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
Pop music
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
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.
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