'Beautiful Man, Beautiful Woman Blues'

Invidia Is An Ugly Emotion

For a while back in the 90s I was living in Neutral Bay where all the beautiful people lived. I was cash poor in a Yuppie suburb. I think I struggled with this fact a lot. I wrote songs about the people I was surrounded by that I didn't relate to, some of them awful as hell and others, well... What can you say about people you don't really know but simply meet in the car park beneath the argument block?

All you candy is imagine their life. Except you have so few clues just by looking at them. And so I had this really blank, nondescript notion-not even a solid idea - about these people. They are an immaculate couple that got around in a black BMW sedan that was always polished shiny. They wore  matching reflective sunglasses made by some famous brand and if you didn't know any better they looked like clothes horses from a department store catalogue.

At the same time I was reading and re-reading Takeshi Kaikoh's book 'Into a Black Sun' and of course the opening epigraph is a quote from Heidegger wherein Heidegger says "the future will be a shining darkness." Indeed the Japanese title of the book translates as 'The Shining Darkness"(which goes to show the translator Cecilia Segawa Siegle totally missed the point of the book when they re-titled it - and I mean it Cecilia!).

I was meditating on what the shining darkness looked like and I thought I could see it on the Silver screen at the movie theatres That the future would be these moving images in the dark, glorious bits of fiction that tangentially took off from reality. Or they would be incandescent lights in the night or fluorescent tubes lighting up in the night streets like scenes from 'Blade Runner'. It was all kind of abstract given how doomed the world looked in 1964 to Kaikoh as he watched the Vietnam War unfold. Or maybe the shining darkness was the reflection of the world in the reflective sunnies worn by Yuppies as they drove by in their BMW.

If you're wondering what that means, it means the future is now and we're living out the logical ramification of past failures of humanity. The Shining Darkness that Heidegger reference points to is world of petit bourgeoisie life, and easy consumerism bankrupting the the world, depleting resources and destroying the environment.

But hey, if you're living in Neutral Bay getting around in a shiny BMW, maybe everything's working out just right for you.




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'Sure Know How To Pick'em Blues'

A Bit More Out On A Limb

Everybody has a psycho ex. Mine is particularly so. I don't want to elaborate on it too much but it got me thinking about the kinds of crazy you do meet along the way in life. Crazy people have a way of fucking you up in life. You don't see it coming because most people are rational so they cannot put crazy into their calculations. Thus when some crazy person unleashes hellfire of insanity in your life, you are not one to know just from how deep in hell the insanity comes, and where the hell it's all going.

One of my friends Darren who got divorced recently had the unique experience of getting together with three psychos in a row, before settling down to marry the fourth. Maybe he attracted crazy; maybe he picked crazy people subconsciously because he secretly enjoyed the drama; no matter, all these women combined to truly fuck up his life, one after the other after the other. Quite the costly exercise if you ask me.

The first time it happens, you sort of wonder what the hell is going on with your friend. The second time it happens you lament his bad luck. The third and fourth time you begin to see maybe he's just crashing by design. It's hard to tell with your friends - and really, if your friend is extra rational, it's even harder to see how these things come to be.

All that said, the taste that crazy leaves in everybody's mouth is different. When I reflect on my crazy girlfriend experience, I get a maudlin remorse of "what the fuck was I thinking?"
I don't know about other folks and their crazy-ex experience, but I think that is good enough reason to be the basis of a blues song.




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'She Lied To Me'

Don't They All, Eventually?

Okay maybe I short-changed you all with the last entry. I did write it late at night. There's gotta be more to these stories right?

Here's something.
A long time ago I had this friend who was deeply in love with this girl he met at university. They also had another friend in the same faculty and the three of them would hang out regularly. The guy - Gary - was deeply love with Molly and Molly to all intents and purposes, was in love with Gary. They were like their own perfect couple living in their perfect bubble.

The third wheel was Gloria, and she was a funny sort who was never really in deep relationships with any man. She'd just sort of casually date guys and imply they had wild sex and then split up. Yet she kept hanging around Gary and Molly. Very odd.

Now, at some point Molly fell out of love with Gary. She didn't know it had happened until one day she thought she didn't feel the buzz of being in love. Instead, she found herself attracted to another guy in the faculty, Roderick. Try as she might she couldn't keep thoughts of Roderick out of her head; and so she confided in Gloria what to do. Gloria offered the strange advice that Molly had been going out with Gary long enough and that Gary had a "dependent personality" so maybe Molly should move on.

And so Molly told Gary she wanted to split up. It was a bolt out of the blue for Gary - who was afflicted with paranoia ever after then - but she didn't explain to Gary why. She instead made up this story about how she wasn't feeling like they were clicking any more and the pressure was too much. Gary being an intuitive kind of guy asked Molly if there was another man involved. Molly denied it vehemently, and swore to all that she held important there was nobody else.

Gary was shocked that Molly had stopped loving him, but he let her go. After all, what can a guy do about it if the woman says she wants out? Two weeks later he ran into Gloria and he explained what Molly had said. Gloria in turn explained her conversation with Molly, and how she had given guidance to Molly such that Molly should get out of the relationship. Gary asked Gloria why on earth she would give such fucked up advice. Gloria replied because she had long been attracted to Gary, and that Molly had been with Gary for quite a while now. If Molly had ceased to value Gary, then she should vacate the picture so that she could have her turn.

"So how'bout it?" she asked; and naturally Gary turned her down because the thought of being with a conniving woman like Gloria revolted him. Life's like that.

What bothered Gary the most about the whole sequence was Molly's lie that there as no other man involved. There clearly of was a man in the picture, and that's what precipitated the breakup. The lie essentially gutted Gary. That is why he asked me to write a song about it.

Gary's dead now. As one of my oldest friends, I really miss him. I guess this song is in memory of him and his suffering.



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'Stupid Valentines Day'

Hey Did I Time This Or What?

Just a moody little blues number for St Valentine's folly day.
Mine didn't go like this at all today. But I'm sure somebody had one of these so if you did... Let me just say it does get better. Hang in there.



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'Gridlock Blues'

Gridlock Commuting's No Way Of Life

The idea of doing a blues album as such came around because 'Spinal Apples' took me way out into the land of modal music and I couldn't even tell you what the key centre was in some of the songs in that set. Some of the suspended chords and dissonant juxtapositions were just too hard to describe- and this in turn left me with the feeling that I would really like to get back to doing something a bit more standard. That is to say i could see the appeal of building songs around I-IV-V chord changes and tried and tested formulae of the blue genre.

The only problem is, I'm not that much of a blues head. So not all of this stuff is going to sound like Chicago Blues or some regurgitated Eric Clapton/SRV/Allman Brothers sort of thing. I do draw a little bit on Hendrix and Zeppelin because one can't really shake off one's roots completely, but in most part this series of songs is my take on the blues as a complete outsider to the traditions.  

That's all by-the-by.
The important bit for this song is that it's about being stuck on a bus, Now, a wise man somewhere said in a Manhattan lift, "nothing like riding the bus makes you reassess your life."
He's absolutely right. There's nothing like being on a bus stuck gridlock that makes you reassess existence itself. Now I could bend your ear about all the ills of the under-funding of public transportation in Australian cities and what have you but ultimately the blues is a music that comes from a very personal headspace. The main thing is the feeling of sitting in a bus, stuck in traffic, with you by yourself with your thoughts, reassessing the entirety of existence, the universe and everything.
When you find yourself in that moment, you've got Gridlock Blues.

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'Plankton of Love'

What The Hell Are You Singing About?

We used to play this song as a gentler, lighter, almost pop kind of song. In the tiny following that we had, one of our regular audience member used to scream out and request this one. He even went and carved the title somewhere in his faculty. It's flattering but also a little absurd. Somewhere there is a piece of carved graffiti in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney wherein it is inscribed 'Plankton of Love'.

People would have walked by this thing and probably never stopped to wonder what the hell it was about. An insignificant cypher of something from another age.
"What the hell?" they might ask themselves. "What the hell is the 'Plankton of Love'?"

From all the previous entries one might be led to think we were a humourless bunch. All these seriously anguished songs about the injustices and the civil inadequacies of government and business, the ever impending doom of a consumerist society eating out the planet and crowding out the eco-system; these were the songs we wrote in earnest because we felt what we felt and what we felt had to be given some shape.

We didn't always take ourselves so seriously. Occasionally we indulged in nonsense lyrics.
Like this one. I really couldn't tell you what the hell we were thinking with this song.





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'Deep In The Heart'

There Is No Other Way

Everybody has to have a ballad somewhere in their catalogue. This one's ours.

The ballad was de rigeur in a set. Somewhere you had to slow right down and croon and strum out a song of professed love and devotion to some love interest. I didn't like this unspoken rule we inherited from other bands. Some bands did their ballads really well Cold Chisel's 'When the War is Over' is a wonderful ballad that fits seamlessly into their sonic landscape. Paul McCartney's 'My Love' in 'Rock Show' is like the pinnacle work where the slow number just reinforces the richness of his song writing.

Of course there's lot of temperament issues to do with this sort of thing. As I've written on many an occasion, I'm not great with love songs, partly because romanticism died in me pretty hard in my 20s. Life in its raw reality is pretty sobering, and once you sober up from love, you just never come back to it with the same abandon of a romantic. You judge your distance, and just how far you're willing to jump before you make your running jump. You don't give your heart away so some maniac can put it on a spit and eat it ("...what are you crazy?").

Ultimately, slowing down for a bit of romanticism just wasn't my temperament back then. All the same you end up writing one of these things pretty much in spite of one self because man does not rock out at 145bpm alone. We sing things we would not admit to in plain prose.

And somewhere deep in the heart, love resides in spite of all our hurt feelings (they say).


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'Black Car'

And The Bankers Come To Take Your Farm

We live on a continent of drought and fires. That's the catch-cry of conservative politicians who always seem to get so much mileage from visiting affected areas and giving handshakes and hugs to the people whose lives have been crippled by the effects of droughts and fires. It's no exception today, same as it ever was in the 2000s, the 1990s, and the 1980s - just a little worse.

The astounding thing is that Climate Change was always a factor in each drought as they progressively got worse and longer. And each time a politician from the National Party would pipe up and say this was not the time to be talking about Climate Change, trying to hose down serious discussion about perhaps-maybe-possibly Australians having to radically re-orient how they interact with this continent. Nothing that could threaten our feeble self image could be allowed on the table for discussion.

This time with these droughts and fires, we heard Michael McCormack with the tried and tested "now-is-not-the-time..." rhetoric early in the bushfire crisis but he was quickly confronted by the reality that the combined terror of these drought and bushfires were unprecedented and firmly pointed a finger towards the impact of global Climate Change. He had to recant and he had to mention the unspeakable reality. It's a notable moment in Australian politics, long overdue.

It's a sad state of affairs for the Nationals because the one thing the National Party is supposed to be doing is siphoning off the fruits of government to unfairly help rural constituents, and yet the help they probably needed the most was to acknowledge reality for what it was. And each time there had been droughts and fires, and the issue got swept under the carpet, it passed the issue on to the next generation of politicians. The hand grenade got passed along and finally exploded in the face of Michael McCormack.

Heaven only knows how many farmers lost their farms waiting for the skies to open and for the drought to break when odds were, they would be waiting longer than the previous floods or be subjected to larger, ever more unthinkable fires. And you have to think about that moment when the farmers saw the black imported car driven by the bankers, coming to take their homes.

This is a song about that moment that kept happening all over, and somehow the rural constituency kept voting in the National Party.

There is no curing stupid except through death and disaster.





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'The Parts'

Perpetual Wars

This song is about the jungle and the people who move beneath the canopy with their guns.

My generation didn't have a great cause. As ironic as the demographic Generation X is, part of the identity is the utter lack of conviction in protesting that existed in the mid-1980s. No Vietnam War protests for us. No great conflict in society to overcome except our own consumerist consent into the globalised neo-liberal ideology - which of course seduced us all with an array of consumer goods. Politics had been replaced by the aestheticisation of commodities. It has to be said it is in this vacuum of great causes that allowed the next generation of deplorable right wingers to creep their way back into the picture, but that is almost by-the-by.

And yet great evil was right there had we only looked and paid attention.
Perhaps it was a marketing move by the US Government that they stopped having overt acts of war headlined by their own troops. The era instead saw something more bizarre in the Iran-Contra affair where the US Government was implicated in smuggling guns into Central America to rebels to fight a proxy war against the leftist Sandinista government. When it all blew up, it seemed obvious that the Reagan Administration should take responsibility and be consigned to history, marched out of the White House. instead, they came up with the expression 'maintain the fiction' and carried on into the first term of George Bush Sr.

The funny thing was howAmerican society in general did not get up in arms about the Iran-Contra affair. It sort of made its way through the headlines but overall, the American population still maintains the fiction to this day that the US President was above all this criminality - and they let Reagan sail off into the sunset as if he were some great moral leader of the nation. And if American citizens weren't going to fight, why should the rest of the first world really care? That was the vibe.
All the same we thought that very apathy, was crap.

I guess it's appropriate to reflect back today in an era when US Republicans circled the wagons to protect their lame-duck law-breaking inept-as-fuck Prez Donald Trump to hark back to an age when Republicans did exactly the same thing in protecting Ronald Reagan. Evil shit is perpetrated by those in high offices all the time and they expect to get away with it at our expense ALL the time.

If nothing else as artists, we wanted answers so we were asking questions in our art.
And still, the questions continue.



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