Until the Breathing Stopped: Syd Barrett's Barrett

I bought a jumper. It was grey and ridged with a buttoned collar and black cuffs. It had a breast pocket with a key-ring zip. Very nineteen eighty-five. I bought it at a shop in at Indooroopilly Shoppingtown. Can't remember for how much. On the same trip I went into the main record shop there and bought a box set of Vivaldi concertos (a beautifully soaring digital recording on Florilegium) and a copy of Barrett. If Madcap Laughs had been there I would have got that instead and gone back later for Barrett. No choice.

I had the money for this extravangance from a few week's work for Debbie Wilson Research. I was wrong for the job and didn't last long at it but it gave me my first working paypackets ever (not counting the money for the video editing job the year before but that was different: 'nother story).

I'd borrowed a silk tie from my brother Stephen for the interview and wore a shirt from my own wardrobe that I took to be mainstream and respectable. The collar was too tight and I made it through the interview with a face like a tomato. I went in the next day and started work in a government office, collating figures from accomodation and hotel industry records. I didn't know what the work was for and didn't ask for the same reason that I didn't know what my father did for a living until I was about seventeen: I didn't care.

This was intensely boring work but helped me with my attempt to quit smoking. At one point (it might have been in a private sector office (my team went to several different locations we were white collar nomads) a fortyish man came through with greeting and handshakes for us all. He later popped into the office I was working in and grabbed a file.

"Hi," he said and gave me a deathcrush handshake. "How're you doing?"

"Great," I said without irony. "How are you?"

He grinned and on his way out said, "I'm winning," also without irony.

I never saw him again. I was glad. Way back then it made him sound like a prick. The only one of the team I had much to do with was a nice enough guy called Gordon who showed me the ropes and kept an eye on how I was doing. We were clopping down the stretchy stone steps of Trades Hall one Friday morning and I remember him asking: "got a good weekend lined up?" I was still new to office work and instead of lying and saying, "yeah, how about you?" I said, "no." He never asked me again.

At one point we were invited into a staff room for the birthday of some lifer who shrank into a corner with a constant time-serving grin. Gordon was a veteran of these things and had warned me that the last time it happened he was allowed to use a staff member's tea mug because its owner was on leave that week. At the end of the first fortnight the portly but pleasant boss (a woman in her forties: everyone who was a second or more older than I was going through their unreachable forties) handed me my pay sachet and said: " Here, Peter, this is what makes it all worthwhile." On the way home that evening I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels.


The next fortnight was my last. Most of it was at the research firm's headquarter offices a few floors over Anne Street with a view of Mt Coot-tha (non-Brisbanites be directed, it's pronounced Mount Cootha). It was a lot better work, mostly writing abstracts for government publications and I excelled at it. But the core of the job was the numbers and I was probably just too slow and sloppy at that. The boss sat on my desk on my last day, handed me my pay and let me go in front of everyone else. Naive, I asked for a reference and was told I could use her as a referee for the language-based work but not the numbers. Then she said, and this saddens me today, "you're free to go."

Embarrassed, I pretended to work for another twenty minutes and packed up and left while the others were at afternoon tea. The mix of rejection and elation is a strange one. I told Dad (who was down from Townsville on one of his renovation assault campaigns on the Auchenflower house) that the project I was working on had finished and he left me alone over it. If I'd told him the truth I would've had two solid weeks of management-class humiliation at every meal.

My shopping spree at Indooroopilly was an early encounter with what would later be given the nauseating name of retail therapy. Nevertheless, it was guided by the fact of being financed by my final payment from Debbie Wilson Research; I was buying things that would last.

A little later some friends came over and we sipped the American whiskey (which had in fact lasted weeks) o'er the Vivaldi records. Apart from the achingly beautiful audio quality of it, the set was one of Christopher Hogwood's directions of baroque mastery which insisted pedantically on period-correct instruments and arrangements (so that the strings were strung slack and the continuo could be organ or lute instead of the usual harpsichord). It made for a lovely late autumn afternoon. Then someone venturing near the LP stack flipped through it until they found Barrett, picked it up and said: "you got this on vinyl."

"I did," I said. "Put it on after this."

For two of the company it was the first Syd they'd heard outside of what was on Relics and it was more warming than the whiskey watching them fold into it as the meandering chime of the clean Fender Esquire noodled before the tide of bass and organ brought us into Baby Lemonade.

I later learned that that beginning, that highly articulate guitar playing was not only Syd himself (I'd assumed it was producer and former bandmate David Gilmour) but recorded only to get a level before the take. Gilmour kept it in. The guitar playing in the rest of the song is nowhere near as articulate (ie when Syd knew he was being recorded).

After the grey day joys of the opener comes the lazy and comfy Love Song with its feed seive acoustic guitar, organ (fellow Floyder and co-producer Richard Wright), tack piano and a double tracked Syd on something soothing. It picks up tempo for the outro and everyone keeps up. Syd probably thought he was going the same pace.

Dominoes slinks in almost unnoticed with Syd quietly musing about losing when his mind's astray over a deep dark thudding bass and kick drum while Rick Wright plays a Riders on the Storm rhodes and Syd Provides a flying backwards guitar line (maybe the longest I've heard). A sad song possibly about inevitability. He sounds muted and resigned.

It is Obvious sounds more upbeat but Syd still sounds tired. A major chord, a fourth up, down again, up again, like a mandraxed Street Fighting Man but there's something going on in all the creeping into cupboards, stranded on spikes, his blood reading oh listen. Something he seems to have seen that no one else has or can. Except for whoever is invited by these words: minds shot together, our minds shot together. Reason it is written on the brambles. Could just be an acid trip. Could be something he couldn't say outside of singing it.

There is none of the light of the first solo album. The Madcap Laughs is filled with golden hair and underwater luminosity, clowns and jugglers. There is much cause for concern in it but it almost sounds stumbled upon there. Here the condition, the field of vision, the no mans land of consciousness was spreading out before Syd and he (helped by the firm hands on the wheel of Gilmour and Wright) was describing it with far more control than he was able the first time.

I have no business feigning psychiatric diagnoses but the next track Rats which sounds like a mix of Syd's normal associative ecstasies and one of Charles Manson's maximum security rants. "Rats rats lay down flat if you think you're unloved than we know about that." The ceaselessly bashing rhythm like the constant nag of They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha Ha lashes for the whole song. Syd begins in his baritone range (which always surprises me even though he used it often) and wavers between it and an octave over it. But during the line "I look into your eyes" he goes from somewhere low to a searing wail. This lies somewhere between mischief and dropping the docking rope. "Rats rats lay down flat yes yes yes yes lay down flat..."

If Rats was unsettling try Masie which closed side one. A glacial 6/8 blues shuffle on the drums with a clean but dark guitar keeping to the lower strings and a bass thud. No change. That all the way through. Syd keeps to his lowest range, sometimes finding notes at the bottom of whatever well he found this one in. Maisie. Bad luck. The pride of the bull. His luminous grin put her in a spin. This track has the sound Angelo Badalamenti found for every David Lynch scene that involved threatening sleaze, carpets crusted with cigarette butts and gum, factory surfaces thick with grease and someone with a ghastly distorted voice walking in under the incandescent bulb to do damage. Syd occasionally puts a toppling laugh in the lines. Something bad is happening here.

Flip the disc and Gigolo Aunt starts after a brief reverby crunch of guitar chords. A constant Beatley thump in the organ, bass and drums and sweet guitar interjections. But this is fun. The wordarama doesn't have the slippery grip of the first side. The words "su-perlative day" are delivered for direct injection; everyone who hears them has an instant picture of a beautiful afternoon. If there are hidden shadows here they are too hard to see for all the light. It's old Scarecrow Syd back again.

Waving My Arms in the Air. Hey, he's still here, bouncing around the scenery in one of Ray Davies' afternoons of rain, shine, tea and toast and all things lovely and English. Like Ray, Syd couldn't sound like his transAtlantic inspirators if he tried; his solid power as a singer was as a middle class English boy. It gave his whimsy and his invention their driving power and is why cover versions never quite sound genuine unless they, too, are delivered English (not British, mind you, English, actually home counties English). Listen to This Mortal Coil's cover of Late Night from Madcap for proof. Imagine Pub With No Beer sung by Marc Almond. Cannot work even in jest.

But the song crunches its gears and strips them as it shifts into another song. There's a party and it sounds good but he's not happy and every thought he gives the girl drags him further into withdrawal until he isn't at the party as much as observing it, thinking and watching as even his thoughts disintegrate and fall around him like his painting of the insects on the cover, pretty but pretty obviously dead.

But the thing is that this was no longer the crazy diamond Syd. There were no more whorls of verimillion waves in a sky explorable with an interstellar overdrive. But there was the shapeless terror behind the coats in the hallway and the difficulty of getting fingernails to stop growing, the zombies and reptilian people just beyond the front door and the chops in the fridge that were always going off.

The treks through the endlessly starting and stopping sessions and takes that even the best production and editing could not mask, the songs that sounded like the instruments were bumping against each other in the dark, all that journey had come to wordless rhythm tracks and muddy belching to suicidally reckless guitar chord progressions. There was nothing left of the black and green scarecrow or the crazy diamond that could meet even an eager and forgiving public. There was just this hobo with the dead eyed stare burning his money on London hotel bills, forgetting why he crossed a room, constantly brushing his teeth.

The padding around the '80s release of the Opel album (pointless early takes and meaningless unfinished tracks) left me feeling dirty when I listened to it. The title track alone held substance but even that with its form (as coherant as he'd ever been) ended with a long and pained plea for something obscure and frightening for its formlessness. The rest was there because of that song. Only that song seemed to merit release but I still wonder about that. It felt like someone had raided his garden shed and excitedly told you that this was his shovel, this was his rake and here's something that seems to be a kind of chair.

Later in his life, towards its end when the online world swooped from the ether and found him the youtube videos appeared. Fat, old and ugly Syd going to the shops. Fat, old and ugly Syd in his front garden. All of it was set to songs like Dark Globe ("wouldn't you miss me?"), the comments section filled with laments about his devastation. Well, I watched them too.

When I heard of his death in 2006 I wept along with all the other rubbernecks on youtube. Such a refulgent star had fallen and kept rolling downhill until one day he just gave up and stopped breathing. He didn't even know he wasn't famous anymore.

But then I heard an interview with Roger Waters who talked about lunching with the band's accountant. "Poor Syd?" the numbercruncher had exclaimed. "He got a big cut out of every Pink Floyd compliation there ever was as well as royalties from the steadily growing cult following lapping up Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the solo albums. He was rolling in it!" The necker cube changed. Suddenly instead of it appearing to be moving from me it started moving my way. Poor Syd? Why should he have kept wanting to be a star? It was we put that bullshit on him. And his escape from it, however incompletely intentional, proved final and satisfying.

Ask yourself: would you rather emerge from a psychotic episode with the old fashioned verve and endlessly tour bowling alleys and RSLs with the old hits, a spanking new autographed Fender and a face made out of orange polymer or would you rather wake up every day finding the joy in designing a new door knob or repaint the kitchen cupboards because the splatter job you did on them last weekend was already boring or go to the shop and see if the old lady has worked out that you mean bovril when you ask her for that black mad cow stuff or hammer dining room table seats together from the palings of an old fence? I know what I'd choose.

But it gets clearer still. There's a track called Wined and Dined, third from last on side two, before the joyously wild Wolfpack and the cute Effervescing Elephant. Wined and Dined is a gentle song about a lovely date with Syd's slide guitar prominent as well as some pleasant fuzzy amp tremolo and a cushion-comfy acoustic strumming through. Of all the tracks on the album there is not a single moment where the bar structure is held up at knifepoint. It is in perfect time from the first to the last. A look at the credits says much. David Gilmour arranged and directed the backing which included Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright. It's tight and perfectly delivered. Even Syd's lead guitar stays on track. It is also the album's only boring track. That's the Syd that would have gone on in music not the one in the next track (Wolfpack) and not even the one in the storybook funny final song about the elephant. Just a tired perfection squinting out at the light through the grey glue of medication until the breathing stopped.

B-Sides and More Besides: Elvis Costello and the Attractions' Tiny Steps

This will be an occasional series about the great unheard, the reverse to the obverse, the face with the least scratches in its groove. There are those I have never listened to (M's M Factor) others I heard but never revisited (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Free Falling), others still I consider the equal of the A-side (Boys Next Door's Dive Position) and the rarest of them all, those I consider superior to the A.

One such of the last is Elvis Costello and the Attractions' Tiny Steps.

Some time in late 1978 I wagged school with Les Peterson and we went record shopping. I went straight to the skid row bin at Palings on Flinders St as that's where I'd got things like The Ramones' Sheena. There was nothing I didn't have except something in with some intentionally ugly cover art which I wrested from the jammed 45s. Hmm! It was Elvis Costello's Radio Radio. I'd never heard of it and I was a big fan since This Year's Model. It was either in the style of that or the first one (which I didn't like as much). At AUD 0.25 I gave it a chance.

We put it on as Les and I enjoyed a brandy and milk (liked it at the time) and heard a This Year's Model style rant with the big Farfisa sound of Steve Naieve blasting out. Yeah, that's ok. And we might have gone on to an album or somehting. After he left I had a look at the other side of the picture sleeve and saw this:

The picture alone would've been enough but the second album sound of the A-side made me curious. I put it on.

It was so low when it started I cranked the volume and put it back to the start. It took me many listens to realise the first words "mersle baby" were actually "muscle baby". And that's it for almost the rest of the words. There are just enough to establish a kind of rainy day British social realist sadness to them. It seemed to be about a bad breakup and he was blaming the girl who was vain and maneating. But there was such a melancholy in Costello's barely decipherable groan. After the voice begins so timidly it soon takes over.

He lightly croons oddly disjointed images of active beauty and weekend or weakened baby etc, like a list of all the things that have gone wrong, over the bright and clean jangle of his Fender Jazzmaster. A high hat taps in here and there almost like at sound check before Elvis releases a sighing "Sooooooooooo....."

Suddenly the snare rolls in with a big Precision Bass revisiting the line from We Got To Get Out of This Place and a great chordy wash from the Farfisa and now the song is about ten times the size it began. And Elvis is more plaintive about wooden bones and pretty lashes, baby's gashes and little tombs for your baby's ashes (holy fuck! what was going on?) He leaves the roll of the melody to whine "something's gone wrong."

And then the chorus. Same thing but a fourth higher and so more dramatic still. "Tiny steps almost real tiny steps you can almost feel ..." Someone is almost human...

The middle eight flows without a mark from the chorus. "Who's that down at the bottom of the garden? Who's that hiding underneath the sofa? Who gets blamed whenever you're in trouble? She's your friend and she's your double!" An icy fingertip of phrase high on the organ keyboard glides above this and with the for once clearly ennunciated words we are in a horror movie. Before we can really take that in we're back under the tide of the chorus which begins to sound more sinister now: "tiny steps, almost real..." And then a thud to silence. For less than a breath.

"Pretty little fashion face," he whispers, "you can't warm her off the shelf..." over the full strength backing. "You can even shop around though you won't find any cheaper." And a big sneering yell: "sheeeee's you're baby now!" Thud to silence and then over stacato organ yelps, one per syllable: "you can keep her!" Then the chorus rises and rages and then the fade which I never deciphered unless it was: "you'll learn to need that human outpost." Into silence.

Like the best tracks on This Year's Model Tiny Steps was a mix of the kind of surly anger every teenager could feel on cue and something stark and severe and disturbing. He seemed to know the workings of nameless clinics and laboratories from first hand experience and took no trouble in equating them with what happens between boys and girls. The original title of his next album still made it on to the cover art: Emotional Fascism. He didn't wear a black shirt but he understood the ones who did, didn't support them but wasn't surprised by them.

Tiny Steps' mix of sweet accessible 60s pop, anger and mystery put the face of Deborah Green in the mix because although I felt no antipathy towards her I was annoyed by the fact that I hadn't driven myself to the stage where her acceptance or rejection of me could've taken place.

She was in my art class and with a near black brunette bob and dark feline eyes could have been an Italian movie queen from the 60s. She was fun and smart and beautiful. We got on well and for awhile I thought that this would just develop into the big thing. My naivete in this meant that when she left for another school for year 12 she left without a word of goodbye and I was shattered.

"Pretty little fashion face..." I hmphed. "You can't warm her off the shelf," I hmphed.

Although an even bigger year awaited me around the curve of December she was never far from my thoughts and even interrupted them when my adolescent salacity brought me to the edge of the abyss of drunken sleaze. If I went ahead and tried "so-o-o-o-o hard to be like the big boys" I would never deserve her.

Then on a night of multiple parties I coaxed Rick and Fiona with god knows what to get out to Sue Walker's place at Wulguru because if anyone had been close to Deborah it had been she. There was absolutely no chance that Deborah wouldn't be there. The drive took an insane time as we struggled with the road map. But when we made the great cul de sac that nestled the Spanish casa with the sun deck that was Sue Walker's place my heart was thumping like a bus engine.

It was dark, subdued but not laughably empty, classy (just like Sue). What would I do? What was I going to say? This was it and there would never be another time. There she was on the couch. I hunched into my leather jacket and made for the kitchen counter for a glass of punch. There was a big fishtank beside it. I looked at the swirling scarlet things in the gluey water and then at Deborah who was looking at them, too. She pointed at one.

"That one's gonna cark it," she said.

I smiled back. Easy. This was going to be easy.

"See this?" she said and raised her left hand on which was a golden ring with a small winking gem set into it. "I'm engaged."

I smiled. Whatever we talked about then might as well have been moonrocks or kelp as all I can remember immediately after it was saying something before Sue took my elbow and showed her new guests the sun deck. Upstairs we looked out at the lights of Wulguru. I rasped something to Rick about materialism until we went back downstairs got in the car and headed back to Peter Mac's party where someone had put "Sure Know Something" on for the fiftieth time. Rick squeezed my shoulder. Fiona kissed me on the forehead. I got drunk.

you'll learn to need that human outpost 

you'll learn to need that human outpost

And so I did ... kinda. Here's proof. Sue later took a photo of me at school. Here it is:

Canyons made of tiny breaths: Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth

Through the blackness that the cover art has implanted comes a tiny rhythm, a string of tiny white knots that sound like the drum machine on a Casio. As it makes its way into the lightless room it is followed by a bright but palm muted electric guitar with a simple chord progression. Then a large cool female voice takes over with a song about Searching for Mr Right. This is delicate and continues to keep itself vulnerable throughout its three minutes. There is no development. It comes and goes but between those two events it shuts you up. It's confident and faltering at the same time. The voice at its centre seems to be both still at school and well past the kind of hunting that the song is about but somewhere between the two states there's a moment of recognition that both can relate to when she sings the words: lose you against the light. The voice is tired and numb from disappointment. It is intensely saddening.

The album goes on, one miniature song after another, all clipped guitar, stark picked trebly bass guitar, organ, drum machine and that barely musical voice asking questions with the lights out.

N.I.T.A. has all of these elements but takes the cameo angst before it a step further with the description of a coupling that didn't survive its first fiery stages seen years after when the other is part of a new family. The abbreviation of the title is expanded near the end of the lyrics "nature intended the abstract for you and me". The narrator is in heavy delusion and will never admit that she is the one who has failed by not moving on, for all her superior musings. A slow few chord wave pattern washes to and fro swinging thick regret.

Music for Evenings, more spiky guitar and bass but an even more muted vocal repeating in a tiny melodic phrase a series of bleak statements about someone she doesn't want. Then, as so often on this album the song just ends with a chunky bass note. And we're back in the dark.

The Young Marble Giants made one album and a few 45s and then disbanded, forming other bands like Weekend and the Gist. A trio from Wales they were the two Moxham brothers and Alison Statton on vocals. Their style and approach to arrangement and recording owed much to a wide musical field but one left severely picked and scratched after they had take what they liked. The result was a bare minimum you would struggle to call rock for all its staccato guitars and white boy picked bass and Statton's hypnotised vocals. The only things like this music were created afterwards. The XX come immediately to mind but they are at the end of a decades long line of imitators. So why did this no-hit tripack have any sway at all let alone the rich legacy they left?

Look at the cover art I put at the start of this post. Between the quirky characters of the band name and the italicised sanserif font of the album title there are three faces in stark half light. The boys all high cheekbones and dimples bookend Statton whose pout is not that of a model but a victim. There is defiance here. Not the camera-flash-long defiance of a hair metal band but something with a quiet strength from knowing the value of restraint in a show of force. The quiet laments of the vanquished call here through a darkness they no longer fear. In a very sobering sense this album is about freedom.

I had an incomplete taping of this album when it was new and never sought it out as vinyl but the Young Marble Giants were my standard for the real alternative rock music. As sparsely arranged as anything by the early Go Betweens or even Gang of Four the Young Marble Giants were both more melodic and emotive than those combined. The politics is there in songs like the title track or Include Me Out but most of it is fought on the personal battleground. While the arrangements are kept to a minimum which is never violated it feels effortless rather than dictated by manifesto. I loved them for this.

Years later after my move to Melbourne I fell into an emotional depression (I won't insult the sufferers of clinical depression by pretending mine was clinical, though I have previously) which began as a lament that I was too slow making friends and led to a withdrawal from situations where I might fix this or strengthen any contacts I'd already established. It was a vile circle of bleakness, worse for my own compliance in it. I crawled out of it  with the help of one friend in particular and joining a writing group in Carlton. Simple remedies, no prescriptions. But until that happened months later I carried through the downer of my final year in Brisbane and set my weekends up for sole music appreciation in the dark.

I led with either Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures or Colossal Youth. The former for when the self pity stung like tragedy and the latter for when some hope was required as a starter. I lay on the couch in the North Melbourne house and listened to the light white horse clops of Searching for Mr Right advance into the gloom.

And I'd fancy I was strong. I lifted myself into control of the books I wanted to write and I'd fashion conferences of mass cultural effect. These were held in cities of glass and light to which I would bring the voice of the lonely and the dispossessed. I stood, borne of this chugging engine of sound, on the peaks of mountains and, coming upon the chasms between them, saw the multitudes of the victims of all life. And into massive canyons made of such tiny breaths I would call the way to the light.

"Going to start a brand new life

Fashioned out of brand new strife

But when I hear the door bell ring

I can never let them in

To meeeeeee."

New York London Townsville Munich: M's Pop Muzik

Anne Helm. That's not her real name. I'm not making one up to protect her; I just can't remember her surname. Anne is right, though. I think I'm getting Helm from the Dean Martin Bond spoof. Anyway, I'm going to recall one of her parties when we were in year 12 because it's my most impactful memory of this song.

Anne Helm's party was the jewel of the schooly weekend but there were two others on the same night. They were both lower on the jukebox but we went to them because different people in Vince's car had to make appearances at each. Didn't bother me. I done my usual scan of the Advertiser for cheap liquor prices and found a bottle of a thing called Old John OP rum. At $6.99 it was insanely cheap even then. My pocket money exceeded the schooly poverty line several times over but I smoked then and also bought records and I didn't drink beer so cheap spirits had the appeal.

The guy at the bottle-oh grinned as he handed it to me. "That's the good stuff, is it?" he said, as though watching me walk into a practical joke setup. "Uh," I responded. As we drove off I unscrewed the cap and took a sniff. And stopped. I was suddenly standing on the edge of a two-kilometre drop.

"Fix me a molotov," I murmured to the void below. "I'm on the hitline."

So as the sun sank on the late spring eve and the great tropical night came down we headed to ... Barbara .... Constance's place for our first stop. Only one of us got out. The rest of us didn't bother because all the babes were at Anne Helm's place. Well, we didn't say babes (and foxes was a word for disco yobbos with their white flares and their nameplate medallions and their genuine sex lives) and we wouldn't have said anything like chicks or even girls because Sandy McArthur and Beck Someone were in the car and that was that for that. Whoever went in came back in a few breaths. "There's seven people there," he said. "They're all wearing hats." Hats meant no alcohol. It wasn't code it's just that seventeen year olds who wore joke hats at parties either didn't drink or were culturally debarked by a lifetime of parental bullying. They would be playing charades by seven and be home by ten. They would neither dance nor play any kind of twister.

The next place was the same so we went down the Strand to peer over at the Island and maybe try the beergarden at the Seaview. The Island's good if you're there or getting there but it loses all magic when peered at from o'er the salt o' the bay. So we piled into the Seaview.

I have never been to the Seaview bar and (assuming it still exists) probably never will. But from the age of sixteen to somewhere around nineteen I was happy to lodge myself between a couple of cronies in its dark and busy beergarden. I ask you to believe that drinking was a far less important thing than being there of itself. We found one of the big chunky plank tables in the dark near the entrance and sat around. Then when Vince nudged me and I looked under the table edge I saw that he'd thoughtfully brought the bottle of rum I'd thoughtfully left in the car. Win was the one who then suggested we scheme and went off to the bar. Two knotty staff returned with him asking for the bottle.

"What bottle would that be?" asked Vince who actually was of age and carried his of age impunity with effortless grace.

"This bloke came to the bar and asked for five half full glasses of coke. Where's the bottle?"

I had been stupid enough to join in the fun of teasing a teacher about our smoking under the trees at lunch and bring out my lighter which was confiscated on sight but I would have never, even drunk, gone to a bar and asked for half full glasses of the schooly's own mixer ... with ice. Win resumed his seat with a face like a great horse as we handed over the bottle of this garbage to be collected on our departure. Meantime we pretty much had to get some drinks which we did: five half full glasses of coke with a little something from Bundaberg in them to ease the stress of the tropical lifestyle. We drank and were merry and then merrier still when a few others of our tribe appeared and laughed like boys with girl germs when we told again the story of what Win had just done. By ten oclock it was time to go to Anne's.

I keep thinking it was near the Strand but it could have been anywhere. I was in a car and wasn't noticing what was through the window. We'd got my bottle back but I couldn't stop looking at Win who was trying to forget how stupid he'd been. He had been the one who'd sneered at me for my cigarette lighter goof to the point of bristling contempt. He couldn't look at me now. He was in the front, the suicide seat, and kept his eyes on the things speeding by.

Anne had done some work. It was an under the house job (house on stilts with weatherboarded ground story with a concreted floor). A trail of Christmas lights led us to the low red glow of the party which was full. We entered.

I knew everyone except for a few friends of some of the girls. The great void of that rum was calling. And suddenly everything geared up a notch when the church organ intro fanfared out from the speakers. The stuttering drums and skeletal amp-tremolo guitar riff and we were under way.

M had conceived of Pop Muzik as a folk song, something that sent the commentators of Sunday radio's Australian top 40 into a "hmm-well" chasm of incredulity. Hal Roach might have had a silver shoulder length swirl and cravat for all I knew but to me he was knotty and had his hair cut at Strategic Bomber Command 5, so clipped and precisely spoken was he for a pop music show. His movietone newsreel voice called from a deep historical vortex that had him berating the forces of Tojo to one mic and firing us up for the countdown to number one on another. I, on the other hand, had no trouble with the idea that Robin (M) Scott had either twanged the number out on a banjo or thought of contemporary folk music as being as electric as Pop Muzik was. Weren't folk songs pop songs anyway?

Anyway, once the gear shifts from the maestoso organ riff which is never heard from again and the stutter takes into the mechanical shunkshunkshunk dukkadunkdunk dunkdunk that is the synthesised bass riff (later ripped for the Ghostbusters themesong and Huey Lewis' New Drug). Female backing vocals cut from sheet aluminium go: pop pop pop music as the wobbly man voice incites: get up get down. And over  a synthbrass blare comes the weird half-man/half-thermosflask voice:

Radio video

Boogie with a suitcase

You're living in a disco

Forget about the ratrace

Let's do the milshake sellin' like a hotcake

Try some buy some fe fi fo fum

Talk about pop music 

Talk about pop music

I twice did the entire lyric for a free coke in front of Barry Horner and Ray Keown at the tuck shop. I was a monkey but the satisfaction.

More of the same:

Bop bop shoo op

I want to dedicate it

Bop bop shoo op

Everybody made it

Bop bop shoo op

Infiltrate it

Bop bop shoo op

Activate it

And then the machine seems to stall but no there's still a thump of function pulsing. And the bit that everyone who heard it around the world liked because they could insert their own corner of the dried-out ex-empire or from the plaque of its yellowed teeth:

New York Paris London Munich everybody talk about pop music TALK ABOUT

Pop music TALK ABOUT

Pop music

YouknowwhatImeanie.

And on and on, the great celebration of delicious boneheaded joy of pop, the whole clanging mess of Iloveyoulovewelovehelovessheloves of eargropes, the whole crumbly salt and sugar mountain of it, declaimed not in the sex-strong voice of a James Brown or a Grace Slick but in something unselfconciously English, some sar-major or PE teacher at the heart of endless drill. Why did this work?

Because it was a folk song. It jumbled the images as though it had found them shattered on the footpath and picked them all up like a hobo and tried them altogether in a small, ornate and deranged palace.

Can't get jumpin' jack I wanna hold get back

Moonlight muzak knick knack paddiwhack 

TALK ABOUT
Pop music

It didn't sound like nonsense because it didn't try to sound deep. It bayed and warbled from the bones of its subject as metallic as the plumbing but as funny as eupehmisms about plumbing and as bollocks-to-that brass-tacks as the best and worst of anything English. I later liked the Fall for doing exactly the same thing (I didn't know it at the time but they already were and better).

In any case I had just spotted Rick and Fiona in a corner. They were self sufficient and felt like home. If I could make them laugh I could be observed to create laughter. I'd kind of got them into this as this wasn't their kind of party. Rick knew a lot of dopeheads, people who moved from bedroom to panel van to job to panelvan to leisure. Fiona was one of us and Rick was her slightly older outside-world boyfriend. Unusually for the girls of my acquaintance I didn't despise him at the cellular level outwards. I liked him a lot. On the way across the room I checked my acne in the light as I passed a window. I must have squinted as Rick's greeting to me was: "vanity is the best policy."

Ever quick with a master diversion I dived into the road tested: "You know what the biggest myth about the oil crisis is?"

We both yelled: "The oil crisis."

I'd read that in Playboy. It fell into a drunken conversation and had never got back out.

After that point I draw a blank as, apart from very very few conversations I had with these lovely people I don't remember a syllable of most of them. Rick was to leave this world soon and horribly. If his exit finds an entrance into an article about a song it will not be this one.

Do it in the supermart

Dig it in the fast lane

Listen to the countdown

They're playing our song again

Vince was at my elbow. He tapped my rum bottle. I turned to see him pointing to the punch bowl. University student parties had newly bought plastic garbage bins filled with any liquid they could find (mostly flagon wine and fruit juice). Schoolies parties were at the seats of rearing and served by the splendour of the double income management class. So there was a real punch bowl on the table. In fact there were two.

I had already decided that I wasn't going to walk around swigging this stuff. It had already given me a vision of a personal apocalypse. I'd been observed toting it on the way in which would be enough. I approached the table and poured a good half in the closest bowl and the remainder in the other.

New York London 

"TOWNSVILLE!!!!"

Munich 

Everybody talk about mm-pop music

The fade set in with the closing comments under a tide of giggling. Behind me a contingent of girls had performed the obligatory insert o' locale. They'd also served to take attention away from my contribution to the other mix. That done, I joined Vince in having too many of these now pineapple, orange and mango flavoured cups o' cold p'ison.

The video for Pop Muzik was all zeitgeist and message. The plastic-skinned M variously in a kind of lounge lizard eye-piercing electric blue and General MacArthur sunglasses and a kind of cloak and dagger overcoat and trilby paced or jerked his way around a pure white background. A brace of pale skinned dancers mimed the backing vox in tight black vinyl as a more plainly dressed woman repeated in split screen who really did look like a session singer in a muted blue jumper and pair of serious looking headphones sang the pulsey backing into a condenser mic, her expression professional, unengaged, just a job. 

The opening verse was delivered from a DJ console that looked like a huge vinyl 45 record. Scott delivered his lipsynch with a stoney face. His character often seemed to move by remote control. For all the busy, nervy verbal patchworking and appeals to the high life the image was robotic. Gary Numan had already done this with Are Friends Electric but as icy as his synthesisers sounded and as frigidly neofascist as his band looked in the video, his I-am-man-machine act had nothing on Scott's which showed the alloy core through the flesh and blood, the calculation in the partying, the cash register bell where the crash cymbal should have been. There was a kind of sneer in the rigidity which you were invited to share. In the fade his vocal lowers to a conspiratorial stage murmur but it's all commands: now listen ...  talk about ...fever  as the assembly line backing vocals coo and hoot on like process engines. In the video he's back at the record console with the two bondage demonesses. One keeps handing him 45s which he flips into the hand of the other who throws them away. Fade to white.

That this dismissive rant could sound like so much fun still impresses me. Sound like fun it did, selling so much that Robin Scott must have survived the mediocrity of his ensuing career with bank balance fat and loose belted. It was a monster hit and serves now (and here in this blog) as a kind of preventative antidote to the soon to follow Kids in America whose sweet tasting cynicism sours before it can get halfway through. Pop Muzik was of course highly derivative but didn't try to pretend it was anything but disposable. Even its message of keeping pop at a fun distance endures.

At least one failed attempt at charming someone I'd never met whose name still suggests itself as Millie even though I later knew otherwise (and so should know now except that it's never the first one I recall) I was very soggy from the punch. This yet I could recognise I was on a loser there. I turned to get back to the table and some more flavoured Old John OP when I saw Anne Helm herself heading unmistakably my way. She'd found out about the extra spiking I'd administered earlier and seemed displeased. She had been pouring herself a plain coke when she clocked my turn and advanced with the soft plastic family-sized bottle in hand, frown-first me-ward.

Anne Helm wore her hair in a kind of Barbara Feldon bob that had lengthened and softened into more of an unmoving rich brunette wave. If you know the actor you might think of Lily Taylor. But seventeen years old. I met her with a grin.

"Fix me a molotov!" I yelled. "I'm on the hitliiine!"

It was probably more like "Fits me a mamal love I'm onna Hitler!"

Whatever she heard me say turned her frown into a bright infernal glare. She rammed the plastic coke bottle towards my head. My hand shot up in self defence and between them our two palms crushed the vessel whose loosely turned cap went splop to the ceiling in advance of a geyser of caffeine, sugar and a host of industrially protected ingredients which returned entirely on Anne Helm's head. Her hair was partially unchanged but most of it looked like a display wig doused in stomach acid. Her mouth agape she turned her widened eyes toward me in a dangerous melange of blame and hatred. I backed away before everything just suddenly changed and she looked straight into the camera and said: "Now that's what I call a sticky situation."

"New York London TOWNSVILLE Munich!" 

yelled the girls behind us. 

Someone had put the song on again.  Not for the last time.

The New Old Wave: Nouvelle Vague

Exclusion is part of every pack animal's kit. It's a lazy but indicative gauge of happiness to report our proximity to the big baying alphadog at the centre. That will always be with us. What saddens me is when I find subculturalists, the early out-opters who wandered in the margins of culture when young, agining into a conservatism so deeply set it would shame the couchiest of mainstreamers.

I will admit that I came to this album concept-first. There was a piece on French chanson music on SBS' much missed Eat Carpet showcase. Chanson just measn song but in French pop music it is equivalent to gentler, song-first fare. Former Dame Premiere Carla Bruni was a chansoner. So are Nouvelle Vague.

I was in before the first live clip in the piece. Why? Words. Nouvelle vague means new wave. New wave was the term used by journalists who though they were being moderne in their descriptions of punk and post punk music from the late seventies and early eighties. The duo at the centre of the project love British new wave music but are primarily into Bossa Nova, the Brazilian dance groove whose name in Portuguese means, say it with me, new wave. James Joyce would love this band.

The only thing absent from most of the commentary on the act and their album was its connection with the coinage of the term Nouvelle vage/new wave first came up in journalism to describe the films of a small group of French directors in the late fifties to the mid sixties. Figures like Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard were taking Hollywood conventions, cutting them up and collaging them to create a cinema both exciting of itself and directly adversarial to the old guard. As that was what happened with rock music in the UK in the late seventies, the term applied perfectly when taken off the shelf. Godard's erstwhile consort and Nouvelle Vague queen, Anna Karina was even on the cover art which looked like it had been through an injet printer whose cartridges were on low (just like the use of available light or still film stock in the new wave films back in the day). This band aimed to misbehave.

Misbehave they did, mining the rich sacred vein of punk and post punk and resetting all of it into chanson. But this was not the same thing as goofing around playing the Sex Pistols as reggae or Smoke on the Water as cocktail jazz. The local act Frank Bennet had recorded Radiohead's Creep as a big Vegas number which was a million times funnier that a bedroom guitarist's pisstake and was meant to be. Nouvelle Vague's purpose diverged wildly from this as they went in seach among the often belligerent material to look for the musicality in it and bring that out in a package that forced you to give the song a second thought.

Ok, so the version of Too Drunk to Fuck is fun and only meant to be fun. It sounds like a jokey afterthought in the studio. That was the track that the rougher necked and boganeering of the ancien regime latched on as evidence of the frivolity of the intent. But they weren't listening.

The track that shimmers out of the speakers and into your central nervous system is Tuxedo Moon's In a Manner of Speaking. The original is a self consciously forbidding number, a pressed metal cold synthesiser backing provides both the clanking rhythm and eerie curlew calls. A typically gorgeous-in-disguise male vocal describes a relationship in a cul de sac, even adding an emotionless spoken vocal for the final verse. The NV version starts with a nylon string guitar gently vamping the chords so fragilely they might collapse like a card house with nearest breath. Bass and percussion enter softly and take a seat by the door. Then the vocal in accented English begins in near stuttering inconfidence until the chorus lifts everything to clouds, taking full advantage of the melody of the original. This song tears your heart out. No joke.

See also, Psyche, Killing Joke's thrasher rendered more sinister here. The Sisters of Mercy's Marian passes clear of the old chorused bass and gated drums and stretches well beyond the horizon with a string figure that lowers you into a warm opioid bath which the original cannot match. The Cure's A Forest is not outdone but beautifully realised with less threat and more witness to something more chilling by the whispered straightness of the delivery. The Specials' Friday Night, Saturday Morning continues the oddly jaunty sadness of the original. And more and more and more, most of it serious as  cats at play and like that often tearingly beautiful.

I was disappointed to find how much resistance this met with from the people I knew from the time of the originals of these songs, how conservatively they held to them and how dsigusted they were with the perceived travesty. The reaction seemed entirely based on the idea that it was a French pisstake on the superior British scene, the old do-Joy Divison as bluegrass turn. They were unresponsive to any argument that diverged from this, preferring the warmth of their exclusion.

These people who had smiled at Bananarama's drums and shouting version of the Pistols' No Feelings, the indy guitar retake of New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle, any number of synthpop reboots of soul or hippy like Tainted Love or California Dreaming frowned like old lawnproud pensioners at Nouvelle Vague's investigations. Well NV are now several albums into it and still exploring.

I saw them twice. First at Hamer Hall, set amid the splendour of the Arts Centre (just beneath the Awful tower) during the So Frenchy So Chic. There was a Citroen on display outside and staff in berets. The auditorium was full and the band played their record, it was fine until the encores when they ruined it by trying to rock out. One goose a few rows away yelled out a request half way through the set but was cowed by the more typically classical music opulence of the venue. "Too Drunk to F!" he cried, having paid a lot of money to do so.

I saw Nouvelle Vague again at the Prince of Wales. They stormed their own set without once trying to rock it. The crowd-participation favourite of getting everyone to yell "putain!" was presented like a staple joke but still funny. And then when they played In a Manner of Speaking, the singer clearly bristling and having to do it yet again relaxed into it and her voice filled the darkened room with pure aching light.

The End of Their Interest Value As I Knew It: REM's Document

Mark E. Brooke was from Dunedin, New Zealand and knew a few of luminaries of the Flying Nun scene as familiar faces at gigs. He was an understating wit of great power and had the advantage of looking out at the universe through light emerald tinted glasses which put him at sufficient distance from anyone he spoke to which in turn allowed him a lot of leeway with his observations of his fellows. While I had refined my old post punk rig to affect a series of tuxedos-by-day he kept hold of his punk roots with a light leather jacket, Docs and drainpipes. His hair was kept Howard Devoto cropped to keep its recession from his forehead from being too obvious. We mentored each other's writing and reading. He was a much better writer. I threw out an opening sentence once which we were both to use for a short story. I read his and didn't finish mine. On Fridays after work we would get drunk and talk.

Smith Street Fitzroy/Collingwood in 1987 had a shop called Leedin Records. There was also a video shop on the same strip called Leedin video. On our way back from McCoppins one evening we went by Smith to pick up some more alcohol and stopped in at the record shop. He chose an Elvis Costello compilation, being a devotee (as I had been) and I came upon the new REM album Document. I was aghast as I had no idea it was out or even if they were still going.

Back at mine we put the REM record on and it slammed straight into the stadium sized rocker Finest Worksong with a gigantic drum sound and army of guitars. Through it, though, saving it from pure sellout, came Michael Stipe's odd cartoony growl which set the whole song at home again. Welcome to the Occupation was a lot more trad for the band and in a minor key. Exhuming McCarthy was like Finest Worksong but chunkier. Disturbance at the Herron House sealed the pattern and by the time we were halfway through the big one from the album, It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) which mixed a Subterranean Homesick Blues roll call with a goofy I-IV-V chorus I thought: well at least it's catchy.

Side two was a a little darker mooded and contained the still great King of Birds but really was more of the same. They'd even managed to get the old Wire song Strange wrong by dressing it up as the new rock like the rest of the album.

What I was hearing was a pattern which continued at least through the following album, Green, which I also bought. Big rock song to start with, something more abstract after, big goofy rock song after that, a big ballad with a mandolin, a minor key cliche fest for a single and so on. It had been the same on the previous one, Life's Rich Pageant and looked to set in.

This did not make me an unfan. As I said I bought the next one and went to see them play Festival Hall with the Go Betweens and dug the show. What it did, when the big fast food catchiness of it wore off, was take me back to the first albums that had made a fan of me in the first place.

What I liked about Murmur and Reckoning was a mix of joyous sixties style guitar chime, a real hook in every song and best of all lyrics that pretty much admitted they were only there to put the human voice in the mix (which is how I listen to the vocals in almost every song I ever hear). It was almost like hearing a stoat or grizzly bear fronting the Byrds.

Increasingly, REM were assuming a vague kind of liberalism which served to reform the lovely growling nonsense into the kind of sloganeering big choruses that I've heard too often. By the time Document came out they were set on course and wouldn't budge until irreversible fame tracked them down. They became interview subjects probably because that's just a lot easier to do. And while Document wasn't necessarily the point that began it is the first time I noticed it. For all my fandom of the band and enthusiasm of this album I had increasingly no option but to admit that whatever I wanted it to be it was just a big middle-of-the-road rock album. There had been a resurgence in old school rock dressed as lamb in the mid to late eighties. Most of it was American but there was plenty of UK crud like Jesus and Mary Chain to match the Georgia Satellites or Jason and the Scorchers. The half decade of alternatives that had preceded this was swept away  as even old guard critics who had fought the big one back in the winter of '77 were typing their approval. It was happening here, too, it's just that there where the choices seemed easier bad retrograde ones were being made.

But if I recall the album the memory of Mark Brooke gets in the way and the kind of ethics-confronting exhanges and thought-trains we'd get into, drunk or not, and the idea that creativity needed nothing but a starting point and a medium still tap me on the shoulder. Whatever happened to it when it was finished, whether it was published, played on the radio, declaimed in a smoky pub or read at Cambridge that first procreative ignition had to take you somewhere that you weren't and if it didn't you were probably trying too hard, thinking too much and plunging your feet into the sand. If we edited each other, hissed in petulance or swore or tripped into mutual insults those notions of the work and its worth remained intact, waiting like tsking teachers for the tirade to ease into silence when the real work would have to be done.

We drifted. He moved back to NZ and took up tertiary teaching. His wife became a doctor. They had kids and were probably happy in that annoyingly non-cloying way that some couples are. I got on with some failed novels and nothing jobs until my guilt woke me before thirty to get myself qualified in something and start some honest work. Meantime there were other people to meet friends to draw even closer, things to do. They were done.

REM left their indy IRS label after Document and went to a major. The follow up, Green, was even bigger and a tour of the world's stadiums put them on the shelf next to U2 where they've stayed to graze and fatten. Younger bands emerged but sounded no better and accepted the sugary crown of fame and influence in even faster trajectories.

Years later I heard Shiny Happy People on a radio. It was instantly recognisable and immediately annoying. I understood every word, even from across the room. I stumbled on the video. They were miming the words which they'd sworn felt too fake before. They'd started comfortably in convention and unless they suddenly converted to industrial neo disco there was only one direction they were likely to go. But it wasn't that they'd sold out it was that I didn't care. It was watching as they changed their wardrobe and divested themselves of the last few things that set them apart until all they had was the surface. This wasn't creativity it was brand recognition. For my money, see also Nirvana, a recognisable talent buried under multitracking and so much compression that the volume knob ceases to be a choice or statement. Massive fame and idolatry followed. But tell me which frontman didn't do himself in.

Now Was Then: Donna Summer's I Feel Love

1977 changed me. The promise of punk rock, only glimpsed the previous year exploded into action and I signed up for it and anything it could bring. It brought. It brought so much that you could buy the Damned and Clash albums at the local K-Mart (I did). The news from overseas came slowly through the NME but quickly and with satisfying incomprehension through the tabloid tv reports that got it all laughably wrong. It was a primal time to plug into culture.

Also, for some reason I've never been able to decide upon my local commercial station (there was a total of one, TNQ7) showed avant-fare like John Cassavettes' Husbands, Antonioni's Blow Up and Zabriskie Point, Five Easy Pieces with all the swearing and a host of other pawnshop films as the midweek movie on prime time. It made the end of year's Star Wars look like a tray of soggy lamingtons.

We had it easy then, though, in that the battlelines were clearly discernable. By the end of the year it was impossible to ignore allegiances to punk and its diasporic waves and the big fat sleepy mainstream. The enemy of all who lined up with the anti-ranks of punk was disco, declaimed as the mindless Mammon of culture as sharply definable as a 10 year old defines the other sex as anathema. It was us against disco.

We were wrong about that, though. While punk was good in small nervous groups where its might felt like pure energy, disco wasn't just mainstream it was the leader of the mating dance. All the yobs we sniggered at with their John Travolta white flares and medallions were getting it in both senses. We had to make do with the everlasting warmth of cultural superiority. Such delights as I was able to glean in begrudging emulation of  the disco alphas came to me later when my elder sib dragged me away from school parties to the university bashes they went to. Even in my studied disdain, though, I never suspected that there might be just as horrifying a pecking order at the disco as there was in the oval or any other scene of human commerce. Nevertheless...

Disco was easily identified on the street. It wore glitter and green feather boas, flares wider than Ross River Road and walked a big bouncing strut to a stiff and steady four on the floor drummer and overgrown bassline. All the harmony seemed to be in the major but when minor chords came in they seemed somehow gutted of their darkness. That was the thing about disco. It had no darkness to it. The suggestion that all ills and the sins of the world could be erased through hard perfected boogie had the feel of a cold and mindless Orwellian nightmare but it was as fluorescently bright as Room 101. There was no redemptive filth to Disco as there sill seemed to be with rock, certainly punk. But then there was this.

I heard it as I heard most new music at night on the radio. Maybe it was the spirit of the time but the local commercial radio had started getting a little more adventurous and it wasn't strange to hear a long Led Zeppelin track like When the Levee Breaks next to Kraftwerk after about eight at night.

I don't remember what came before or after this but I do remember that its entry into the light of my yellow walled room seemed to bring with it a kind of coloured darkness. My radio was leaking a void into my room. This carried no dread but still bore a kind of threat in its weirdness.

I knew about synthesiser music from various things in the air anyway, and then there were Dad's stereo demonstration records and there was always Switched on Bach. Well, I can't just dismiss that one in a mention. I remember a sizeable group of family gathered around the stereo when I was still young enough to play on the floor. I might have had the cover of the record to play with as the sounds came out. Some of us were in wonder, partly because of the claimed travesty of the old master's music but others in awe of the sheer joy of invention they were hearing. I remember bright sound filling the room and didn't know to care if Old Father Bach was being assaulted. There seemed a chase to the music, a pursuit through cartoon coloured hills and valleys.

At thirteen, still clinging to the sanctity of eighteenth century music that I'd constructed in the previous two years, I chose two records for my birthday, both in CBS' Greatest Hits of various composers. Mozart's Greatest Hits was rich but routine with a lot of partial symphonies and concertos etc. Bach's Greatest Hits on the other hand was far more adventurous, presenting the great Tocatta and Fugue in D minor (already fatigued by too many appearances in film soundtracks) as a gigantic orchestral piece, and several of Walter (later Wendy) Carlos' pieces from Switched on Bach. The general modernisation of the four sides of vinyl baroque were a revelation. Carlos' realisations of Bach, far from cheapening them, brought the scarcely credible invention of them. I was far too young to have seen A Clockwork Orange but that would have provided an easy extension. Before I let guitar and drumkit rock music into my ears I was enchanted by synthesisers.

By the two years until the release of I Feel Love I was ready for something like this, a pop song made entirely of synthesis and human voice. But nothing had quite prepared me for the sheer onslaught of it.

A brief brassy fifth rises from silence before the machine bursts in and takes over, busy, pistoning, chunky and hissing all at once. But this isn't a steam or petrol powered thing. It's Tesla from the ground up, a plug in autodance that teases with brassy sideswipes from major to minor while the ground of fifth seventh to tonic, the whole thing coursing forward on its own momentum, too advanced for the most audacious sci fi.

But then there's Donna herself lighting on to the spiky bed of rhythm as though made of aural feathers. Her voice at first dry and falsetto descends through a modal almost Gregorian figure down to a major third when a slightly tailing reverb coats her voice and hangs a little. Then again, same thing. But then at the end of this with a fifth and a seventh she soars into the chorus and the bass swells and bulges filling to a tide of huge sound that rises in the breath and sweat to press the light and air of the room with a drunkening crave for more and more and more of the same, unstoppable. Guess what, synthesisers, long the territory of the mountainous bores of prog rock, were sexy, sexier than the hardest nutted powerchord there ever was.

But this is not a knee trembler out the back of the club, this is a night's abandon. It rises and falls, gathers speed and passion and relaxes, breaks down and builds again, Donna's fleshly angel returning to soar over the writhing crowd of the senses. This goes charging and energising for five very long radio minutes finally pusling and thumping on in auto, stripped to bass but still in high charge on to the fade.

This did not convert me to the disco team. After this all disco sounded like a bunch of cruddy old session hacks pumping away until payday. Disco? This brought me to the point of tears with its intensity and comprehension of my (and everyone else's) throbbing biology. I wondered what the floor and the lights and big human storm felt like to be inside when this was first played on the world's dj consoles. I was fifteen and had to imagine. But holy burning christ did I imagine.

Mystery Cloud: Abba's SOS

I never owned a copy of this one. Didn't have to. It was released into the atmosphere and poured into the reservoirs. But that didn't stop it haunting me then all the way up to now. It started with the video.

There's a weird revision that has gone around since the nineties that music videos were hen's teeth before MTV. This affects other historical accounts. A tv docco about ABBA made in the early noughties had Bjorn Ulvaeus claim that they had in effect invented MTV because they made videos for each single they released. I remember watching Countdown in the mid seventies which featured almost wall to wall videos. (The stinky Bandstand had local acts covering international hits, probably from union demands leftover from the sixties but the spectacle of it was an embarrassment.) There were, of course, the live miming acts on Countdown but there was never a show that wasn't mostly clips. Countdown wasn't 24/7 like MTV and MTV might have stirred US record companies to release music videos as a matter of course but this idea that it was unthinkable before MTV is a recent one.

I start here because one of the most powerful videos I saw when I was starting to get into pop music (I came to it late from a childhood of classical music) was Abba's SOS. There was an exciting element to seeing clips from overseas. The video quality often looked a little gluey but that gave it an old-movie-on-portable-tv compression to it. It felt like stolen moments from other people's lives across the world, the photos of the fashion magazines my sisters and mother read come to life, they bore a real glamour.

I registered ABBA as the creators of I Do I Do I Do I Do, a song which, despite its pleasing massed saxophone hook sounded like something you'd hear at a country hall wedding reception when all the up-too-late kids pretended to dance but mostly fought in a cranky clairvoyant channelling of how they'd act at eighty-seven. There was a video to it but it was flat and glitzy. It didn't have the punch of Sweet's Fox on the Run performancer or the warm as a spring night Come Up and See Me by Steve Harley and Cockney rebel. It didn't even have the laughable (even then) hippy sleaze of Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band which I liked (despite the embarrassing lyric) for the harmonies.

One afternoon toward the end of grade eight, in the margin between exams and the official breakup when attendance scrutiny was lax I went home, glowing with the lightness of a year achieved, and set myself up in front of the upstairs tv with an iced coffee and watched one of the odd midmorning repeats of Countdown. It must have been one I'd missed as I didn't recognise some of the songs. And then, among the goopy Sherbert clips (they always seemed fat to me) or spiky Skyhooks numbers there came this.

It begins like the picture above, with Agnetha (my Nanna corrected my mispronunciation of the name from Ag-neetha to Annyetta) on a sunny but cold Swedish morning looking troubled. A brief but very serious downward figure on the piano preceded this. It was phased but I didn't know that then so it just sounded disturbing. Agnetha's high clear voice was stretched with pain, asking where her happiness has gone. Whatever was intended, this all added up to one of those mystery movies you'd see on rainy afternoons where the searcher never found the missing girl. Well, here was the missing girl singing from the ether itself, her face almost completely filling the screen, Scandinavianly beautiful but in torment. The strange viscous piano swelling around her voice like a tide of ectoplasm. Then - BAM - slamming into the picture with a big chorus in the relative major and "oh it's ABBA" again. But then, oh no it's back, a big dark bass in the synthesiers growls up a minor key run over a distant vocal refrain: "When you're gone how can I even try to go on?" I'm shivering as I type this. Second verse is more of the first. No need for development, the atmosphere will do. Sometimes we like living in the sadness. BAM with the chorus and holy smokes with the growling tail lashing. No third verse. Instead a thumping ground of low D octave with a severe clipped version of the vocal melody. It's like a funeral march. Then we're whisked back up to the chorus by the carinvalesque million note piano and moog arpeggio to the BAM chorus and then the big growling monster beneath the distant cry of pain: "When you're gone how can I even try to go on?" Twice as long as it has before, grinding with black emptying despair. And THEN this fades into the same descending solo piano that starts the song, minor key, fatal, final. One last whimper-not-bang D minor chord hangs twirling in the darkness.

And this was ABBA! ABBA, the cute double couple act with the lot, neuralogically tested in lab conditions hooky pop songs, magazine looks, music videos, the nous to sing in English, and the unbreakable sub-Arctic core of mighty Nordic hygiene that can disinfect all that it touches, bringing you a song that fed on the pain of its listeners and returned with the strength of that lightless accumulation with every replay. As I say, I never needed to own a copy of this song as its visit to the Earth was a successful mission. Nothing else they did ever achieved this greatness (although Knowing Me Knowing You made a solid approach) and it marks the point at which my admiration for them began to decline as the chirpier numbers started flooding the airwaves to saturation.

I tried to make it through the rest of that Countdown but was too restless. Whatever the weather really was I remember it as being thickly overcast with black rainy stains in the clouds. I rode my bike around Aitkenvale. Went down to the bank of the Ross, green and overgrown, and looked at the water. Came back home and noodled around D minor on the piano. Waited until I heard the song again.

Oxycodonehydrochloride: Bian Eno and Harold Budd's The Plateaux of Mirror

On Bastille Day 2012 I climbed Lake Mountain to see the snowfall, slipped and broke my fibula. Read about it here. A week after initial examination I was booked for surgery to get a plate put in to hold the break in place so it could heal properly. There was one viable window for this and I took it rather than wait two more weeks and risk the bone healing the wrong way. I cancelled a vid night at home (there were to be plenty of those in the coming months) and the understanding friend who received this news offered to give me a lift to the hospital. This was a relief as it always felt a little wrong getting a taxi for two blocks. The first time I did that I was ripped off by the driver.

I presented myself at reception where my being in shorts on a day under ten degrees was wondered at. When you have a leg in a cast you have to improvise. As though that was the pass question I was fast tracked up the stairs to strip off, don a little white backless OT number and lie on a bed until attended by a series of medical personnel who asked me questions.

I was wheeled into the operating room, given a nerve block and an epidural both of which had an unsettling feel and asked to count backwards and close my eyes. I did but when I opened them again I looked straight into the eyes of someone who hadn't been there a second before who smiled and said: "That went well."

INTIMATE DETAILS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH MIGHT DISTURB. THOSE AFTER ARE FINE.

Then I was wheeled into a small ward where I was to lie down, shut up and be observed for about a day. I had no objection. Each hour I was asked by a nurse to rate my pain. For the first few I was numb from the waist down, unable to move my legs let alone my toes which were also tested. Something I would never have guessed going in was being unable to sense that your genitalia were there but knowing from vague referred pain that you needed to urinate but having no muscular force to do so. I tried the plastic bottle but that also involved feeling around there and the sensation of touching male genitalia that did not register as my own was disturbing. Worse when it's wet from urine you can't even smell. I nevertheless aimed into the bottle and heard some trickling from through the curtain. Looking at the bottle I realised the sound had been from me and there was a slight deposit visible through the plastic. My ability to control my bladder flow returned slowly throughout the evening and night but I will never forget that level of helplessness and unease.

Also returning through the following hours was me ability to feel pain which never left me nor lessened in the day I had yet to lie there. I was regularly given paracetamol which did nothing noticeable but when it became too hard to take another thing called Endone. Oxycodonehydrochloride. A hybrid of natural and synthesised opioid for the treatment of severe pain. It's getting its own chapter in the comic Fibula but a few words here will be necessary. Endone erases pain but also lessens every other part of your consciousness. There is no pleasure in the absence of pain in this case, merely the absence and a profound and constant fatigue. I felt a definite lack of everything I might have registered while conscious, as though I'd had about fifty IQ points removed while my flesh and nerves dealt with the pain. Effective but ... scary, like the situation in the previous paragraph.

I had brought my phone and charger with me and kept it close. With it I could futz about on Facebook, check my email and read whatever was in my Kindle stock. Also, I could send the music I'd put on it to my bluetooth headset, lie back and be still.

Having exhausted the first of Brian Eno's Ambient albums, Music for Airports, over the previous week I chose his next in that series and looped it so that I could drift in and out of sleep with its gentleness to meet me. Indeed, as the first modal fade in rose I lay back and felt more at ease.

Throughout the night I did indeed wake to it, every time a nurse came in to check on me and it provided a good bridge from sleep to wooziness. At about two in the morning the retreating nerve block made the pain it had concealed grow and burn. It rose in intensity steadily over a few hours until I could do no more than ackowledge it. As soon as I could I called a nurse who listened to me and gave me endone.

As this filled out my nervous system with its oddly harsh pain erasure and my consciousness lowered to static functionality the music continued. I concentrated on it until I could relax and accept it. It began to feel like a dose of something the drug had left out, the euphoria that an opioid is supposed to bring, the ingredient X that lulls and caresses.

The Budd/Eno set on this album is not time bound by structure. While there is clear motivation in each piece there is neither an urgency to fulfil a phrase here or stretch one out to the edge of its strength there. There is just a series of visits to landscapes strange but warm, places and vistas whose colours alone provide their shape, fields and horizons of uterine comfort, of ease, of peace.

Once out of hospital I had to continue on the Endone and intially did so from necessity but I learned to wean myself from it by missing dosage periods. This is where my phone's primary purpose enters as I would get whoever was available around for dinner and wine. This, of course carries a potential second problem but it's one I've never been owned by. In two weeks I was off all pain relief and coping with even the most infernal of outbreaks. And when alone during that time, when faced with nothing but the comfortless lack of concentration that ruled out even the lightest of reading or even the most trough-fed viewing I let the Endone harden me to old timber, let my cat parachute on to my doona to warm me in the frozen predawn, and go from wasted oak to floating driftwood just by adding this record.

Art Director's Paradise: Air's Moon Safari

Winter 1998. I'd changed workplaces and strengthened by career path and had started to climb out of under the smother of the life described in the Tricky article. I was getting sick of catching up with new movies on VHS and decided to try going to a new movie per week. I'd grab a fellow cinephile and go to as many as fit into an already over-widened margin as I could find. I managed about thirty-nine all up and the results were predictably middle-heavy, very few complete garbage and a little fewer that approached greatness. But one of them took us completely by surprise.

Seeing the advance buzz and stills of Alex The Crow Proyas' Dark City I wrote it off as a kind of Blade Runner too late after the fact but worth a ticket for the look alone. About five of us piled into the huge Hoyts multiplex that once stood on Bourke St one windswept evening and sat in front of one of the most wonderful things we'd seen in years. Dark City does have the art director's circle jerk look to it with is dusty noir and neon sci-fi streets and offices but also a genuinely engaging plot. Oh, and one of Jennifer Connelly's many appearences standing on the end of a pier, William Hurt in enjoyably underplayed role, Keifer Sutherland with bung eye as the one who might just know exactly what is going on and the late great Ian Richardson as ... well, in case you haven't seen it yet....

This is such a rare occasion that this time in a group of that size no one begged off to go home. We all went to Brunswick St for drinks and chat. Enough of us were going through a Frangelico phase at the time for that to be the round of choice. The gentle buzz from that and the surprise of the movie (seen in all of its cinematic splendour rather than on any of our ratty little tvs) set us in a great mood. Through all of this I and a friend noticed the cafe music and exhanged a glance. I asked the waitress what it was and had a copy the morning after.

I didn't bother napstering with this I went straight to the cd with its seventies sci-fi sporting imagery and fonts. The title was in a small thin font beneath the big block name and the words vertically down the side read: FRENCH BAND. There was a kind of tiled effect of colour behind the two action-comic figures who might have been playing soccer or running along the corridor of a sub-space cruiser in a Brit sci fi from decades before.

And from the opening instrumental delivered in a kind of brown vinyl synthesiser and trebly Fender bass to the Wish You Were Here wahs and snarls of the closer we are taken on the very best kind of retro journey in that it's one that knows you know but doesn't care if you don't.

It's mostly instrumentals but there are voices, grated through vocoders if male and recorded well and cleanly if female. Sexy Boy has a fuzz bass through a Peter Frampton talk box. Kelly Watch the Stars has a big three chord synth pattern and wobbly alien chorus asking Kelly to look up at night. This made for one of the best scene establishments in Daria as the fashion club had gathered in Quinn's room for one of their pecking-order-affirming sleepovers. And on...

And that's pretty much it. The album is a tightly blended mix of everything that drove you away from your dad's stereo system demonstration records and toward the sci fi tv shows that sounded like them. But best of all the record is a marvel of post-modern popsterising highlighting the irony of an era in which the new is just a redecorated revival AND it's good. All the synthesiser sounds, whether plotted on a monitor with wave table synthesis or plonked out on Korgs and Moogs from 1977, all the big block chords in choc-orange polyester, all the goofy Sparky's Magic Piano voices and goopy spacefoodstick lyrics add up to something I needed at that time more than anything else, a need that seemed obscure until its drunkeningly welcome appearence: AIR.

Breathless in Babylon: Tricky's Pre-Millennium Tension

Slowly, in what feels like it must be the unnerving blue gloom of a black light room the stuttered drumless rhythm emerges wriggling around the room like a family of small black snakes. Then Tricky's asthmatic whisper, rough and broken rises through the soft writhe talking about breathlessness.

Next something even darker grumbles low in the dark while Tricky and Martina intone the same lines in unsteady unison until her clear cool water voice takes over for the chorus "I met a Christian in Christiansands and a devil in Helsinki". Some inaudible speaking mixed two rooms away and what sounds like the beginning of the Strat riff from Bowie's Golden Years. Don't know what it's about but it sounds nasty.

And on. These sounds are from a club at the wrong end of the pre-dawn, a paranoid, tunnelvisioned whispering threat. Everyone's conversation is audible at once clear and hating. And all of them want something all of the time and all of them get something less than they want and all of them try again. And the night will come and it will come soon when their bodies will pile to the ceiling in a writhing mess of bleeding filth. ......

That's just what I needed to write and draw the second issue of Hysteria. The main story of #2 was about obssession and began with the line: Phil got up again and woke the fly. Phil's girl had been stolen by his best friend and he couldn't let it go, eventually lighting on a plan to flay the Judas. When he goes to the dictionary to ascertain what flay actually means he is all the more determined to capture his victim and remove his skin. He reads up on taxidermy and starts in on mice and other small animals of the neighbourhood, fighting the hallucinogenic effects of sleep deprivation.

The sleep deprivation part was autobiographical (the rest of it wasn't). From late 1997 to early '98 I was on the floor of my room with pencils, ink and crow quills, inking over the pencils themselves. No tracing paper here, if I blaffed a page I did it again or it went in as is, the idea was a controlled murderous chaos.

Trip hop and techno are the 90s pop music legacy. NONE of the rock music from the time was anything but revivalism. The only things that sounded like exceptions moved into electronica and away from rock (eg My Bloody Valentine or Beck's Mellow Gold). Trip hop had a cinematic edge to it; spy movies or outright horror were evoked when not actually sampled and what lyrics were decipherable were impressionistic confessions or suggested vague atrocities.

For me this was all timely. I was at the apocalyptic end of my sharehousing days and fighting in vain against the realisation that in my mid thirties I had just grown too old for it. The only flatmates I could get for my elegantly wasted innercity hovel were the not too choosy poor of the eager youth bouncing through studies to careers; brats and the near desperate. After a string of those over about three years I'd sworn off. But until I did I had to live with it.

I was working part time, day on day off which fit perfectly with comics creation. Recovering from a nasty back injury, I'd lie belly down on the floor of my room and draw on toothy A4 pads Which I'd then ink. Hysteria #1 came out to a good localised reception (leave me alone, it was self-published and everyone was starting that way). The cover was adapted from a photograph of one of Charcot's hysteria patients in a kind of ecstasy.

The cover of #2 was an original based on the same figure but she'd grown long metallic talons and fangs. The whole issue was about situations escalating into horror. A woman gets on a tram and sits opposite a man who looks safe until hands grow out of his eye sockets and stretch toward her with supple snake-like arms. The Rortsen character who'd been such fun in the first one meets and kills his doppleganger. The autobiographical Oblomov Days strip was about the momentarily terrifying realisation after a relationship that it will never be the same as it was. A boy whose sister went missing grows up on a futile quest to find her only to be confronted with her riding a black cloud which might or might not be only his insanity amping up. That kind of thing. The seasonal theme was my most hated: summer.

I was allowing myself to feel beseiged by my circumstances which meant that I not only thought these stories up in the first place but eagerly rendered them almost unreadable through poor page layout and logic leaps unfamiliar to anyone who had not been me at half past two in the morning of the day that I'd done them. The main story ran for seventy-five pages of this. It really did have a three act structure that worked. Most people who managed to get through it gave up and looked at the drawing. That's the opposite of what should happen with a narrative comic. A review in the justly short-lived magazine Milk Bar not only disliked the issue (which is perfectly acceptable) but lost its own way and seemed in the end to damn the comic for not being more like prose (which is unacceptable): even my critics were unreadable. Fun in a Samuel Beckett story but not in life. Eventually, I had to admit to having created something unreadable and moved on.


My next project was the unfinishable and never titled tale of a serial killer who was taunted by the ghost of his first victim to kill more so that he would never repay the debt to his conscience. It was left unfinished because I just burnt out. I read far too much about serial killers online and watched all the increasingly purulent entries in the born-purulent serial killer genre, and even a tv show called Millennium from the same team as made the X-Files but wanted to out-dark it. The times they were a fearin'.

I had taped a horror movie I'd never seen from tv and watched it over and again, completely haunted by it. I followed up by raiding the local monster sized video shop for more and nastier examples. All this fed my comics and writing to the exclusion of all other influences. Guess who else was into horror.

Tricky was riding a tide of admiration after creating one of trip hop's grand structures, the Maxinque album which like the others (Massive Attack's Blue Lines and Portishead's Dummy being chief among them). The colour drunk journey it took its listeners to had been absorbed into the cool cafe scene the world over and had fallen on soft times, the soundtrack to blather about what are now termed first world problems. Pre-Millennium Tension not only alluded to stress in the menstrual cycle linguistically but visually in the cover art as the stark black light nudes held glowing red globes over their groins. This was not to be an album to carry coffee chats about piercings but to disturb that fan base into the knowledge of where they were.

Makes Me Wanna Die is a Martina vocal over a thick trip hop thud and tremolo Rhodes electric piano. "You're insignificant, an isn't..." And more lines that teeter between Tricky's tendencies to be either puerile or paranoid. Eventually, we start to hear his whisper very gradually rise in the mix preceeding her lines by seconds as though feeding them. The plaintive short melodic phrase frequently cutting away from the established rhythm gives the sense of the centre failing to hold.

I listened to this a lot at this time not because its horror was an escape but a reminder of the reality. The Matrix was a year or two away but I'll still use the figure it left with the culture: this album was the red pill.

I felt detached from a workplace that I convinced myself didn't want me after all those career building years and left it after each shift to a home that wanted me to move on. My one solace was the welcome I received from the indy comics crowd who liked what I did and shared their time and encouragement without effort. And the comics I gave them were indigestible.

I was in one band that had a funny song about fears of global disaster at the change of millennium and another, comprised of new age geese who went on uncritically about lizard people conspiracies and the Mayan calendar who wrote songs about the apocalypse. Tricky's singular take on hip hop which dived here into alienating his own genre was a comfort in the same way that touching something colder than you are on a winter morning is a comfort.

I have never been that unhappy for that long before or since. Since then I have never once made it all the way through this album.