Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: music

  • the pickling palace

    The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and then the Friday afternoon traffic will surge up the hill again to carry them away. He says something and she says, “You are fucking kidding me.” “No,” he says, something something. “You’re just making that up!” Her incredulity is a dare. Climb this tree for me and bring that fruit. He says, “No, I’m deadset serious. Anything you like.” One of the other blokes says something and then the girl begins to sing, or chant, like she was at a football game: “Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus.” The positive guy sings something over the top of her, harmonizing. He’s making it up. He’s fucking-kidding her. Their verandah falls apart in a seething heap of laughs just as a truck roars down the road. When the noise clears he is saying, aggrieved, “…been doing it all my life.” I know that feeling, I have too. I have just got home from a delicate day of negotiations in my unconscious and as we swept over the bridge with its hanging-lantern streetlights and banners I felt a song unbrew in me. I sang it out the window in handfuls of confetti and as we pulled away from under the biggest fig tree, that the road goes around (the greatest kind of road), I said, to my long-legged companion who was driving, “Did you see that girl on the corner, the beautiful girl, with the guy who’s just so in love with her?” “Yes,” he said, his voice warm as if fond of them. “How she was just standing there in her little purple dress,” I said, “holding the orange flowers he brought her. He’s looking at her so carefully, he’s in love with her every little gesture. She’s not even noticing, telling him something, he’s in love with the way that she says it.” “So is she in love?” he wanted to know. I said, “Could be. But she’s not thinking about it, she is remembering something that happened and telling him. So it was hard to tell.”

    We drove round a sweeping corner prickly with pedestrians. We had watched a giant ibis as it took off from a street sign and flew the length of Charlotte Street, its white wings insignia. The prosperous tropical colonialism and sandstone and big bunches of trees made me feel at home. I wound my seat back and propped my foot out the side window. I said, sentimentally, “Both of them standing there with their bicycles.”

  • supermantra

    We were on the markets when a tiny, white-haired lady came up to my partner and offered him a brochure. “Save Victoria Park!” she said. He is two metres tall. He looked down at her with his arms full of leafy vegetables and said, very gently, in a deep voice, “I will.” “Oh, thank you!” As I watched, her whole body relaxed. She believed him. She laid her hand trustingly on his upper arm. From the juice stall behind us Bob Marley was still singing, One love… One heart, a song he started singing forty-odd years ago and he has not given it up yet. As we drove home we both had that song caught in our heads. I said, “That lady! She looked up at you so sweetly. ‘Oh! It’s Superman!’” He laughed, singing, filling in the lyrics he didn’t know with only a slight hesitation: “One love, one soul…” “One love, one groove…” All the vegetables nodded on the back seat whenever we went over a bump, frondy and inviting and waiting to be sliced for German soup.

  • my god, I’m so drunk

    My god, I’m so drunk. What happened is: it’s all Diamond Dave’s fault. What I mean to say is: we went out to see him play. We were walking and on the way several bauhinia trees stretched themselves across the cyclone-wire fence of a local public playground, I pulled them down towards the ground and took half a dozen flowers, thinking: I have never seen Dave play, I can throw these to him on the stage. In the pub.

    The pub it turns out is, like, the happiest bar I have been in for several years. There were six people in there when we came in, plus a barmaid whose long slender legs had tattooed across the hem of her leather skirt, “forever young.” “If only she knew,” I said to my Berlin companion, whose height people in public places remark on. But fuck them. Dave’s number one fan came reeling up to us and gasped and let his hand fall open like a slow present. “You!” he said, “are like the new Jerry Hall. Oh. My. God.” I was laughing. “When I die and I finally get reincarnated… I wanna come back AS YOU.”

    My darling bought us a beer. It was a German beer whose name the scribbled bar girl could not recognise when he pronounced it the German way. “Oh,” she said, “Doppeldingsbum.” Our friend Diamond Dave, or so he claims (“Is that really my name?”) was playing covers as though his life hung from them. I felt ashamed, abashed, totally awakened at the sound, I had never heard him play in all those years we had been friends and yelled into my companion’s sweet ear, “He’s just a natural born rock star!” He was. He is. The bar filled with revellers. Some of them were 21 and some were 62. The bald guy making eyes from across the bar began to dance as Dave poured himself into “Love is the Drug,” an exquisite cover, absolutely defined again by his rolling bass.

    Probably my favourite song for the night was the Sunnyboys, “Alone With You.” Lord, was I dancing. That just never gets old. And then Dave struck up something of Elvis’s, can’t remember what it was, oh! “Hound Dog”! and the bald guy across the bar left off leaning and started slowly grooving. Like he was wearing a hole through the floor. I strode round to join up with him, sashaying good, and we both sang it out as people do who love music and are perhaps drinking, who knows, it’s the Valley. A whole pile of people poured in. There were two gigs upstairs and one in the back room. “It’s a labyrinth,” said my friend when he came offstage. I left my beer standing there and the man I’d been dancing with bowed with his hands, like Thai masseurs do, “Thank you, lady,” he said, “thank you, love.” Later on he turned up at my elbow saying, “Can you introduce me,” and then grinned into both our faces, saying, “You are suited, you look right together.” He told my boyfriend, “She’s a great girl. I mean! She’s super great!” But I let my beer stand and went out to explore the back. It was noisier. Death punk vibe. There was the girl with cherry bomb hair and long black leather jacket. There was – hey! Dusty Anastasiou waved cheerily, next on the bill, I promised I would go see them play but then my boyfriend threw an accidental beer over me, I forgot. Anyway we slunk home cold and reeking of alcohol. “I can’t believe you threw that over me, I am so cold, I’m so wet.” But we had climbed up the stairs and found the skinhead gig right up under the roof, the boys clustered at one end the girls coiled at the other, we looked out the clotted windows on the Valley, Friday night concupiscence, all the sleek taxi cabs stopping and starting at the curb, the people stumbling in and out of places, the girl who looked like Ashley Judd and the post-traumatic-stress-disordered Scottish Falklands veteran who told us all his archaic and sad, tired, unpleasant history and by his side the little punk boy whose girlfriend, fiery-dyed and fearlessly tattooed up like a Maori warrior queen, sang along every word with some Nirvana song I’d never heard of, such is music, the shared ecstasy and the narrow individual dream that takes up all the moors and can encompass every wonder, every effort, every thing. I came home stripping off my beer clothes and barely knowing anything, deep in the serenity, close friend to a rock star and light as lager foam in my soul, on my feet, all down the front of me, wherever you’d want to be: the music has always been there first and is what guides us, canary singing in the coal mine, “You’ll be safe here, you’ll be sweet.” Good night, canary dear. I love you.

  • a singer I’d never heard of

    Our nearest cafe has made such a bold and tender innovation. Simple, really. How shall I describe it? Ok, imagine it’s Monday morning. It’s earlier than you’d like. For reasons unusual you have had to stagger out of bed and you feel grumpy. There’s no milk, argh. You grab your mug and stumble almost literally down the hill. Over your head trees are waving to each other across the asphalt, they would join hands if they could. The crows cark, the traffic spurls, the world is bright and full of love and if I could just get my eyes to open properly I’d see it all. At the bottom of a steep slope there’s a little coffee shop. If you had a billycart you’d be there within seconds. The usual clot of people in suits standing not looking at each other parts on a sweet and familiar sound: a strummed guitar. Monday morning gig! First thing, in the grumpy hour. It’s genius.

    A guy sits curved over a mic whose stand, set at an enquiring angle, seems to be interviewing him. Guitar is plugged into a tiny amp, one of those kerbside amps you carry under one arm. You reach the head of the queue and buy coffee. He is singing. He sings with a tentative grace. The customers, embarrassed, so strenuously ignore him it almost must break his heart. The songs are familiar, radio fodder, he is doing them an injustice. You love him for that. With his voice he breaks open the idea that all songs come fully formed from a studio, there is no struggle, only gloss; that everyone’s life is far better than yours.

    You have had to kind of climb out of your sleep and sleep’s warm privacy to emerge in public city life, to use your vocal chords. Your hair is all over your face and you’re wearing the tshirt you slept in. You lean over and say, You have got the sweetest voice, it’s such a lovely surprise of a Monday morning. Oh! he says: thanks. He takes hold of his guitar differently. Over the back of his machine the barista asks, Did you just request the Beastie Boys? I told him he has the sweetest voice, you say: same thing.

    You are slouched against the besser block wall in the sun. Your hips swing and one clog is knocking on the other, you emit an appreciative murmur when the song is done. This emboldens a man in his suit standing nearby to say, That was better than the original! The singer laughs, thanks him. All of a sudden the music is not invisible and we don’t have to pretend it hasn’t happened. A girl in knee-length boots comes striding in and sits at a spindly table opposite. A guy in a striped tie looks up and smiles. At the end of the next song your coffee is ready, in its own curling-handled brown mug. You can’t leave because you’ve asked the guitarist, Do you write stuff, as well? And very diffidently he has offered: I could pull one of those out… if you like. And he pulls out like a long swathe of coloured scarves knotted one end to the other a lilting song about a little bird; sitting on my shoulder; telling me you’re not the man you use to be. It is a song about self-belief: that thing we’re all in need of. The things this little bird says to him seem cruel and they remind you of the kinds of things your own little bird sometimes whispers, the reasons why you are not also sitting out in the sun in a coffee shop, playing. You think about your dusty guitar and how he said, I haven’t played my own songs for a long time. You notice how he is curled in on himself but from the outside there is nothing not to like: his gentle presence, his tortured and reedy voice, plaintive and frayed but strong inside, like a rope. When the song is done it is a gift that he has given you. You want to give it back, to show it to him. You say, That was really lovely. Have more confidence in your own stuff. Thanks! he says, already sitting up straighter. You look at him and keep seeing yourself. I was so happy when I came down the hill just now! you say: Monday morning gig! it’s brilliant! You’ve made a big difference to my day.

    You pick up your mug off the railing. He ducks his head, says, You’ve made a big difference to my day, too. Thank you, you say again, and leaving the music behind, carrying the music, start walking up the hill for home. Carrying milk and honey and beans. A small swirling land of milk and honey. Pot of steam. A bright morning. A singer you’ve never heard of, but heard, and who heard you. What more can be grace? Come, Monday: come.

  • all the accidental musics wrung

    Sometimes a song I’ve been listening to intently for ages suddenly rolls past in a different setting, the studio rather than the live performance, or another performance of it at some other gig somewhere in some other dive across town… and I all of a sudden realise, unwelcomely, that favourite line I so exquisitely cherished is in fact a simpler, balder statement or plea than what I had heard… and what I’ve been singing all of this time. Whenever this happens I wish I could take it back, unhear it I mean but also take it deep into myself, have that line – which in a kind of unintentional way, perhaps I wrote, or cowrote – for my own and smuggle it into some other song, illuminating some other life. I guess you could do this (I could, I mean) if you acknowledged the spurring accident… as in a piece of poetry or a painting made in response to something made by someone else, a work that brings to conscious light an insight some artist you are not has already articulated. Maybe then.

  • dancing, just dancing

    Dancing in the dark. It’s so beautiful. I heard about it back in Melbourne, where it was born (and so was I), and just kept not going because I felt too shy to go on my own. In Berlin I signed up for the No Lights No Lycra facebook page and waited for them to organise an event but they never did. Finally last Tuesday the old Ukrainian Community Hall in South Brisbane with its solemn Cyrillic listings in gold of every president since 1949 and its overpowering fake floral stench from the immaculate brown-tiled bathrooms downstairs came through for me and truly delivered. A girl in a slouchy beanie stood bopping on the pavement, holding an envelope. “You here for No Lights?” She slipped my five dollars inside her envelope and pushed the door wide. “C’mon in, we’ve just started.”

    Inside the dim foyer were big double doors. I went through. The darkness bloomed all around me like mould, soft and plentiful. Oh, the delicious sound, oh, the song I had not heard in so many years and which swept me away like laughing salt water. The song took me by the throat because I used to love it, in the day, the day when days were nights and I was only waiting for the soft darkness to fall. I remember driving to a club I loved and smiling at the doorman whom I knew from a Government lecture at Uni and who never charged me, and just falling onto the dancefloor and dancing until I had to go to the bathroom, until I needed a drink, until they closed. The dancefloor was tiled in black and white and I was very often the only one on it. I didn’t care. Alcohol helped me to get there. A man said to me once in a park, I know you! You were dancing at the club and you smiled at me. But I hadn’t even seen him, I was smiling at god. I was god. The music was everything.

    In the darkness the first song made me dance and very quickly the dancing made me cry. I remembered all the times I had wanted to dance and couldn’t. I realized: nobody can see me! I’m invisible. I’m hardly here. I felt the hot freedom pouring like molten sand through me and through me, like glass, a kind of tide of revelation, only me in this full space, me and the lyrics, me and the bass. And as I realized the extent to which I always feel observed, counted, and noticed, and to which I hinge and hem myself, and won’t let myself go, it all got too much and I started to cry. The crying lasted only a moment, a long moment, then the next song took me in its arms and I got this big broad grin across my face, a grin that almost hurt, that lasted several songs before it disappeared without my noticing it.

    By the time that boring song came up I didn’t care, I was dancing. My feet came up towards my chin, I flung my shoulders like a bird. I shuffled forward between the blurs. Ever so slowly as my eyes arrived I could make out through the teeming darkness people in a trance of dance, their arms flung up, their heads hanging low. People hopping, jumping, one woman just strutting in a long walk back and forth from one pillar to the next, making a shadowy sashay. Just for herself. She didn’t need to be anything, do anything. Everybody looked absorbed in their own element. I was dancing. We could not make each other out except to keep from colliding. Somebody laughed. Somebody set up a clap and its contagion caught across the wide old hall.

    I noticed the second Tuesday something that felt really familiar in me but which I had never consciously seen before: that a lot of the time my dancing involves throwing myself slightly off-balance, so the dancing is more like a falling, a forever falling. Just in time I catch myself, I stave off the floor, I rescue me.

    Spun on the spot like a floss I faced the back. The thread of light under the double doors and upright in between them reflected dully on the dim floorboards, resembling an upside-down cross. At the end of every song we grew still and soon another song started. Some were from the 70s, 80s, some were woven by machine. I went out to get cool air under my shirt and let the sweat roll between my breasts and pool in the tiny belly button cave and run down my arms; the night breeze struck me like a soft tree, ineffably; across the road in the old church hall a dozen drummers had set up a racket, independently, a rhythm, they sounded like they were conducting ceremony rather than just rehearsing. I walked round the hall and peered in on them before plunging back into the throbbing, dancing dark. “Last song!” she cried and everybody whooped. At the end of the hour a small light went on up the front and people gathered along the side bench for their bags. As we left two by two or singly or in threes the girl with the beanie was there, gallantly holding back the door, greeting everybody the same: “Nice work, ladies.” Only then as the street trees dipped over the road tropically did I parse the vision I had seen but not really noticed, when the lights came on: these people are all women – it is us who dance, it’s we who want an hour off from being seen, we are here to hold our freedom in our mouths like berries too many to swallow, the jaw dislodges and the voice unhinges and juice rolls fatly and purply downhill, over the hills and valleys of me. Of you, who is me.

    I opened all the windows and drove silent home. Thinking about a man who courted me by visiting with drugs. Who used to ply me with pot and I always accepted it and we would talk about music for hours, hours and hours and hours, maybe playing one song over a third, a fourth, a sixth and seventh time to see through the weave. He said to me, When you perform, remember: it’s all in the approach. It’s in the way you walk over to the guitar. I nodded, I had no idea what he might mean. And I got up and danced, irresistibly, through my own house like a thicket of books and ideas dense and shifting like sleeping cattle swaying upright, he loved to watch and I didn’t care, I let him, I’d forgotten him, and once I danced up in a sprung crouch onto the kitchen sink, under the taps, flicking the wall with my flat hands, I played the house like my instrument, I ran out on the verandah and threw my head back my mouth open where the rain poured down from the broken gutter and that night when I came in again and the song had ended my suitor was lying back in his chair, looking very grave, his long fingers a tent, and he said, “Yeah, I know you got the voice, like I said; I realize that you’re this big poet and all. But in my view: you are more yourself in the dance than in any other form.”

  • the underground birdcage

    Brisbane’s underground opened up unexpectedly and swallowed us whole. Like two fishes we went down, happy to be coveted. Brisbane sprawls on the surface of several hills, sunny and pleased with itself, the city centre sprouting like rockets deteriorates into sleeping suburbs at its very walls, a castle hemmed in by shanties: who knew there was anything underground, mysterious, culturally exploratory at all?

    It’s above ground, it turns out, like a 70s pool. Perched above a suburban railway station in a decayed birdcage shelter like a lean-to, stripped inside, its tin roof bared and its internal walls mostly gone. This might have once have been the house of the shopkeeper who founded the burger bar downstairs, barred and bolted at street level: as we ducked under the sagging verandah to come up we read: Award-Winning Coffee! PLUS: Bacon & Egg Rolls.

    The milk bar was closed, it being late on Good Friday, everything was closed in fact, everyone gone. Miles of car dealerships gleamed up and down the highway. The railway station was empty and cool-lit. Huge billboards loomed. We went up a rickety flight of stairs and into the unlit living room of a couple who host these gigs intermittently, whose devotion to experimental music lies thick like dust over every surface in sight. They had stacks of tapes on a milk-crate table, I’d not heard of even one of the bands. We sat down on a velvety car seat and a milk crate filled with comics. Outside, the verandah was hedged with netting and the lights from the dealership opposite swam. People smoked various plants. Eventually two bands played. One was the Loop Orchestra, which morphed out of Severed Heads, and whose members have been assiduously pursuing the random mismatching of tape loops since 1979. They took a long time to set up. Their equipment was heavy. Their sound was intoxicating and strange. Compelling re-occuring beats splurted from old splices in the tape. One man wore dozens of loops round his wrist like loose dark bracelets, slipping them off when he wanted to change and refit. A young audience member scrolled his phone throughout the set. Another, in his fifties, sat on the floor like a child being told the best stories and when his attention wandered he picked up an old flyer off the floor and held it up close to his eyes to read.

    A girl with plaits attached to her hat turned her head next to me and gazed glassily past. Her smile was vague and convulsive. The man in the Bauhaus t-shirt who kept bending over some detailed arrangement behind the stacks of jars in the cluttered kitchen corner turned out to be the drummer for the second band. He told me their name but I forgot it. It was clever. His drums were built out of scrap. I was perfectly comfortable in my warm car seat, I took many dark photos, my mind just sank away. Everything was dark and people’s shadows cut the reading light delineating the stage. With care it was possible to pick a way along the verandah which felt like at every moment it would dissolve into the highway and disappear in a smear of rapidly swept past headlight. The light from the head, and the light from the heart. The moon climbed impaired and creamy through the dark netting and lighted the shining untouched vehicles displayed forever, from last century, from a comatose time when people thought it was ok to mine whole mountains hollow and smelt their insides into trash. So many different kinds of sleep. Our audience stirred when one set closed and another opened and applause was low to the ground, enthusiastic. Up the back it was possible to buy t-shirts, so I did: five dollars, screen-printed, awkward cut-out letters claiming boldly and purply Real Bad Music. A rack of tapes and records and cds ranged from five dollars to twenty; four twenty-dollar notes unfurled in the tall jar into which I dropped my coins. People came up the back stairs at intervals and slipped in between the shadows watching and swaying. House plants trailed from tins hung from the tongue and groove walls and from the tiny thicket outside, garden plants reached in. The imperfect floor had a board missing here and there and had been repaired with layers of steel shop signs and advertising placards. My favourite said, in white on grey, “…your business the exposure it deserves.”

     

  • easy cure

    Found this dim-lit, twinkling little bar in an unexpected quarter of town. All seats were empty and the bar owner and his staff were sat around a corral of lounges playing The Cure and playing guitar. I mean The Cure, as in 1979: doomph/slup/doomph/slup/“Accuracy…” We sat down and the barman quickly flipped for the Rolling Stones. Ugh, I said to my companion as we let our eyes run over the heads and shoulders of the weird beers they had on display, these guys are like one-twelfth the band The Cure were. Sir Jagger left his garden party prematurely to drizzle out “Ruby Tuesday” and it felt like flat champagne, the musical excitement level had just dropped to a sad low tide. I remembered how actually the supposedly sweet, supposedly fulsome folk singer Melanie had turned this drear song inside out, stringently, dragging out of its melancholic chorus the brisk, tripping threat “stillummonnamissyou…” Guy who owned the bar came over to talk beers. He was finally able to explain why a German person would never have heard of a “lager.” (“How come now I’m in Australia I never see anyone drinking Fosters?” “ugh. Those are our… Export Beers.”) Lager is like a Pilsner only, he told us, “more lager.” They wanted to know would we like to join them. Meanwhile two ladies had burst in asking “do you do coffees?” then ordered tea. I described to him the album I had made with “a kind of collective” of musos recruited in clubs, on the streets, how part of it was kind of jazz and part of it “a kind of folk.” He took from me a card saying, “How did you know I would be into that stuff?” I lifted my hand to flop round the bare ceiling, the little white-clad tables, the squashy couches, the bare backed beers, the I dunno… “The Cure, baby.”

     

  • sharing a desk

    Brother is staying for a few days & brother and Berliner are sharing a desk. They don’t know each other very well. I walk in on them sitting side by side with their computers open, both are typing furiously and music is playing.

    Cathoel: so are you just taking turns between the songwriters and the techno, then?

    Berliner: yup.

    Brother: and we’ve been making remixes of your songs. Just by playing a song of yours over the top of what’s happening, so that~

    Cathoel (sings): Tuesdays I lie in bed with my ex…

    Brother: exactly, sometimes it works out perfectly. You should do remixes!

    Cathoel: let’s! We can mix them with Tony Abbott’s speeches. Or, you know, sing-song public speakers.

    Berliner (still typing): yup.

  • ring Tony

    Phone call from Berlin, around two months ago:

    My mum: yes, and so

    Me: yes, and then if we

    Mum’s phone: buh bah dah da bump..

    Me: is that your ringtone? Why do you have ‘Bad to the Bone’?

    Mum: what?

    Me: George Thorogood and the Destroyers

    Mum: who?

    Me: bad to the bone. Buh bah dah da bump. Bad to the bone. Buh bah dah da bump. B-b-b-b-bad. Bad to the bone.

    Mum: oh well it was the only one I can hear.