MY 1984

Photo by Ian Wadley of 7 Bongalonga Close Westfarce SW666

The New Year's Eve bashes were dominated by dystopian themed parties. I went to one but it just made me want to get back into the band and more music. I signed on the dole and saved a little, living free at the family home before heading down on one of the last Sunlander trips I'd make. The train got into Roma St in the morning and I got a cab home. Stephen was in high spirits. If '83 had begun with the nightmare family absent, '84 started with them completely evacuated. They really were no more. Day one, we both put the work in, scrubbing the grime and memories from the house. I even put the Halleluiah chorus on as we went through the living room.

I didn't give myself any time to miss Uni. There was Greg to call about the new songs I'd finished up north and demoes to organise. Greg had moved out to the Northside, quite close by. It would be easier than before to get some demos worked out. We started practicing at his place. Most of the old set was dropped and my medieval influenced stuff was moving in, along with more Arabic flavours. Lots of promise.

Stephen's friends from wild days in Townsville moved down and in and for about five months it was pretty fine with an uptick in coffee quality, communal meals and long and winding conversations. I caught up with a lot of the reading I wanted to do now that Uni no longer ruled that aspect. I haunted the CBD bookshops on dole day and always came home with something. Same with music, I raided the Record Market in Queen St and built up a revival of my first love, classical and prior. Finally, I started writing fiction. The idea was to write my way into being a film director. Well, my course hadn't been a practical one in either sense. Everything felt good.

Greg and I demoed a lot of new songs one weekend on 4-track with Margot and Liz participating, making them the only recordings of the whole 1983 line up ever done. Later, I can't recall when but it was over a couple of colder nights, we went to Basement and did about eight of them. And then the band suffered a soft collapse with everyone drifting away and leaving me with another post band dearth like the one in 1982. Well, I still had the writing and that's what I concentrated on for the rest of the year. This is around the same time as the departure of the main couple in the house, a troubling visit by an old school friend. After that, Stephen's prank of removing the valves of the ancient tv proved successful and it never worked again. The mood with the remaining householders slowdived.

I stopped going to the kind of gigs I had gone to but the local scene was on the turn, anyway with a bland professionalism infiltrating the venues and dance clubs sprouting up. Punk had become thrash and lost my interest. What had been anti-rock fell into a kind of boofy bossa nova as well meaning bores like The Style Council began to exert an influence. 

Ray Parker's Ghostbusters was a movie theme, audio merch that started early and lifted the rhythm and riff from M's Pop Muzik from five years before but it worked like a charm as did the catchy shriek of Cindy Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun as Stevie Wonder lulled us to sleep with the long distance lullaby I Just Called to Say I Love You which was only marginally more exciting that the duet Islands in the Stream from Kenny Rogers  and Dolly Parton from which we might have woken with Pat Benatar's Love is a Battlefield as Lionel Richie set off red flags of all nations with his tender and queasy Hello and INXS reminded us that they had started releasing the same song under different titles until the end of the band with their Original Sin and Frankie Goes to Hollywood followed suit with their Two Tribes thumper and Nena pretended she was Debbie Harry with a song about Luftballons and Prince's When Doves Cry sounded like everything else he brought out as Tina Turner asked what Love had to Do With It and Wham tried going all Motown with Wake Me Up Before You Go Go before the real singer left and bade us listen to a Careless Whisper and Kenny Loggins felt all Footloose which was another movie tie in to let us know that the culture was made of more bubbles than icecream and if we wanted to wait for the next development in post-punk we were only having ourselves on as it had been swallowed whole by the mainstream and sold for scrap in Heinz commercials. The transitions to a return of rock bands were beginning even on stations like 4ZZZ as there seemed to be no more need for dub exploration. We were growing into careers after uni, or acted like we were, and the parties became more theme and catering, two things that the best of the past five years had been decidedly un. My favourite single of the year was Echo and the Bunnymen's The Killing Moon. That really means it was the only single I liked that year. The Laughing Clown's magnificent Eternally Yours was hard to count as it had kind of come out at the end of the previous year. Then again, it's hard to remember the music of a year when your favourite radio station seemed to buy in the main blob and my brother's prank of sabotaging the tv left us without Countdown for months. Sure, first world problems but the horrifying smother of the mainstream kept spreading until even the funk was wearing a white T-shirt and the punk was some bands started calling themselves (which was a joke when punk lived).

I asked around for people who might be interested in joining the Gatekeepers but what point when you don't have a phone and aren't even going to gigs? I had one extended chat with a potential keyboard player who seemed so uninterested that to this day I have no idea why she turned up at all. I lent her some Ravi Shankar records and she returned one but replaced the other with a pan pipes album. That's funny now but at the time I wanted to slowly poison her.

I wrote short stories. A lot of them. I didn't send any away as I knew myself better than that and concentrated on finishing a book of linked tales like James Joyce's Dubliners. It passed the time but gave me a project. I missed Uni but knew that doing honours or a masters would just be putting things off longer for little. I read a lot and watched a lot of movies in the overnight marathons that the commercial stations used to put on. I learned to love the Marx Brothers and Jacques Tati, the stories of Franz Kafka, Camus' The Outsider, and a stack more. Getting back into classical and earlier music was a pleasure. Whenever I looked up from whatever writing I was doing I seemed to be getting absorbed into the great nothing of the culture. The Michael Radford film of 1984 felt like home.

I went to Townsville for my final family Christmas but that bothered me less than what I would be returning to. I had to do something. It took a while but I did. Anyway, that's for next year.

This is the view from my room in the house at Bangalla St
Auchenflower, the only place I lived in Brisbane. I don't
remember taking the photo and can't recall how I came to 
have a copy. It would be from the first five years of the '80s.