Music - Notes from Pig City

Peter Garrett is back, and he’s ready to dance again

Music / July 22, 2016 / 9 minutes of reading

In the nascent Sydney punk scene of 1976, the Oxford Funhouse on Taylor Square was ground zero. The venue had been established by Radio Birdman who, along with Brisbane’s the Saints, can lay claim to the title of Australia’s first punk band.

Peter Garrett, who was leading an embryonic band not yet named Midnight Oil at the time, checked them out early and came away a changed man, marvelling at how the hipsters in the crowd kept their sunglasses on amid the mayhem. “The sound was laser-bright and ferocious, and frontman Rob Younger was riveting, stalking the tiny stage with a leonine fury,” he wrote in his memoir, Big Blue Sky, released late last year.

If you want an idea of where Garrett got the unique dance step that captivated audiences for over 20 years, watch Younger in action. Garrett wasn’t informed by his movements so much as the idea of performance as an altered form of consciousness. “I like to get myself into a state where I’m not aware of what I do at all, yet somehow I get it all out,” Younger said at the time. “I don’t know, I try not to think about it.”

Garrett similarly deflects questions about his dancing, as if talking about it might cause him to freeze.… Read more..

Peter Garrett is back, and he’s ready to dance again Read More »

Witch Hats: Deliverance

Music / July 17, 2016 / 3 minutes of reading

The cover of Witch Hats’ third album Deliverance is an 1861 sketch by Ludwig Becker, the German artist and explorer who died as a member of Burke and Wills’ ill-fated expedition from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Titled “Border Of Mud Desert” and drawn in the last weeks of the artist’s life, it’s a desolate, despairing image, catching a blinding reflection of light across a dead, treeless plain.

It’s a suitable accompaniment for the music. There’s a wildness and a barely contained sense of desperation across Deliverance, and also something defiantly Australian – although that’s probably just the phlegmy sneer of singer/songwriter Kris Buscombe, who recalls a young Chris Bailey circa the Saints’ masterpiece, Prehistoric Sounds.

It’s also tempting to read into these eight taut tracks some of the same sense of mortal dread that imbued Becker’s imagery. Like the Drones’ Feelin Kinda Free, Deliverance paints contemporary Australia as a dystopian nightmare, a paranoid surveillance state where incest occurs behind closed doors while peeping toms keep watch from the bushes outside.

But whereas Feelin Kinda Free distorted the Drones’ sound into something barely recognisable from their past, Witch Hats have perfected theirs: rough-hewn but intelligent, intense blasts of mid-paced post-punk and pop.… Read more..

Witch Hats: Deliverance Read More »

Mick Harvey: Delirium Tremens

Music / June 30, 2016 / 3 minutes of reading

In 1995, at the pinnacle of his success as Nick Cave’s right-hand man, multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey embarked on the most quixotic of solo projects. He set about translating the songs of the dissolute, recently deceased French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg into English, resulting in two albums in just over two years: Intoxicated Man and Pink Elephants.

For the uninitiated, some context is necessary. To English speakers, Gainsbourg is best known for his 1969 erotic novelty hit Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus, first recorded with Brigitte Bardot and later, successfully, with longtime flame Jane Birkin. But his full catalogue is an embarrassment of riches. At his funeral in 1991, no less than French president François Mitterrand said: “He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire.”

He was also a notorious provocateur. To All The Lucky Kids is the funniest not-really anti-drugs song ever: “To all the lucky kids, in substance I’d say this / Don’t go near magic mushrooms / Or acrid marijuana fumes.” Then there’s Lemon Incest, originally recorded with daughter Charlotte: “The love we’ll never make together’s heaven sent, the purest, the most intense” – creepily recorded with “pa-pa-pa” backing vocals.

Both Intoxicated Man and Pink Elephants were cult hits, introducing a generation of English speakers to one of the oddest and finest songwriters of the 20th century.… Read more..

Mick Harvey: Delirium Tremens Read More »

Le provocateur

Music / June 23, 2016 / 6 minutes of reading

Immediately after cutting their striptease classic Je t’aime … Moi Non Plus in 1969, French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg and his English paramour, Jane Birkin, adjourned to the restaurant of their Parisian hotel. Gainsbourg, full of mischief, convinced the staff to play the record. As the song built, literally, to its climax – with the sound of Birkin in the throes of apparent orgasm – the room went still.

“Everybody’s knives and forks were in the air, suspended,” Birkin later told Gainsbourg’s biographer, Sylvie Simmons. “Gainsbourg said, ‘I think we’ve got a hit.’” And for decades, Je t’aime was the erotic novelty hit for which Gainsbourg was best known – at least outside of France, until a heart attack ended his life aged 62, in 1991.

Four years later, Melbourne musician Mick Harvey – then a key member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – released Intoxicated Man, a collection of Gainsbourg covers, translated into English. In the liner notes, he explained “what might otherwise be an unnecessarily enigmatic project,” professing his bewilderment that Gainsbourg’s work was virtually unknown outside of French-speaking countries.

These days, it’s a different story. Gainsbourg’s legacy is everywhere: from season two of Mad Men (a jingle for a coffee company is a reworking of his racy 1964 single Couleur Café) through the work of everyone from French band Air to Beck to Arcade Fire.… Read more..

Le provocateur Read More »

Taylor Swift is single. Bring on the breakup songs

Music / June 8, 2016 / 4 minutes of reading

Taylor Swift is single again, and I for one am glad. Not for her heartbreak (as a fellow human, naturally, I’m sorry for her pain), and certainly not because she’s “back on the market” since, needless to say, I’m not in it. No, I’m glad selfishly, because if it produces a song half as good as I Knew You Were Trouble, the world will be a better place, for she will ease the pain of anyone who’s ever been through the same.

Which, let’s face it, is pretty much all of us. Romantic heartbreak is the lingua franca of the pop song. In the opening soliloquy of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Rob (played in Stephen Frears’ film by John Cusack) poses a universal question, as the 13th Floor Elevators’ garage classic You’re Gonna Miss Me blasts through his headphones:

“What came first – the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence is going to take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable?… Read more..

Taylor Swift is single. Bring on the breakup songs Read More »

The day I got owned by Grant McLennan

Music / May 7, 2016 / 3 minutes of reading

It was the 10^th anniversary of Grant McLennan’s passing yesterday. It wasn’t until late afternoon that I actually remembered; there’d been some stuff going down in my own world that I’d been absorbed within. But then I also remembered that days before, I’d put a lay-by on a rare copy of G Is For Go-Betweens, the long since out-of-print box set released a couple of years ago by Domino, that had turned up in Rocking Horse Records.

The box was expensive at the time (which put me off) and of course it was even more so now, but I’d regretted missing out after it quickly disappeared. So I traded some old stuff to make the initial deposit and – being inclined towards the sentimental and the symbolic – I decided to head into town and pick it up, rather than waiting a few more days to actually get paid. Sometimes you just have to do these things.

So I took it home and spent the night in a funk, listening to the early singles and the first three albums, Send Me A Lullaby (ripe for rediscovery, though the band was still gelling), Before Hollywood (on which they perfected the Striped Sunlight Sound to which they’d aspired) and Spring Hill Fair (sort of a step sideways, before their next great leap forward, to the masterful Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express).… Read more..

The day I got owned by Grant McLennan Read More »