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

It’s OK to steal, cos it’s so nice to share

Media / June 27, 2012 / 4 minutes of reading

In 2001, American alt-country singer Gillian Welch released a song that, in her ever-so-quiet way, excoriated the download generation. Everything Is Free made a crucial observation: that musicians, artists and writers would keep creating content regardless of whether anyone actually wanted to pay for it or not.

“Everything is free now,” she sang plaintively. “That’s what they say / Everything I ever done / Gotta give it away / Someone hit the big score / They figured it out / That we’re gonna do it anyway / Even if it doesn’t pay.”

That drive – the physical compulsion to create – has always been at the centre of the artist’s core. They don’t choose to live in penury as such: poverty is simply the most common by-product of the fact that one doesn’t really choose to be an artist, either. It’s something that more often chooses you.

Welch wrote the song just before file-sharing service Napster was taken to the cleaners in the courts, but the damage was already done. Who wanted to pay for anything they could get for free anymore? Loudon Wainwright III put Welch’s viewpoint more pungently in another song, Something For Nothing: “It’s OK to steal, ’cause it’s so nice to share.”… Read more..

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Bayoneting the wounded

Media / June 25, 2012 / 7 minutes of reading

In her classic long-form essay The Journalist And The Murderer, American writer Janet Malcolm used an opening gambit that immortalised herself while throwing a bucket of corrosive acid over her profession. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” she declared. “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse…

“Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the public’s ‘right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”

After one of the most traumatic weeks in the history of Australian media, perhaps now is not the kindest time to be quoting Malcolm. But I was reminded of her words last Thursday, when a nasty spat broke out over at Media and Marketing website Mumbrella after Tina Alldis, head of PR agency Mango in Sydney, penned an opinion piece for the website that seemed to do a tap-dance at the prospect of thousands of people about to hit the dole queues.… Read more..

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The beginning of a breakdown: Lyon

Music / June 6, 2012 / 7 minutes of reading

“Welcome to the big, fat south of France,” says Andy.

Actually, we’re not fully in the south yet. We’re in Lyon, which is more in the central east, really. But it’s sunny, it’s very warm, and after a day and a half’s driving, the cold and wet of Brittany feels another world away. The road had taken us away from the major highway, through winding hills and small Terracotta-topped villages. Then we’d spent a good hour poking our way through the city’s outskirts to its mad, pulsating centre.

There’s less than half a million people here, but it feels like more. Maybe that’s because I’m still driving the Big Black Car. The streets in the city are narrow, the roads are chaotic, and parking is slightly … desperate. We want to check out Dangerhouse, a famous record emporium near the city centre, but it’s impossible to find a space for the van anywhere, so in the end we just head for the venue. It feels hot and crowded and stressful.

Actually, it’s not that bad, just a bit of a taster for what’s to come in the real south – in Marseilles. And the stress falls away pretty quickly once we’re on the boat.… Read more..

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Deliverance: Lorient

Music / May 16, 2012 / 6 minutes of reading

Like Brest, Lorient was smashed to pieces during World War II. It’s a seaport on the south coast of Brittany in north-west France, and a former German U-Boat base. All the allies’ bombs combined couldn’t penetrate the three giant reinforced concrete structures that sheltered the boats, so they reverted to plan B, destroying the city in order to cut supply lines to the base.

On Rue Florian Laport, which runs down to the docks, you’d be forgiven for thinking some parts of Lorient had never actually been rebuilt. If you’re a dirty, filthy rock & roll band and you wanted to grime up your image by picturing yourself in a setting of authentic urban decay, here you will find an overload of photo opportunities: abandoned buildings, huge slag-heaps of dirt and smashed windows abound.

They have great graffiti here, though. The band photos didn’t materialise, but I did get this shot of Stackers in one of those bombed-out buildings:

Appropriately, it’s on this street, amid all this detritus, that you’ll find the dirtiest, filthiest and best rock & roll club in France, if not all Europe. Le Galion was once a sailor’s bar and, from all accounts, a violent place; if you look hard enough you’ll probably still find the odd tooth that’s been knocked out of some poor seafarer’s head.… Read more..

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The fear: Brest

Music / May 10, 2012 / 6 minutes of reading

Brest is a naval port on the north-west coast of France which was largely rebuilt after being blown to bits by the British in World War II. It’s cold and wet. Apparently it rains about 200 days a year here. I’m tempted to use that for an explanation for the depressed-looking nature of the place, but that would have a lot more to do with prevailing economic conditions.

It’s two days before the general election, and times are tough. The population is waiting for Sarkozy like Australians once famously waited for Paul Keating: with baseball bats. “Under Sarkozy, one million out of work,” one sad-looking fellow tells me, baulking at the prices on our merchandise. “When your tour over, we will have new president.”

The band’s just played another crazed show in a beautiful room under a hotel called La Vauban. Pity there weren’t many more than 30 or 40 there to see it, in a room that you could comfortably fit 300 into, thanks to a band competition across town that sucked away most of the town’s eligible punters for the night.

Most of the audience were fellow musicians: the guys from Head On, fronted by Beast Records’ inimitable Seb, and Ultra Bullitt, whose singer/bass player extraordinaire Erwen La Roux has put on tonight’s show.… Read more..

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Big black car: Paris

Music / May 6, 2012 / 6 minutes of reading

La Méchanique Ondulatoire feels a bit like a railway tunnel: a curved brick room under a funky little bar, tucked away in the narrowest of side streets off Rue de la Roquette, in the Bastille. And the light at the end of the tunnel, ready to crush anyone stupid enough to get in the way, is HITS. It’s their fifth show in six days – a lot, for a band that’s never done more than three on the trot – and the band is cooking.

It’s a Wednesday night, but we’re in Paris, and so relieved and astounded just to be here that it might as well be New Year’s Eve as far as we’re concerned. Upon pulling up at the venue, we’re met by fellow Brisbane emigre Ben Salter, who’s over here for at least the next five months, living off a songwriter’s grant and building a new fan base in Europe. He greets us like lost friends, which I guess we are. All of our eyes feel like saucers.

We’d left La Louvière in Belgium in the morning, crossed the French border to the east and made something like a five-hour drive to Caen, the extraordinarily beautiful capital of Lower Normandy, much of it built in the 11th century during the reign of William the Conquerer (also known as William the Bastard, due to his lineage as the illegitimate son of the unmarried son of Robert the Magnificent and Herleva.… Read more..

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