Love Songs #9: Blue Southern Sky: THROW YOUR ARMS AROUND ME - HUNTERS AND COLLECTORS

As an outfit that added a gas cylinder to its drum kit and considered its mixer to be a band member Hunters and Collectors were a perfect fit for the Australian post punk scene in the early 80s. They fit perfectly because they didn't fit. If your synth pop bips leaned a little toward Depeche Mode or powerpop had real guitar solos you were part of the problem, not the solution. And this was no time for blurring irony. So, when Hunnas took the stage in their sweaty blue singlets and prison haircuts, clanging, ticking and calling titanic footy war cries they weren't being yobs, they were being new.

Really, what great point to try outdoing Devo or Kraftwerk when they'd sewn up that ol' industrial thang? There was still a working class culture in Australia at that time that  ... worked. There was still industry. And Hunnas weren't that interested in coming across like bosses or lab coated animal testers, they yelled from the factory floor among the clamour and drones and shuddering engines. And when they sang it wasn't about penalty rates or capitalism - they could happily leave that to Midnight Oil or Redgum to shore up their future self-embarrassment - but urban tribalism with a strange J.G. Ballard tinge and a big misshapen absurdism; nursery rhymes with jungle drums.

I came back from my northern Christmas holidays with a week or so spare until uni started and the mighty World of Stone was the first thing I heard when I switched 4ZZZ on. Its scrap metal in the rainforest vibe spread out but it never coasted or got too samey. A thin-boned funk figure on the guitar, the strong vocals calling from the next valley and at every chorus a huge grinding riff under an organ wash. The back announce added that they were playing at the New York Hotel the next Sunday night. I counted my coins and made a mental note. I gathered a few friends to order a the White Chairs. Two of them were going to see the band at one of the leagues club venues that night (Cherie jokingly clicking her fingers as she said she was "going tribal, man"). I couldn't afford both so aimed at the NY. My brother in law Roger came over and told me about the gig as well. I went with him.

The New York Hotel was massive inside. There was a table service bar with a sky high ceiling that once, when I thought I was flashing back, briefly hovered centimetres above my head. The venue was also huge and had the highest stage I've ever seen. Flanking the stage were two mezzanines with tables. Down on the floor everyone could see everything. One of the supports was a band called Sigh of Relief who had a guitar sound composed entirely of chords played through a Roland Chorus amp with the chorus on 11. The singer completely misjudged the audience vibe (very cruisey at the end of summer) and snarled before one number: "this is for all those fucking people who sit in their fucking bedsits and fuck themselves!" Silence. Enough silence to let the band know that living well was a better revenge and, besides, no one in Brisbane lived in a bedsit (it wasn't bloody Manchester!). And so they ploughed through about five more chorused chord showcases and left.

When Hunnas got up they wandered on like roadies. There seemed to be about fifty of them. By the time the light funk of the guitar lifted from the workshop clave tinkle and the massive picked bass shuddered to operation speed it dawned on us that the set had started. When Mark Seymour began the urgent valley cry of the vocal that led to the giant riff of the chorus we were home. Through just over an hour of mighty jungle steel and we were exhausted and thrilled. It was new and massive and didn't have to be from anywhere. God, that was a good time to see bands. And that was before The Birthday Party played there but that's another anecdote.

Hunnas just kept it up over the next years, working with krautrock's own Conny Plank to produce great new albums that roared, hammered and thundered but sounded nothing like rock (very, very important in both H&C's native Melbourne and my temporarily adoptive Brisbane with its sparse is class minimalism). Their odd clanging thud with melody infiltrated the charts. In 1983 they even made it to Countdown with the Richard Lowenstein directed clip for Talking to a Stranger, both sound and vision heavily cinematic, a kind of melange of Man Called Horse, Mad Max 2 and a tour of the Fitzroy Housing Commission towers and grounds, all face paint, junkyard bonfires and wriggly scrawled titles that appeared and vanished mysteriously as the violent bass machine and horn section charged on. Everything about it absorbed its times but was so adamantly itself. So what happened?

What happened? How come only a year and a bit after that we get a three chord song so identikit you could sing Hang On Sloopy over the backing track?

People left and the band moved on. By the time the next major album appeared the band was a tighter unit gathered around vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Mark Seymour. Actually, that role-call looks a little egalitarian. By the time the next major album appeared the band was a tighter unit gathered around leader Mark Seymour. If they had been the scream of the dispossessed over the storm of machinery they were now a rock band. If we had seen a collective working as a spontaneously generated organic unit creating the sounds and images of the sickness of the cities we now saw a rock band. One step too close to comfort and they would fall into the abyss of being an Ozrock band. The mighty would have fallen. Did it fall here?

A grinding major key riff played in the D position on the guitar and rising a full fourth to G and then A and we're in. He's telling his lover that he will come to her and she will throw her arms around him. That's the song. No twists or archness. No cynicism either but, crucially, no naivete. It's not the red-clawed venery of The Slab, it's love. This time it's love and if your first hearing of it sounds like the pub after closing then you need to hear it again because the man who screeched and wailed about monkeys in the caretaker's lodge is now singing about love.

As the chords insistently swing on a pendulum of I to IV to I to V, Seymour tells his love that he will kiss her in four places, that she'll make her call his name, that she should shed her skin so they can get started and the call in the title. Three chords. Not so simple, though.

First, Mark Seymour's voice is instantly recognisable. It is masculine. And it is frankly Australian. If Chrissie Amphlett a few years earlier sounded like someone from the cast of Ginger Meggs: The Musical and Redgum's John Schumann twanged like the back o' Bourke Seymour just sounded Australian. Not Paul Hogan but something unaffected, as comfortable as a white-with-one in the morning and a beading stubby of Vic at sunset. More, the great machismo in a lot of the early vocals here found its vulnerability and a means to represent both in the same song without switching like Sybil. Seymour plays this love lyric knowingly, aware that the more bloke in a singlet he tries to be with these words of compulsion the more vulnerable he will seem to the other blokes in the canteen, aware that in this moment he no longer cares. He declares. And declares. And declares. It keeps just feeling better even if it's just the same words over the same chords.

This is a very muscular work. There might be the sliver tinkling of an acoustic and some Telecaster chime in that pretty opening but the first verse is delivered over big hard bass and drums only. Seymour's voice, always perfectly pitched, sings the melody he wrote and allows a slight tremor in his voice, made clear and close in the absence of a comfy guitar wash. It's just him and her and he's letting the real stuff emerge from the shadow of his six packed toughness. The guitar starts late and enters cautiously. The first breakout section ("and we may never meet again...") introduces the organ which glides in comfortably. We've hardly noticed the harmonies but they've been consolidating the vocal from halfway through the first verse. So, by the time she makes him call her name and he shouts it to the blue summer skyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy we have to struggle not to join in:

And you will throwowowow your arms around meeeeee.

A repeat of the pretty intro, this time more strongly supported releases its tension with a big sighing chord on the guitar with some lovely Fender amp tremolo. And now Seymour starts playing his plain but sweet melody, stretching and twisting the phrases to match the bucking in his heart: you know I will never say goodbye.... Below this, the wordless choir ohs and aahs, the organ swells and the now constant grinding guitar compells. And when the second breakout happens it's even bigger and when he shouts to the blue summer sky it's a 40 degree Melbourne sky with not a wisp of condensation in the entire visible dome:

And you will throwowowow your arms around meeeeee.

And then instead of yet another pretty intro we get it's chords but all low down the fretboard in pure force (cleverly, this always sounds like newly introduced chords but they aren't) and an even bigger breakout where something resembling the old jungle cries rings out as the voices soar above the bashing swell:

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo yeaaaaah!

And then, piece by piece, Seymour's voice is all over the place, repeating lines over each other before the chorus returns in the soaring guise of the middle section:

Throw-ohooooooooooooooooooh your arms around me!...

When this intensifies to saturation we stop, exhausted with a gentle lowering strum on the acoustic. Over.

It's not an instant replay job, this. It might have the three unchallenging chord structure of bubblegum but it plays things far more adult. There is neither the concussed ecstasy of adolesence nor the darker drives of young adulthood; here we cruise with the power of the narrator being drawn to the power of his lover through the electric air of a summer afternoon. The combined force of the two push the energy to its height and it flashes refulgent and blinding. End. Might happen again. Might never happen again but here was a moment when both of them were on peak form and will be a lifelong memory. Nary a single mention of the word love but that's the strongest thing in the air, here.

For me it was inseparable from Melbourne summer. Standing on the breakwater at the end of St Kilda Pier, encased in the cool dry air, I'd look up over the bay and the huge blue sky and smile just because I felt free from a year of doldrums. I thought the line was actually: "I'll shout it to the blue southern sky." Hearing Hunters and Collectors play the St Kilda Festival on the foreshore and feeling the rush of love for this song was like hearing the live Simon and Garfunkel album in Central Park where Paul Simon gets a big roar from the line: "It's good to play a neighbourhood concert." As cliched as the chords might have been and as studious the effort of creating a classic pop song I still plugged into it. I wasn't in love at the time but that didn't feel far away at any time at that age. Melbourne had winters the way that neither Brisbane nor Townsville had them. The ones in Melbourne felt real. They were cold all day long for months. The winter that year (1986) was so cold it snowed, lightly and briefly but still snowed. When the spring and summer came there was a relief in the difference alone between the seasons. There was a quirk to Melbourne and because of it I never felt alone. Still don't. So without making a sound or opening my mouth I would shout that to the blue summer sky. This was my town.

Throw Your Arms Around Me was never a hit. They'd tried it once as a single and then as a live track and again as a single as part of the Human Frailty album. See also the Angels' Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again? Was it the long titles? Both were pop songs in the classic 60s vein and both offered supremely satisfying rewards to the ear. Maybe it's that they came on like teens but proved far more grown up, a disturbing tension. Both were also tried a few times as though their time hadn't come with the first iteration. Everyone knows Throw Your Arms, though. Everyone can sing the chorus and a crowd will roar at the sound of any band playing it. They just didn't want to buy it on a piece of plastic. Does that make it more of a folk song? Maybe. You probably know at least a bit of Waltzing Matilda and this song but Sunglasses at Night?


I don't know if Hunnas turned into Ozrock but that seemed to be the accusation at the time. For those reading from other climes, Ozrock is a derogatory term for a host of record-company-directed charting acts from the 80s like Mondo Rock, Cold Chisel or INXS. Whatever their origins as creative forces, once these bands were Ozrocked they produced the same music with different titles until career desiccation. Human Frailty is a fine album and the kind that the band of World of Stone would make in time, given the everpresent need of musicians to develop. Is it the best direction? Well, I can listen to it happily but not with the same excitement as I hear Talking to a Stranger or Towtruck. They sound like a rock band not an organic force. The guitars and vocals are reinforced with double tracking and you can slot the songs into Rage without incident. This continued until the band's dissolution in the 90s. Mark Seymour's voice remains strong and he still writes songs and, while I have my Run Run Runs with their wild landscapes and primordial cries I know I can never pass up a listen to this one song that nailed what it feels like to be in love and grown up. Perhaps I just yearned for both and never lost the connection.

Love Songs #8: Midst of Life: LOVE WILL TEAR US APART - JOY DIVISION

"There is a screaming across the sky." Thus begins Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. As my friend read the rest of the page it felt like I imagine hypnosis to feel, a waking buzzing numbness in which all sensations are coloured by an opening statement or command. When I later tried the novel for myself I gave up through lack of interest. I'd ploughed through Ulysses and devoured whole chunks of Finnegans Wake but this reputedly conquerable tome left me cold except for that first experience. I still love that first page as an opener; the newness and boldness of it still thrill me.

That's how I feel about Love Will Tear Us Apart. The opening crash of the acoustic twelve string playing the sustain chord over the chugging electric, the ice cold snare drums knocking and insisting until suddenly the song is in flight with its shadow shrinking to nothing on the terrain below. The riff, the riff of the decade to follow, soars with us, playing a modal melody both bold and vulnerable on the synth strings. It's screaming like an airliner but it's crushingly sad.

When routine bites hard...

Ian Curtis' mournful croon enters, he's enunciating but he's tired, exhausted. Ambitions low, resentment high and emotions stiffened and dessicated.

Why is the bedroom so cold?

One follows the other.

You cry out it your sleep...

This is the line that gets me. She cries out in her sleep and all his failings are exposed. You can feel how cold the bedroom is and how hard the routine has bitten in those few syllables.

And love, love will tear us apart again...

The contrary motion of this delicate arrangement is extraordinary because what should sound skeletal and hollow is actually quite gorgeous. No tonal instruments (including voice) double each other until the chorus where the fullness of it is enough, needing no change in volume or extra instrumentation. The deceptively simple drumming can sound robotic but Steve Morris is putting a lot of little inconsistencies in there. Peter Hook's bass line is the riff during the verse while the synth courses through a slower figure. And Curtis sings a variation of the riff for the verse and note for note in the chorus. The whole thing sounds like a machine keeping itself working but the machine's sole purpose is to sing a lament. Even in the 1980 of Blitz, Gary Numan, The Cure and Public Image in the charts this one stood out, sounding like it came out of an industrial lab in Schweinfurt.

Anyone who gets into Joy Division to even a slight degree will come across the tidbit that Curtis was given a copy of a Frank Sinatra greatest hits album, not to listen to the music but the sound of ol' blue eyes' voice. And he did and the great DC3 drone came out of the speakers and into Ian's ears. It was like a fog horn at first but then, as with any constant signal, he heard the nuance, the brief lift and fall of the tone of the engine here and there and he understood. The result is that he sounds both fearful and vulnerable but also confident and in control, eerily conflicted. The beauty of the refrain, sung four times at the end and it never seems enough, hurting because it's soothing.

And then with the same kind of insistence as at the beginning and in the song's sole break one chord is repeated like all the biting routine. But then the gear shifts completely and we swing into an unambiguous major figure. It's borrowed from And Then he Kissed Me, a charming but cheesy girl group teen anthem from generations gone. It's back. Love. It's back. That's the point of the spookiest part of the chorus: the word "again". This entire situation repeats. After all the screaming and the bruises and the scarifying admissions have settled and healed and the shock of the slap has passed, repeat. Plug it in, turn it on and run it all over again. Here we are in the midst of life.

I knew nothing of the band when this song came out but it only took one airing on Countdown (I wish I could say 4ZZZ) for me to buy a copy. The picture sleeve looked like a gravestone which went with the detail, served up like garnish whenever the song was mentioned, that not long after this the second album, on the eve of the big breakthtough US tour, Ian Curtis hanged himself. I didn't get either album for a few years as I didn't like buying into the suicide worship nonsense and thought the band otherwise sounded too serious (guffaw!). Later I got right into everything I could hear or find out about them. But at the time I didn't need their stormcloud rock.

My brother's marriage was a disaster. I hadn't been there for the honeymoon or its gasping pursuit but when I got to it (sharing house with it in 1980, the year of the song's release) and witnessed the dark violence of it for over two years. My parents could fight and get quite disturbingly callous with each other but this verged on assault and from both parties. She controlled by finding guilt-holds in everyone she encountered. He used and ruined almost everything he touched as though it had were an unwanted gift. I would wake to their screams and stay out until exhaustion drove me home. There were lighter moments but I struggle to recall one that wasn't threatened with collapse by either of these two forces of hatred in a moment of feeling a little unloved.

Still, while all this returns now and then when I hear the song and I need to close my eyes or stop it playing I can yet let the newness and boldness of the opening takeoff lift me into knowing skies and soar through them. There is a screaming across them but I just stop listening and glide.

Love Songs #7: Hit : YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY - THE OHIO EXPRESS

Bubblegum was a strange thing. The cynicism of it was standard enough: after a decade of simplistic pop being bought by the shipping container load by tweens the suits knew that you could throw the whole band loyalty out the window as long as you supplied enough of sugar-beat goodness. No one over twelve was allowed in there. You had to dance like a tantrum and sing along like in music class. But the thing was that it didn't just make good business sense, it worked emotionally.

When I say bubblegum, I don't just mean pop music or even sugary pop music as such. I mean the lab-designed units sprayed over the nations of the world from herculean crop dusters of inhalable media. As in a dystopic sci-fi movie from the time (late sixties) the spooring only affected the younger population and fired them on to great feats of .... well, much the same as before except they bought a lot of records that previous band/brand loyalty might have impeded.

It was a sub industry that preferred the one hit wonder, such constant newness did it promise. Yesterday's 1910 Fruitgum Company was today's Ohio Express. While some of these bands actually existed none of them really had to as it was the same crew of session players who did the recordings, anyway. Except for the voice. They needed the voice. So when Johnny Varongo (real name: Edward Harris (not his real name)) was spirited away from his photogenic garage band it was only for a few afternoons while he got the vocal right.

If there were Johns Pauls Georges and Ringos they were limited to the confines of the great tween zine tide in which the band photos might well have been shopped versions of a single Ur photo and only those whacky names could distinguish them from each other. But even if that didn't work there really wasn't much of a barrier between what came out of the candy coloured pvc portable record players and the tv where shows like The Archies, The Monkees and The Banana Splits, Whacky Races, Cool McCool, Scooby Doo etc etc blended into one red food dye #134 fuelled happiness circuit. Bubblegum was a way of plugging in and consuming from an early age and, as such, was as much a gateway drug as the cartoons to the consumerist conformity that was and remains rock music. A few years later things like rum and coke made the initially vile tasting alcohol attractive.

That said, it still worked. So what if it introduced a generation to the next mass consumerism, that is still the chief means of expressing social mobility on the planet until the great anti-con revolution that will never happen. But underneath the big smothering blanket of buy there remained a kind of sincerity. Even cartoon characters have to win you in some way. It might be pure pragmatism but none of these would have sold a unit without remembering the way children think and feel, especially when they're about to shunted into adolescence.

For starters here we have the initial crunch of palm muted guitars: chunkchunkchunkchunk. This gets a bigger boost on more guitars and a piano sforzando which intensifies the crunch. And then we break on through to the syrup centre with a raspberry flavoured vocal: "Yummy yummy yummy I've got love in my tummy and I feel like a lovin' you..." Goes straight to the nerve centre when all those crushes and wobbly feelings take on the ineluctable might of Sucrose Prime which bursts in and floods through to every cell, equalising inside with outside. And, kinda like sugar, kinda like spices, it just keeps reinforcing with falsetto harmonies are not the micro chorales of The Beach Boys but better, cleaner, simpler, more direct an injection. And then, not even a token solo we leap a full tone for the last verse, elevating something that was already pretty high: yummy yummy yummy. And end on the refrain that doesn't have words because they're just not needed - ba ba bababa ba ba bababa ba ba - as the sweet rasp cuts through like a new flavour. Hey, that's only two and a half minutes, exactly as long as it takes to get through one raspberry splozodrop! Solution? Have another one. Now!

If you're eleven years old and you feel love you spend half the time enjoying the hit and half denying that you feel anything. When I was eleven it was Diane. When I was twelve it was Veronica. The very thought of these girls ran through me like a charge. I rode to school on a bike drawn to them like a tram cable. And when I was there across the desk from them I acted like a five year old, spitting out petulant disdain and wisecracks. Once I saw Mark Robinson talk smoothly to Veronica and her positive and easy response brought me to the brink of morbidity with jealousy. Coulda done with a hit like this but it was years past the era. Sherbert or Skyhooks? Do me a favour.

But those chugging guitars and spun sugar vocals would have been the treat. Something else that seldom gets admitted is how much bubblegum informed punk. Everyone's ready to press the buzzer and yell Stooges or New York Dolls but few remember or admit that the backings of these cartoony lozenges took the best bits of contemporary hard rock to stabilise the sweetness and more directly informed The Ramones or Stiff Little Fingers. It wasn't just gooey gooey chewy chewy but plenty of crunch as well. If you fell from the preteen crush you might have loved the eviscerating intensity of Merry Clayton's solo vocal in Gimme Shelter but you had to listen to about four minutes of build up. Bubblegum started at the build up and only needed to get a little higher and they didn't sing about nasty stuff like "raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaape and murder" but stuff you understood.

Understanding is the key notion here. Just as confectioners understand that we want our sugar administered in the right kind of package by proportion of sweet to sour, of squirty syrup to hard shell crunch and if the balance is wrong they go out of business. They know that their client is the human nervous system and once comprehended, is a client forever. This song like the best of bubblegum temporarily stabilises the wobbling heart of the tween with the force of a hospital dose. When that's over repeat:

chunkchunkchunkchunkCRUNCHchunkchunkchunkchunkCRUNCHchunkchunkCRUNCHchunkchunkCRUNCHCRUNCHCRUNCHCRUNCHCRUNCH: yummyyummyummyI'vegotloveinmytummy

Try Buy!

AGAIN!

Love Songs #6: Desolation: WEEPING - THROBBING GRISTLE

Cosey left Gen for Chris. Gen took every pill he could find and woke up in Casualty. All of them played on this.

A hammered dulcimer plonks hesitantly until it finds the melodic figure and then repeats it with mutations until the end. Under this a squeaky atonal violin drones inconsistently. Gen's vocal comes into a room that sounds like its bare stipped boards lit by a single incandescent bulb. The voice hangs in the yellow light, hovering above as it describes the body on the floor, draining. "You didn't see me on the floor weeping..."

Once past the intentional irritants of the arrangement we know we've all been here. This is the room where rejection presents as a physical pain. The chest tightens, the throat constricts and the self negation spreads into the system. The floor feels like home but even that is temporary as the universe itself, element by element falling away, soon declares its hostility and activates its anitbodies against you. You do not belong here.

A surprisingly little time later the memory of it is only painful to recall aloud because it's embarrassing. Time enough after that we know what we felt was real for those hours and days, all that self-punishing shock. We don't learn that much from it (we'll get there more than one more time each) but we'll remember it.

Throbbing Gristle began as an anarchoperformanceart collective blasting their installations with musique concrete that really sounded like it was made of concrete. The innocuous buildings on their label art were from photos of the death camp gas chambers. Noise and disturbance. Confrontation. So why this visit to the same place that Frankie Valli and Miley Cyrus went? Couldn't have been the money.

Actually, it's just more of that noise and confrontation. If they are going to go on about Zyklon B Zombies then they are almost duty bound to turn the cameras on themselves. When I say duty I really do mean something like military compulsion. The air when politics meets art on a speed date gets severely rigid very rapidly. The sense of mission, suddenly engorged, is compulsive and unstoppable. But here beneath the artless clomping and mosquito drones is something that really does sound like tenderness. What mission now? Well, there are a few things happening at once.

First, the wracking of self-annihilation is clear and supported by every sound we hear. The report back from a moment of desolate loneliness is form-perfect; not a semi-colon out of place, foolscap pages typed and carbon-ed and presented in a spotless manila folder: Effects of "Romantic" Rejection Upon Collective Staff and Recommendations.

Then there's the confrontation of the fans or at least any who expect the stone face of the agit-prop-ers to remain unshattered. There is no escaping the plain vulnerability of it. Even We! You won't hear anything like it from fellow Mr Nasty of the North Mark E. Smith from the same era. And it isn't a matter of this-is-as-close-to-tender-as-they-got, it's tender. Eerie and frozen, yes, but tender. There is no accident that the great disturbers themselves offered this. In context, it could not fail to unsettle the hardest of fans and wipe the sneer off the face of the tartest detractor.

Finally the stillness. It's knocked around by words or sounds always returns to inertia. Each increasingly pathetic wish for his rejector to witness him cries out as though the futility of it might be changed by this, as though the sight of his tears might draw some of her own, alter her body chemistry at the molecular level and supply her cells with saturated love again. Not only can this never happen but it shouldn't. He's not thinking that, though, the withdrawal is too still strong and he (and we with him) doesn't see that the closest he could get would be staged and lifeless. For now, he's on repeat, looping the same distress signal until the battery drains. They'll sweep what's left of him out when the neighbours complain about the stench and Cosey will hear of it and hurl herself off an obsidian cliff into the crashing breakers below.

Except that he'll just wake up and get on with it like we all do. Now, that's confrontation. And, fuck, does it haunt us.

Love Songs #5: Bashin' the Fashion: WRECKING BALL - MILEY CYRUS

The pop song trope for the last decade and a bit has been a verse melody built on sizeable interval leaps. So you go A up to E down to G# up to E down to F# up to F# etc. This is nothing new. Listen to a lot of fifties doo wop and teen rock and hear how little variation there is in the tension around the C - A minor - F (or D minor) - G progression. We hear a lot of it now and think everyone's writing the same song but it's just the same process and it's as old as formalised western music itself. If there's an ageist slant on this it's most likely to centre on this, as though pop songs in the good ol' days were Bach fugues and now we're down to endless loops of Three Blind Mice. The other objection might be that no one seems to have moved on from mindless pop o' yore: that the kids today aren't as bad as disappointing. Both views are of course utopian bullshit and should be met as such.

Why begin with such apology? Because all the mud slung at Miley Cyrus for her racy (by the average classroom standard) dance routines that make the good folk go "whoa!" and frighten the horses. Yeah, like David Bowie never happened. These are the same people who were fired up at the thrill of seeing punk ridiculed on TV in the late seventies, the early X-ers who still believe that they fought on barricades until the Man relented and the world was safe from vacuous culture. I'm from that generation and know, when cutting through the nostalgia, that that war was a failure, that its subculture was just absorbed in the maw of Mammon and all the bitter politics were spat out like a snake spits out an eggshell. Today, it's nothing for a Good Charlotte to look all tatts and piercings but sound like Toto (which they do) and kind of thought of as punk. It's nice to have the memories but the cause is the stuff of archaeology now.

The reason that there will always be plain and simple money spinning pop is the same one as that which explains why rock guitarists still think that an overdrive pedal makes them blackhatted badguys: formula, persistent regurgitated regulated formula. Which brings us back to Do.

Wrecking Ball begins with this leaping chirp of a melody the same as countless other pop songs. There's a second section for relief in the relative tonality and then there's the great BIG chorus in which the title is repeated a couple of times in the formulaic 4th to major 3rd. A middle eight establishes some thinking space where the least hyperbolic thoughts in the lyric are aired and then back into the chorus and then end.

But here's my real problem with Wrecking Ball: it's good. It's really good. From the leapy first lines and the fiddly little autotune flourishes (that have been de rigeur since Cher made us wonder what we heard back in the terrible summer of '98) to the massive explosion of the chorus that features a kick that really does have the aural feel of a wrecking ball and Miley's tone perfect anguished teen operatics, this is massive pop. It not only should be celebrated but already has been by every kid who's mimed it into the shampoo bottle in front of the bathroom mirror.

Pop doesn't need brains; it only requires processed emotion. The worst of it saturates and stays in its era along with all the couture and hairdos that need a generation's ridicule to re-emerge from dormancy. Wrecking Ball will remain firm because through all its slick production and observance of praxis it sounds like she means what she's singing. Only just in her twenties when it was handed to her by a committee of Ro-Men she obviously felt the heart-in-mouth pain of the powerlessness of a dissolving teenage romance from recent memory. I'm guessing at that and I'm happy to assume it was her rather than the direction of a producer because the voice wails about "breaking your walls" and then sings "but you wrecked me" in an aching broken glottal stutter that ends the chorus in choking tears: "you wre-eh-eh-ecked me!".

Everyone has felt like this. Everyone who went to those first high school parties the parents cut the cord and let the kids drink. There never was one that didn't end with a demolished heart screaming pain through a scrum of friends in the bathroom, the hallway of under the streetlamp outside. Amid the chundering first drinkers and grunting chat-ups these tiny screaming arias were sung. Whether these were wails or swallowed honking sobs there was always a tidal cascade of human pain before its target had the armour to fend it. That's what the chorus sounds like. Tellingly, there is no fade (they are a tad old school, anyway); after the final wash of anguish the great sound subsides, leaving only a gentle electronic sigh that loops. That fades but it does in real life.

The director's cut of the video is telling. The official or first release clip is quite routine alternating between Cyrus miming directly to camera in white underwear and images of walls bursting from a wrecking ball (sometimes with the singer riding it and some of those naked) and Cyrus playing with a sledge hammer like it's a giant hard on. But high profile and controversial photographer Terry Richardson recut it to fix tightly on Cyrus' head so that it almost fills the screen.

The infinite white background could be a cosmetics shoot or a human sized steriliser. Cyrus' face is almost blue from it, the eyes accentuating it and the dark magenta of the lips proving it by their breach. Tears bead from her eyes. There is even a slight nasal trail. The single shot allows her no escape from us.

We see her flub some lip synch and we remember that she hasn't just been doing videos for years but practically grew up in front of the camera. The transition of the second verse to the chorus is even odder as she stops altogether. This is meant to enhance the impression that we are watching a single continuous take (they coulda used a dissolve and gotta way with it) and even though it only happens so that Miley can emote the big chorus it sill looks like she's overcome. It's these moments, and there are others, that give the impression that this is the real image, the one beneath the tongue-poking, crotch-rubbing panto of the public image, the tear breaking through the clown makeup. It's just more public image but, boy, do we suck it up.

After the single credit, white chalk-board cursive on a black field, we get a micro showreel with Richardson and Cyrus, goofing around and, yep, here comes that tongue as she makes a face. Cut!

But the resonance hums on. The pity still whimpers through the blitzkrieg. We've felt that for real. We remember it.

Love Songs #2: Disconnect: UNSENT LETTER - MACHINE GUN FELLATIO

With a name that made you smirk or wince when you spoke it, this electro-burlesque act from the noughties plastered the laddish triple J waves with guaranteed airplay numbers about rootin', tokin, snortin' and partayin'. So how come this? How come, from under the tide of motherfuckers on motorcycles and pussy towns this eerie tale of ghosted love emerged and took it place among the filth and japes?

Well, the answer's easy: Matt Ford can write a good song and forced this one into the ready made context of the band rather than sell it through a solo identity with the extra admin and PR bullshit that that would entail. Apart from everything else it stopped everyone who was a fan or all the naughtiness in their tracks when they heard it and so profoundly moved them that they almost forgot about 99% of the band's material.

In backgrounding this post I went through some online resources and found out that Ford co-wrote the big spooky epic pop song No Aphrodisiac for the Whitlams. I had no idea that was so but if he wrote this one the surprise of it dwindles rapidly.

Unsent Letter is a song of a man seeking contact after disconnection. He's broken up with a woman and now when he tries to talk to her he can't get past the weather. She doesn't hang up but there's nothing left there on the line. So he imagines himself driving around with a pair of girls. Nothing else matters or doesn't, though. He gives things up, starts others with no effect. At every turn, his thoughts and daydreams or ambitions return to her silence and his frustration at having created that. Even when he admits the part he played there is no resolution; it's just too engaging going over it again and again.

It's important that he suggests that he was the one who ended it. Without that this might just be another wallow. Here he knows he has made a mistake and because she can never be present at his best, most eloquent and pithy after-the-fact pleas all he can do is polish them further and move on ... but it's just too engaging going over it again.

The song doesn't start so much as lift in a slight breeze. Quiet wukkawukka guitar chords are raised by a synthetic tom tom without which they would just return to the dust. Ford's quiet voice begins with the line about trying to talk. A clanking like a train at a crossing appears briefly and a deep synth note swells like a cue in a horror movie. This is taken by an electric bass and a Rhodes piano on its slowest tremolo setting, lending a seasick wobble, and a light drum kit plays a skeletal shuffle for the chorus about driving around.

Then we get back to the inertia of the opening but bolstered by the bass and the drums. The guitar does not now or at any other time in the song, break out of its tiny insistence. The second chorus adds an organ which swells and then fades under the first line of the next verse. Then inertia again as the bass coaxes the guitar to keep aloft. Some whispered backwards percussion and another chorus with the organ returning but with an funereal solemnity. It takes the solo after the last chorus which falls back to inerita before fading out on the mournful figure. Silence.

While some double tracking appears to alter the vocal texture this is a solo vocal, one man against himself and the frayed mess around him, singing with minimal to no reverb, as his words, though they briefly rise to inspiration, keep falling to the floor. And nothing resolves. The song he wrote for her (this one) has only just been finished and joins the other unsent letters addressed to her care of someone somewhere better. The girls in the car with him are either ghosts of her or revenge bimbos but either way they are made of neurones and synapses, not flesh and blood.

The insistent regret that drives this song with its minor key harping reminiscent of folk music or timeless blues that circles around and could keep doing so well after lights out. It's gently paced but it's intense as this sadness is not self-pity but self-torture.

We have all gone through breakups and felt variously well-rid of people or cruelly used by them but there is always that one we never quite shake, the one we threw away. This is the one who appears in the shadows at every new time to remind us of what we had and will never have again and that WE were the ones who made sure of that. And, as we formulate again a replay of the last argument where we win, we remember that this is true, that  our one shot at the great dream of a lifelong love was something we chose to annihilate.

We might have felt threatened by the intimacy or desolate that it didn't feel like it was enough. Whatever it was we are now greatly empowered by the experience and will just keep learning ... except it was us, we did that, we crushed someone because we weakened. The real one probably recovered and has long moved on to "something better" and can't take any contact with us past the weather. But, and this is where it really gets eerie, they are not the one we miss or the one we "talk" to when we can't do anything else. We talk to the ghost.

The video of this song from the time at first made me wince. It came at the end of a decade of serial killer chic at the movies and on tv. That genre's characteristic look and feel seemed force fed into the imagery, private operating rooms and confused looking women being taken by a man (played by the vocalist) while the palette desaturates and the angles and editing do the herky jerky. But the clip goes into far more interesting territory as the woman he's dressing up like a victim plays the comatose real one he's injured (take your pick of car accident, domestic violence or maybe just leave it at metaphor), eventually sitting beside her inert body on the hospital bed as the entire room begins to shake and shudder as though it's moving along a road.

Love Songs #1 Ache: ONLY LONELY - DIVINYLS

Divinyls poured out of the funnel of their record company as a kind of pre-mix new wave act but just as no one identified as punk then no one smeared themselves with its softer epithet. The term was a joke, a dad-in-a-cardigan stab at hipness, and no one under thirty would say it without a smirk or a sarcastic twang. Divinyls, of course, weren't so much a new wave band as a band. They dressed theatrically in their videos and their songs clicked into AM radio playlists like Lego pieces.

For me, their overproduced rock sound and reliance on sweet guitar hooks turned me off. And then there was the singer. Chrissy Amphlett's turn as the female answer to Angus Young was astute and proved durable. Miming on Countdown or flailing on stage, she tore it up as the eternal schoolgirl, the first one to blow perfect smokerings at the bike shed and make much more of it than shaping of exhaled fumes. Publicly, the brat child of pop royalty and senior administration, Amphlett played 19th Nervous Breakdown from the point of view of its target, living and playing unto peril and dependency, a thick moppy fringe hiding a pair of eyes you knew could turn you to stone if she showed them.

But there was also the side she would only allow us to glimpse and while it could be sentimental, it wasn't warm and fuzzy. That was the briefly sounding harmonic that had me thinking twice about her while the rest of me dismissed her band and their output as costumed-up Oz Rock. My favourite song of theirs is Good Die Young and it would be here except that the loss that it tells of and wails with is not about love.

Chrissy Amphlett's voice was like no other. It morphed from girlish naiveté to the rasp of a crazy old lady in the same line. The transition was effortless as though her throat was wired to a distortion pedal. And while a lot of pop music production still removes the breaths Amphlett's are deliberately left in adding a constant urgency, some inhalations sounded more like wheezes. Her vowels were defiantly Australian and when scraping into the rasping madwoman tone created a startling disconnect between her fresh beauty and some old boiler screaming at the kids riding bikes on the footpaths. It was hard to tell how contrived this was: on the one hand there was the uniform which could have been a dirty old manager's idea of the sex sell or a wearable irony before it was cool; on the other hand Amphlett seemed so earnest, her dancing more like the shakes and flails of hyperactivity than raunch. If it was contrived that was only polish after the fact. It seemed a product of a condition, something she was, if not natural then inevitable.

Only Lonely, recorded for the film of Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, shattered my dismissal of the band who were sold as new wave but sounded like the old 70s. Shattered because for all its guitar track trowelling it did something extremely effective. On the one hand the bright wall o' guitars chimes like churchbells on speed, Amphlett's chanting verses, which would be choruses in a lesser song, use a chirpy almost calypso melody to tell us how lonely she is. She likes morning but can only feel lonely when the sun goes down. Even in the arms of a lover she feels lonely and apologises for it helplessly.

This is the crush of every day and it rings with the urgency of youth and rasps with the desperation of experience, sometimes in the same line, Amplett's turning of a phrase transferred her effortlessly between the schoolgirl and the cranky old hen with the cats. For every bird call springing up to the third there's a sob down a semitone, welling in the minor until the lush descent of the guitars come down to pick it up again. The chorus bashes in with cooing falsettos and Amphlett's torn voice pleading to get involved.

Chrissie Amphlett was a beautiful woman. She became a rock diva in the space of a very few hit singles. But look at the clip I've linked above and count how many times you see her face in light. Go and find the video for the first hit song, Boys in Town. Even back then there's a conscious effort to play down the sexiness of her school uniform. But here she's backlit, her face a dark shape in the frame of her mop of hair. It's an impression, almost negative space. This is not the video done on film which has much more light and air, more 80s, if you will. This one is less the 80s of hot pink hair and yellow jeans than the 80s that came after the sweaty old 70s when for a few years at least the brashest of pop music shied from sex like the schoolgirl who didn't smoke from the disco medallioned monster eyeing her off from across the room. In the record company video she's a singer in a rock band; the Countdown (!) clip she's a scream in the darkness.

I think it's unwise to align songwriter or singer too closely to their life when a song lyric is most likely a distillation of experience rather than a direct report of it. Then again, we happily attribute a Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain with near divine inspiration from personal trauma why not Amphlett who was pretty open about her own. And why sniff at her and McEntee's wish to keep all of that wrapped up in contemporary pop? It works, it still works. Let that stand.

This is the girl who try as she might can never connect with those she does gets close enough to hold, whose desperate eyes scare her dates who tell her to wait. That middle eight used to annoy me and seemed to be an uncorrected line written by the male of the songwriting partnership. Now, the more I hear it the truer it rings for this character Amphlett has assumed. And here she is, singing from the void that was once a girl, her face a blur, her hopeful springing melody cracking with failure.

This is essentially the same message as the Smiths' How Soon is Now and while there is much to love about that song there is really none of the scream through the bars of Only Lonely whose gleaming fresh guitar rock cannot conceal the real deal. I prefer it the way I prefer Good Die Young to The Smiths' Suffer Little Children (a bigger stretch, admittedly, but while we're down there...): the sombreness of Morrissey's lament for the victims of murder doesn't go as far as Amphlett's broken anger and pain for the missing person for me. The tight sustains of the chords and insistence of the chorus which seems to fall from the verses breaks into my chest cavity every time I hear it. Same goes for Only Lonely. To my knowledge, while the band and their central creative partnership delivered nothing as powerful as these again this pair of songs shall stand for the rest of my imaginable life as the essence of pop music's power at its best and that is the glimpse of what always seems to lie behind the joys of love, the ache that burns to pain ... and can get you singing along like a kid on a school excursion bus.