6/18/2017 1 Comment 24. Policy of Truth – Depeche ModeAnother band for whom it’s impossible to pick just one song: how do you do it, when they’ve got so many stone cold classic tunes? This one always reminds me of LA, driving around late at night on the way to the beach to have a coke in some diner, because we were too young to drink there, and then that moment hits in the song and the whole world flattens, glides, rolls past the window.
I think it’s that moment that picked this song for me, but it could just as easily have been Never Let Me Down Again for walking around Berlin moodily, Eyman and I pissed off at each other because we’d never spent that long with another person before, both of us stomping about with our Walkmans on before he said “here, listen to this” and I did, and I got it. We probably even hugged. But man, the songs. Bullet of a Gun. Personal Jesus. Walking in My Shoes. Strangelove. Enjoy The Silence. Even the new ones, like Wrong, are amazing. Hell, I reserve the right to return to DM another day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2VBmHOYpV8
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I really loved the Frankies: there was just something about them that really hit me (with a laser beam) at some primal level. It was probably the bass line. And they got me just at that period where I had plenty of money from working on my paper round and nothing much to spend it on, so I bought all the various versions of 12” singles they released. And the t-shirts.
It’s funny that I never saw any other level to the song, I just loved it for its drive: it’s so obvious in retrospect. And that’s without seeing the video. A few years later when I moved out of home I used to go to the gay bars on Oxford Street all the time: they played the best music, and all the girls used to go there so they wouldn’t get hit on. I used to get hit on all the time, because I was young and skinny, but I never realised it because I’ve always been stupid like that, and if I couldn’t tell when a girl liked me how would I know when a boy did? I realised I was old when I noticed that gay guys didn’t hit on me anymore. Ho hum. It’s a shame those clubs weren’t actually as good as this, although it does remind me of going clubbing after Mardi Gras at the Hordern Pavillion, and when I went for a wee I looked down and there was a bloke sort of swimming his way along the trough: “keep going, don’t mind me” he insisted, but it stopped me in my tracks. Undeterred, he just moved on to the next punter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCpz3LAjxek 6/16/2017 1 Comment 22. Blue Monday – New OrderIt was always just the perfect song, this: I guess that’s why they kept putting it out, over and over again. Or maybe they were just trying to pay for the sleeve. I had the original, actually, but I love this version because it’s just funny.
I remember being into New Order for years, probably from about when Love Will Tear Us Apart tore them apart and they retreated, licking their wounds, to America and house music and Temptation (or The Up Down Turnaround Song as it became known to us when someone’s girlfriend asked us to play it again after we’d all danced like maniacs around the fire out at The Farm, a ramshackle place a friend of my friend’s brother used to live at that would draw us like moths back in the day) and Ceremony, drawn in by those stark covers. But this. That drumbeat. That bassline. How does it feel? Hearing this, in some crappy club in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, it felt like a revelation. I saw them play live, at the Enmore Theatre supported by The Deadly Hume (the then-new band by the bloke who played The Wang for Hunters and Collectors before deciding he wanted to be the front man and leaving, writing Passenger Blues - "Got my eyes on your / Got the Death Seat Blues" - that was the spiritual song of that trip to Melbourne with Eyman). I was standing at the front before realising the crowd was jumping so much that the wooden floor in front of the stage was bowing up and down about a foot from the concrete floor on which all the seats rested: I had one leg on either part of the floor, and figured I needed to move. This was back when they only ever played 10 songs at a show, encores included, so I stayed put when everyone else was leaving on a countback. I was rewarded with a version of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMjH1nR0ds 6/15/2017 1 Comment 21. The One I Love – R.E.MI first got into R.E.M. in Los Angeles, in the holding zone for our trip where we were buying bikes and hanging out with Mickey and Scooter, learning how to just be, how to exist without a timetable. It was a great time, living at Mickey’s place, a girl we didn’t know a month before but who had been a penpal (remember those?) of a friend from school who said “oh, well if you’re going through LA I’ll ask her if you can stay at her place”, and whose grey-bearded trucker dad took one look at us, realised we were mostly harmless, and allowed us to stay for as long as we wanted, bizarrely.
She had the new Hoodoo Gurus (“you’ve heard of them over here?”) and R.E.M. albums (Life’s Rich Pageant), and after playing them on a loop we went down to Tower Records and stocked up for the trip to come. I would ride around endlessly in my long-sleeved pink R.E.M. t-shirt with the orange bike on it, feeling it was an outward symbol of the person I’d become. Man, I wish I had that shirt now. And yeah, I know this song is off Document, but it was out when I was in Europe, so sue me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7oQEPfe-O8 6/14/2017 4 Comments 20. Dirty Old Town – The PoguesTalking about moshpits at Selina’s, these lads got everyone moving. It’s hard to credit really, given how mild a song like this is, but the crowd mostly made their own fun, I suspect. I drove there with Eyman, and it was on the way over that we started to talk around the idea of cycling around Europe: “I’ve had this idea,” “Yeah, I was going to say the same thing,” “Do you think it’s possible?” “Yeah, I don’t see why not”.
By the time we drove into Coogee, it was decided: we’d sell everything, and we’d go. A couple of months to get everything in order, and off. It was a great night, epic, we could hardly contain ourselves with the joy of a plan, and the world was meeting us at that level of excitement. “He’s drinking from a milkshake cup”, “It’s a bottle of wine in there”, “He’s doing alright on it,” “Spoke too soon, he’s off for a rest,” “Spider looks like he’s taken over more than a few times”. And in a few months, we were on a plane to LA, en route to Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s11BuatTuXk I know they were rubbish, but my god they were great at being rubbish. So they were a cartoon Killing Joke, with the guitarist with the blonde hair piled high, the bass player trying to make the best of a bad haircut and too much denim in his life, and the singer with the American Indian obsession who wished he was Jim Morrison. And I think he was, briefly, when The Doors reformed with him singing. I guess there was no point doing anything again after that, was there?
But this song. I saw them play at Selina’s in Coogee Bay, driving my little Corolla all the way across town by myself because I couldn’t convince anyone else of their epicness (perhaps unsurprisingly: I’m probably in the same boat right now) and borrowing my cousin’s leather jacket for the night. I walked in, a bloke clocked the coat and asked me if he could score some smack, and the show started. I was down in the mosh pit, as was my way back then, and we were all being thrown from pillar to post before the beer glasses from the back started to rain down during this song. I watched as a few of them landed before the bloke next to me got dropped by one to the head, realised discretion was the better part of valour and started to move back, but something made me look up. There was one glass, thrown from right in the back, and it seemed to fly in slow motion: I stopped and watched, hypnotised along with everyone else, as it described a curve over my head. I looked towards the stage as Ian bloody Astbury watched it fly over his head, over the guitarist behind him, and land right on the snare just as the beat breaks for the final bit of the song, and the entire venue roared as one at the sheer perfection of that moment. I had a tape of this album in the car, but I couldn’t hear it the whole way home, so much were my ears ringing. And I think they continued for most of the next day, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6PgftKbQnQ 6/12/2017 0 Comments 18. Love Like Blood – Killing JokeI could never be a Goth, sadly. I mean look at me: I’m bloody ginger, I’ve got blue eyes, it’s too ridiculous for words. But it didn’t mean I didn’t want to be one, I just knew it could never be. But they had great tunes, the moody buggers, all huge riffs and stonking baselines and moody lyrics that said … well who knows, I never listen to lyrics really, it’s probably why I’ve never rated Bob Dylan. And why I won’t collect a Nobel Prize for literature.
But Killing Joke were epic: clearly it all meant a hell of a lot to them, and Jaz was a brilliant front man, screaming away in front of that wall of noise. It was a coin toss between this and Eighties, which is just a genius song (and clip) about how much EVERYTHING IS A DISASTER, man, all propelled by Geordie and his almost mountainous, bass-like guitar riff. I knew I should have kept bleaching my hair after that trip to the Snowy Mountains. It works for him, and he has a bloody stupid name to get past on his route to effortless cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnpwuRlXbhk I don’t really get homesick. Maybe it’s because I’ve moved around the world so much that it burnt out, or maybe it’s that I tend to live in the here and now, not the there and then. But this song always sends me back to the 80s in Sydney, the sun-bleached landscape, to too hot to think summers when I would get a red rattler all the way from North Sydney to Doonside, feeling the temperature soar the further west I got before finally being able to escape the tin can and go home, open the door and pull my clothes off as I walked through the house to the pool, and I swear I could hear the steam hiss as I broke the surface of the water. There’s little wonder I moved to Double Bay.
But I love watching this clip, seeing the funny little platform at Macdonaldtown that I used to see every day, wondering who on earth used it as it was always empty as the trains blew through, and the band (how many times must they have had a word to Robert about his dress sense, and how great that he ignored them) walking the streets of Balmain, a suburb I used to dream of living in after all those nights at the Cat and Fiddle, all the others at the Town Hall with Becky and the gang after screenprinting endless yards of material for a pair of trousers that had the fly backwards, all the telephone poles and brief glimpses of the water between the houses, and that beautiful bloody bridge just there. I just found out that there’s another clip for this song, all sepia tones and mid-west iconography as they were clearly trying to break America, but I’m glad I hadn’t seen it until now, because it’s just wrong for me, it has to be hazy shots on the inner west of Sydney (even if the song is probably about Brisbane: they don’t have anything worth filming there, clearly). And why on earth did they think it was worth trying to break The Go-Betweens in the US? Surely that’s a fool’s errand, although I saw that Sub Pop, original and best home of Nirvana, The Shins, Rogue Wave etc have signed an Australian band call Rolling Blackouts CF who claim inspiration from The GBs, and they’re doing okay apparently. I guess everything comes around eventually. I still wish I lived in Balmain. I guess a couple of days on holiday there and a long run around the peninsula will have to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfP6G0LSEA 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 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
5/31/2017 0 Comments 6. Heart of Glass – BlondieI have no idea how disco managed to resonate in my young head, but that bass line / hi hat combination gets me every time, which is why I still fall for bands who do it now, just to be ironic. And god, what a great front person Debbie Harry was! Just so impossibly glamourous, even though she was living with a punk band in the Lower East Side. How they got from that to this is a thing of wonder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGU_4-5RaxU
5/30/2017 0 Comments 5. I’m A Believer – The MonkeesThey really were a cartoon, but became a band. Why does no one make kids TV shows featuring a band living together and getting into hijinks? Modern life is rubbish. Didn’t they have a cool beach buggy too, or was that Sigmund and The Sea Monsters? I don’t care, this is a great tune, hanging on the simplest keyboard line in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU93NiF12qs
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