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

Dying by degrees

Miscellaneous, Music / April 24, 2016 / 5 minutes of reading

Songs don’t have trigger warnings; if they did, they wouldn’t hit us so damn hard. News stories might warn viewers or readers in advance that the content they are about to consume may be graphic but, in art, an R rating or parental advisory sticker shouldn’t protect us from the shock and awe of emotional impact.

Some of the great songs in history cover intensely difficult terrain. Some of them even become fluke hits: Suzanne Vega’s late-’80s classic Luka, a study of child abuse, is one. Archie Roach’s Took The Children Away endures, too, because you didn’t have to be a member of the Stolen Generations to be moved by Roach’s suffering.

About a year ago, I heard a song by Melbourne songwriter Jen Cloher, Hold My Hand, the last song on her most recent album In Blood Memory. It hit me like a truck. The song is a conversation between two old lovers. One asks the other to tell the story of how they first met. He responds:

Well my dear, it was cold,

Shivering, nearly snow

You wore my favourite coat.

But his answer is instantly forgotten, and the conversation, like the song, becomes circular:

Did I dear?… Read more..

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Cowboys of the cab industry get their comeuppance

Miscellaneous / April 24, 2016 / 5 minutes of reading

One thing I learned about the taxi industry, after 15 years driving for it, is that it is unburdened by either self-awareness or shame. Take, for example, the Taxi Council of Queensland’s recent claim that Uber – the ride-share app that’s happily eating its lunch – is a potential haven for sexual predators which the industry rejects.

Pardon? My observation is that it’s next to impossible to get rejected by the taxi industry, at least in my home state of Queensland. Drivers are like gold; keeping bums behind the wheel is all that counts as the cab cartel – once as convinced as Kodak that the digital thing would never catch on – faces up to its own mortality.

It’s not as if the mainstream industry doesn’t have its own safety issues. Just punch “taxi sexual assault” into any search engine. In Victoria, the Institute of Forensic Medicine identified 25 cases over a three-year period. Most of the victims were heavily intoxicated. Two were intellectually disabled.

I have lost count of the number of my female friends who won’t have anything to do with taxis after being scared off by drivers who (a) suggested there might be other ways of paying their fare, or (b) who loitered around their front doors with intent, or (c) upbraided them for being out alone without their husbands.… Read more..

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The strange return of Mr Somewhere

Music / April 24, 2016 / 7 minutes of reading

Robert Forster, co-founder of the Go-Betweens, writes that in the small, but febrile post-Saints Brisbane music scene of the late 1970s, everyone knew each other. That should be no surprise: really, they still do. But even back in those days, he says, he and the late Grant McLennan knew of Peter Milton Walsh before they had met him; he was a man with “whispers and claims on his trail”.

Walsh is the near-myth behind the Apartments, the group he named after one of Billy Wilder’s greatest films. It speaks of him. He wore impeccable suits and shades under a big mop of blond hair in Brisbane’s sweltering heat. He had a taste for the arcane and the exotic. His music is of another time: of post-punk, certainly, but also of Burt Bacharach and Jacques Brel; Françoise Hardy and Serge Gainsbourg.

He is a star in France, yet all but unknown here. He lives quietly in Sydney, rarely performs, and has just made his first album – his fifth overall – in 18 years. The man himself is no mystery; just not one to make a noise about himself. He deadpans he has been “hard at work developing my sitting still and keeping quiet talents, which to me are a little bit neglected in this world”.… Read more..

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Out in the heartland, no rocker is safe from right-wingers

Australian Politics, Music / April 24, 2016 / 4 minutes of reading

It’s getting to the stage where there practically isn’t a heartland rocker left whose songs haven’t been egregiously misused for conservative political ends. In America, it’s Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp and Neil Young. Now, in Australia, it’s Jimmy Barnes, who has been forced to distance himself from anti-immigration groups Reclaim Australia and the United Patriots Front, after Cold Chisel’s classic Khe Sanh was used in rallies over the weekend.

Don’t they know Barnes’ wife was born in Thailand? Did they never listen to Don Walker’s superb lyrics, which would have made it plain that Khe Sanh – about a burned-out Vietnam veteran – was not exactly a call to arms for an ethnically pure Australia?

Of course not, but let’s face it, we aren’t exactly dealing with Mensa candidates here.

“The aussie spirit is what you stood for in so many” (sic), bemoaned the Australian Defence League in reply to Barnes. “You have just showed the world and every Australian that grew up loving your music that you are nothing but a political correct fold at your knees idiot.” (sic, sic, sic.)

In America, the Republican Party has made a pastime of co-opting the songs of its heartland rockers.… Read more..

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PJ Harvey’s bubble bursts

Music / April 24, 2016 / 5 minutes of reading

It’s tough to be critical of Polly Jean (PJ) Harvey. As an artist, her place in history is secure: hailed as the world’s best songwriter by Rolling Stone upon the release of her first album, Dry, in 1992, Harvey is the sole dual winner of the Mercury Music Prize (first for Stories Of The City, Stories Of The Sea, released in 2000, then for Let England Shake, released in 2011). And she’s not just a critic’s darling – she bears the royal seal of approval, having been awarded an MBE for her services to music in 2013.

So a new release by PJ Harvey is a certifiable event. And the usually reserved singer/songwriter is making sure that the follow-up to Let England Shake will be noticed: she’s recording it behind one-way glass at Somerset House in London, turning the studio into an “mutating, multi-dimensional sound sculpture”.

In effect, PJ Harvey is turning herself into an exhibit, and hopes the audience “will be able to experience the flow and energy of the recording process”. London-based art commissioning organisation Artangel has said in a statement: “The working process of a project has always been as important to us as its public presentation, and here both can be fully explored and revealed at the same time.”… Read more..

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Australian anthems: (I’m) Stranded

Music, Qld Politics / April 24, 2016 / 4 minutes of reading

The video begins, appropriately enough, with the sight of a door being kicked open – then a hurricane of noise rushes through. Until very recently in Brisbane, it was still possible to visit the decrepit building on Petrie Terrace and stand in front of the fireplace on top of which the words “(I’m) Stranded” were once daubed in red letters, where the Saints shot the primitive but charged clip for their debut single.

It’s not quite where Australian punk rock was born – that, arguably, happened a little further down the road, in the Saints’ rehearsal room on the corner of Milton Road, not far from the Castlemaine XXXX brewery. Club 76, they called it. But the Saints had been going for a few years by then – since mid 1973, by guitarist Ed Kuepper’s reckoning.

Being first can be an overrated virtue, but in the Saints’ case, it needs to be stated over and over again. (I’m) Stranded, which appeared on the band’s own Fatal label in September 1976 (the same month the 100 Club in London held a festival featuring a colourful assortment of new bands including the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned) was the first independently produced rock single in Australia.… Read more..

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