6/10/2017 0 Comments 16. In Between Days – The CureThey were one of the few bands to convince me to see a show at the Sydney Entertainment Centre (because obviously I’ve always been a music snob, and big venues suck). I went with a group of friends and I was wearing my long sleeved stripey Mambo shirt, my favourite shirt for most of my life, a shirt that bizarrely I still own (and fit!), but never wear.
And as we sat down for a beer, with the entire pub to ourselves, we realised that everyone else in the venue was underaged (so they couldn’t drink) and wearing black, because that’s what you do when you see The Cure, isn’t it? Which made me laugh even harder when Fat Bob and Co bounded on stage in bright, primary clothes and started making jokes. I don’t know how people failed to get their funny side: they made a clip for Close to Me in a wardrobe, and pushed it off a cliff. And don’t even get me started on Why Can’t I Be You. But this one, it’s the perfect encapsulation of that show, even though it was The Sea tour by then. And I love the contrast between the black and white and the colour bits. Especially when the socks attack. I love socks. If I won the lottery, I would buy a new pair of socks for every day, and then throw them away. Because new socks rock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scif2vfg1ug&list=PL1IwCrvt7ePuqb8eb_FzITixmOfE7PNgR
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They were supposed to be U2 sized, weren’t they? The two bands were fierce rivals, both putting out albums at the same time and competing for the same audience, but obviously Echo were the cooler ones, the ones who thought they didn’t need to try. And for a while they didn’t: they put out track after track of atmospheric, epic tracks, live a cross between Joy Division and … well, U2 I guess.
And then they tried to break America. The problem was that Bono was always desperate for attention, while Ian McCulloch didn’t feel the need to compete. Maybe he just got laid enough, who knows. But this song was just perfect: I remember hearing it on KROQ while we were driving to Dodger Stadium in LA and thinking yeah, they’ve made it now. Shows how much I know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_bJf3foa5I Remember when people danced in their clips? Amazing, wasn’t it? And this was from that period of time when black British artists where showing the US how to be cool. And it mostly involved dreadlocks, electronic strings, and really simple, driving beats. And more dancing. How Lisa Bonet didn’t become the biggest star in the world is beyond me, all things considered. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB54dZkzZOY
God, where do you start with The Smiths? I guess it’s to admit that they were one of the few bands that Eyman sent my way, rather than vice versa: I remember going over to his house when he still lived in Blacktown and seeing all the 12” singles he had of them, those iconic covers, and listening to them but not getting the appeal. He smiled and said wait, you’ll see, and eventually I did.
It was This Charming Man that won me over, punctured bicycle and all, which would become a recurring theme for us (on Richmond Road, in Northern France, all over), and from then on I was gone. And then there’s that guitar throb of an opener to How Soon Is Now. And Eyman playing I Know It’s Over, over and over, repeating oh mother I can feel the soil falling over my head even when the song stopped. Or Please Please Please, so pleasing. Or realising that Morrissey was actually funny when I listened to Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. Or the desperation, so teenaged, of Ask. Or the mental soundscape of Panic, or the self-laceration of Bigmouth Strikes Again. But no, it had to be this: the fumbling of the darkened underpass, the almost funny to die by your side, the beauty of the double decker bus. Just gorgeous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4BsbNB-0pA I miss those nights out, doing whatever the hell we did back then, and coming home at some ungodly hour but not wanting to sleep, so putting on Rage to see what they were going to show us. Sometimes it was 5 hours of German death metal, other times it was something as perfect as this. This clip is probably the absolute distilled essence of 80s Australian cutting edge video effects. And why don’t they make songs that Just. Keep. Going like this anymore? I guess it’s just not cool to propel anymore: you have to be able to see the joins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A03aR3_qzs
6/5/2017 0 Comments 11. Barbados – Models“All I see is washed away, I am the voice left from drinking.” The genius of this song is to go from that despair to the unbridled joy of the chorus. That was the real sense of the 80s: everything was wretched until it wasn’t, and then everything was a sax solo. Great times. And not. That’s life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4ootGStV7Q
Mark Seymour, lead singer of the Hunters, wrote probably the best music memoir of all time, so there’s not a lot I could add to what he’s already written. In fact, you can listen to him read the passage about this clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewfJjdHLdbA But it won’t prepare you for the 80s styled insanity of this clip, a band firing on all cylinders in a 13 tonne truck heading into the future.
They remind me of driving around Sydney with 2 friends, one who hated the song Run Run Run (a 12 minute heart spasm of a thing on the album that spawned this), the other who kept playing it, rewinding the tape and playing it again while the first whined and moaned in pain on the back seat. Or driving to Melbourne with the first (let’s just call him Eyman, as that’s his name) in the middle of the night, getting 2 flat tyres in a row and having to hitch a ride with a family, sitting on the back seat and cradling a tyre between a 4 year old kid who kept looking at me as though I was going to steal his teddy and an elderly aunt who kept forgetting why I was there as the dad in the front seat told me repeatedly that he wouldn’t have picked me up if I did have the tyre. At the next town people would drive past and give me updates on when Dave the Tyre Guy was going to finish breakfast, and when I eventually got back to the car Eyman had slept through the whole thing blissfully. When we arrived in Melbourne, with nowhere to stay and no real idea where to go, we headed to a pub in St Kilda because I’d heard the Hunters played there sometimes, and we started drinking. Suddenly this clip made a lot more sense to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyiYBajrefY He’s just so effortlessly cool, isn’t he? Defiantly geeky when he arrived on the scene, he clearly didn’t care what people thought of him with his giant glasses and fifties styling, because he knew his songs would last forever. And they do: you’ve just got to say Pump It Up, Watching The Detectives, Veronica, I Write The Book, and they burrow into your ears without being asked. This song always struck me as beautiful, as does the video: sadly it was recorded just after his wife, who was on tour on the other side of the world (she was the bass player for The Pogues), told him she wanted a divorce. Most people would cancel the shoot and hide in their hotel room and moan, but he went down to the main station in Melbourne and put his pain on display for the world.
I saw him once, in Venice: I was sitting in a bar and he strolled through, wearing a huge coat, shiny black trousers with some sort of pattern sown along the length in black, glasses with diamonds along the arms, and the makings of a wry grin on his face. He blew threw the place like he owned it and was going to the cooler, secret room out the back, and I want to say he winked as he passed. And you weren’t there, so I will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOdi7-vpRG4 Back when I was a kid I used to play soccer for the local team, and because my folks were working in the shop on the weekends I used to get a lift to the games with Gabriel Keegan, a curiously named Argentinean kid on my team, and his dad in his old blue Bedford van. He always had the radio on and we’d sing along to whatever was playing, but the year this came out this song came on every week, either on the way there or back, and we used to belt out the the bah bah bahs and howl with laughter. Obviously we had no idea what the song was about (I think we actually thought it was Town Called Alice, and that it was about the Springs) but it didn’t matter, because it’s a brilliant tune and steams all the way to the end, and we’d always end up singing it again afterwards, just because it was brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfpRm-p7qlY
The first record I ever bought was Zenyatta Mondatta (and it was a cassette, from Target in Parramatta), and the first song of theirs I learnt the bass line to was Walking on the Moon, but this song was the one that captured my heart. For a band that were so studiously uptight, this just blew the cobwebs off and made people dance. Even someone as po-faced as Sting sounds like he’s having fun, which is pretty amazing in a band that regular came to blows with each other. He never wrote anything this fun again, but at least it’s there, on their least popular album (although possibly my favourite) ready to bring a smile to the face of anyone who’ll listen. Even the call back at the end to one of their gloomier songs sounds like it’s enjoying itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aENX1Sf3fgQ
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