The Dark Inside the Sunshine: The Beatles' White Album

This one is so deeply engraved into my life as a listener that it's hard to know what to say and leave out. I can't put it off any longer so I'll just start somewhere.

My sister came back from a holiday in Brisbane bearing even more sophistication than normal and related with typical precision all the things that had happened there, all that she had touched and now possessed as worldliness. Also, she tabled a Darrell Lee Walnut log, mandatory purchase for anyone of us who went to Brisbane as a kind of proof that they'd been there. But she also had a strange story.

She'd heard a record that wasn't music so much as a collage of horror. Car crashes, crackling fires, people laughing at a funeral and a voice surfacing from the chaos repeating the words: number nine number nine number nine. The friend she'd stayed with had played it to her and spent the entire night talking about the codes in the record, how it referred to a death and was used by a family of murderers. What was it called? "Revolution 9", said Nita. I had a sudden image of a grainy black and white picture of a man screaming. That, to my mind, was the record cover. That night, as a way of protecting myself from the thought of it, I slept on the floor in the my sister's room. She was now immune from power of the record and could pass the immunity on. I couldn't sleep. At one point she turned over and in her sleep counted on the fingers of one hand and said something I couldn't make out but must have been a spell. Revolution 9 had been in the room that night. It had broken in and moved around in the dark.

A few years later when I was thirteen my brother Michael came by from one of his mystery treks (mysterious because I never asked and preferred to leave formless and intriguing) and brought a swag of LPs he'd picked up on his travels. Bowie, Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and lots of Beatles. My own record buying was still almost a year off and the only thing like this collection had moved out with siblings like Michael, Greg and Rina. What was left was a small lineup of compilations and worn grooved classics from the antiquity of a few years back. But here was Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Road and another one which I had to look at a few times to work out.

It was a double but opened from the top. The gatefold was a shiny laminated carboard of creamy white and there, when you looked properly, the words The Beatles appeared embossed at a careless angle. I wondered if Michael had bought this at a discount because of this fault. The sheaths were black paper. The thick vinyl of the discs bore the Apple label. Opening the gatefold only increased my foreboding. There were pictures of each Beatle but they looked dishevelled and criminal. The songs, too, had weird titles like Back in the USSR, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Cry Baby Cry, Glass Onion, Yer Blues, Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey. In the middle of all that there was Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da. That was the only title I recognised and it was a bouncy little number. It's presence in the list of kooky sounding titles seemed sinister as though we were meant to be lured into this dark place through this tiny morsel of familiarity. It looked like bait. And there, at the bottom of the list of green lettered words was Revolution 9. I almost threw the the record across the room. The chirpy Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da was the stranger with the lolly that let the intruder whose friends were killers and the dead waiting in the dark of the black shrouds around the discs. I put the album back in the pile and even left the room.

But the album was still there, compacted darkness in the light, giving the spirit of murder space in my house. It was like having a snake in the walls.

And I was angry. They were The Beatles. They did fun songs about firemen and yellow submarines. this album seemed like an unmasking of an evil that had fooled the world for years. Later, during those Christmas holidays I went down to the rumpus room and played through the album in tiny sampling touches with the stylus. There were no visible gaps between the tracks. This was the only way to do it safely. I must have inadvertantly missed every single hook on the first side. What I was getting sounded bland and anti-commercial. One night I set up a tape dub with the big TEAC deck and got about the first five or so of the second side. Michael left for university that week and took everything with him. I was robbed of my moment of courage.

The songs I had on tape (Martha My Dear to Piggies) were a lot better than my sampling had made out but they still creeped me out. Martha was a great song with a catchy piano part but went wrong in the middle eight. I'm So Tired seemed pointless but suspicious for all that. Blackbird sounded lonely and nocturnal. Piggies sounded sweet. The words were clearly satirical and the last line about the pigs eating their bacon sent shivers through me. I know it flowed from the satire but the thought felt violent and hating. I listened to the tape to work out the Martha My Dear intro but left the rest silent on the tape.

There were too many gaps in my guessing at the piano part for Martha and I gave up trying it. There was a lot of other music to get into in the meantime. There was the mighty and awesome Queen as well as anything new by Split Enz and the great tide of mid 70s pop that could laze like the worst of the previous decade on worn-through riffs and nothing lyrics (youtube The Bump by Kenny; yes a song about a particular dance but check it!) or a goldilocks mix of rock edge and pure sugary icing like Sailor's Glass of Champagne, any single by TMG or Steve Harley's Make Me Smile. But the Beatles weren't going away.

Someone, maybe in Allen Klein's office, maybe Klein himself if he still had any power over the back catalogue, realised that enough time had past to address a whole new pocket-moneyed generation of potential Beatle fans and began releasing old stock not seen in the shops for half a decade or more. A few pre Pepper albums appeared including early compilations but the big one that year was a double called The Beatles Rock and Roll Music. It had a gatefold and typically 70s cover art in that it was a realistic painting of the band in the early 60s on the front and the title looked like a neon sign. On the back was a rear view including a reversed neon sign. In the gatefold was a grab of imagery from the American 50s: a big car, a glass of Coke and maybe a hot dog. I think the idea was that the Beatles brought the 60s to the 50s but it was more likely to be the fifties nostalgia tide that was rising at the time with Happy Days and American Graffiti etc., all that boomer beware stuff. Win bought the first copy of this and lent it around for taping which we all did.

The first disc is early rockers including a lot of cover versions. Fantastic on the first few listens as it filled in the origins episodes on a lot of the music on the air even then. Hearing these Chuck Berry and Little Richard numbers through the ears of The Beatles meant I knew both without needing to hear the originals but also hearing them in ACDC, Hush, Sherbert, Skyhooks, Slade etc etc. But I couldn't relate to this for very long even if it was still around. It seemed as distant to me as Elvis whose early hits were the aural equivalent to op shop kitsch (which had to wait for decades for redemption).

The second disc ground on its first side in much the same way but ended on the single version of Revolution. This was built on old stuff but had typical Beatle intrusions (like the "an-y-how" chords which are classical in movement) and a berserk beginning of insanely distorted guitars and a scream I thought was a baby's (which made it weird and scary to me). Side four...

When I got to side four I was still in my school clothes because I'd been going over the first disc again and again. The rest of the present clan were watching tv after dinner and I was kneeling at the stereo with a pair of German headphones clamped on my head. Back in the USSR was fun but again so oldie that it fatigued rather than delighted. And then it changed.

A sudden scratchy insistent snarl on a distorted guitar, not the controlled fuzz tone of a T Rex but something wilder like a puma screech. The voice (Paul's) came in with a voice that sounded like he was on a rack, the high strings chord stretching below him, down as he went higher. When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide when I turn and I go for a RIDE and I get to the bottom and I see you  AGAAAAAAAAAIN YEAH YEAH YEAH! Suddenly there's a panzer division charging up from the lower depths, clanking, smashing, grinding. Paul keeps screaming beserker. I can't believe the force of it. My mouth is open and my eyes are wide. I hide behind my hands as it charges into my ears. HELTER SKELTER (sharp descending scale on the guitar) HELTER SKELTER (the falling figure again). Paul keeps screaming about breaking you and coming down fast. The noise rages on. Weirdly shimmery Beatle harmonies start up they don't fit well which just makes it worse. Squeals, screams, a big chunky bass, sounds of metal being stressed and breaking, chaos. The ending falls slowly apart but COMES BACK AGAIN with the sound of more twisting steel beams and heavy things falling. Finally the last screeching fall before Ringo screams, "I'VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!"

The next song starts but I reach into the player and lift the needle to get some silence. I can't speak or communicate what I have just experienced. My father is watching some UK comedy or cop show and Mum is in the next chair doing the same. Nita who might have had a word, is busy with some homework. Stephen?  Never. I put the needle back to the start of the track and live through it again. I have a notion about this.

I don't tape the album but return it to Win the next day with thanks. Win has older siblings who are as much music fans as mine. I ask him if there's a copy of the Beatles double album at his place, the one with the white cover. He says he'll check. That night I actually dream I have a copy of it. There are no copies in the local shops. It wouldn't be particularly expensive it's just not around.

The next day Win tells me he found his sister's copy and played it over dinner. Did he, did he get to Revolution 9? No, just the first side. What was that like? Every song was good.

Same dream more or less. I had a copy of the album. It was in a dark wooden box. The wood was stained like an antique. This wasn't a copy but a single artefact. If someone else had it then it meant that I couldn't. I went down to the rumpus room which was filled with yellow light and took the album out of the box and moved the discs in a circular motion before putting each on. The music sounded preclassical, Gregorian but played on clarinets and oboes. When I wake and remember that I don't have a copy of the album I feel a genuine pain, an aching lack.

Win tells me the whole family had the album on while dinner was on and they were setting the table. He laughed as he described Revolution 9, pronouncing it noine. Number noine, number noine? The upward inflection at the end making it sound goofy and Australian. The more he and Peter Broadbent giggle over it the more I know that it got to them, too, and they are just playing at pretending it didn't. I also feel envy. They have lived through it and I have not. I need my own copy.

For the next few weeks I go into town with Mum and try the record shops. Chandlers, Palings, others I've forgotten. Everyone has the Red and Blue albums, the old compilations that were somehow supposed to fulfil the need when every song on them is out of context. The White Album, even though I have never heard it in full, is a single artefact dangerous to break up. Look what happened when Helter Skelter got free on Rock and Roll Music. I would have to have the whole thing with me.

Meantime there were the new ones Sailor, Kenny, Ted Mulry Gang, Queen released the stupid Best Friend song off Opera, and Countdown's every precious second stumbled and screamed onward at the weekend. Then, towards the August holidays it was there in Chandlers, encased in a sleeve protector, white and shiny with the name embossed. $7.99 Mine. It was murder waiting for Mum to return to the car and the sun even then in the alleged late winter was pitiless. The record did, in fact warp a little while I waited.

Home! I put it on side one and felt the approaching jet engine take me up. Slam! Been away so long I hardly knew the place... Back in the USSR sounded routine on the compilation but here it was like being in the middle of the engine room. But - and -  It skipped. It started skipping and kept skipping. Dad noticed, came in and examined the disc. He showed me the side on view, how it was warped and how that was that. I realised this had pretty much been my doing when I'd leaned it against the car. It was shady but Townsville shady. Dad went back out to his expert futility in the yard. I put the record back on the platter and adjusted the counterweight on the stylus. Heavy for heavy. Then it behaved, Back in the USSR played flawlessly. If Dad heard that he probably frowned and shrugged.

Dear Prudence was purely beautiful. Sunny days and daisy chains with a big chunky bassline skipping down like a giant woodsprite and an intriguing guitar line with an insistence on a high string. Glass Onion shatters the gentle fade of Prudence with a tight chunky crunch. The words other song titles in them and then there's a sudden change at the end from rock to a shivery string section. It sounded like code. Ob-La-Di in this context adds to the tension because its cheer feels like a ploy. Wild Honey Pie after it sounds insane with its big loopy twangs and screaming. Bungalow Bill starts with classical guitar and then a football chorus and then a psychedelic verse in another time signature that seems both nursery rhyme and sinister. Gently Weeps comes on big with space and sadness. The lead guitar really does cry. A slight high George vocal shimmers over the solid band playing. There is nothing innocent, chirpy or fun about Happiness is a Warm Gun. The guitar arpeggio at the start is from a mystery movie and the vocals have a troubling coldness. Then the fuzz guitar frank Zappa section about the mother superior and the doowop fade out with the sexual innuendo and snare/gunshot at the end brought it to the end. That was only side one.

I went through side two impatiently. It was a group of songs I was largely familiar with and they went from strong to formless and bland. Julia had a jump in it which I didn't care about. Strange for me to think that now but I did then. I just wanted to get to side 3. When you don't want to hear Blackbird it seems to go for hours.

A big thunderous tom roll and hot dual guitar riff and we're into Birthday. Not much to it but it's fun and thickly rocking. Someone in the distance counts in Yer Blues and the darkness of the album returns. A snarling riff and dry and desperate vocal. He feels so lonely he could die. I knew that from the Elvis song. There it still sounded dark but here it came from the depths. Mother Nature's Son is lovely. Over twanged acoustic guitar (must be Paul) and subtle brass section. Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey. Slamming rock song with silly lyrics and a great little bass hook in the outro. Sexy Sadie opens with a piano progression made brittle by slapback echo. Cool vocal from John in front of sweet fabs harmonies. Somone done him wrong. Probably a groupie. (Supposedly changed from Maharishi, learnt much later.) Fade out with a beautiful falsetto improv by John. Then there's a few spiky notes on the distorted guitar. Snarl and seethe. I know what this is. Refer to the description above. No difference except this time it's louder and through the speakers. HELTER SKELTER! dununununun HELTER SKELTER! dununununununun and then straight after Ringo screams about his blisters the gentlest song on the album starts with a sad finger style figure on the acousitc. George and probably Paul almost whispering the harmonies. He's lost someone. It feels like about four in the morning. Whoever it is is gone forever and all he can do is pretend he can see her. A big middle eight just sounds like more pain. Something like a tree creaking and falling, a swelling organ chord and weird almost eastern falsetto. If it was late night before now it will never be day again. Has he hanged himself? Something has happened.

A cold Milo. Quickly!

Side 4 begins with the druggy sleeptalking version of Revolution which had been so manic on the compilation album. Bedroom acoustic playing a blues figure. "Take two." Lazy bright distorted Chuck Berry intro on the electric and we're in the middle of a big and spacy room with the voices and sounds tired but happy. Even then I imagined it filled with pot smoke. I like it but it's weird and assume it was the second version because I heard the fast one first. Honey Pie plods along but I like the clarinet-like guitar that I was surprised to find out John played. It reminded me of the way Brian May used his guitar tone to suggest other instruments. In fact (again, heard it first) Honey Pie reminded me of the ragtime songs on Night at the Opera. Savoy Truffle starts snipey and mean and ends that way. Never outstays its welcome and is welcome after Honey Pie. Cry Baby Cry smooths along like Sexy Sadie but gets bigger and spacier as it goes. Nursery nonsense could be code.

Then we get one of the creepiest moments on the record. A steady fingerstyle minor chord on an acoustic, like the rawhide riff. Paul sings in falsetto. Can you take me back where I come from? Can you take me back? It sounds like someone's ghost. It walks off without finishing the thought but seems ready to wail in the darkness. Fade.

Before I know it a restless swell of sounds rises and Number nine, number nine? Sounds like a BBC announcer. Whoa! I leap to the stereo and lift the needle. I can't do it, yet. It's daylight but there's no one around like there was with Helter Skelter the first time. I have to work my way. It was months before I heard Goodnight, the final song because there were no track divisions and I couldn't risk hearing any sound from the intruder.

Familiarity ironed out most of the dark spots and I got a Beatles songbook for my birthday which let me inside the songs. Nothing demystifies music more than playing it. We grew close, that album and I. Also, it had weathered its eight years of life far better than other albums considered milestones like Sgt Pepper or Led Zeppelin IV. The White Album sounded as normal and current as A Night at the Opera; the rock was hard edged, the campy ragtime as campy and even the jokes sounded natural and un-showbiz. To this day, despite the sharper innovations of Revolver or Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album feels fresher than the music that surrounded my first hearing it. English pop was still very goofy, coming out of glam (which I am still glad I missed) but hovering in a kind of novelty stasis. American music was unthinkable with its Eagles and Doobie Brothers blandness. The White Album had not been surpassed with its one side of tight packed songs, second of looser tries, third of consolidated adventure and fourth of looking at the universe through the horror of its atoms. That's how I thought of it and have had no need of replacing it as a standard for how a matured artist's album should present itself.

Meanwhile there was still IT. The monster of the fourth side. It lived, coiled in the stack in the rumpus room ready to rise and strike.

My sister Marina visited from Brisbane, bringing her hard won sophistication with her. Over mint tea we talked about the Beatles and she filled me in on as many of the creepy Paul-is-dead clues on the later albums. This cover (we spent a long time with Sgt Pepper), that song and then finally we had to get to the great cavern of Revolution 9. Well, I at least had a guide.

After Paul's ghost song an inaudible conversation and a few piano notes comes the chorus: number nine number nine number nine... looping and then folding itself back into the mix. A rough cut collage of patches of orchestral music. Some very sinister sounding speech which sounds like John. More looped orchestras, backwards guitar, breath, shouting, a baby, a screamed "right", a choir, more creepy scouse talking, car horns,piano yoko's voice, arabic chanting, random spoken phrases, screamingcreepyvoicecrashingbackwardsmusicnumberninenumberninenumbernineaahahhhahaahhhhcrashnoisecreepyvoicenumberninenumberninegunfirechoir Yoko's voice. "if you become naked" protesters, "hold the line hold the line!" soccer fans? "block that kick, block that kick!"

Syrupy strings slop out of the speakers before Ringo sings Goodnight which has no presence at all. I'm wide eyed and open mouthed but it's not the same as the first listen to Helter Skelter. We had a history of World War II in our home library which had a picture I had to struggle to look at. It was taken in the Buchenwald concentration camp. One of the stripe-clad inmates with a skull like starved face was kneeling over another, lying on the ground dying. The hard black and white of the image accentuated each crag and hollow of suffering on their faces. There was no hope in the situation. The photo had been taken by one of the liberating soldiers but liberty could not stop the flow of needless death right away. There had to be more leaking out of the light into darkness until it could be fixed. The sight of the photo was like being slapped in the eyes. Rightly or wrongly, the sensation of hearing Revolution 9 for the first time was the same.

There was nothing I could control about it, nothing that made sense to me. It felt like having a nightmare replayed. I needed to address it but Rina was on a roll in spooking me so just kept on with the secret signs of death and the great unravelled order that lay just beneath the surface of this record. Also, the darkness that was imported into its grooves by fans. She told me about Charles Manson and his murder hippies. The killings and the trial. I got out into the air of the August holidays and rode around on my bike for a while. Flashez would be on soon and Mike Meade would make me smile.

The album is still one of my favourites and when new formats or presentations of The Beatles come up it's always the first one I'll get. (Of the 2009 remasters I bought the usb stick in the little green apple for the stereo set and the box set of the mono which had the White Album exact down to the poster and the black disc sheaths.) It's a collection that I've since learned was the result of deep divisions in the band and at best was each with the others as a backing band. But while John sings Julia with himself it's a poignant song that blends the influences of his mother and Yoko. While the big boonjy country for kids' tv rhythm track of Don't Pass Me By still sounds like the others insulting Ringo it still sounds like a band. And at its tightest and toughest it's what rock music can sound like when it doesn't care when it's played or for whom.

The rest of the August holidays turned a few things. I had been tuning my guitar to open E minor (add one fingertip to get a major on every barre) and started learning how rock music was put together by listening and playing along. Wings released a massive double album and the 1966 Got To Get You Into My Life was released in the US and became a top 40 hit. All music I heard now had a standard for measurement and I became aware of how attracted I was to the things that I feared, how imagination will spring to life when gaps in knowledge prove troublesome, how music alone can do what it does.

By the end of the year when the world provided me with the next step (the Weekend Magazine soft news story on punk rock) I was eager for it and not too long after when the more audacious campaigns into undiscovered sound appeared from the realm of post punk I went back to the White Album and Revolution 9 became a favourite. No, an inspiration.

The Young Person's Guide to Grownedupness: Queen's A Night at the Opera

Why do I always remember it being winter? There was so much in the radio downstairs that poured out over the Christmas holidays and the month leading up to school that thickened the air with new sound that I would just sit in front of the big stereo in the rumpus room and breathe it in. Mostly I'd draw. Stills from imagined period dramas, Louis the Sun King or the trenches of Flanders. But it would have been constantly humid, shrill with mosquitoes and the belching rhythm of cane toads. It would have been boiling hot all day long.

Maybe it's that I used to listen a lot at night and the memory of the light suggests cooler temperatures (Townsville doesn't really have a winter, just a lessening of summer). Maybe it's the idea that sophistication is something that happens far from places like North Queensland where the winter seems permanent and its imposition of intellectual rigour compulsory. Around me, regardless of the arch artsiness of my elder siblings and their cronies, my parents' social circle, the flat tropical stasis hissed on, compressing the least wish of the slightest fancy to take wing.

There were no new inventions when I was thirteen. There was a tv show called The Inventors but that was all ratchets and advanced can openers. The real, ethereal spirit of the new and conquering idea was gone and we were doomed to lives on endless treadmills. Even the new music was old, the cardboard of its covers scuffed and the grooves within neglected.

I waged war on this and could because we had a sizeable stock of 78 records with old jazz and classical fare that I unearthed and played. I looked into aural canyons of huge symphonies and delighted in the final raspberry-like hiss of the hihat at the end of a ragtime song. I even used Dad's old reel to reel mono to create a radio play about gangsters set in the 20s, using these treasures and my magic with accents (the character called Gus was referred to as Gush).

A year after that I was familiar with Abbey Road and the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed and began to expect that level of purpose in the songs I heard on the radio. If they didn't have that then they had to provide something in its place like a riff, melody or big chorus. I would listen to just enough lyrics to imagine stories in the songs of artistes whose primary function as artistes was to make a living out of their Iloveyouloveshelovesheloves lamingtons of sound. I didn't understand this at the time and considered a song on the radio to be a statement of something that the singer had discovered and needed to communicate to everyone else.

That doesn't really describe the average mid seventies pop song at all well. I found this out over months that felt like years. But there were enough anomalies to suggest that there was some signal in the noise. I remember hearing the deep male voice choir of one of the songs off Rick Wakeman's KIng Arthur album. They sounded like the dark ages but gave way to the gooey notes of a synthesiser and someone shouting a challenge to someone else. High drama but as I never heard it again (to this day, in fact) I had to let it pass. The song Slip Kid by the Who had some real drama in it about a new English civil war (I think). These were among a small selection of pickings in the weeds of the field, a few growths plump with drama. Music, even pop music, could be more than moonjunelovedove. It could be serious. And then I heard it.

What caught me was the acapella harmonies. These weren't like the ye olde voices in the Rick Wakeman track. They were airy and light and somehow a lot bigger, like a barbershop quartet in a bright white sci-fi setting. Something sad has happened. Anyway the wind blows doesn't really matter to me. The last words were repeated twice and they reached into the clouds. A slow arpeggio back and forth like a man swinging on a noose. Mama, Just killed a man ... Oh. His voice sounds like he's crying. He has to go, to leave us all behind and face he truth. Then soaring: Mamaaaaaaaaa ooooooh.... Higher still, falsetto: Carry on carry on ... and then almost mumbled as though nothing really happened.

Then we're at the trial. Strident marching piano chords. And then everything goes nuts like Gilbert and Sullivan on speed. I see a little silhouetto of a man. Scaramouche scaramouche will you do the fandango? Gilbert and Sullivan as imagined by Edward Lear. The nonsense syllables, whether they referred to anything or not sounded like scuttlebutt, pleading and judgement, Punch and Judy at the Old Bailey. There was even an impossibly high note for the finish: For me for me for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Then we plummet into Slade like hard rock with a big wrenching riff. All that gentleness and silliness is now stadium shouting. So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye...  Just gotta get right out of here....

Then we are lifted by a fluid melodic guitar solo that sounds like a clarinet. And then the crying voice returns to plead that nothing really matters to him and the echo of fortune behind him: anwyay the wind blows....

Huh? How many songs had I just heard then? There was a barbershop quartet, a ballad, a mock opera, a rock song and the end of a ballad. In a near once-in-a-lifetime experience the DJ actually back announced. "That was Queen with Bohemian Rhapsody. It's a warm 25 in the city tonight..."

What? Queen? Bohemian? Did they take Hungarian Rhapsody and turn it into a pop song? How much Brahms did I know anyway? What did I just hear?

They didn't play it again all summer. I virtually rewrote it from the ground up trying to remember it. I told my sister about it and she assured me that I meant Quintessence who were always being shortened to Quin. There was no such band as Queen. It was probably illegal to call yourself that anyway. Go wash out your nasty little ears and listen to the radio properly. When I got back to school in February I asked around. Had anyone else heard it? Everyone had. What did they know about the song? The band? Nothing.

That Friday the shorter edition of Countdown was on for all the back-to-schools. I watched it at Nanna's. I hoped and hoped and - It was the second clip they played. I don't remember any other clip from the show. The barbershop opening was four heads in darkness and horror movie lighting. The ballad part looked like a live act. The big block harmonies and warbling from the operatic part used video feedback like the audio echo. Everything was being thrown at the studio wall. Actually, to be honest, even though it gets celebrated as being revolutionary the video for Bohemian Rhapsody looked like the wonky effects of any Dr Who episode. But what did I care about that when the song was there in front of me. They looked like a real rock band and peformed this minor but genuine miracle before me. The show was repeated on Saturday mornings so I watched it in the rumpus room tv at home in colour. Not much difference but the sound was better. At school we bickered over who did the funny bits better.

The news of the album arrived and I was the first on my block. A UK pressing with good thick cardboard on the cover from Ken Hurford's Import Records round the corner. I'd ruined the home stereo (I'm assuming that but I think I was just there when it happened) so that it didn't play both channels so I went next door to Nanna's and lowered the needle of her wartime victrola or whatever it was on to this pristine deep dish vinyl. Nita was there, too, having also been impressed. Nanna was happy for me to do this as she had declared the video listenable and obviously the work of serious young men (we're talking about Freddie Mercury, here, but we didn't know that then).

I liked the liner notes. No synthesisers, they said. Wow! Brian played a toy koto on one track (looked it up, well koto) and Freddie was responsible for the Bechstein debauchery. "Bechstein," Nanna snorted, as though I should have known, "is a piano." I had known what debauchery was.

Anyway, we heard the Bechstein first, glistening in like a Russian Debussy before some cellos and screeching echo guitar broke in with a horror movie moment which gave way to a stern piano vamp, irritated as though piqued at having been interrupted like that. Then after a sudden block harmony Freddie comes in angrily with Death on Two Legs and it's the best Bond theme ever (well, should've been). Everything's out in the open: a hard knuckled rhythm section, big harmonies, serpentine rockstar guitar, those elastic vocals that could growl underground and suddenly soar. And the piano, all the way through. It sounded like a real one. Not like the big 'verby pianos in ballads but like the ones in piano concertos. No synthesisers? Who'd need them?

Without a breath we go from hatred and anger to the kind of goopy tinkley thing the Beatles seemed to throw in that sounded like the twenties. Freddie through a megaphone and the big choir and Brian's dixieland jazzband made out of fuzz guitar which stopped me sudden. No synthesisers!

No breathing allowed as the engine noise splutters and roars and another voice screams that he's in love with his car. It's heavy and funny.

A breath and then - Ok, first dud out of four. John Deacon's You're My Best Friend comes on like the big thing in the papier mache costume in the kid's show that everyone says they like the best out of sympathy alone. It's a big boulder headed nong of a thing that I never played in full unless I was drawing and couldn't be bothered getting up to skip. Even the solo sounded like it was taking the piss. Where were we?

A spacey acoustic guitar shug with a sci-fi choir turns into 39, a folk stomper about interplanetary travel which also involves time travel. Different voice again. Guitarist, the one who played the toy koto. Great little short story. Sounds like The Seekers. Wonder if they ever covered.

Sweet Lady comes on like a Slade grind. Freddie even sounds a bit like Noddy. Rock song. Feels like the first one on the album. Straight after another one of those diddlydiddlydee ragtime thingies. End of side one.

Icy winds blow across the groove in side two. Plinky notes blow past and fall. That'd be the toy koto. A gentle harmony in the minor with mystical mien ends with a bang of cymbal, block harmony and marches in a doomladen crunch descanted by distant feedback. Freddie is serious again, the tune from somewhere in the 1490s and a story of prophecy and apocalypse. Metal big and heavy. Like Sabbath except that it keeps putting things from a deeper knowledge of music. The first chorus ends where you expect it will but the next ends somewhere else. These people didn't just come up with the riff, play it for an hour and put a solo over it, they affined it with a much earlier European tradition and orchestrated it around the idea of the lyric. But it doesn't sound like prog it sounds like metal. No synthesisers. And Brian May's signature rhythm tone is incredible, sounding both processed and natural (I wonder if there's some clean tone mixed in).  The middle is all acapella and echoplex but again it's complex harmonies and, oddly enough, cinema. This is a song in widescreen. (When my father did perform the few seconds of soldering that repaired the home stereo I made him test it with this song. He admitted that the middle section gave him "the willies".) And then BAM! back into metal and a big angry multitracked guitar tide from Brian May who sounds by this first listen's stage like no one else in particular. Another verse and chorus and some more guitar fury and then. But still I hear and still I dare not laugh at the mad man. BAM! We ease out on the wind and a gentle sad acoustic piece which ends in the same key as the next song. Well, ends, segues.

Love of My Life sounds like a parlour song. Not much to say beyond declaring its beauty. Brian May's solo (strange to call them that when they are all so layered) now sounds like a string quartet. And harp. Good Company another dixieland but one of Brian's. All thump and uke with barbershop harmonies. Another story this time about a lifetime love gone wrong. The closest they get to Beatlesque. We go out on another Brian setpiece, this time a whole jazz band which really sounds like a jazzband.

Bohemian Rhapsody. Already described but in context the opening vocal quartet continues the vocal texture of Good Company before breaking its own ground. After it where further? Home. The fat lady has sung. We stand for the national anthem ('nother Brian May wonder).

We are silent at this point. Wow! No words. I'm exhausted. Put it on again! Now!

These were sounds that were not bestowed by an older siblilng. They hadn't existed at the beginning of the previous year. I had found these sounds. This comedy and tragedy, this campy foppish foolery and grim cataclysm, this big goofy fun, this sarcasm, this fun. This was mine and up to me to share.

There was more.

I kept hearing for a while people around my age and a little younger air how long it took before they knew Freddie was gay. That's table talk. Look, if you were a teenager in the mid 70s when Queen broke through and didn't at least suspect that Freddie Mercury was gay then the naivete that descended through geological time and resulted in you might well convey an adaptive advantage but it saddens me to even think of it. As one of a family of overliterate, management class but Whitlam voting, secular minded, high flying yet pragmatic bourgeoise one of the worst sins that I, even at thirteen, could committ was to show a lack of worldliness. So when Nita smirked to me that Freddie was gay I shrugged and said, "sure".

We weren't exceptional. Everyone I knew at school who had an opinion knew as well and there was no great crsis of conscience from knowing it on the one hand and still using "poofter" as the worst air dagger you could aim at a fellow boy (if a girl said it you'd be ready for counselling). While I couldn't articulate the difference at the time I knew the feeling of it. And while it isn't true to say that if not for Freddie we would've stayed less tolerant with all the queer jokes from Dick Emery, Dave Allen, The Two Ronnies and Benny choking the airwaves nightly forcing it down. But with Freddie there was no shame to it: I mean our shame, shame to admit it shame to associate. If Freddie was gay the big thing about it was not that we cared but that he didn't care.

If you loved Freddie (and only the earlier cro magnons among us refused to) you didn't care either. And when it came to knowing real live people in your vicinity who were also gay it didn't matter then either. Put up against the greatness of things like this album and the ease of its pulverising virtuosity, the Ronnies and the Dicks looked old and numb. We didn't wipe homophobia out by singing along to Seaside Rendezvous but we emerged from our own adolescence without it. That, in large part, was Freddie Mercury who does not deserve the sticky museum label of genius because genius is never this much fun.

Gay? Of course he was fucking gay. I didn't know he was Indian!

Ground Control to Golden Years: CHANGESONEBOWIE

Good compilation albums are instructive texts. We move among the pieces like aural exhibits, variously admiring or wincing as we pass each one. The whole album becomes a testimony to the artist's endeavour. I've already covered one here and will probably end up doing many as I've now and then found a compilation to be more useful than an official album.

Also, they need to be good albums. They are not always both.

The Yardbirds Remember feels hastily compiled and poorly planned. The industrial metallic lettering and silly seagull photo on the cover testify to that but there is just too much to skip once it's on the turntable. This, however, is indicative of the band's recording career which played out as a few extraordinary moments in a near featurelessly because unsympathetically recorded field. So, it's instructive but not a great listen overall.

Changesonebowie, on the other hand, is both.

There is a dud: I cannot fathom why John I'm Only Dancing is on here (it wasn't just because it was a single, he released others during this time: Sorrow isn't on this, though it wasn't written by him) or reworked more than once in later years; for all of any significance it holds it always felt like a mosquito turning up.

But it's just one dud. The other ten are masterpieces and there is a strange effect of walking through a hall of great marble columns at the same time as the best party of the year.

This record is how I heard most of these songs for the first time.

Space Oddity drifts in and grows brighter and colder until it seems like a tiny explosion disappearing in and joining the distant star field. The soaring harmonies and the sudden downer of the central section, the whispered countdown in the opening verses and the takeoff made out of ... I still haven't dared to work out what they used for it. Not knowing anything of the many careers of Bowie at that moment I heard the song up close like that I assumed that this was the first thing he ever recorded. That, in the mid 70s when this album was released, was the point.

John I'm Only Dancing.

Changes begins with such sophistication and cinematic intrigue it seems to stand outside of time itself. The cool, jazzy verses and the big boppy choruses don't gel at first but before the end of the first listen they're both at home with each other. The languid sax at the end sounds like cigarette smoke in a detective movie.

The Ziggy songs bring the tight chill of a story. Razor sharp fuzz guitar playing a riff that sounds more like a fanfare. Bowie flying in from outer space on a high oh yeah. A cool cruel song that fades in sadness before the jet engines of Suffragette City scoop us up all the way to the rollercoster chorus  and A-F powerdrive.

Less than a breath later it's Jean Genie like an old time rave up by the Yardbirds but kinkier and tougher. Don't know what it's about but need to walk around in it unseen for awhile. DududududududududuDUD!

Side two. "This aint rock and roll. This is genocide!" The scrawning guitar riff, the cowbell and we're into the Stones doing sci-fi with a robot chorus. Don't know what's going on here either but don't know if it's safe to step in.

Rebel Rebel. This I had heard when someone put it on over the school PA while we were waiting to get split into PE teams one morning. Someone knew it was Bowie but couldn't tell me the song. I only cared about the riff which was so engrossing it seemed to go forever and still feel too small a serve. Here it was. It took me by surprise. I played it twice in a row the first time.

Young Americans. Cold plastic funk which I didn't skip but didn't like either (until decades later).

Fame. Funk but with something weird and heavy about it. It sounded like the kind of thing he'd sing in the then new movie where he played an alien. That's where I went whenever I heard it. the video had him singing in a suit. His hair was impossibly orange and he seemed too thin to be alive. Life on his planet was a strange thing.

Golden Years. Funk but with Gregorian chant and something light and modal overhead. More about fame? I couldn't tell. The gold in the years didn't seem to be about riches. There seemed something oddly demonic about it like someone listening to a tempting inner voice. The happy rhythm of the verses seemed a taunt. The whistling in the fade another. Creepy. Beautifully creepy.

There is no real anecdote to go with this one except that in the May holidays when I bought it I found a new galaxy of images to add to my daydreams and knew I would be finding every last album these songs were from and greedily gouge out even more. Even the lesser numbers here felt brash and new. They could only be topped toward the end of that year by something I claimed for my own, new, coloured like cake icing and harder than ship rivets: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. Until then changesonebowie would fill me in on the world to come.

The Mouse at 6-5-7: Vivaldi's Cello Concerto in C Minor RV 401 (Neville Marriner and The Academy of St Martin in the Fields)

A small tentative figure in the treble and alto strings rises softly, creeping into the room before uncloaking in the semi-darkness. I watch it move in stately motion, performing a kind of dumb show. Is it a murder? Is it just grief for the victim of one? Something quietly violent has happened and now it's dancing in front of me by the light of the next room. When the solo cello arrives it seems to be elaborating the facts of the case but the sound of the statements themselves is so dark and ornate it is impossible to recieve more detail than a brittle angry mourning in them. This happened. This happened. This happened. We don't know what happened but its damage spread and crawled into this voice and clung, together for all time.

The second movement is not in the relative major. The sadness has spread and for a while it is hard to discern the fury beneath it but that forces surfaces, staring at us until we too recall.

The third movement is the fastest but for all the fleet ascents and descents the witness in the solo voice clutches at each speeding heel, keeping it earthbound until each fatal signature Vivaldi closing cadence of 6th 5th 1st (Ab, G7, C minor). But if the voice had been a herald in the shadows in the first movement and a ghost rising from beneath in the second, here it is a serpent. Now fleet and troublingly sinuous and then coiling around each thing that would fly and escape. And then the sentence, final and slashing: 6th! 5th! 1st! No tierce di picardi to end on a smiling major third for this Red Priest's imagining. We grind on in the minor to the last.

When that happened I'd either leave the record on for the even angrier Geminiani concerto grosso or take it off, sit back down, look into the darkness and think about people called Hector, Herbert and Hermione. They were the characters in the novel I was trying to write called The Mouse.

Hector Mann (in his forties but the way I imagined him then puts him more in his sixties: I was twenty-two), a senior Public Servant, lives with his son, Herbert (still a child, about ten) and comes home one evening to discover that Herbert is ill. He puts the boy to bed, taking his temperature and giving him a hot lemon drink and then retires to his den where he stares at the wall with a continuing hatred. On the wall to one side of him is a poster his wife put there, a photograph of a mouse in close-up nibbling on some grains. It had been a taunt and though he can't bring himself to look at it he has never removed it.

Hermione Mann reveals herself to be the novel's narrator, a task she performs from her grave in Toowong Cemetery. She begins (at about the fifth chapter) thus:

When the moon is full above my stone I have the clearest sight. Never in my living days have I known such fineness in the detail nor colour nor perspective. And when my kin are aching, when they wince from sores or sadness I can see. I can see without the moon.

She tells the tale of Hector's continuing failure to control his son's illness which is mutating the boy into something grey and scarred. He grows increasingly terrified of the possibility of the situation worsening with the involvement of doctors. At the same time he has noticed a mouse had appeared in the home, a vile darting bringer of plague. He has found what he believes is a solution in the garden out the back which he has let wild since his wife, its curator, died, in tribute. A stray cat with a torn eyelid which makes it look like a mad professor has taken residence. By the time Hector progresses from feeding it to talking with it directly we start waiting for Hermione to do more than see clearly.

Where did this come from?

Partly from the lapse in mood in the winter following the departure of about half the household which left me both relieved and in an emotional slump, and partly from the things I saw when I listened to this concerto.

In the first months back from finishing uni and going on my second last Christmas holidays to Townsville I came back to Brisbane refreshed and ready for the second year of my band The Gatekeepers, resuming reading for pleasure, planning my entry into the world of cinema and breathing a little before admitting that it was just all going to be work instead of any of that.

One of the first things I did was head into town and stoll. It was a weekday and I had a blissful nowhere to go. Finding myself on Queen St I hung a left into the Record Market, a large shop of new and old that had a fantastic second hand section. I once found a copy of the mono mix of Sgt Pepper (a 1967 original pressing) for ninety-nine cents! The guy at the counter had to check the price but found it was legit and let me have it for that. I later gave it to Pat Ridgewell as a token of thanks for doing some audio engineering. God knows what it's worth now.

Mainly, though, the Record Market was where I dived into what had been a steadily growing craving over the past two years. The ever superbly programmed local FM 3MBS was playing a lot of the rising tide of early-music revivalism as well as new digital recordings of baroque and classical pieces. Here, on shamingly well kept second hand vinyl was a treasure house of great recordings for mostly less than four dollars. I alsmost bought them by weight.

One of them was Italian Concertos, a mix of eighteenth and nineteenth century Italian masters performed by the dependable Academy of St Martin in the Fields under the baton of Sir Neville Marriner. The cover was different to the one I had which was the World Record Club appropriation but the contents was the thing.

To revisit this music I had to listen to Ofra Harnoy's recording from the nineties. Splendid performance but clearly influenced by the trend in earlier music performance toward higher speeds. Marriner's recording is slower and statelier and, because of that, also much darker. The tense passage in the third movement where the cello is arpeggiating between G7 and C minor feels like writhing serpents.

Maestro Daniel Barenboim famously said that people should destroy classical recordings after playing them once. He wasn't being insanely consumerist but stressing the performance of music over its fetishisation. The latter happens whenever someone who comes to classical music from other bases like rock or folk and considers the recorded version of anything to be the definitive statement (unless a rare superior live version comes along).

All that should matter in classical music is that the performance is expressive of the piece. Yet many people I know who liked this or that classical music after decades immersed in rock consider any performance other than the one they first heard is wrong. Well, it has to be wrong. The reason that there are so very many recordings of pieces like The Four Seasons or Mozart's symphonies is the suggestion that the value lies in the difference. Still, while I enjoy Harnoy's playing I still pine for the Marriner version (can't even identify the soloist now) which didn't make it to cd and was probably donated along with most of my vinyl to the local op shop years ago.

Meanwhile, I wrote, page after page of the saga of the family Mann and their mouse. Watched the leaves fall from the frangiapani by my balcony, raked up the leaves of the macadamia out the back, had endless cups of sugary tea with lots of milk, read whatever books I'd bought second hand with the same fervour as I met the records, chatted to Rick about them and whatever else was born in the quiet light of the afternoon, avoided brother Stephen's thundering nonsense and began to feel old.

The band had disintegrated over the first few months of 1984 as this one fell away, that one joined a cabaret outfit that afforded her a living and the other who swore off bands after half a decade failing to become a rock star. We made some recordings over a fun Easter break and then polished them into stiff, unfeeling things petrified by the costs of an eight track studio and called it quits.

I had no Uni. There was no more mix of multisyllabic cinebabble and popcorn, the blend had gone and now that there was only the popcorn it tasted fattening. The reading was good. Everyone got into it and we talked a lot about that. The good thing there was that I just learned to relax with the chat, take a sip now and then and coast until evening.

But it was too still. The Mouse was grinding into stasis and I was listening to the concerto without a thought of Hector, his raised-eyebrow stray or his mouse of horror. I just heard the darkness around his house ripped by the whines of his increasingly doughy son. Bored I began a short story, a monologue fed on a diet of Colin Davis' batonning of Mozart's Requiem with a host of mighty soloists and the John Alldis choir and the BBC symphony orchestra, to this day my defin- oh.

And More B-Sides: The Go Betweens' Stop Before You Say It.

When the Go Betweens came back from Scotland with this single my impression was that they'd gone there to do that. I still don't know if the recording was part of a larger foray into the jewel set in the silver sea but for all the depth of information I fathomed (not deep) they went, recorded this and came back.

4ZZZ made a lot of it and mostly they played the A which, quite frankly kept me from buying it. It was lightly whiney and seemed self-consciously quirky and anti-pop. The chorus with its intentional amelodic trailing off seemed like a waste to me from the folk who had brought us the great Lee Remick/Karen, People Say/Don't Let Him Come Back.

Of those it was closest to Karen but Karen was better at it, a constant tension building to a chorus without a melody in earshot but plenty of drama whose intensity seemed tighter for all the sparseness of its arrangement. But the passable verses of this one led to the statement that just sounded like an affected non-sequitur, something conjured for their peers to approve of. Appeals to good taste that led to Picasso knew where. But someone slipped once on Triplezed or thought like I did and played the B.

Stop Before You Say It begins with a spiky rhythm in the instrumental trio with an upfront melodic bass and then Robert Forster in an icy voice sings about someone very creepy over a plain picked bass. He's that cold you can skate on his skin. You scratched his cut and put your finger in. When he speaks someone interrupts (what'd you say?) So he hugs the chair and his blood comes up.

Then the trio thickens up and even chugs a little for the chorus. And you can break his heart (the other voice higher, down in the mix repeats it in a different melody) and again but he feels nothing. Then the introductory riff repeats and suddenly I'm reminded of the Young Marble Giants.

Sparseness was the word we used of the Go Betweens. They seemed to leave things out on purpose, so you'd imagine them yourself or see through the gaps to their imaginations. This was the time when one of them coined the phrase about Brisbane music that it was the striped sunlight sound (I think on a Triplezed interview). There was a mix of the laidback Queensland way of things and the intensity of reacting against it that permeated the air of any gig I went to at the time.

Well, I won't go into them too much here but the other reasons why the ol' Bundy Rum 'n' reggae public face of the Sunshine State was proved a lie to anyone under thirty and in the margins of culture back then by the inevitable police presence at any gig outside of the few venues in the CBD that allowed bands of interests to play there and certainly any gig setup by the bands themselves in spiky Andy Hardy fashion at places like the Blind Hall or AHEPA. That said, I'll have to confess that beyond a certain recognisable tension in early Go Betweens material I hear no obvious protest. That was for self-styled punk bands who already in 1981 seemed as revivalist as Ol' 55 or Shakin' Stevens.

But The GoBs had moved on and this song was proof. While the chorus ends in a look-at-me-but-don't-look-now feyness the chorus of Stop is left deliberately unstated. We get it twice. The call and response and then he feels nothing and then badump dododododo badump on the bass and drums. Then a sweet guitar figure, all singlecoil thin and unsustained before freezing down for the last verse which is the same as the first. Except this time you get the final line. Badump - Whatcha gonna do? Stop before you say it. The bass trails off for a few notes but it isn't like the whine of the A-side end, it feels more like the inertia, the notes stumble out after a sudden stop.

So why was this the B-side? True enough, people who bought indy singles played both sides as the songs were usually thought about and worked on rather than perfunctory covers or strained jokes. And it was a short time before the B was just another version of the A (I can remember people being angry that New Order did this on Blue Monday).

But even call this an A when it was the more arresting of the two and far more indicative of the direction they'd take on their debut LP Send Me a Lullaby? Was the call and response chorus too sixties? Too Nuggets for the folks down at the Exchange? I only ever met Lindy out of the then trio (she hadn't played on the single, that was the drummer from Orange Juice on their label Postcard) and though she wasn't I had the impression that they were stuck up aesthetes. I no longer harbour that view but liked how the Jonathon Richman goofiness and Brisbane plainness belied all that. Stop Before You Say It was the B-side because it was the more commercial because the perversity of that was as affordable as a busride to town from Auchenflower because they could because something had to be the A-side because even the straight National-Party-voting world where that meant something needed to be shown that it had been a decision more considered than the flip of a coin.

And the better song endures because it can.

A Curious Case of Disappointment: The Birthday Party's Release the Bats

It came on 4ZZZ one night while I was trying to start an assignment. The fore announcement made it sound like a novelty record. No goofy Lugosi voice just the band name and title: this is the Birthday Party's new single Release the Bats. And the big raw toms thumped and the thick bass bounced around them like a medicine ball and then the guitars and the screaming started and it was too late to turn back. It was exhilarating and dark. To this day this song makes me laugh.

Something weird and changing always happened when I left Brisbane for my Christmas holidays while at Uni. Hunters and Collectors blipped on my radar on the first day back in Brisbane for second year. Never heard of them before. A few of my friends plus one guy I didn't know formed Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums between second and third year. And between 1980 and 1981 The Boys Next Door became The Birthday Party. I first saw this in a small article in RAM magazine. I only read it because they were touring nationally with the Go Betweens.

I'd liked Boys Next Door. Door Door is a great post punk album filled with melody and anger and some intriguing arrangements. I got into it through the single Shivers (more on that 45 in another post) and while it was never on high rotation I looked forward to what they'd do next. They seemed to have gone to the UK for the standard Australian failure-to-penetrate mission and had come back angrier, nastier, spikier and noisier. I read the new name and wondered if they'd taken it from the Pinter play. I never had the Prayers on Fire LP but I had it on cassette. Truth be told apart from a few standouts apart from a few standouts I could never quite get into it. It seemed formless and unfocussed.

When I saw them the following year at the New York when they came on stage protected by a forcefield of impermeable contempt for everything around them and when Nick Cave violated the stage/audience divide by charging on to the mezzanine, grabbing random punters and screaming: "EXPRESS YOURSELF!" at them I began to understand. They were a circus act. A kind of grand guignol without a keeper. They were performance rather than recording artistes and worked like Trojans at it. Even their interviews, trickling through the synthpop and the dross, were performances: Nick Cave sneering that no one would come to their shows for the music.

This was the kind of propaganda by deed act the world needed at the time. They knew they would never outsell anyone even one tier above them so they settled in for constant kudos. It's the trade off between mass popularity or worshipful cool. The former case has to be inhumanly strong to grow and change and maintain the fan base (what was the last industrial dub album by U2?). The latter case doesn't require longevity but doesn't ridicule it either (Wire anyone?) as long as the sense that the act in question did what they did for love.

So when Release the Bats crashed, splattered and bumped its way out of my eensy clock radio somewhere in the wilds of 1981 I was all admiration. Also, I was in fits. The thing was so gloriously puerile and violent. "How I wish those bats would BITE!" Sex horror vampire. Don't tell me that it doesn't hurt. Guitar tone tortured on a molten frying pan and a bass that seemed to wear a permanent dirty grin. And the drums just go on, the restless homicidal natives of an old Hollywood movie. And Nick just keeps screaming. It felt both teeth gratingly childish and real, as dangerous as they were at the New York. "ARRRRRGH! BITE!" A chunga kunga chunga kunga.

You don't create fear by saying the word horror. Bauhaus' Bela Lugosi's Dead while pleasantly gothic is only ever silly and try-hard if you attempt to take it seriously. But if you say horror the way a child might and sound like a grown up it's wrong and unsettling, like the reverse effect of Mercedes McCambridge's smokey old voice coming out of twelve year old Linda Blair's mouth in The Exorcist. All the screaming in this track feels like that, a grown man with a child's urges, Elvis' twin brother kept alive but let out of the basket in the back shed. And still so try hard so look we bad that the entire thing sounded like a big jokey taunt. It was exhilaratingly funny.

No one else had heard it and for a while I thought I'd dreamed it. A few of us were in a shopping centre out in the wilds of darkest Brisbane once (all doughnut stands and auto shops) and as we left I asked one of us to scream the title like on the record. He waited until we were almost out and let out a gigantic rasping RELEASE THE BATS! to the shoppers. It sounded like a wildcat. I was bent over laughing. I'm a late developer and was still very giggly at eighteen. Later at band practice between songs I got the drummer to play the basic tom beat while I screamed into the microphone. Mirth all around.

Weeks later, sitting around with the same people, sipping on lukewarm XXXX I brought up the track in a conversation about recent music. Someone said: "That! It's all chaos and noise until you realise it's actually a song".

He was right. He's still right. There are verses and choruses and if you strip it back it might as well be a rockabilly number. Hmph! I thought. Still laugh at it, but.

Saturation: Garbage's Garbage

She was a career artist and liked being one. There was none of the self-imposed suffering other artists complain of as you mentally collate your next shopping list. She didn't need art for her suffering as the bipolar did all that for her.

That diagnosis was not self-administered and she was always on something or choosing not to take it. This made her behaviour erratic and often exciting. This is where I point out that there was nothing erotic between us. Now and then she would venture an advance but it would be a taunt and I wouldn't let it through. She wasn't unattractive. She was insane. And this is where I point out that for all of this I loved the time we spent and would easily look forward to seeing her next.

Next was almost entirely at night, at her flat down a few blocks or at some place on Brunswick St. We'd talk about anything that came up but mostly about who we were seeing (or wanted to) and any commentaries that spluttered to life from that subject. Whereas I was always not living up to my ad campaigns or vanishing quietly from peripheral visions, she would wear the skin off her lovers who were left shivering in the ditches of the night waiting for their coats to grow back. One of these was my longest standing friend at the time who had moved on even from responding to the aftersales period of predawn panic calls from stranger's places or calls for after hours alcohol. Nevertheless he kept a close eye on us and imagined our platonism as a torrid passion. She and I together drank (not always alcohol) watched movies but mostly we talked. When I started cartooning she was heavily supportive and we'd often draw together as well.

One perk for both of us to this arrangement was that we'd dress up for each other so if we went out somewhere we'd provide each other with a presentable warm prop for anyone looking. Until anyone asked we looked involved but if it came to make executive decisions at social occasions we'd disengage as though modular and go for that. This contained no pain, even of the kind of weird unexamined jealousy that can occur to friends in similar situations.

The comfort of the pretence allowed for this as well as her frequent reminder that she saw her friends as one side of a rubik's cube in that when one tile was brought in by a twist another would vanish. She would usually say this over a drink but I had no doubt she meant and practiced it. The idea that she could only cope with a limited number of friends was pleasantly unconventional. The accompanying one that I, too, would sooner or later be on one of the tiles on the forgotten sides around the corner did not disturb me beyond knowing that I would miss these things for a time.

But this was a noncomittal intimacy; for a few years I'd happily listen to the on-again/off-again boyfriend stories and tales of growing up Queensland-strange (which I'd kind of done myself). Some people will send you to sleep with the latest bulletin about what you can clearly see over time is a featureless loss of effort rather than a dynamic relationship. This time they're on and the next time they're off and the pendulum just swings lower and lower unto death. But her's were always funny and their self-awareness never precious.

Towards the end of all of this she appeared at my door with running makeup and soaked as though she'd fallen in a pool. And she was sucking on what looked like an anti-gravity tube. Her lips were black from whatever was in it and some of that was dribbing down her chin. She walked past me into my hallway, up the stairs and to my room, leaving my flatmate silently mouthing a question about dialling triple zero. Upstairs, she bundled herself under my doona. We'd shared a bed exactly once before but that was from exhaustion after a night spent calming one of her wildeyed hours to a kind of slumber. This was similarly unsexual. I sat at my desk.

"Bastards!" she snorted.

"Who?"

"At St Vincents. They could see I was in trouble but this."

She lifted her left wrist which was sewn shut where she'd cut it. She cut. She called it a release. She thought the term "cry for help" was for pussies. I was used to it.

"Seems like a good job," I said.

"Not that! This!" She was pointing to her sleeve which was as damp as the rest of her clothes.

"Why are you wet?"

"Loaded question," she laughed. "The bastard that threw me out pushed me in the fountain."

"There's a fountain as St Vincents?"

"Maybe I was in the fountain already."

"Which?"

"Oh what does it matter? Anyway, I just kept yelling at them and they came out and told me not to come back."

"You got bounced from Emergency?"

"Oh laugh away! Big joke!" She took another suck from the astronaut tube. It left a splat on her lower lip. "They said I was upsetting the others. People with their guts hanging out. Why would they be upset about me?"

"So, you came here."

"You normalise me." She took another suck from the tube. "And you were closer. Do you mind?"

My bed would be damp for all the wrong reasons, well, a wrong reason. "Yeah, it's fine," I said.

"What are you doing?"

"Working on a short story."

"Any good?

"Not yet."

"Mind if I sleep here?"

"No."

She lay back and closed her eyes. "You mean "no" it isn't ok or "no" you don't mind?"

"Get some sleep."

I turned back to my computer and knew I wouldn't be able to concentrate so I did some typing and laughed audibly now and then before removing what I had to and getting in beside her. She put me in a headlock and pulled me close to her. She smelled chemical. She guided my head to her chest.

"You can put your head there, if you like."

The severe antieroticism of seeing her wrist stitched up turned the volume up on our platonism and the image of me sleeping with my head on her breast like a mother and child was instantly repellent. I returned to my side and found to my surprise that I was exhausted. I had a dream about school which ended in my falling over a cliff and landing on my back.

"Stop snoring!" she whined, retracting her fist.

I mumbled an apology and blinked several times quickly as she got out of bed and stood up. She studied me for a few uncomfortable seconds.

"I'm going home," she said. "Did you call rat girl?"

"I will."

One thing we always did in public was pick out people for each other. I'd mentioned a Liquid TV cartoon I'd seen where one of the patients in a therapy circle had said: "I look like a rat." I'd said that features on the cartoon girl corresponded with a look I liked (dark eyes, long straight nose). At a party we went to she pointed out that the hostess had that look (her costume even involved a pair of minnie mouse ears: true story!). I agreed and made some way in a chat-up and then left it for later.

"You never will," she said, "but it's good you at least talked."

"You know I'm going out with Dianne." I wasn't but it was an effective comeback.

"What, still?'

"Yes."

"Alright, well, I'm going home. You go fuck yourself which you shouldn't find hard as you're such a great fat master of it."

"And also with you," I murmured and turned away from her.

She closed the door with a gentleness that could only be sarcasm then thudded down the stairs and slammed the front door.

I left it for a few weeks then called her. When the Fringe Festival still had its street party in Brunswick Street I used to like starting it with her or someone equally enjoyable. She lived over the bookshop where she worked which was on Brunswick Street so I called her up to see if she wanted to watch the parade. Her voice was cold and annoyed as she told me she couldn't.

"I'm going to a lunch with some people and then going to a footy barbeque after."

Footy? Someone had translated that hieroglyphic on a newstand for her.

I was on an outer tile. No announcement. I'd just been moved there.

I went to the parade with someone else and mingled with everyone I knew anyway. But even the street party had run itself into the ground. The parade was always fun but after that it was just a few rock bands, some scattered clowning and two blocks of food stalls. And it had grown crowded. Once, it was on the calendar. You couldn't get half a block before being accosted by someone you knew offering you a drink or begging some of yours. It was always early in spring so I'd go in a tuxedo and picked from a punnet of strawberries. Everyone was everyone else's friend for at least two minutes. You'd explore or get snagged into a visit to someone's place a few floors up from the street and have a deep conversation that you'd never have again or remember. So often I'd be pulled out of the crowd by someone in stage makeup who turned ot to be someone I should've recognised without a squint. I loved it. We all loved it. It was like ANZAC Day for bohos. But then most of them had moved out by then and all we seemed to have instead was tourists, sample bags and hotdogs. Perhaps, if anything, it had outlived its day.

I will now admit to my shame that her dismissal of me was felt as more an inconvenience than a rejection. It seemed needless but, given that I'd known it was inevitable, not a trauma. Still, I now had to find honest social things or projects for the spare weekend nights. I'd grown used to having that comfortable other option. So I did.

We used to trade music all the time and one album she pressed on me to tape (still the nineties, still tape) was Garbage's debut. She particularly liked the closing song Milk.

Like a lot of people she thought of the band through the singer, Shirley Manson. The frog-eyed beauty in the visual gravity centre of the publicity shots had cowritten the material and delivered it in the whispers and commands of a dominatrix. To look at her you knew she could only be British but sang in a smooth L.A. cool. It was all about supervixens, taunts, tantrums, Bel Air parties and a lot of things that can only happen between two and five in the morning. Both above this turbulence and from deep within its rips, Manson crooned a series of observations of things that every fan wished they'd been caught at and everything that would put it beneath the notice of anyone who actually did them (on the basis that people who could fill diaries don't need to).

I have no real love for this album though I have to admit to admiring aspects of it. The band and album name suggest the irony of its time when love songs had to sound criminal and songs about personal atrocity like syrupy ballads. But the value of the irony only goes as far as most exercises in irony; it runs out soon after the surface is breached. The trick is to make the surface so appealing that none will attempt plumbing it.

Shirley Manson gives her look, words and big tired voice to the humanity of it but it is drummer and producer Butch Vig who removes the flesh and blood. This album is on the rockier side of pop but at the time it was alligned with the likes of Portishead's Dummy. It's an easy mistake. Under the near constant guitar wash there is a mass of percussion both played and programmed. It is telling that it can be hard to tell the difference. Folded into the layers are samples from all the usual sources, punk, jass, lounge etc. The pace overall is a rock 'n' roll slowed down for sex.

That's the plan but there's something wrong here and it does the same thing to me as Nirvana's breakthrough Nevermind. It's great a few weeks high rotation but after that it just gets exhausting. Why? Butch Vig, who produced both albums knows how to do one thing above all and that is the creation of instant saturation. You feel these songs are old hits while you are listening to them for the first time. They have been stripped of any warmth and idiosyncrisy that might have brought them perilously close to listeners needing time with them. Nothing isn't a hook. When something sounds catchy it is doubled by another instrument so that there is no chance of it ever getting away from anyone who hears it. And all of this is brought to a great airless prison by massive audio compression that allows everything through at what sounds like the same level until every possible moment that might have presented itself as special gets smothered and squashed into the same texture as everything else. You remember getting new plasticine? You'd roll it and form it and sculpt it and smash it together until all you had was a ball as grey as the mud outside. That's what this album starts sounding like after you have played it once a day for two weeks. Once that's happened you will never play it again. But by that time millions of other people have bought it because it worked on them the same way.

There is one exception to all this. The last song, Milk, is a plaintive ballad. Over a descending flute figure and synthesised strings and a constant pusling beat, Manson sings pain and loneliness. She says she's cruel and in control, that she's damaging but she's waiting and waiting and waiting for whoever it is and will be waiting long after the fade. The lights go out. End.

She had a kitten once. A friend whose cat had birthed a litter gave her one of them. It was tiny and black. She named it after an arts publisher and let it spend time peering over the rail of her flat's balcony. Otherwise it would dart around inside. She would describe its personality as though it were someone in her arts scene, someone flamboyant, beautiful and indulged. I love cats and after a few visits noticing its absence I asked where it was.

"Oh," she said. End of topic.

For a while that was the only memory I could associate with her.

After her rebuff about the Fringe party I tried one more call but only got her machine. I hung up without leaving a message. The beep I imagined when she played through them sounded like my full stop.