reach a point where pop music is over."

The strategy can also backfire.

Spiky metal types Feeder became the latest combo to undergo the Coldplay makeover, but their reception at the recent Download Festival suggested they have alienated their core audience. If cloning pop is selling like beans, it seems there are only so many varieties the market will sustain.

Generally a surrogate works best when the original is not around. Keane and Athlete profited when Coldplay were slaving away on X&Y. The Alarm - who Joe Strummer once derided as "a pale imitation of a shadow of the Clash" - had a few hits when their mentors had imploded.

A problem is that too many copies of something can damage the original. There was a time when every second band sounded like Oasis. Embrace used to be an Oasis surrogate to the point of adopting similar bravado during interviews.

They prospered as the Gallaghers' distinctiveness and creativity wavered. Eventually, both became passe. Embrace now sound like Coldplay: their recent return was on the back of a song written by Chris Martin, who himself was once considered too heavily influenced by Jeff Buckley, who in turn was a surrogate of his father, 1960s singer Tim Buckley.

"Sometimes it does feel like the whole industry is eating itself," says Ross.

It could be just another sign of the times, in the same way that fashion designers are now used to seeing their work copied on the high street. But pop culture is supposed to be above this.

Given that the music industry today is dominated by four multinational conglomerates, it's not surprising that much of their output comes down to the preferences of people at the top.

One major-label A&R man who prefers not to be named has noticed his bosses' obsessions with their own notions of "taste". He believes majors are run by people who don't actually like rock'n'roll.

"They'll happily say that Sting or the Police are their favourite acts," he whispers.

"So someone like Chris Martin comes along, who writes intelligent songs with a bit of a political leaning, and they consider that to be 'quality'. So it becomes 'What we do at this company is provide quality', and the next thing they've signed a band who sound like Coldplay and it becomes this dreadful conveyor belt."

To an extent, record companies will always respond to what's around. If kids like the Libertines, for instance, the chances are they'll pick up a guitar and sound like the Libertines, especially given that their ramshackle sound is easier for young musicians to appropriate.

What Ross finds disturbing is the "altogether higher level of cynicism a band would need to transform themselves into something as musically sophisticated as Coldplay".

At the heart of it is pop's obsession with genres. Weighell notices how we no longer ask people "What artists do you like?" but "What sort of music do you like?"

A&R men still seem particularly preoccupied with pop's trends and scenes. In the 1990s, for example, it seemed like you just had to come from Manchester to get a record deal. One story had it that entire A&R departments were sent to the Rainy City and told not to come back without one of its bands.

"That story may sound apocryphal but I was there (as Factory Records' publicist) and it did actually happen," laughs Jeff Barrett, head of Heavenly Recordings, whose latest signings are the Magic Numbers.

"They came up in coaches and signed those bands!" That's 808 State, Inspiral Carpets, My Jealous God, Mock Turtles, Northside, Intastella, the High, World of Twist, Rig and Paris Angels. Remember them all?

Probably not, because usually by the time the "next wave" or "clone" band have got their album out, the scene has moved on.

"I don't know if the industry ever learns," says Ross, who knows of at least two A&R scouts permanently camped out trying to find a Futureheads.

When Barrett came across something fresher in outsize hippyish folk-duo Magic Numbers, other A&R men asked him: "Are you sure?" "They thought they were 'out of time'," he says.

The nub is that surrogates can and do develop. Grunge queen Alanis Morissette was once a talentshow- entering disco diva. Even David Bowie started off as a derided surrogate of cabaret singer Anthony Newley. Perhaps a climate of homogeneity will provoke more wayward talents into doing something different. And when they do, the industry can cope - EMI handled Radiohead's metamorphosis from indie rockers to experimental electronic boffins with Kid A.

But perhaps the most intriguing question is whether an act could be really wily - get signed as a clone and use that platform to create something that's their own. It may have happened already. Few will remember that Blur were originally signed as a baggy band.

Their first records in 1990 and '91 had the much-copied indie-dance groove; Damon Albarn probably wouldn't broadcast this now, but he had a bowl cut and was less cool than the Mock Turtles.

But almost immediately Blur reinvented themselves from psychedelic popsters to Parklife Britpoppers to angular experimentalists - and Albarn's still doing it with the multimedia Gorillaz.

"Damon's a very intelligent character," says Ross. "I certainly wouldn't bet against him having planned it all along."

These days, Albarn even has his own almost-surrogate in the Blurish Kaiser Chiefs. Not bad for someone who began pop life as a copy of Ian Brown.

- The Guardian

Paid-up punks

2005-09-16T19:31:00.000-07:00

September 16, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/15/1126377383560.html

Original punks the Clash.
Photo: AP

Sponsorship deals, credit card endorsements, apathy and MTV. Punk ain't what it used to be, writes Michael Dwyer.

Punk. It may be the most adaptable four-letter word in the modern musician's vocabulary. Between the Clash's Know Your Rights and Blink 182's Show Us Your Boobies lies the broadest pigeonhole known to rock'n'roll.

It's universally accepted that Iggy Pop's scarred chest smeared with peanut butter was punk.

The Ramones' 90-second garage rock nuggets were punk.

The Sex Pistols swearing on television was punk.

The Dead Kennedys' California Uber Alles was punk.

But fast forward to modern Swedish 'punks' Millencolin - they have a skate sponsorship deal. And Canada's Simple Plan offer a personalised Mastercard offer.

We're either talking about a radical post-modern redefinition of the term here, or a flagrant perversion of punk ideology. But one thing hasn't changed. To the old guard, it's incredibly offensive.

"When you look around today, it's like punk never happened," bemoans Don Letts, maker of Punk: Attitude, the allegedly "definitive" documentary out on DVD next week.

"Not only have people forgotten, they don't care.

"Back in my day you could blame The Man," says the London dub DJ and influential associate of The Clash.

"Now there's complicit guilt, because kids don't want much. They just want their 15 minutes of fame. They're playing up to the cult of celebrity.

"If you wanna be on MTV and be in the Top 40 then you're not gonna be allowed to be that radical. It's become increasingly difficult to be radical within the format of music.."

If punk is ''the fight against complacency," as fellow film-maker Jim Jarmusch declares early in Letts's film, Simple Plan's Jeff Stinco strikes a contentious pose from his laid-back position in Montreal.

"I gotta tell you, it's an awesome day here," he gloats.

"I spent my whole day just chilling on the main street, drinking beer and watching the girls. It's great."

A multi-platinum major label concern, Simple Plan is one of the most successful "punk-pop" bands of recent years.

Like practically every band labelled punk in the last 35 years, Stinco doesn't identify himself as such. It's not his fault that the first link when you Google 'Simple Plan Punk' is 'Punk rock music artists - corporate entertainment bookings.'

"I think punk is an era in rock'n'roll,'' he says.

''I'm not even sure it's a genre. We're not making any statements, not even fashion statements - like the Sex Pistols were.''

New punks Millencolin.
Photo:Supplied

''I mean, I have respect for them and the Clash but they weren't my early influences. The bands that got me were bands like Face to Face, Lagwagon, No Use For a Name, Strung Out" - all sound-alike hardcore skateboard enthusiasts that cranked up amps in sunny California in the '80s.

"As a teenager I was pretty rebellious. I needed some kind of outlet for my anger and my frustration and those bands seemed to express those feelings in very easy-to-understand words and straight-to-the-point music. The simplicity and the intensity of it was fascinating to me."

In that respect, Simple Plan picked up on much the same energy that the Ramones or the Pistols ignited in a previous generation.

And in purely sonic terms, the thread hasn't changed much from '60s trailblazers the Stooges to Millencolin - who could be described as generic Swedish skate rockers. They return to their core Australian market for the umpteenth time next week.

What's changed is the tapestry of music as a whole. Since Nirvana made punk synonymous with mainstream rock, the subversion potential of a snotty-nosed, electrified squall has become virtually zero.

To Millencolin guitarist Erik Ohlsson, who also designs the artwork for the band's independent releases, punk is a question of personal control, rather than sound or intent.

"Punk rock, for me, has always been about doing it yourself," he says. "Be aware and be creative. For me it's a really personal, positive thing. You're not following the rest of the stereotype, being who you should be. You follow your own path."

Reminded that Millencolin's "own path" is now identical to the mainstream youth culture superhighway as seen in Coca-Cola ads, Ohlsson can only offer a sheepish chuckle and "hope that everyone is doing it for the right reason."

In his band's case, that reason was creating a soundtrack to their skateboarding exploits. Hardly the "death or glory" minefield that the Clash's Joe Strummer spent his life negotiating.

"We are political personally, but we don't involve that in our music," Ohlsson says. "I think in this time, it's really important to bring out a positive vibe and entertain people. A lot of our lyrics are political in a personal way: growing up issues, relationship issues, which are really important too."

It's a pretty safe mission statement. In fact, for a band that prides itself on operating outside the corporate music sphere, it's plain lame. Asked how he thinks Millencolin's outlook might differ from a major label rock dinosaur like Bon Jovi, Ohlsson doesn't even sound insulted.

"We never had a manager, we grew up from the underground, being in control of everything," he says.

"I don't know how Bon Jovi felt when they started a band but I think those guys had a goal to be rock stars and get tons of girls and they have never been the issues for us. Well, of course it's great getting girls," he concedes, "but it's not the focus."

Don Letts understands the fundamental lack of ambition he perceives in the modern punk.

"Counter cultural movements are fuelled and informed by the social, economic and political climate of the times," he notes.

"And I guess the youth of the west don't want for too much. But sometimes you gotta get really ill before you know you need a cure. And look around, man. We're really sick."

That fact has not been completely hijacked by the punk-pop gravy train that's made Simple Plan and their ilk so comfortable. Detroit punk agitators the Suicide Machines mount their first tour of Australia next month, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Given the temper of the times, guitarist Dan Lukacinsky is appalled that so few of his contemporaries share their blatant tone of political dissent.

"Punk rock has been too safe for a long time," he says. "Great bands like Anti-Flag have been banging away forever but it's like people just didn't wanna hear it. People who work normal jobs look at music as an outlet to have a good time. They think really hard at their jobs, they don't wanna do that with music. And that's the whole problem in the US right now: ignorance and complacency."

Don't bother looking for the Suicide Machines' latest album, War Profiteering is Killing Us All, on the Billboard or ARIA charts.

Song titles such as Capitalist Suicide, All Systems Fail and 17% 18 to 25 (about the low youth voter turnout at the last US election) are plainly less commercially viable than the navel-gazing cliches favoured by Simple Plan.

Lukacinsky lays much of the blame for youth apathy at the door of MTV.

"If you have a captive audience of young people like they do, they have a responsibility to tell the truth about certain things. They have Rock the Vote (young voter registration campaign), but it's all a bunch of garbage when you see how empty and meaningless their programming is."

Lukacinsky stops short of dissing MTV pawns such as Simple Plan.

"They're friends of ours," he chuckles, "and I know they didn't get into this to get rich."

He does, however, acknowledge a certain ideological contradiction in Suicide Machines' website link to their skatewear sponsors.

There's no such concession from Jeff Stinco, who talks with equal enthusiasm about his band's involvement with the Make Poverty History campaign and the new Simple Plan cash card.

Dude, it's totally a Mastercard with the band's picture on it.

"It's a concept that allows young people to get used to using a credit card," Stinco explains.

"Their parents fill them up with money and hopefully it teaches them how to spend wisely. The coolest thing is people get to have their favourite band on their card. It's personalised, so it's another way for them to express their identity."

But, says Don Letts: "When we got into music, it was an anti-establishment thing. Now people are getting into music to be part of the establishment. The pop culture of that time broke down social, class and race barriers. It was very instrumental in making our world a better place. In a certain section of UK society, music has been a galvanising force. It has that potential. I think people have forgotten that.

"But I am an optimist," he says.

"You can't stop this thing. I think we've got to look to places that haven't been saturated with satellite dishes and haven't had MTV rammed down their throats for 25 years. Maybe places like Iraq? Like Orson Welles said, if you wanna make a truly original film, don't watch movies."

Teenage memories

2005-09-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Murfett
Dusk to dawn
September 16, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/15/1126377383590.html

Good pop music evokes memories of 'making out' and teen angst, writes Andrew Murfett.

THE best pop music isn't always disposable.

My all-time favourites are typically songs I associate with either a person I care for, a booze-soaked memory, a missed opportunity, a moment of triumph or, at the absolute extreme, a moment that's helped shape me.

A great record is like a virtual photo album. I can put it on and be instantly transported back not only to the time and place but also the feelings and emotions.

For example, the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is my first trip to Queensland, a time of loneliness and my old friend Georgie.

You Am I's Hourly, Daily sums up my first year out of high school and my first serious girlfriend.

The first Australian song I ever heard on US radio was the Church's Under The Milky Way and every time I hear the track, I instantly recall driving through the Florida Keys that muggy afternoon.

Similarly, anything by Pearl Jam harks back to high school, Carlton Colds and PJ super milds.

While I never drink Coldies these days and I've given up the smokes, I still love Pearl Jam.

Actually, when I hear Spin The Black Circle, I'm reminded of an old mate drunkenly explaining the meaning of the track between swigs of our shared hipflask one night at Richmond station.

Which brings me to the maligned and unfashionable Counting Crows. After a dire day at the office recently, I searched my CD shelf for an album of melancholic nostalgia and came across August and Everything After.

My teenage years were as angst-ridden as any and August ... was always a temporary panacea.

While I was never a Mr Jones sorta guy, at moments Round Here and the at-the-time profound Raining in Baltimore felt both insightful and cathartic.

Listening to the album again for the first time in years, I still knew every word.

I thought of how I used to hang at a schoolmate's place, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes after school listening to August .... Indeed, when they announced their first Australian tour in '93, we ditched school for the morning to line up for tickets.

The shows were eventually cancelled and I didn't see them play until four years later in Miami.

I've listened to August ... a couple more times since. Each time, besides the feelings it evokes - I want to call in sick to work, take up smoking again and head to the beach on a cold day - I still hear great pop songs.

Which brings me to the first night I ever heard Jeff Buckley. I was about to travel overseas for the first time and a few friends gathered at my parents' house to toast my farewell.

Over the night, despite the boozy tone of the evening, the track Last Goodbye must have been played at least three or four times.

Each time, I silently noted the track's glorious guitar intro, the melody and Jeff Buckley's gorgeously anguished vocals.

The night lingered on, and the last two standing were myself and a friend who, it happens, I had a crush on.

We took a drive and as that balmy summer night turned into day, ended up at a beach, talked candidly and, being teenagers, made out.

We were both in burgeoning relationships at the time and, although we talked intermittently for a few months later, things were never the same and I haven't seen her for almost 10 years.

Although I have since come to know and love the album Grace (especially Hallelujah), every time I hear Last Goodbye I think of that person, that night, our last goodbye.

Vancouver's Red Hot Indie Music Scene

2005-09-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

It's incredibly diverse, and grabbing wide attention.

By Elaine Corden
September 13, 2005

http://thetyee.ca/Entertainment/2005/09/13/VanIndieScene/

Vancouver's indie supergroup, The New Pornographers. Photo: Steven Dewall

Your mom loves Coldplay. She does. And so does everyone else's mom. Even if you liked them before, your mom's adoration of their milquetoast melodies had kind of ruined it for you, hasn't it? Ditto U2, ditto White Stripes. You can't listen to them now without thinking of your matriarch, or of that annoying man at the office, or the million other folk who insist on keeping the minivan radio tuned on "mass consumption." And so you have to move on. Because if you hear X & Y one more time, you're personally going to hunt Coldplay's plaintive singer down and beat him with a James Taylor album.

You're tired of bands being rammed down your throat. You are a pop culture refugee. Well, sit down next to me. Enter the world of independent music.

With due respect to the all-conquering pop-song, the advantages of exploring independent music are obvious: songs you love are less likely to become jingles for Sunny D., you are not feeding the media beast that is AOL Time Warner, and yes, you can walk a little taller knowing that your record collection is unique, unlike your neighbor's. It takes a little more effort to find the diamonds amidst so much coal, but in the end, it's worth the effort.

Laid back explosion

While every town has its local gems, Vancouver's indie music scene is red-hot right now, so you really need look no further than your own province as a starting point. In fact, had you traveled down to Victory Square, on the edge of Gastown, this past Labour Day, you would have found a veritable treasure chest of independent, local acts: all playing a beautifully utopian outdoor concert, not in the name of profit (the event was free), but rather for the sheer love of making noise.

With seven acts on hand (Fond of Tigers, The Christa Min, The Book of Lists, Calamalka, Ladyhawk, P:ano and the buzzier-than-buzz Pink Mountaintops), you'd have been hard-pressed to come away with something you didn't like. In fact, the line-up was exemplary of why taste-making music press, such as Pitchforkmedia.com, NME, and Spin have taken an interest in our fair city lately.

Take Black Mountain. Drawing huge interest in the UK and Stateside, the Vancouver-based group has just returned from a jaunt opening up for (wait for it) Coldplay, a feat that, considering the uber-popularity of that group, was of no small importance. Ramshackle and defiantly retro, Black Mountain (whose membership forms no small part of the aforementioned Pink Mountaintops) are making '60s-styled, druggy guitar rock that's the toast of the global indie rock community.

Coastal talent pool

Likewise, The New Pornographers and specifically chief songwriter Carl Newman, have been drawing over-the-top praise in the international music media, with American rag Blender naming Newman to their "Hot 100" list of worldwide music visionaries. One listen of Pornographer's witty, harmony-laden new album, Twin Cinema, will tell you why. While the album traverses the well-worn territory of love and relationships, it's done in such a fresh, clever way that you'll find yourself immediately hooked.

Add to that jerky post-punkers Hot Hot Heat, a once-indie, now-signed-to-Warner outfit who is playing the likes of Glastonbury and David Letterman. And The Organ, an all-female group whose melancholy, Smiths-esque 80's revivalism is capturing critics' hearts. And a host of other up-and-comers making their mark beyond our borders, and all together, you have something akin to the Seattle explosion of the 1990s or the Hives-led Swedish garage rock phenom at the start of this century.

The chief difference, (the difference, one hopes, which will not leave us in the same time-has-not-passed-since-Soundgarden's-"Spoon Man" state as the still-grungified Seattle) is the incredible diversity of our flourishing talent.

Diverse rock

The acts on hand at the Victory Square Block Party, for example, while all "rock" bands, could trace their respective influences to groups as varied as Roxy Music: the spacey-sounding Book of Lists, who also draw heavily on the canon of psychedelic prophet Syd Barrett (listen to Book of Lists' single "Through Stained Glass"), to Canned Heat. And Pink Mountaintops, basically a sexed-up version of Black Mountain who mix songs about "Sweet 69" with romantic, existential boy/girl duets (listen to Pink Mountaintops' single "Leslie").

Furthermore, while it's our pop and rock outfits drawing the most attention right now, other genres, such as jazz, hip-hop and electronica also boast some extraordinary talent. For example, hip-hop fans should check out the rabbitting, quickfire delivery of socially-conscious local Birdapres if they don't believe visceral rap could come from laid-back Vancity. (Listen to Birdapres' single "Broke Beat")

Perhaps this is the upside of the Vancouver's whorish courtship of "global city" status. It may be that we have to endure the occasional unnecessary stadium or Cadillac transit project to keep talented artists in town. In the past, we've hemorrhaged talent to cities like Montreal and Toronto, but now it seems that we're finally interesting enough for artist to remain here.

Wade in

If you're a newcomer to this strange and exciting world, it may be daunting to wade in to the torrent of creativity in the city right now. It is still, despite the talent boon, a crapshoot to wander into a nightclub or music venue not knowing any of the artists. Any of the bands mentioned above are a sure bet.

When you get to their shows, saddle up to the nearest hipster-with-a-beard and ask them who their favourite local act is. You'll be amazed at the variety of answers, and the liveliness of opinions on the matter. We've finally outgrown the days when we were famous for grow-ops and Bryan Adams, and have become a world-recognized epicentre for visionary music. If you're brave enough to explore the scene, you may just end up handing that Coldplay album over to your mother for good. Trust me. You won't need it where you're going.

Elaine Corden is a Vancouver writer, editor and living room dancer.

Music downloads (Click on the links below to listen):

"Through Stained Glass" by Book of Lists at http://newmusiccanada.com/genres/artist.cfm?Band_Id=15290

"Leslie" by Pink Mountaintops at http://newmusiccanada.com/genres/artist.cfm?Band_Id=13283

"Broke Beat" by Birdapres at http://newmusiccanada.com/genres/artist.cfm?Band_Id=15302

Magic circles

2005-09-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

September 9, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/07/1125772586522.html

Magic Dirt live - energy and charisma.
Photo: Simon Schluter

Snow White, Magic Dirt's newest release, was a lesson in discipline for the band, writes Emma Miller.

FIFTEEN years ago, Magic Dirt bass player Dean Turner witnessed something that changed his perception of music forever. Friends were playing a gig at Geelong's Barwon Club and they invited his rather straight-looking friend Adalita Srsen - his bandmate in quirky pop act Deer Bubbles - to do an impromptu performance.

"Adalita got up on stage to sing a song with this band and I've never seen anything like it," Turner says. "She f**king let go - glasses went flying, hair's everywhere, she's on the ground screaming into this microphone and the whole pub erupted.

"Everyone in the place was saying, 'This is incredible' and for me that was definitely a point where I realised we could take this much further. I think that experience was just learning how much you can let go and an audience will respond to that."

Letting go is something Magic Dirt does exceptionally well. The Geelong-born, Melbourne-based and distortion-fuelled rock/pop band has the kind of energy and charisma that most bands can only dream of.

This is a band not afraid to let rip and they like their audiences to do the same. If music is sex, Magic Dirt, who have been together 13 years, is a leather-clad dominatrix in 10-inch heels.

But when we meet they are eating muffins in a plain white room at their record company offices; there is little sign of the powerhouse rock gods of the stage.

In fact, Magic Dirt look almost normal. Srsen is wearing hardly any make-up; guitarist Raul Sanchez and Turner are signing copies of the band's new album, Snow White, as diligently as if it were a high school assignment. Drummer Adam Robertson sips a takeaway coffee.

The contrast between the two Magic Dirts is something of which the band is conscious and something they also appear to cultivate through their music, which, of late, has veered from grungy, angry rock to super-melodic pop songs.

Snow White is no exception. The beautiful cover art immediately sets a contradictory tone by featuring red roses, and the songs include smatterings of country, doo-wop and girly pop alongside their more typical hard-edged sounds. It's easily their most diverse and accessible album yet.

Srsen's voice veers from shouting to soulful and an impressive soaring falsetto reminiscent of early Sinead O'Connor. It's all about as double-edged as Srsen herself, a woman who has been known to wear frilly pink blouses with sleeves short enough to show off her many tattoos, and who delights in juxtaposing images of softness and hardness, strength and vulnerability.

She agrees that Snow White, the band's fourth album, is far more mellow and less angst-ridden than 2003's Tough Love, which raged about heartbreak, betrayal and masturbation.

"We're growing up more and you let go of those feelings, you're over and done with certain things and you don't go back there," she says.

"So there's a lot of intense, deep feeling on the new record but it's not necessarily coming from an angry viewpoint. A lot of the album's about beauty and that's what I wanted to do, make a beautiful album."

Although Tough Love was nominated for an ARIA award and finally delivered the band the recognition they deserved, it very nearly destroyed them.

"Tough Love was so regimented and there was a lot of discipline, it was very S&M, you know, cracking the whip every second," Srsen says.

"We talked about every single thing, we worked really hard in the studio, we had tuning problems, I had difficulties singing. It all sounds great in the end but there was so much trial by fire and so much discipline which we'd never really encountered before; never put ourselves through before. So after all of that I guess we were a little bit burnt-out, a little bit tired and wanted to just relax a bit."

Adds Turner: "We found out it was a shit way to write music. We set goals for ourselves and at the end of the record we had achieved those goals. But it's not a very fun way to make music so we'll never do a record like that again."

Enter the looser, floatier Snow White, where the band followed their muse, even if it meant using acoustic guitar for the first time (on the track Envious) and working for days trying to find the right tone for I Love the Rain, which Srsen wrote about her cat.

"You don't really have a say, you just follow it," she says, of a more organic song-writing and recording process. "You feel like you're under a spell, the art is dictating what you're doing, not the other way around. You have to surrender to it."

But what if fans don't like the result?

"That doesn't stress me," she says. "That's the reward you get from surrendering to the feeling. You don't really care."

But if Magic Dirt have put their artistic calling first, that's not to say they don't care about their fans. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a band of their stature that is more down to earth and hands-on when it comes to dealing with the public.

"We all enjoy after shows, talking to the crowd, and we've always been like that, from day one," Srsen says.

"The night doesn't feel complete to us unless we've done that part, liaised and chatted and hung out."

Says Robertson: "No one's ever too good not to have a beer with other people."

"That's the scene we came from, which was the antithesis of rock stardom," adds Turner.

"I think we bring a lot of that into what we do now. Because a wanker is just a wanker no matter what they did 40 minutes ago on stage."

And Magic Dirt have worked very hard at not being wankers. On the band's website, www.magicdirt.net, Srsen personally posts frequent diary entries about what the band is up to, from how recent gigs went to what books she's been reading.

The band recently toured remote areas of Australia and chose local bands as supports. They have also been visiting regional schools, where they give 40-minute talks on the music industry and do a short acoustic set.

It's not really what you'd expect from an established rock act signed to a major label - so why do they bother?

"We came from a small town where art was not considered important at all," Turner says.

"It's all just sport and trade (in Geelong) and we're trying to even up that balance a little bit. Expressing yourself is important and creating art is a worthwhile pastime and passion."

"It's about not being scared of following your dreams," Robertson says.

"Because kids are always getting told 'that's stupid'. I was basically going to be a farmer's son for the rest of my life, but I said, 'F**k that, I'm getting out of here and I'm going to do this instead'."

It's that kind of single-minded ambition that has helped Magic Dirt survive in an industry that spits out young talent like wads of stale chewing gum.

Since forming in 1992, they've endured the break-up of Srsen and Turner's relationship, being dumped by their record label and - probably the bane of every wannabe rock star's life - parental disdain.

Srsen says while her mother used to take photos at gigs in the early days, her parents continue to cut out job ads from the paper for her.

"There was a lot of resistance; still is," she says.

"They wanted me to be a teacher but I sort of am a teacher in a way." She had to look within to find the strength to follow her musical ambitions.

"I was pretty fiery, I was headstrong and absolutely taken with this impulse to be creative. It's a kind of craziness, I think.

"We are stubborn and curious, like cats and cockroaches. I think they are the qualities of this band that stand out the most."

The band is about to head off on a national tour, which is far and away their favourite thing.

"There's this retarded adolescent's thing of going on holiday. It's a working holiday but you don't have to worry about bills or doing the dishes," Sanchez says.

"I really feel like it's a community project," Srsen says.

"We're doing it for the community and the community's there for us - it's a two-way street. We bring joy and fun and rock and sweat and good times - it's almost socialist or something."

Magic Dirt play the Northcote Social Club on Wednesday, Ding Dong Lounge on Thursday, Revolver Upstairs next Friday and The Tote next Saturday.

Fast and furious

2005-09-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

September 9, 2005
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/07/1125772586549.html

Fantomas, with Mike Patton, right.
Photo: Dustin Rabin

Fantomas' music, unless played right, risks being horrible noise, Mike Patton tells Andrew Drever.

THE manic pace of singer Mike Patton's work continues unabated. This year has already seen the release of the Fantomas album Suspended Animation, his collaboration record General Patton vs the X-Ecutioners and the mellow collaboration LP Romances.

But wait. There's more. Now, the prolific former Faith No More singer's focus is his long-awaited "pop" project, Peeping Tom, a series of albums on which he will play all the instruments.

Then there's the collaborations with producer Dan "the Automator" Nakamura, Muggs from Cypress Hill, Brazilian chanteuse Bebel Gilberto, rapper Kool Keith, 3-D from Massive Attack, beatboxer Rahzel, Amon Tobin and Melbourne's the Avalanches.

There's also talk of work with Bjork, a third Tomahawk album, the running of his record label Ipecac and a film score to compose.

"Well, it doesn't feel like work, man," he says from San Francisco.

"I'd be doing this anyway. Thank God I'm making a living at it. I feel pretty lucky. This is just a pace I feel comfortable working at. I like to have a few things going on at once. It feels natural. I don't have to push myself . . ."

Suspended Animation, the fourth Fantomas album and the follow-up to the 74-minute "ambient" album Delirium Cordia is made up of 30 short pieces of music.

The band, comprising Patton, Melvins guitarist Buzz Osborne, former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and former Mr Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn, continue to refine their death-metal blast, with a rapid-fire tribute to cartoon music.

"Well, those guys physically have capabilities that are downright unfair to the rest of the world," Patton says of his band.

"They're open to doing anything and have a deep trust of the material that I give them. No matter how insane or complicated it sounds, they're willing to take a stab at it.

"If you don't play this stuff right, it's just horrible noise. It's meaningless. If it's executed perfectly, though, it's magical and it's really fun and comical and intense at the same time. It takes patience and a lot of f---ing work, but it's one of the most fun and challenging band environments I've ever been in."

Fantomas play the Palace, St Kilda, on Tuesday night.

No beer, no show, says Cave

2005-09-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

September 9, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/08/1125772641985.html

Australian singer Nick Cave scored a victory for rock and roll over health and safety laws after refusing to take the stage in London last week without his beer and smokes.

As Cave walked on stage at Alexandra Palace last week for a concert with his band the Bad Seeds, he was stopped by a security guard who told him his cans of beer and cigarettes were against the venue's rules.

According to British newspaper The Independent today, Cave told the guard he would not perform.

"Nick just said 'Fine, if I can't take a beer on with me, I'm going back to my dressing room. You can go out there and tell some jokes to entertain the crowd for three hours.'," a source on Cave's tour told the Independent.

"Then the band turned on their heels and marched back up to their dressing rooms."

The paper said that, after an awkward wait, venue authorities backed down and gave the band "special allowance' to take their beers and smokes on stage.

- AAP

Name your poison

2005-08-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

Name your poison
August 26, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/the-name-game/2005/08/24/1124562925180.html

Where did Australian band Jet come up with their name?
Photo: Supplied

Michael Witheford analyses the delicate art of naming a band.

CONSIDER this: you are in a rock band whose talents are undetectable but whose musical failings could serve as comic legend if they weren't way too dull even for any "so bad it's good" factor.

No one but your friends and possibly a few lost souls wandering into a pub are ever likely to suffer your desperate, doleful, badly executed songs.

Your gigs are self-consciously chaotic, and not in an exciting, revolutionary, smash-it-up way. You tend to drop things - lyrics, ideas, tunes - as if they were soap. That first and last self-financed CD single is destined to recline on the shelves of a few reluctantly sympathetic independent record shops until you are called back to remove it.

So how can you leave your mark on musical history?

Here's one method: Call yourselves Half Man Half Biscuit.

This inept English band, who once homicidally attacked the Beach Boys' Help Me Rhonda, are well-remembered not because they assassinated other people's beautiful tunes but because they were called Half Man Half Biscuit.

If you can't play an instrument or sing, at least you might get a bit of the old, "I never saw you but I remember the name", stuff if party talk drifts in the wrong direction. And that's certainly better than nothing. It's a bit like the unforgettable American punks the Go F-- Yourselves. Titled in a moment of inspiration, their music possibly never even existed.

So why do so many bands choose names that are rubbish? All that fine-tuning of songs, and then a regrettable last-minute choice for that first press release, or inaugural Tuesday night at the bottom of the bill at the Tote.

One of my aims in life (and I've succeeded thus far) is to not know how the Sydney pop-punks Frenzal Rhomb happened upon their epithet.

A rhomb is "an equilateral parallelogram, or quadrilateral figure whose sides are equal and the opposite sides parallel". Frenzal is apparently a word made up by the band to confuse us.

Others have done a bit better. One of Australia's most charismatic vocalists of the post-punk era, Ron Peno of Died Pretty, recalls that the band arrived at their debut gig in Brisbane in 1980 well in advance of any decision about who the hell they were.

Consequently the Pere Ubu track Final Solution presented itself as a temporary handle. Had the group persisted with that one, controversy regarding a possible crypto-Nazi fascination would surely have followed.

"I had the name the Died Pretty from my previous band," Peno says. "And I didn't really like it, to tell you the truth. But when we had to christen the band, that was the most popular choice. One of the others we considered was the Watch Below."

Generally perceived to be an allusion to the die-young-leave-a-beautiful-corpse attitude, Peno now admits: "What I was thinking about was a piece of clothing dyed a pretty colour, actually."

And so another myth bites the gooey carpet of rock history.

Some musicians blaze a doctrinaire battle with bandmates over the word or words that will represent them on chalkboards and in gig guides.

Friendships can creak in brittle rehearsal-room arguments as hundreds of suggestions are pooh-poohed. For other acts, though, a shrug, a nod and any end to the indecision will do until something better crops up.

After his experiences as frontman with Weddings, Parties, Anything, Melbourne's Mick Thomas made certain his current band, the Sure Thing, would be advertised under a less cumbersome banner.

"It seemed like a good idea in the early '80s when so many bands had odd names," Thomas says.

"We spent months deciding on a logo, too. Then the T-shirts came out and (Pete) Lawler (bass) had changed it. Three months later we changed that again."

But the name stuck, and in America, where irony can be wafer-thin and literalism dominates, the group were doomed.

Says Thomas: "We had to sign a management deal in order to get to the record companies, and they insisted we call ourselves WPA. Unfortunately, those were also the initials of the Works Progress Association, which was a kind of unemployment scheme. We got absolutely nowhere."

In the strange world of band names, everyone probably has their pet hates: Oingo Boingo, Was (Not Was) both rating highly, one imagines, but all-female American rockers Sahara Hotnights did the sensible thing and looked to the form guide. Horses often have delightful monikers for race callers to chew on - such as Sahara Hotnights.

The Beatles? Crap name, really, but it was still a byword for genius, so was never seen as naff, even in the late '60s when bands were being things like the Strawberry Alarm Clock and Moby Grape.

Had the Fab Four not been as unbelievably good and transcended their silly ID, chances are they would be remembered along with Freddie and the Dreamers, or Herman's Hermits as men in stovepipe suits who smiled a lot, sang a bit and vanished.

A real local winner in the name game is the Japanese-Aussie pop-punk trio Mach Pelican. Drummer Toshi Maeda says they wanted to name themselves after some sort of creature.

"When we got to Australia from Japan it was the first time we'd seen anything like a pelican. They looked really strange so we chose Pelican, but because they're so slow we had to find something that described how buzzing and fast our music was to put on top, so we chose Mach, so people thought about speed."

Then there's the Ice Cream Hands, also from Melbourne. They culled their name from the song Flavour of Night by English cult star Robyn Hitchcock.

Songwriter Chuck Jenkins says the band were playing covers, including the Mary Tyler Moore Theme, as the Dishonest Johns. "It was just at the time when grunge was starting to take off," he says, " and we wanted to fly in the face of that so we chose something we thought was cheesy.

"At one point we were going to be Ice Cream Suit, which is a Ray Bradbury short story, but we'd mentioned Ice Cream Hands too, and somebody booked us under that name. As is always the case, you think you'll only use the name once, but then you get another gig and think 'Well, we better not confuse the 10 people who came to see us at the Tote' and suddenly the name's permanent."

The term is apparently yet another euphemism for the messy aftermath of sexual hi-jinx, but Jenkins was oblivious to this and has had to suffer the consequences.

"I think it's used a bit in England," he says. "But it didn't make it out here on the First Fleet. I noticed it in a paragraph of a song on, I think, the first Oasis album."

The Lovin' Spoonful and 10CC are also reputed to reference a man's last moments of sexual interest, while Steely Dan got their name from an apparently inflexible female sex toy.

Sometimes the effect of classic literature results in band names such as the Go Betweens and Holden Caulfield. Augie March came from Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.

The Birthday Party is a neat enough name of its own accord, but Nick Cave was always at pains to explain that the eponymous and ponderous Harold Pinter play was the inspiration.

R.E.M. have used other names just for fun. They do it to test out new material and attract a different listening crowd. Included are Bingo Hand Job, the Neon Mud Men, Fat Drunk and Stupid, and Hornets Attack Victor Mature.

Believe it or not another band called themselves the latter quite independently. (The Hollywood actor was playing golf when the assault took place.)

Bands such as The The and the Pop Group twisted the band name dilemma back on itself. And why can't more acts think of a name like Jesus Chrysler?
Or sound as good as their name, like Sonic Youth, Queens of the Stone Age or Dogs Die in Hot Cars. Actually, the last of those is a rubbish name but the band are so good it just becomes splendid.

One question rarely addressed is whether an inspired moment with a pen and paper can actually result in piquing the interest of a record company, catching the eye of a punter looking at a gig guide or listening to radio and whether the opposite is true - can a shocking name be a kind of instant musical suicide?

Melbourne band booker Mark Burchett thinks that if a band has a bad name, the industry can tend to get a preconceived idea about them. "And then a clever title suggests a band might be worth checking out," he says.

There has been a trend towards simplicity, thankfully, which has spawned such bands as Blur, Pulp, Ride and other Britpop acts. These have been recalibrated by newcomers the Vines, the Hives, the Music, and the Streets to good effect.

Sometimes, however, a perfect synthesis of band tag and band music occurs, the latest example being Melbourne's wildly popular Jet. Just three letters, but perfectly representative of noise, speed and the pure excitement of rock'n'roll.

The members of Ultimate Spinach and Transatlantic Chicken Wicken No. 5 must be shaking their heads and wondering why world domination was never theirs.

Michael Witheford is a Melbourne writer who onced played in a band called The Fish John West Reject.

The Origins of Species

Where bands got their names

Foo Fighters
Slang from World War II, used by US pilots to describe UFOs or weird-looking fireballs they sometimes saw over Germany.

Fountains of Wayne
The name of a New Jersey lawn ornaments garden shop.

The Vines
Unpredictable frontman Craig Nicholls' dad was in a '60s band called the Vynes.

Primal Scream
The first book dealing with primal therapy by Dr Arthur Janov. Evident on some searing early John Lennon solo songs.

The Ramones
Paul McCartney would check himself into hotels during Beatlemania as Paul Ramone. Fab Four fan Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin to his mum) was first to change his surname.

Redd Kross
Tried Red Cross but apparently there was an organisation with that name already that wasn't at all pleased.

Motorhead
Lemmy wanted to call the band "Bastard" but was persuaded to use the title of a song he wrote for his first band, Hawkwind, instead. Motorhead is American slang for someone on speed.

The Fall
Artsy-fartsy "existential" novel by French-Algerian soccer goalie and occasional writer Albert Camus.

The Doors
Apparently inspired by Aldous Huxley's book The Doors Of Perception. They were on drugs that band, you know.

Fine Young Cannibals
A band member opened a movie guide and randomly happened upon the film All the Fine Young Cannibals starring Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood.

Echo and the Bunnymen
Before they found a drummer the band had a drum machine they called Echo.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Because it was better than their first try - Hitler's Underpantz.

Depeche Mode
A French fashion magazine

Why Lennon lives on

2005-08-14T19:27:00.000-07:00

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday August 14 2005
The Observer

John Lennon was the voice of a generation, yet now many
young people cannot identify a picture of him.

On the western edge of New York's Central Park, a sun-dappled
mosaic circle on the ground contains the single word 'Imagine'.
This is the still, calm centre of Strawberry Fields, a
rechristened corner of the park that has become a mecca for
the curious and the faithful who come daily in a constant
stream of murmuring devotion to remember John Lennon, the
city's most famous adopted son.

Today, like every day for the last 14 years, the 'Imagine'
site is tended by a native New Yorker called Gary, a
41-year-old self-appointed keeper of the Lennon flame in
ragged ponytail, baggy shorts and faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
'John came to me in my sleep and told me to do it,'
he says, when I ask why he has covered the circle with petals.
'I do it every day, man. I've done it with rose petals and leaves.
I've done it with pumpkin seeds and pine kernels. One time, when
I couldn't get no flowers in the winter, I covered it with
bagels and green bananas. I think,' he says, without irony,
'that John would have liked that.'

Gary bids me sit on a nearby park bench beside his wife,
who shares his devotion to the late Beatle. 'I'm a hippy, man,'
he says, as if that explains everything, even the bagels. 'I used
to be a regular guy, watching the Monday night football game,
until Howard Cossell came on and told the world John Lennon was
dead. It was too much to take in. Then, years later, John visited
me in a dream and I've been here every day since.'

It is almost 25 years since Lennon was shot dead in front of
his wife Yoko by Mark Chapman, a deranged fan, on the doorstep
of the nearby Dakota building where he lived. It happened on the
night of 8 December, 1980, shocking the world and provoking scenes
of silent, numb grieving among the New Yorkers who had taken Lennon
- the toughest, mouthiest, most cynical, and therefore the most
New York Beatle - to their bosom when he was finally granted full
residency after a long legal battle with US immigration.

As Chapman nears the end of his prison term (he was sentenced
to life but has so far made three unsuccessful parole requests
since becoming eligible in 2000) there is little sense that Lennon
fans in New York have forgiven him for his senseless slaying of the
man who wrote and sang the two most enduring odes to pacifism and
eternal optimism; 'Give Peace A Chance' and 'Imagine', the latter
having now attained the currency of a humanist hymn. 'It would be
safer for everyone, including Mark Chapman, if he stays inside,'
the barman in my New York hotel had reasoned the night before when
I brought up the thorny topic of Chapman's mooted release. 'He would
not last a week on the streets of New York.'

At the 'Imagine' shrine, though, on this humid Sunday in late
July, the talk tends towards the hippy-dippy as Lennon pilgrims
of every age queue to have their picture taken beside Gary's ongoing
artwork. 'It's kind of Buddhist,' ventures one pale and model-thin
teenage girl to another as they stare at the petal-strewn shrine.
I ask them what Lennon means to them. They look bemused. 'He was the
first pop singer who got shot, right?' says the taller of the two,
as if there has been a slew of rock and roll assassinations since.
'He was in the Beatles!' says her friend, 'We learnt about them in
school.' It is my turn to look bemused. 'You learnt about the
Beatles in school?' They both nod. 'When we did the Sixties,' says
the tall one. I feel suddenly ancient as it dawns on me that the
Sixties are now as distant to these girls as the Thirties were
to me at their age.

Do they listen to Beatles music? 'Um, not really,' says the
taller of the two. 'We like 50 Cent - 50 Cent rocks!' They
stroll off, bobbing and nodding to the thump of an invisible
hip-hop beat, the Beatles, the greatest pop group the world
has ever known, a vague historical artefact in their already
overcrowded teenage minds.

It seems that the legend of the Beatles, whose greatness was
of such sustained singularity and inventiveness that nothing
since in pop music has come close, may finally be fading. In
a recent survey by OMM, The Observer's music magazine, 56 per
cent of the music-mad 16- to 24-year-olds polled could not put
a name to a photograph of Lennon. Perhaps, as the baby boomer
generation that spawned him slips into late middle age,
his iconic status too is under threat.

And yet, three years ago, Lennon was the only musician to make
it into the Top 10 Greatest Britons voted for by BBC viewers,
taking his place alongside Churchill, Darwin and Shakespeare.
And back in 1999 his most well-known - and, some would say,
most asinine - song, 'Imagine', was voted the nation's favourite
pop lyric in another BBC poll. As the 25th anniversary of his
death approaches, Lennon is destined once again to be feted as
arguably the greatest rock star of them all, a position that
only the equally iconic figures of Bob Dylan or Elvis Presley
have the historical clout to contest. His commercial resurrection
is already under way in the unlikely environs of Broadway where
a multimillion dollar musical, called simply Lennon, has just
opened with the blessing of Yoko Ono. If it signals Lennon's
late commodification by the showbiz mainstream, it shows too,
in its hamfisted way, how Lennon and his songs defy this kind
of reductionism. 'He's too big for that kind of treatment,'
as Paul McCartney succinctly put it recently.

Among today's pop stars, Lennon remains one of the touchstones of
greatness, both as a songwriter and social commentator. U2's
Bono, lead singer of the biggest pop group since the Beatles,
and one of the few contemporary rock stars to run with Lennon's
notion of the rock lyric as slogan, as a catalyst for capturing,
then igniting, the public consciousness, acknowledges him as
his prime influence. 'I remember listening to the Imagine album
when I was 12,' he tells me from a car en route to a
U2 concert in Madrid. 'It changed the shape of my bedroom, it
changed the shape of my head and it changed the shape of my
life. It just widened the aperture so much it was as if I was
seeing the world for the first time. I learnt off the lyrics
to 'Just Gimme Some Truth' and that, in a way, was the template
for all that followed.'

What Bono admires most is 'that daring-to-fail courage that
often backfired. Even though he had a mouth full of spite and
spleen, he always had a deep vulnerability and a huge heart. He
was a true artist insofar as he wasn't afraid to fail.'

It was the mouth full of spite and spleen, though, that
undoubtedly led Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis to worship
Lennon above all others, Liam once claiming that 'John Lennon
and Johnny Rotten were the only two that mattered in rock and
roll'. Likewise, Primal Scream, a group named in homage to the
self-exorcising therapy invented by Arthur Janov that Lennon
underwent prior to writing his first, and most rawly confessional,
solo album, Plastic Ono Band. 'As a singer he's up there with
Jerry Lee (Lewis) and Little Richard in my book,' says lead
singer Bobby Gillespie, who has just finished recording a
version of Lennon's scathing 'Just Gimme Some Truth'. 'But there
was also this fierce instinctual intelligence at work in his songs,
and in his whole attitude. That's a lethal combination. It gave
the Beatles the edge they needed. He was the abrasive one, the
one you could never quite be sure of.'

It seems then that, even as he is fading into folk memory
like Elvis before him, Lennon lives on, too, though in a
different, perhaps more meaningful, way. Despite the ubiquity
of his most softcore and impossibly utopian ditty, 'Imagine',
as the ultimate Desert Island Disc choice, despite the
mainstream's collective memory of the Beatles as the ultimate
tousle-haired, all-grinning epitome of Swinging Sixties fabness,
despite the happy-clappy inanity of Lennon the musical, there
is something about the least-loveable Beatle that resists our
attempts to posthumously canonise him, something to do with
what that never-quite-abandoned abrasiveness and unpredictability.

Of all the new breed of British pop stars who emerged in
the Sixties, Lennon was the one who harked back most to the
Angry Young Man archetype of Fifties writers like John Osborne
and Keith Waterhouse. His anger was undoubtedly class-based,
a working class Northerner's response to the stultifying
conservatism that held sway in the Fifties and early Sixties.
It ran deeper than that, though. Born John Winston Lennon during
a German air raid on Liverpool in 1940, his childhood was materially
stable but emotionally uncertain. His father, Fred, a seaman, was
only a fleeting presence throughout his youth, and his mother,
Julia, perhaps overwhelmed by responsibility, entrusted her son's
upbringing to his now fabled Aunt Mimi.

His mother's death, in 1958, left the teenage Lennon traumatised
to the point where he never spoke of it, though his anger at the
world was increasingly vented against those he perceived as weaker
and more vulnerable than himself, particularly the disabled, whom
he mocked relentlessly in his jokes and his fitful writings. Though
he would later cloak that anger in an often cynical sense of humour
and a gift for surrealist word play, Lennon was easily the most
volatile British pop star, at least until that other John - Lydon
aka Rotten - came spitting and scowling out of north London
squat-land in the late Seventies.

He also possessed in the early Sixties' the first credible white
rock'n'roll voice - what the late Beatles historian Ian MacDonald
memorably described as 'that brassy Northern roar, flecked with
bluesy moans'. You can hear echoes of his style in every disaffected
rock singer since, from the guttural whine of Kurt Cobain to the
more obvious Lennonesque signature that Liam Gallagher stamps on
every Oasis song.

'In a very real way, Lennon was the first modern pop star,'
elaborates the music writer and historian of punk, Jon Savage, who
is currently writing a history of youth culture. 'He had the anger
and drive of the misfit, the outsider, that is such a key element
in the defining pop music of the last 50 years. He grew up in a
Liverpool that was nowhere really, and in a postwar environment that
did not suit his personality, nor value his particular kind of
natural intelligence. That drive was unstoppable, though, and it
helped the Beatles break down all those doors, and create that tidal
wave of energy that swept all before it.'

While the Beatles are generally accepted as the greatest pop
group ever by critics and public alike, Savage sees their importance
as much more than simply musical. 'I don't think it's overstating
the case to say they almost single-handedly kick-started the
eradication of Victorianism in Britain. Put simply, the Beatles
didn't just change pop music, they changed everything.'

It has been 35 years since the Beatles' great adventure ended
not with a bang but a protracted whimper, their messy and protracted
break-up signalling the death knell for all they stood for: the
bright, brief flaring of pop as the defining cultural determinant
of the second half of the 20th century, and the attendant, and
equally brief, flowering of a radical, countercultural community
whose rise and fall was soundtracked by their songs. In short,
the Beatles were pop in excelsis: young, innocent, and cool,
then brilliantly, beautifully ambitious, every record a leap of
faith and experimentation, waited for with bated breath by an
audience that grew with them, and came to expect nothing more from
them than inspired pop perfection.

Because of that, Lennon was the first rock star to grapple with
the often emasculating contradictions of the job: the tricky
tightrope walk between celebrity and street credibility; the
conundrum of how to sing with conviction about rebellion and
injustice while inured to both by lavish and indulgent lifestyle.
'John Lennon offered an insoluble paradox,' wrote George Melly in
one of the few trenchant pieces published in the immediate wake of
Lennon's death. 'His huge fortune reduced the value of his
gestures (he and Yoko once arrived in a white Rolls Royce to
fast on the steps of a church), and yet without his fame those
gestures would have passed unnoticed.'

From the early protest folk of Dylan to the grand philanthropic
gestures of Live Aid, that same paradox has been played out
again and again with the same uneasy undertow: can the
self-centredness and egoism of celebrity really be aligned with
genuine political idealism? The political Lennon did his best,
and more than most, to straddle the contradictions of his celebrity.
In the early Beatles days he was a natural iconoclast and rebel,
constantly undercutting the clean-cut image insisted on by their
manager, Brian Epstein. As MacDonald pointed out in his final
book, The People's Music, Lennon's onstage persona - 'legs planted
wide ... knees bent, grinning lasciviously as he strummed' -
was 'defensive to the point of belligerence'. In nearly every bit
of early footage of the group playing live, Lennon is the one
undercutting the established performing ritual, mugging for the
cameras, pulling silly faces and acting the monkey between songs.
It is as if he already senses - and wants to alert us, the audience,
to - the absurdity of his calling.

Though they were all natural wits, Lennon was easily the edgiest,
most unpredictable Beatle, the one, as MacDonald puts it, 'who
first knocked the door of propriety off its hinges'. It was Lennon
who famously quipped during the Beatles' Royal Variety Performance
in 1963: 'Will all the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands?
The rest of you just rattle your jewellery.' It was Lennon who sent
back his MBE. And Lennon, too, who, at the height of Beatlemania,
offered in interview the offending words, 'We're more popular than
Jesus now', a self-evident truth that precipitated an orgy of record
burning and recrimination across the American heartlands.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Lennon who first tired of the
prison of the Beatles, embarking with his usual all-consuming
zeal on a new adventure, celebrated in a Beatles song, 'The Ballad
of John and Yoko', in 1969, even as its very public acknowledgement
signalled the group's end.

In a way, though, Lennon had begun retreating from the Beatles - or,
at least, their confining celebrity - at the very height of their
popularity. In the mid-Sixties, after the group had stopped touring
to concentrate on their groundbreaking studio performances, he would
retreat between sessions to the big house in Weybridge he shared with
his first wife, Cynthia, and their young son, Julian. There, he
existed in a state of protracted domestic enervation, either staring
out of the window in a stoned haze or playing with the expensive
gadgets that littered every room.

'John's record for not speaking, just doing nothing and not
communicating to anyone is three days,' wrote the Beatles' first
biographer, Hunter Davis in 1968. 'I'm an expert at it,' Lennon told
him. 'I can get up and start doing nothing straight away. I just sit
on the step and look into space until it's time to go to bed.'

Lennon's retreat inside himself was precipitated by his regular
intake of LSD, which he took almost daily throughout 1967. His
mental state was fragile going on psychotic, and for a while he
thought himself the reincarnation of Jesus. Yoko, as he constantly
reminded the world when it blamed her for the break-up of the Beatles
and his marriage, saved his life. After they met at one of her
experimental art shows in London she became the new focus of all
his energies, replacing even McCartney as his creative foil.
Tellingly, his nickname for Yoko was 'Mother', and in a very real
way her smothering devotion provided the all-consuming emotional
environment he had craved since the loss of his mother.

Yoko, as MacDonald notes, 'pulled John out of self-absorption,
introduced him to political art'. The results of this newfound
late radicalism were mixed. They famously spent their seven-day
honeymoon in bed for world peace, while the world's media beat a
path to their Amsterdam hotel room, mistakenly believing they were
going to make love on camera. The 'bed-in' was mocked relentlessly
in the British press, where John and Yoko provided consistently
entertaining copy as pop's reigning odd couple, but there was an
underlying air of surrealism and even self-mockery in many of their
pranks that went unnoticed.

In the early Seventies, Lennon embraced a more confrontational,
and, given his commitment to peace, contradictory, radicalism. It
produced some of his finest post-Beatles songs, including the
anthemic 'Power to the People' and the incendiary 'Attica State',
but led to some ill-advised liaisons with the more extreme end of
late-Sixties/ early Seventies' activism, most notably the Black
Panthers and the Yippies - basically radicalised hippies seeking
anarchist revolution. He even turned up, with Yoko in tow, at a
'Troops Out of Ireland' anti-internment rally in London in August
1971, where, unbelievably, he held up a placard that read, 'Victory
to the IRA Against British Imperialism'. This, just a few months
before 'Imagine' was released. (The following year he released
'The Luck of the Irish', a hamfisted protest song that included the
non-ironic line, 'If you had the luck of the Irish, you'd wish
you were English instead'. It was outdone in its radical posturing
only by McCartney's 'Give Ireland Back to The Irish', Wings'
debut single from the same year.)

Lennon, then, more than any other pop star before or since,
was a mess of contradictions. It is easy in these post-ideological
times to poke fun at his invariably short-lived commitment to a
variety of often seemingly paradoxical causes, just as it must be
difficult for a teenager of today to even imagine a time when a
rock star could be so politically active as to be perceived as a
threat by the FBI. But Lennon was that rock star, even if he
admitted later, with his characteristic candour, that he had
never really been convinced by any of the causes that claimed him
as a figurehead.

The cruellest irony of his sudden and brutal death was that
it occurred at a pivotal moment when Lennon seemed finally to
be making peace with the world, and, more pertinently, with
himself. He had come though his fabled 'lost weekend', which
began in 1973 when Yoko threw him out because of his drinking
and philandering, and continued over several wild, bottle-strewn
months, often in the company of celebrated rock reprobates like
Keith Moon of the Who and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson.

Post-reconciliation, though, John and Yoko seemed stronger, more
committed to each other than to their joint career as artistic
provocateurs.

'He was calmer and more focused than I had ever seen him,' says
photographer Bob Gruen, who befriended Lennon in what were to
become his final years in New York. 'His whole thrust in life
was towards the notion of family, towards his wife, Yoko, and
their son, Sean. That was the message he was about to take to
the world - that after all the questing for the big answers he
had found real peace and love at home.'

Whether or not this would have made for great music is hardly
the issue here; Lennon, like McCartney, had by then made more
than enough great music, had redefined the parameters of pop
music like no other songwriters. What Lennon might have found,
though, had he been allowed to grow up finally, and grow old
gracefully, was the kind of peace and contentment that had eluded
him for most of his short, angry inspired life.

'Though he was a hero to many, his whole point was not heroic,'
says Bono. 'He hadn't always been the man he wanted to be, yet
he kept struggling to redefine himself and to find himself. His
real strength was his raw honesty and vulnerability. This was
the guy who sang "Help", don't forget. He dared to bare his soul,
and he dared to fail. That takes real courage.'

Perhaps it's time we remembered John Lennon for what he really
was: not just the first and greatest pop star but also the most
vulnerable and messed-up. The iconoclast who dared imagine what
global fame, useless of itself, might be used for. The upstart
who stole the world, and tried, in his impulsively tough and
compulsively tender way, to make sense of it. And, most courageous
of all, to change it.

'John Lennon: The New York Years' by Bob Gruen is published on 1
October by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

The Beasts of Bourbon

2005-08-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

The Beasts of Bourbon
Reviewer Martin Boulton
August 15, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/reviews/beasts-return-with-menace/2005/08/14/1123957943758.html

Hi-Fi Bar, city, August 13

To celebrate the release of their live album Low Life, the Beasts of Bourbon's show on Saturday night was typically menacing and crammed with tunes they have written or made their own over 20 years of delivering scowling, intimidating rock'n'roll.

Dressed in a black T-shirt and looking ready for a fight, Tex Perkins prowled around the stage, glaring at the audience during Bad Revisited, most of the time looking like he would rather be anywhere else than having to entertain a full house of fans.

But Perkins is no ordinary performer, and years of strutting on stages here and overseas has taught him and his buddies how to build a performance.

After breaking his back last year, Brian Hooper looked comfortable with his bass guitar slung low. Guitarist Spencer P. Jones went about his business, puffing away now and then on a ciggie, while Charlie Owen (guitar) and Tony Pola (drums) looked and played like they had been in the band since day one.

By the time Jones was strumming the opening to Ride On, AC/DC's classic tale of broken promises and broken hearts, Perkins had spotted a bloke in the crowd who must have looked a little hot, so he emptied his beer on the guy's head.

For a moment or two the area around the front of the stage was a tinderbox as Perkins gestured to the slightly soggy punter to climb up and do something about it. The band played on, Hooper grinning at the sight of it all and clearly glad to be back.

Just Right and Black Milk sounded as good as ever, Perkins showing he has lost none of his enthusiasm for songs born out of what was originally a side project.

Drop Out, from 1984's Axeman's Jazz album, likewise has lost none of its appeal over the years with its lazy, this-song-could-fall-over-at-any-second guitar sound drooling off the stage with the same appeal it has always had.

After a short break they swaggered back. By this stage Tex looked like there was nowhere he would rather be, and punched out Let's Get Funky, Saturated and Hard For You before leaving the crowd battered and better for the experience.

Even the guy wearing the beer would be happy with that.

The coolest band in the world

2005-07-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

The coolest band in the world
By Guy Blackman
July 31, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/icelandic-cool/2005/07/28/1122143956416.html

They sing in a made-up language, their songs don't really have titles, their videos are designed to confront. Guy Blackman speaks with Iceland's Sigur Ros.

The success of Icelandic quartet Sigur Ros seems a very 21st century phenomenon. Their music is epic, sprawling and experimental, much of it sung in an invented language called Hopelandic, but major labels in America practically fell over each other trying to sign Sigur Ros when they emerged into the English-speaking world five years ago. Their third and most recent album was named ( ), comprised entirely of untitled tracks, yet the band have sold more than one million CDs worldwide. They make music videos featuring mentally handicapped dancers, gay adolescent soccer players and post-nuclear fallout children, but nonetheless rub shoulders with Hollywood A-list celebrities and chart-topping rock stars.

It's hard to imagine these insular, boyish men - vocalist Jonsi Birgisson, keyboardist Kjartan Sveinson, bassist Georg Holm and drummer Orri Dyrason - enjoying the same popularity in a pre-internet (or pre-Radiohead) world. But that's not to take anything away from Sigur Ros.

The band share a deep, almost telepathic bond based on more than a decade of playing together, and their unclassifiable music reflects this, with echoing guitars, glacial strings and Birgisson's high, plaintive vocals evocatively conjuring up the long dark winters and treeless plains of their homeland.

It also makes for perfect soundtrack fodder. Much of Sigur Ros' international profile has come from the inclusion of their music in such high-profile films as the 2001 Tom Cruise vehicle Vanilla Sky and Wes Anderson's recent quirky comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
"I remember one guy coming up to us at a party in Hollywood," says bemused bassist Holm, who speaks better English than his bandmates and so handles the bulk of their interviews. "We were having a drink and he asked us, 'Who are you?' and when we told him, 'We're a band and we had this song in this one film', he didn't even say goodbye, he just left. He was probably a scriptwriter and he wanted to find a producer, or something like that."

In their own recording studio, a converted indoor swimming pool in a village just outside of Reykjavik, the band have a wall that they call their Wall of Shame. On it are photos of themselves with various celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and Courtney Love, and a framed letter from Metallica's Lars Ulrich, written after he came to a Sigur Ros show in 2001, which reads: "Thank you, thank you, thank you! We are in the studio right now struggling to make some sort of album. I'm going to go back after this completely inspired." Holm says the wall's name is just a joke, and there's really no shame attached, but he's not entirely convincing.

Other celebrity Sigur Ros admirers include the X-Files' Gillian Anderson, who wrote glowingly about them in her online journal after attending a concert, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, who chose Sigur Ros as the soundtrack for the birth of their daughter Apple.

Pretty good work for a band who began in high school in 1994 as little other than a harmless distraction from their studies. They named themselves in honour of Birgisson's baby sister Sigurros (meaning "victory rose" in Icelandic), born just a few days before the schoolmates made their first recording in a cheap studio and cemented their future as a band.

Excited about capturing their first ever song on tape, the teenage band went straight from the studio to the house of Thor Eldon, former guitarist for Bjork's old band the Sugarcubes, and owner of a record label called Smekkleysa (Bad Taste). "He called us back a few days later and said, 'I'd really like to make an album with you, or at least I'd like to put this song on a compilation I'm producing'," says Holm. "So we jumped up and down for joy, and thought, 'We've made it!' Especially because we had no expectations, we just liked making the music."

The band released an album on Smekkleysa in 1997, but the first anyone outside of Iceland heard of Sigur Ros was when their second album, Agtis Byrjun (translation: a good beginning), was released in the UK in 2000. But the storm of critical praise and listener adulation following its release on influential independent Fat Cat Records travelled so quickly across the Atlantic that by the end of the year Sigur Ros were the subject of a fierce bidding war in the US, with major labels promising untold riches and fame to the shy foursome.

In the end they signed a deal with MCA (now absorbed into Geffen Records) because their deal offered the band the most artistic freedom. According to Holm, Sigur Ros are determined to answer to no one - within reason. "Musically and artistically we have 100 per cent freedom to do what we want," he says. "The only thing, which is basically what every record contract has, is that there has to be a certain quality to it. We can't just fart in a microphone and give that to them as a record. That's not the right thing to do."

In a world where record companies seem more and more to own, and even create, their artists, Sigur Ros' self-mastery might seem a remarkable achievement. But Holm sees it as nothing more than a reward for persistence, and for knowing what you want and being prepared to fight for it. "I don't think bands really try hard enough to have it," he says. "I think they give up to a certain degree, and I also think that a lot of people just don't care, they just want to become a famous star or something, they'll just sign whatever crap deal they get and become property of a record company. I think anything you want is achievable, even in the music industry."

He hopes that Sigur Ros can act as a kind of role model for aspiring unsigned artists, showing them that it is possible to make music within the major-label industry without having to compromise, although he admits that a certain amount of flexibility is necessary. "We try to make as few big compromises on our side as we can," he says. "Sometimes we make a small compromise to be able to get the big things we want from the record company."

Despite their singular creative focus and intensity, Sigur Ros are not entirely po-faced artists. Holm reveals that singer Birgisson (who came out to his bandmates after they had been playing together for about a year, although Holm says he had already suspected he was gay) is a big fan of Savage Garden, and the band have previously admitted that their favourite part of winning an MTV Award for "Artistic Achievement In Music" in 2001 was getting to meet Beyonce.

But Holm himself is not completely at ease with some aspects of popular culture. He does not understand modern R'n'B, and gets unexpectedly heated on the subject of popular music videos. "I think they are an underestimated medium," he says. "Most music channels will just play R'n'B or hip-hop videos, and they're almost all the same. It's always some guy in a baseball cap in a club trying to pick up a girl! They don't tell you anything. They are a waste of your time, basically, a waste of everybody's time. I think music videos should tell a story."

Sigur Ros' three videos to date have all had fairly carefully constructed narratives, in contrast to the free-form music they accompany. The first, for the 1999 single Svefn-G-Englar, featured Perlan, a dance troupe of young men and women with Down Syndrome, dressed as angels dancing across a field. The second, Virar Vel Til Loftarasa from Agtis Byrjun, was the tale of two boys finding the flower of romance during a soccer match, much to the horror of the assembled onlookers. The most recent video, for Untitled #1, from ( ), presents a group of school children playing in gas masks in a bleak, radioactive landscape.

Each video has generated a degree of controversy, which can't help but suggest a deliberate intent to shock on Sigur Ros' part. Holm isn't so sure. "Yes and no," he says. "I guess the last two videos shocked people - well, actually, all of them did - but they were never really meant to shock. They were just meant to be short, beautiful stories."

Sigur Ros are definitely hoping their new album will shock, or at least surprise, their listeners. Self-professed perfectionists, they have been holed up in their studio for the better part of two years working on the follow up to 2002's ( ), and conjecture about a possible new direction has dominated fan forums web-wide. The album is now finished and scheduled for a September release, under the name Takk ... (Icelandic for "thanks").

Holm is wary of giving away too much about the upcoming release, but does reveal that the vocals are in proper Icelandic this time, and the tracks have titles. "We're really excited about this record, and we want other people to feel as excited about it," he says. "So we sort of want it to be a surprise. It's really good, though, better than anything we've done before."

Sigur Ros play Hamer Hall on Wednesday. All tickets are sold.

One of a kind

2005-07-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

One of a kind

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/one-of-a-kind/2005/07/27/1122143909900.html

July 29, 2005

It's the unremarkable things that often make a live concert legendary, writes Patrick Donovan.

Standing stage-side as wild man Iggy Pop brought in the new year of 1998 at the Falls Festival in the hills at the back of Lorne was the best show I have experienced.

Part of that thrill came from having co-managed the tour for Iggy, his family and band for the preceding week, and seeing him transform from mellow elder statesman of rock, thrilled at discovering old-timers rolling their arms under on the lawn-bowls green adjacent to his hotel room, to primal party animal inviting dozens of rabid fans to invade his stage.

But I would be prepared to instantly age another 20 years and forgo my Australian citizenship to have been in the audience at the Cincinnati Pop Festival in 1970, when the young and buffed Iggy stepped off the stage and rode across the assembled throng on to a sea of hands, having first covered himself in peanut butter, while his band the Stooges cranked out a gnarly metallic rhythm reminiscent of cars being eaten by a Detroit car-processing plant.

What factors go into making a legendary gig? In Iggy's case, it was power, danger spontaneity, and a sense of occasion. Other factors include the venue, the quality of the sound mix, your expectations plus those of the mates you're with, your (and the band's) state of sobriety (or otherwise), and retrospective feelings of nostalgia.

For some, nothing beats securing good seats with an uninhibited view of the stage. But often the most memorable gigs are not seen, but experienced, flailing about or grooving along with loved ones or strangers. The best sets I saw the Stones and Bob Dylan play were at the Rod Laver Arena with a great view of the performance, but they didn't make my top 10 gigs.

The Stones at the Enmore Theatre (10 rows from the front, on the dance floor, when AC/DC's Angus and Malcolm Young joined them on stage for a blues jam), and Dylan at the Mercury Lounge, were crowded and uncomfortable and most people queued for hours to get in, but they were once-in-a-lifetime experiences. It's certainly sexier dancing to the Stones' R&B romp Midnight Rambler in a mosh pit, but they'll throw you out for doing that at the Rod Laver Arena.

Even better still, I imagine, would have been to see the Stones in their prime with an awesome support: at Royal Albert Hall with the Beatles in 1964; the Rock 'n' Roll Circus extravaganza; when they supported Little Richard in 1963, or perhaps the ultimate - when Stevie Wonder supported the Stones on their Exile on Main Street tour.

But there's no doubt some gigs look better on paper than in reality.

The Bob Marley and the Wailers/Sly and the Family Stone US tour sounds like a groover's dream, but reports suggest there was tension in the air as coked-up funk fans heckled the Jamaicans to speed up the tempo.

On paper, the recent Nick Cave/Cat Power tour looked like it might make my Top 10 gig list, but the venues weren't quite right, Cave's gospel singers didn't sound as good live as they did on the album, and Cat Power, who has an aversion to crowds and lights, was not the right choice for support.

I still rate the Seeds show at the Collingwood Town Hall, around Henry's Dream time, as their best gig that I have seen.

Australian rock traditionally lends itself to wild, dangerous, passionate performances - often in a crowded, sweaty pub with the possibility that deranged singers could throw themselves at you at any moment.

Midnight Oil, the Beasts of Bourbon, Cold Chisel, the Powdermonkeys, the Eastern Dark, and X have all played such shows, while the Drones and the Darling Downs are two bands on the circuit that provide regular, thrilling moments of transcendence.

Some of the best shows are enhanced by the relaxed vibe of a festival. The cumulative effect of catching Soundgarden, the Ramones, Bjork, Smashing Pumpkins, Teenage Fanclub and the Breeders at the 1994 Big Day Out; or James Brown, Dr John, Steve Earle, Solomon Burke, Pharoah Sanders, the Black Keys, Toots and the Maytals and Burning Spear at last year's Bluesfest, is almost overwhelming.

But nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. It's easy to assume that gen Xers and Ys have missed the boat. But were the 1960s and '70s really that good? Or are they just recalled through smudged, rose-coloured glasses?

Our generation certainly adds to the mystique as we pass on stories we have heard about AC/DC playing at your uncle's Glen Waverley school dance, Led Zeppelin at Kooyong or crazed shows by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band and Frank Zappa and the Mothers.
There are few contemporary acts in my wish list, but it's because most of them have toured Australia recently.

And there have been a handful of gigs in the past few years - Nick Cave, Gillian Welch, Neil Young, George Clinton - that people swear changed their lives.

Of the current crop, Outkast would have been a mind-blowing experience, and the longer Lucinda Williams puts off touring Australia again, and the more I listen to her wild live album recorded at San Francisco's Fillmore Theatre, the more I long to see her perform.

It would have been thrilling to see train-wreck acts such as New Order when they were young and reckless, but reports suggest they are playing the best gigs of their lives into their 40s and 50s, now they are sober, can remember their songs and can stand up for more than 45 minutes at a time.

Considering the tyranny of distance, it's amazing that Australia can attract so many big names on tour. But sometimes Australia's geographical isolation can have a negative impact on a show.
At 2003's bluesfest, Buddy Guy refused to play his recent songs, assuming that a blues-ignorant Australian crowd would prefer hearing his impressions of Hendrix and B.B. King. (But blues fans still talk about Guy's show at Richmond's Old Greek Theatre in 1987, when his scintillating, other-worldly guitar playing sounded like what you imagine Jimi Hendrix would have sounded like were he alive today.)

We will never have the chance to see the types of shows that happen when musicians come together in musical hubs such as London or New York.

Several weeks ago I was in London when Patti Smith curated the Meltdown Festival, which culminated in a re-creation of her classic album Horses with the Velvet Underground's John Cale, plus a tribute to Jimi Hendrix and William Blake with Jeff Beck, Flea and Joanna Newsom.
I also saw Television, who have never played in Australia. But watch out for expectations - my fear before the gig was of having to ask for my money back if they didn't play their 10-minute epic Marquee Moon.

Sticky's top 10 gigs:

1. Iggy Pop at the Falls Festival, 1998
2. The Rolling Stones at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, 2003
3. Bob Dylan at the Mercury Lounge, 1998
4. Gillian Welch and David Rawlins at the Forum, 2004
5. Neil Young at Myer Music Bowl, 2003
6. Funkadelic at the Metro, 2002
7. Beastie Boys and Helmet at Festival Hall, 1994
8. Ministry at Big Day Out, 1995
9. Dirty Three at Meredith Music Festival, 2004.
10. Dead Moon and the Powdermonkeys at the Corner, 2003

Sticky's gig wish list:

· Iggy and the Stooges at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, 1970
· Rock'n'Roll Circus, 1968· The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, 1964
· James Brown at the Apollo Theatre, 1962
· Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, 1968
· Elvis comeback tour, 1968
· Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, 1969
· Nina Simone at Freddie Jett's Pied Piper club, 1969
· Houndog Taylor at Florence's Lounge, Chicago, 1970
· John Lee Hooker, Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan, Austin, Texas, 1972
· Led Zeppelin at Kooyong, 1972
· Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tour, 1973
· The Clash supporting the Sex Pistols, 1976
· Bob Marley and the Wailers and Sly and the Family Stone US tour, 1975
· Sex Pistols last show, Winterland, 1978
· The Clash's first US show, Berkeley Community Theatre, 1979, with Bo Diddley opening
· Black Flag at Mabuhay Gardens, 1980
· AC/DC, Myer Music Bowl, 1981
· Cold Chisel at Mawson, near Swansea.
· Toots and the Maytals with the Ramones, plus Michael Winslow from Police Academy as MC, doing Led Zep and reggae impressions in New York, circa 1980
· Nirvana supporting Sonic Youth in 1991
· Outkast, Atlanta, 2004· Lucinda Williams at the Fillmore, 2004.

Homesick with The Waifs

2005-07-22T18:48:00.000-07:00

Hello again,

I had another homesick moment last week. I went to see an Aussie band at The Commodore Ballroom called The Waifs, from Perth. (www.thewaifs.com) They're a five-piece, and have been around for about 12 years now, their music a rootsy-folky-country and mainly acoustic brand of music, with sweet, sentimental songs about life, love and being on the road. They've been slogging it out on the road in Australia and around the world solidly almost non-stop in that time, for a long time playing to small pubs and hippy folk festivals, slowly but surely gaining a reputation for giving amazing shows and building a loyal, if small following. Only in the last 2-3 years or so, with the release of 'Up All Night' have they been making serious inroads into the national Aussie psyche and gaining popularity overseas.

I saw them once before in 2003 at the Womadelaide World Music and Dance Festival in Adelaide and was blown away. They then came across my path again in Dublin last year, and now here in Vancouver. They get around.

Anyway, a funny little story about this band. They had released a single from "Up All Night" called "London Still", a song about living in London and being homesick for Australia - a song that thousands of Aussies can relate to no doubt! I first heard this song at Womad, and hundreds of times on the radio in the ensuing months right up until I left on this trip in July 2003. It's such a sweet, melancholy song, that while still living in Melbourne, it made me want to be in London so that I could be homesick for Australia. And every time I heard the song it literally sent a chill up my spine, and nearly brought a tear to my eye. Every time. Strange huh?
Then in Dublin I came across the album again (thanks Kita!), and proceeded to be homesick, substituting London for Dublin in the lyrics.

So, when I saw the gig announced in the street press back in April, I snapped up tickets immediately. Australian patriotism is rife, everywhere you go if there is an Aussie band or Aussie-related event happening, we come out in droves. Arriving at The Commodore, you'd swear to God you were in Sydney, what with 95% of the accents you heard being the distinct twang typical of Aussies. It was great, but it did make me feel homesick.

Since I've been away from Melbourne, the following of The Waifs seemed to have grown manifestly in size - apparently they're HUGE now, thanks to the success of "Up All Night" and high-rotation of that album on youth radio network Triple J. So, when they came on stage, the noise and cheering was fever pitch and deafening. The show opened on a sombre note tho, happening on the same day as the London Bombings, and so the band began with a slow, sad and reflective version of London Still. No speech or comment, just the song and a quiet 'thank-you' afterwards. That was all that was needed to be said on the matter. On with the show. the show must go on, as those in London stoically proved.

Needless to say, despite the two girls, Vicki and Donna, both being heavily pregnant, they put on a huge and awesome performance, throwing in a lot of old crowd favourites, mixing up the slow songs with the faster finger-picking guitar tunes, road testing some new songs and whipping the crowd into a lather with a barnstorming version of their classic "Crazy Train". The crowd response was loud and long, and the band seemed genuinely overwhelmed and touched by the energy feeding back at them..."Oh gee, thanks guys!". No, Thank You. Awesome.

Cheers, Tony

Vanishing act - Paul Kelly

2005-07-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

Vanishing act

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/13/1120934299541.html

By Michael Dwyer
July 15, 2005

Paul Kelly

Why Paul Kelly thinks the music of his youth has plenty in common with punk.
Paul Kelly slips the double vinyl album from its plastic sleeve and opens the gatefold cover. He smiles a distant smile. "There's Woody (Guthrie)," he says after a while. "There's Hank (Williams), Buddy Holly ..."

He doesn't remark on his younger self in the collage of faces adorning his classic album of '86, Gossip. It's almost like he isn't there. He drinks in heroes, friends and memories for a minute, closes the cover, writes the fan's name at the top and hesitates. "Good luck," he writes at last, "Paul Kelly."

Thanks. Anyone proposing to retrace the great Australian songwriter's journey so far probably needs it. Never an open book, Kelly has been slowly disappearing between the lines of his songs for years, a vanishing act that reaches another misty peak with Foggy Highway.

It's his second bluegrass album, following his '99 collaboration with Uncle Bill, Smoke, and it's no accident the two titles share an allusion to the veils that sometimes obscure reality from perception. "I was gonna call this one Fog," he says with a grin.

A compact figure in a big, black leather coat, Kelly is an affable if concise conversationalist who generally prefers not to meet the press. For years, he's expressed himself better through open letters to fans and media.

In his latest letter, he's expansive about what attracted him to bluegrass as a teenager. He was struck by the keening voices and strange melancholy of the Stanley Brothers and Dock Boggs, he writes, but moreover by the apparent distance between singer and song. These people "sang in voices distinctly their own but often from fantastical points of view," he writes. "Dick Justice sang from inside the head of a little bird that had witnessed a murder.

"Twentieth century singers sang as doomed 18th-century ship captains, 19th-century outlaws, ghosts or moles in the ground. Rock and pop music, a more self-expressive form where the song was usually about the singer, seemed quite limited to me in comparison."

When Kelly made his first Countdown appearance with the Dots 25 years ago, it was with pop's unambiguous first-person pronoun to the fore - even if his first Top 40 title, (I Wanna Be Like) Billy Baxter, offers an amusing indication of his escapist tendencies in hindsight.

Then as now, he held dear the more mysterious music he'd heard in the folk clubs of Adelaide and the country pubs in the foothills above Perth. Or, as he notes more poetically in his letter, "the country of pop was where I took up residence, but like an immigrant I always held onto those first songs, the dark, unruly hymns of home".

"When I was 19, 20, learning guitar, I was mainly learning folk songs and country songs," he recollects today. "Bluegrass songs would often prick my ears 'cause they seemed to come from somewhere so alien.

"I don't go to a lot of bluegrass festivals but I know it sees itself as being a bit outside of mainstream country. From what I know about the way it was born and developed, there seems to be a lot of parallels to punk music. When bluegrass first hit, jaws were dropping because they played so fast. Punk was like that too. I find it fascinating 'cause it's very raw but it takes a lot of skill to play."

Hence the Stormwater Boys, the band of sharp-pickers Kelly assembled for Foggy Highway. Their harmonies and musicianship are striking from the off, but the album's unique atmosphere is due at least as much to the author's stories. He acknowledges he selected his old songs and tailored his new ones to fit a certain mood, roughly in keeping with the album's title.

"The thing that really struck me when I saw (Joel and Ethan Coen's bluegrass-soaked movie) O Brother Where Art Thou? was that nearly all the songs had a yearning for another place," he says.

"Religion is big part of it but it's not always couched in religious terms. Big Rock Candy Mountain is a fantasy about a place where the cops have wooden legs; 'I'm weary, let me rest'; I'll Fly Away ... so much of that music springs from this longing for another place apart from this hardscrabble life."

It's tempting to conclude that Kelly uses the bluegrass tradition to pursue a similar yearning, the better to leave behind his own somewhat reticent persona for the attitudes and identities of fictitious characters. He recalls the first time he successfully shed his own skin to sing from a woman's point of view as a turning point in his work.

"When I wrote Sweet Guy, I was doing it with the Coloured Girls but I was trying to give it away to female singers I knew. It was (that band's late guitarist) Steve Connolly who convinced me to sing it myself, 'cause he had a lot of folk music in his background, too. It felt a bit odd at first, but once I'd done that song I knew I could do it again."

Everything's Turning to White, sung from the point of view of a shell-shocked wife in a short story by Raymond Carver, was easier by virtue of its more folky structure, Kelly says. Soon his audience was accustomed to the range of disguises that make his songs so much larger than his own slight and grizzled form.

Think of the prison inmate writing home for Christmas in How To Make Gravy, for example, or the bereft refugee in detention in Emotional.

The Billy Leach tent boxer in Rally Round the Drum is one of several old characters who reappear on Foggy Highway. Perhaps the most spellbinding is They Thought I Was Asleep, told from the point of view of a child in the back of a car, deeply shaken by the sound of his parents sobbing.

"I don't know what mum's crying about," the writer shrugs, "and I don't know if everything was all right in the end. Mick Albeck, the fiddle player, was funny 'cause he was asking, 'What did happen?' I had to say, 'I'm sorry, I don't know'."

With its roots in Bible Belt American folk and its occasional southern gothic overtones, Foggy Highway shares some common ground with another great Australian storyteller. Nick Cave, though, for all his brilliant dramatic devices, still has trouble extricating his songs from accusations of autobiography.

He openly lamented as much in the wake of his No More Shall We Part album of '01: "I find it a failure in my songwriting," he said, "that the songs can't exist without people immediately thinking, 'Oh shit, what's happened here? The Sorrowful Wife? Things are going wrong in his marriage!'"

Cave added: "The songs that I like of other people's, that really touch me, they're usually ones that sound as if they're about something that's true; a truth that reveals something about the artist."

Kelly thinks about this for a moment.

"You can tell a story that resonates with you, even though it's not your story," he says.
"That way you sing it with truth, perhaps. People don't tell the truth about themselves anyway, so who's to say when they write a song about breaking up with their wife that you're hearing the truth?"

As for his own vanishing act, Kelly thinks it may be due to a smaller stage presence to begin with. "I think Nick's much more of a performer and I don't think I am," he says. "He's fervent and he's passionate when he sings, so people will think 'Oh, it must be about him'.

"I tend to be a bit more detached, maybe. I'm not a natural performer. I've got better at it just through doing it a lot and gaining confidence, but I only became a performer because I'd written things and the best way of getting them out there was to sing them myself."

For the first time, his elusive streak extends to abdicating all instruments to his band on Foggy Highway, but rest assured he'll emerge from the mist when he hits home state stages next week.

"I still don't have very good technique for bluegrass," he insists, "'cause on a guitar you've really got to nail those alternating bass lines and stuff like that, so that's why I didn't play on the record.

"I'll play live, though, 'cause I can get away with that."

Hi, lonesome!
A lightning-fast history of bluegrass:

1939 - High-harmonising hillbilly Bill Monroe names his Blue Grass Boys after his "bluegrass state" of Kentucky. Mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass soon to be reclassified as lethal instruments.

1946 - North Carolina banjo player Earl Scruggs ups the pace with a new, triple-fingered picking style.

1948 - Old Boys Scruggs and Lester Flatt form the Foggy Mountain Boys.

1954 - Elvis Presley cuts Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky as first Sun Records B-side.

1962 - Flatt and Scruggs' Ballad of Jed Clampett graces US TV comedy The Beverly Hillbillies.

1967 - Flatt and Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Breakdown makes bank-robbing fun in Bonnie & Clyde.

1972 - Eric Weissberg's and Steve Mandel's Dueling Banjos appears in Deliverance; becomes international shorthand for "Uh-oh, inbred yokels".

1980s - Former Scruggs and Ralph Stanley sideman Ricky Scaggs spearheads new Nashville traditionalist movement.

2001 - O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack shifts millions worldwide, great news for old timers (including the Stanley Brothers) and alleged "newgrass" players (including Alison Krauss).

2004 - Gillian Welch almost sparks mob lynching when a hapless Melbourne fan makes a floorboard creak during a performance.

Paul Kelly and the Stormwater Boys play the Palais in Hepburn Springs on Wednesday and the Athenaeum on Thursday and Friday. Foggy Highway is out through EMI.

Nooooooooo!!!!

2005-07-08T16:19:00.000-07:00

Heaven or Las Vegas?

www.guardian.co.uk
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

Laura Barton on what the closure of the world's most famous punk-rock club, CBGB's, says about the state of New York's live music scene.

Friday July 08 2005

The walls used to drip. The crowd used to jostle and sweat.

On stage, Joey Ramone would strut and swagger through the barest of sets. This was CBGB's, mid-1970s, in its lean and thrusting prime, when punk rock was music's indigestible gristle, igniting the dirty backstreets and underground clubs of New York and London. Now CBGB's, the most famous punk club in history, is set to close.

The crude-sounding abbreviations of CBGB/OMFUG have long intrigued the masses. The wholesome explanation is: Country Bluegrass Blues/Other Music for Uplifting Gormandisers. Though Hilly Kristal, founder of the club, intended CBGB's to be a home for bluegrass and folk - indeed, its initial performances boasted acts such as the Con Fullum Band, Elly Greenberg and the Wretched Refuse String Band - it soon became the habitat of the squally experimental bands of the hour. Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and, most famously, the Ramones formed an almost umbilical link with the club.

CBGB's opened in December 1973. In a decade grown fat on Jethro Tull, it offered a cadaverous, alley-cat cool, its bands playing sets that weighed in at a skinny 15 minutes. The club skulked on the edge of New York's seamiest side, an area of the city that is only now beginning to buckle under the forces of regeneration and fashion. Visit today in daylight hours and you'll find the usual row of bar-proppers hunched over early beers, shelves of CBGB-branded merchandise and walls thick with graffiti, stickers and dirt. Outside, patrons of the homeless shelter next door clutter about on the pavement.

It is the homeless shelter that has perhaps been the undoing of CBGB's. The Bowery Residents' Committee runs the building and is CBGB's landlord, and the relationship between the two has been tempestuous, largely owing to the club's flagrant contravention of health and safety regulations and a somewhat blase attitude to rent payment. Next month, the club's lease is up, and the BRC wants to raise the rent to something more appropriate for a district in the pink of regeneration - a sum rumoured to be double the current amount, and certainly enough to make Kristal splutter.

So, now that all the Save CBGB's campaigns have been waged and the club's threats to up sticks to Las Vegas shrugged off, it looks as though CBGB's role in the New York live scene is finally over. It has been some while, however, since CBGB's was right at the throb of the New York scene, and its closure comes amid wider suspicion that the city's - or, more particularly, Manhattan's - live music scene is dwindling away. Indeed, much of it has relocated to the more fashionable and remote quarters of Williamsburg, leaving the city to the fat cats and the tourists. Some even argue that the nation's West Coast scene is today more vibrant than that of New York.

Some claim the end of CBGB's is overdue, and that its continued existence has been symptomatic of a current flabbiness in punk rock; that punk, once the great exhorter of annihilation, of ripping up and starting again, has reached an age where it can grow attached to its family heirlooms. Would it really be fitting to shift CBGB's to Vegas, to pickle and preserve it as one of America's great cultural artefacts, as a place where tourists can take time out from the casinos and Celine Dion concerts to visit this freakshow museum of sorts and buy their branded punk-rock memorabilia?

Far better, perhaps, to hope CBGB's dies before it gets old.

The Go-Betweens

2005-07-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I'm not sure if i can put my finger on it exactly, nor into words exactly, to describe the kind of pop sensibility that's flowing thru the airwaves at the moment, but there seems to a particular, select group of bands getting phenomenal amounts of airplay on Seattle college radio.

There is one particular thread that spins thru a number, but not all, of the bands, and I strongly hesitate to use the phrase because it seems to mean so many different things, both good and bad these days, but I think an 'alternative country' feel, or at the very least, influence, pervades in this sound, with a heavy focus on tightly written, sung and performed story-based songs with a laid-back and mellow feel. They also have some sort of emotion behind them. I know that's a very loose and rambling description, but as a KEXP DJ wrote to me when I asked her opinion for this piece, "It's like asking someone to describe sex. Sure you can try, but until you feel it or with music, hear it, it's almost impossible".

Anyway, among bands that I've recently discovered, recently re-discovered or have been a fan of for years, which fall into this particular strong song-writing pop sensibilty, and am I'm liking at the moment include The Mountain Goats, Okkervil River, The Flaming Lips, The Decemberists, The Lucksmiths, The Postal Service, Mike Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing), Devin Davis, My Morning Jacket, The Eels, Death Cab For Cutie, Wilco, The Sleepy Jackson, The Wedding Present, The Dears, and Elliott Smith. In any event, nearly all of these bands tend to operate on fairly independant level, either releasing work on thier own labels, or on very low-key, low budget small record labels.

I don't think any of them are contracted to a major label or get much, if any airplay on yer standard generic commercial radio station. This is also another common thread - it seems that any kind of band with any level of integrity and credibility, that follows this particular path, well, that seems to flow thru to their music, they write songs that have strength, character, and a real feeling of warmth in them. They write songs that have some purpose and meaning, the plaintive singing, intelligent lyrics, and sparse instrumentation with a good narrative in an understated manner really strive to get a message of some sort across. They also most definitely have a less 'throwaway or disposable' feel about them, like these songs will stand up to the tests of time, the stories being told emoting more to the listener than any of the vacuous crap being dished out on commercial radio.

Among these is Melbourne band The Go-Betweens.

This band had a reasonable level of success in Australia in the 80's and i think early 90's before calling it a day, and have reformed in recent times, releasing a new album on which they are promoting on tour thru the States. I never really paid much attention to them way back then, but I most certainly as now. This band have a sound that's, how do I put it, more along the adult-oriented rock scope (but that makes it sound like a bad thing, whereas they're actually not). They're also getting a truckload of airplay on KEXP, which is what basically prompted this blog entry. They were always kinda sorta on my musical radar growing up as a kid, but were probably (definitely, actually) a bit mature for my teenage ears to wrap around at the time, And this time round, they've kinda come in from left field in my musical awareness, but very much in a positive way.

The way the DJ's rap about them made me realise just how much respect and adoration they've gained in this part of the world that I was totally was never aware of in the past. . And, to be honest, I think it goes back to that style of song writing i ranted on about that has enabled them to come back and reform and be as successful as they have second time around. The American market is so fickle, and for them to be able to pick up where they left off is a testament to them as a band.

So, after discovering them on their second go on the musical merry-go-round myself, I highly encourage you to check 'em out for yourself. (www.go-betweens.net)

...But Seriously

2005-07-01T19:53:00.000-07:00

Hi,

My flatmate Ceri has this funny habit of getting up at 4am-ish in the morning to have a cup of tea, check/write his emails, and read the English papers online for an hour or so, and then going back to bed. Something about having cacked up sleeping patterns...

When I get up in the morning, I quickly do a check of my emails before work, but always get sidetracked by the articles that he has left open. Ceri is a pretty intelligent guy, Oxford Uni graduate, and always has something thoughtful to say on the issues of the world, which I quite enjoy - it's nice to have a bit of intellectual brain stimulation, especially when the bulk of my day, work, involves virtually no use of that organ whatsoever!

Anyway, this is reflected in the papers and articles he reads, usually from The Guardian, an English, slightly left-leaning editorial style newspaper. The topics and issues are wide ranging and varied, both in style and content, and the ones I come across in the morning are always of this ilk, but this one in particular I felt somewhat close to.

It raises the issue of what happens to a persons taste in music once they hit the age of 30. I like to think I've got a pretty good, up-to-the-minute, and, crucially, credible taste in music. If you've been following my journal even remotely closely you'll have figured out that i'm not yer average Top-40 joe, sticking more closely to the fringes, most recently picking up on cool, new, and local bands from Seattle college radio - KEXP FM (www.KEXP.org) which I can't rate highly enough.

Anyway, the link to the article in question is just below - click on it and come back to me with your thoughts and comments (if you can be bothered).

Cheers,

Tony

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1476908,00.html