Notes from Pig City - Archive of author and journalist Andrew Stafford

Response to Queensland Theatre’s Twelfth Night

Music / May 24, 2018 / 5 minutes of reading

“If music be the food of love, play on!”I remember the first time I heard those words. It wasn’t in high school or university, but in a song from 1987 called Eat The Rich, a song written by the British heavy metal band Motörhead specifically for the film of the same name.

The song was full of double entendres and cheap innuendo. “They say music is the food of love / Let’s see if you’re hungry enough!” were the opening lines, gargled by the late Lemmy Kilmister, whose lyrics deftly trod Spinal Tap’s famous fine line between clever and stupid.

I’m not sure how I have managed to almost entirely avoid Shakespeare, despite a life devoted to words and music. The sum total of my experience was a reading (not a performance) of Hamlet, in year 11. It is, frankly, an embarrassing gap for a writer.

When Queensland Theatre invited me to respond to their production of Twelfth Night, I was intimidated, and my instinctive response was ‘no’. Then I realised I was being offered a challenge and a belated opportunity to engage with something beautiful.

The other selling point was musical: Tim Finn, whose early work as a member of Split Enz had been forever imprinted on my brain, would supply the food of love for the play, composing music for Shakespeare’s old verses as well as a suite of original new songs.… Read more..

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Midnight Oil: 1984

Music / May 24, 2018 / 5 minutes of reading

For those old enough to remember it, 1984 was a year full of dread and apocalyptic overtones. It wasn’t just the paranoia of George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the same name: in some ways, the current age of mass corporate/state surveillance and black-is-white propaganda makes 1984 feel closer at hand today than it did at the time. What’s easily forgotten is a fear that has only recently been truly reawakened: of nuclear terror (or error) and mutually assured destruction. The cold war could have turned hot and melted us all at any moment.

The mid-80s was also an interesting time in pop and rock music: everybody wanted to either rule the world or save it. Midnight Oil were very much in the latter category and 1984, a documentary by Ray Argall, focuses on a pivotal year in the band’s career. Their fifth album, Red Sails In The Sunset, was a continuation of the Armageddon-themed 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1: the cover featured a drained and cratered Sydney Harbour after a nuclear strike (with the Harbour Bridge and Opera House remaining eerily intact).

The album was released in October and became the band’s first No.… Read more..

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Rock in hard places

Music / May 23, 2018 / 8 minutes of reading

It’s Good Friday in Brisbane and most of the city is dead quiet, with pubs and clubs not opening until midnight due to Easter trading laws. In the inner suburb of West End, however, something very noisy is stirring.

On a makeshift stage in a large room, a three-piece band called Hexmere is playing a raucous, raw brand of grindcore punk to a small crowd. There’s another gig planned for the following night, with many more people expected.

These all-ages shows are being sporadically staged by the Outer Space art collective, which won the Brisbane city council’s tender to operate this 300-capacity venue for two years, rent-free. The space needs work. But it represents an experiment, a gamble and a new hope for the city’s youth culture.

The fact that the city council chose to make the space available is important. Despite a rich history, live music in Brisbane, as in so many other cities around the world, struggles to survive against the pressures of gentrification, regulation and competition.

The music industry’s inextricable links to alcohol and bars has left a dearth of venues accessible to under-18s, raising concerns about how the complex ecosystem that sustains a vibrant local music scene – comprising everything from record shops to independent labels to public radio – will reproduce itself without engaging audiences from a young age.… Read more..

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Derek Smalls: “I wouldn’t call it jazz but I wouldn’t call it non-jazz”

Music / May 23, 2018 / 4 minutes of reading

In which I talk to the legendary bass player of one of Britain’s loudest bands, Spinal Tap, on the eve of the release of the now 75-year-old’s long-awaited first solo album, Smalls Change…

Derek! It’s good to talk to you.

It’s great to be talked to.

This is your first solo album under your own name. Did you feel creatively stifled by David and Nigel, the two visionaries in Spinal Tap?

I wouldn’t say I was stifled; I would say I was big-footed. When you’re around two people of that level of talent, there’s not that much oxygen to go around, really.

Back From The Dead, Tap’s last album, finally included the appearance of Jazz Oddyssey in three parts, but there’s no jazz on this record. It’s mostly heavy-duty rock & roll.

I wouldn’t call it jazz but I wouldn’t call it non-jazz. But I did do a follow-up to Jazz Oddyssey, which wasn’t right for this record. It’s called Jazz Iliad.

This album is a series of meditations on ageing. Let’s start with the song Memo To Willie. Do you have any trouble getting it up these days?

I do not sir, thank you for asking.

Camp Cope: How To Socialise & Make Friends

Music / May 23, 2018 / 3 minutes of reading

In his “mongrel memoir” How To Make Gravy, Paul Kelly has a chapter on circle songs – songs that are built on a chord progression that cycles in the same order from beginning to end. The melody may vary, but there’s no bridge or change in the chorus to break the circle. Wide Open Road, by the Triffids, is a circle song; so too Kelly’s Careless. A lot of folk music, Kelly observes, is like this: “We just pick it up and pass it on.”

The Opener, by Camp Cope, is another circle song. With it, and their defiant gesture at the Falls festival – calling out the organisers in front of a jam-packed tent for their lowly placement on the bill, in keeping with the song’s theme – the Melbourne three-piece instantly stamped themselves as the Australian band of the moment and the #MeToo generation. They resonate because they are so real.

Even if not for singer and guitarist Georgia “Maq” McDonald’s pedigree (she is the daughter of the late Hugh McDonald, formerly of Australian folk-rock band Redgum), Camp Cope’s second album How To Socialise & Make Friends would sound like a baton being passed to a new generation.… Read more..

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Marlon Williams: Make way for love

Music / May 23, 2018 / 4 minutes of reading

The breakup album is a standard trope of rock music. Bob Dylan set the benchmark in 1975 with Blood On The Tracks; Beck’s Sea Change (2002) is a famous more modern example. Now Marlon Williams – the 28-year-old Melbourne-based New Zealander with the golden throat – has offered his own contribution to the form with his second album, Make Way For Love.

And Williams is making no secret of the album’s source: the dissolution of his three-year relationship with another acclaimed New Zealander, Aldous Harding, in December 2016. He even coaxed her to sing on the album’s penultimate song, the duet Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore.

“I think she saw how important it was to me, more than anything, and that song, more than any other, expresses a feeling I couldn’t put into her words any other way,” Williams says. “I’m actually telling her something in that song, and she’s responding through my words in her voice, so it’s a really important song for me.”

After a long apprenticeship in his home country, Williams burst into international view with his debut solo album in 2015. He was acclaimed for his storytelling gift and stunning voice, a tremulous instrument that’s often been compared to Roy Orbison.… Read more..

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