Dullsville: Future shock down under

Christmas time this year was spent back home with my family in Perth, Western Australia for the first time in three years. As usual a whirl-wind trip spent between city and countryside, with so many visits and people to see that it seemed almost like a business trip at times. But there is a strange side to seeing people so infrequently, appearing almost out of nowhere and taking two or three hours for a coffee and then disappearing again for another couple of years. I wonder how akin this experience is to making an album, staying locked away on a studio for a year or more and then emerging to face the media and the fans with 70 minutes plus of music?

But the once sparkling city of Dullsville, capital of Western Australia, the State of Excitement, has been quietly transforming itself while I was away.

The long talked about Northbridge Link Project to join the City CBD region, usually uninhabited after 5:30pm, with the neighbouring nightlife district Northbridge is finally underway. But it is downtown and elsewhere where most of the change is seen: several new sky scrapers, several of them residential, to bring the population into the city, a new State Theatre named after the city’s most famous son Heath Ledger and of course the new Perth Arena complex replacing the old Entertainment Centre.  

This still doesn’t mean the shops are open after 5:30 as the following song laments, but there is change afoot

One of the lines of this song refers to curtains which was a ridiculous and confused excuse for many West Australians (or Sandgropers in the old days) to argue against change, or the introduction of daylight saving, a bizarrely contentious issue that had floated around for years. Apparently the extra hour of daylight every day would fade the curtains faster. However, one thing that struck me about being home was how few curtains there actually where in use! Every day I was woken up by the dawn, the harsh summer light pouring through the windows to the sound of birdsong.

All this is a long winded way to introduce two ideas. One is, that despite all the mutterings, there is no visible sign to an outsider of any crisis or global economic shut down in Australia, or at least Perth. Perhaps more interestingly is this issue of visions of the future and of forward planning. Perth’s main characteristic down the years has been to demolish and build a-new in place of conservation. One reason for this was that nothing was probably ever old enough to conserve. The city was founded in 1827 and was a slowly developing colony of convicts and free settlers until 1885 when gold was found at Halls Creek. Several more major finds in the next ten years, including Kalgoorlie in 1893 by Patrick “Paddy” Hannan meant genuine wild west style gold rushes  and a population explosion in time for the Federation of Australia in 1901.

So nothing was ever old enough to be worth saving, which is one reason why the downtown area, the historic centre, is largely devoid of history. But in its place what Perth gets is this fevered vision of the future, this endless imagining of how it will be. A case in point is the aforementioned Northbridge Link, envisaged for years and now a reality, whereas the proposed Perth Foreshore development looks very much the city of the future even if its future is still a dream.

A lack of future or vision of the future is the central thesis of Simon Reynolds' “Retromania” which I read while in Perth staring up at all the future falling neatly into place.

The premise of “Retromania” is that sometime around the late 60s many forms of art, including fashion, ceased to imagine the future and instead focused their attention on the past and what was perceived to be the authentic roots and feeling of the art form.

Music became pastiche and genuine new movements that broke away from existing forms were rare: the Beatles use of multi-track recording to make “Sgt Peppers”, the advent of synthesizers and later samplers and digital technology. Fashion became the same: instead of us now running around in silver space suits and other such things, we adorn largely the same clothes as previous decades, even invoking vintage styles as a form of authenticity. Reynolds even makes the bold and correct statement that English chavs are one of the few social groups to be really unbound by retromania and instead to where fashion and fabrics endemic to a particular time and place: now.

Reynolds’ book is fascinating and incredibly analytical, reading almost like an assembly manual for modern day society, but he still left many questions unanswered. Why for instance would a music collector obsessed with staving off death by obtaining the perfect record collection, complete with all “archives” from his/her own past, resort to mindlessly downloading and collecting as much music from the present as possible without listening to it? This new music represents no part of the person’s historical continuum, but must somehow be collected all the same. One can also read into the plundering of the past a kind of subjective criticism. It appears almost everyone is doing it, but for some artists it is almost more acceptable than for others. Amy Winehouse made a career out of aping 50s classic rock tropes whereas a group like the Cramps comes across as somehow more authentic – and futuristic - despite doing nearly the same.

Reynolds does important work, however, introducing a broad audience to Finnish eccentric Erkki Kurenniemi

and ideas like “super hybridity”, a concept to describe the internet’s effect on dissolving time and space in conjunction with the modern worlds rapid turnover of ideas and styles: the flow from one thing to another follows no logic and no linear direction, much as Deleuze and Guattari predicted. California’s Gonja Sufi is constantly named as the most obvious exponent of this style.

Reynolds also talks about “nostalgia for the future” and the transition from “Future shock”, the famous book by Alvin Toffler published in 1970, and filmed with Orson Wells in 1972, to “Future fatigue”.

Reynolds quotes Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa from “The book of Disquiet”

“…a feeling worse than tedium but for which there is no other name. It’s a feeling of desolation I’m unable to pinpoint…. I don’t know who I am or what I am…”

Boredom and the future. Sounds like some place I know. But where did the future all go wrong?

On the music side of things, Australia was wracked by the near tragedy of Molly Meldrum’s accident while I was there. Meldrum is a household name in Australia and something of a bumbling icon for Generation Xers and slightly older people. Meldrum came to fame in the 70s as the somewhat accidental and clumsy host of the ABC TV show Countdown (recently slated for resurrection, a move that might deeply upset Simon Reynolds) and later moved on to commercial television, plugging inane albums on shows like Hey hey its Saturday. The 65 year old Meldrum recently suffered serious injuries and was in an induced coma after falling several metres putting up Christmas tree decorations.

I once met an Australian girl in a Barcelona bar in 2006, picking her up with the line “I just heard Molly Meldrum was dead”. The line worked, but turned out to be untrue. It was a wind up; a friend in Perth had sent me a text saying Meldrum had died. The joke was it came in the same week as the death of the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin and Peter “King of the Mountain” Brock who died on 8th September 2006 3km from the end of the race in the Targa West '06 rally at Gidgegannup, about 40 km from Perth. Brock was most well-known for his endurance race exploits, always on Holden and never in Ford, including taking the chequered flag nine times at Australia’s Bathurst 1000 race. The joke was how could Australia lose so many icons in one week?

There have also been some steady progress in Australia’s music profile recently, especially with regards to the more experimental side of things. Wire readers may have spotted a free download  of Wire-tapper sounding experimental sounds under the slightly-derivative umbrella label “New Weird Australia”. Brisbane also had a recent write up in the Wire while the Room 40 label has come up for consistent praise. Label owner Lawrence English also had his concept album “The Peregrine” on Experimedia widely hailed at year’s end.

Lawrence English - The Peregrine (album preview) by experimedia

A friend also turned me on to the Perth band Mental Powers who combine fragments of song with shaking percussive improvisation. A limited run of releases has seen light of day on the Badminton Bandit label.

Melbourne group HTRK had a productive 2011, releasing a handful of albums and singles shared across several labels including Australia’s own Misteltone and Ghostly International. Blurring dark ambient, industrial and dubstep, one of the groups most enigmatic tracks was “Blending” from the “Work (work work)” album.

Also from Melbourne, Berlin-based producer Tornado Wallace has also been earmarked as one to watch, releasing a couple of well received singles in 2011 including his third for Delusions of Grandeur and more recently the successful “Part 9” single on Instruments of Rapture, home to some of the 6^th Borough Project’s early work.

Finally, hailing from the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Martyn Palmer has just released an ep called “Horizon Glow” under the Option Command moniker for Canada’s King Deluxe collective and label. Palmer’s sound mixes the multi coloured computer game tapestry woven by labels like Hyperdub with more traditional IDM structures.

Option Command - Polybell Strategy from King Deluxe on Vimeo.

Finally, in festival news, perhaps there are signs of a crisis after all as attendees at the Australian summer festivals seem to be decreasing – or perhaps refuse to show up for the bands on offer or are spread too thin amongst the multitude of festivals that have sprung up in recent years where there was once only the Big Day Out. This year the Perth leg of the festival will be stripped down from the multi-stage affair to a single main stage with only half the crowd of previous years expected. Yet the lineup too seems to hark back to a different day and age: Soundgarden, The Living End, Noel Gallagher, Röyskopp, Kasbian and My Chemical Romance amongst many more. Hardly a line-up to die for even if you are a stadium rock kind of fan. Southbound, held on the outskirts of summer holiday town Busselton, promised Fleet Foxes, Metronomy (Simon Reynold’s recommended band from the above video), Arctic Monkeys and Crystal Castles, but little else. The Summerdayze festival is where to head for for electronic needs, with still barely enough interesting names in Flying Lotus, Benga and Skream, Seth Troxler and perhaps Moby to offset the array of mediocrity that is Justice, Snoop Dogg, Scissor Sisters, Pendulum and Sasha.

The truth is, getting artists and particular bands and their gear to Australia is a difficult and expensive thing, but perhaps still there could be more risks taken with lineups and styles since the range at each festival is precariously narrow or too commercially appealing to be interesting. To finish with Reynolds again, he makes the point clearly in his book that the kids now days have unlimited access to musical knowledge and don’t have the limitation and stigma about jumping styles as once was the case 15 or 20 years ago. Maybe the time is right for change the approach? As Big Day Out organiser Ken Wes said in the West Australian paper recently "There's only so many times you want to go and stand in a paddock"

Crate trawling I – London: From Mongo to Fruition

Everything seems to have stopped. Too much work, day and night, coupled with racing across town in secret looking for jobs meant that my free time has been broken into little fragments, usually early in the morning or late at night where it is impossible to do anything properly. It is then you realise how long it takes to do useless tasks like charging your iPod or do something more substantial like actually immersing in a book, writing something or just being happy. Thank god then for immediate consumerist satisfaction and mind emptying vacations to plaster over the shallowness.

A hasty trip to London, partly also to look for jobs, was as vacuous as it gets in terms of clashes with foreignness, new things and intelligent tourism, with neither a monument nor a work of art in site other than a pint of real ale. I did squeeze in a football match which can seem like theatre or art when at its best. Unshakeably, there is always a sense of something Thespian amongst the fans no matter what happens on the pitch. Particular characters are attracted to the stadiums, radiant with beer, replete with cerebral analysis and immediate recourse to ancient history and a nervous clammer for total victory whose drive is honed by the edginess that comes from forever staving off enemies with banter, abuse, threats and the rare act of physical violence. But I digress….

I did manage some crate digging while there at Notting Hill’s fabled Music and Video Exchange stores which is always a great way to dispel the blues.

Trawling through the rock crates is always a little bit more sentimental than browsing through the stock in the electronic store, largely since I listen to far less rock-related stuff these days, but more since its glory days extend far back beyond when techno was a twinkle in the eye. That is just another way of saying that here you find more music that is wrapped in memories and personal mythologies. The blurred, half-conscious remembering of this music is of course what journalist David Keenan labelled as hypnagogic pop, one of the most derided genre terms   of recent memory (see my next post for some more on genre terms…).

So it was that I found myself paying money for little treasures whose only purpose seemed to remind me of the faraway past. In particular, the 7” section delivered many treasures that were part of the regular playlist of DJ Wayne at the mythical Fruition Club in Perth back in the first years of the 90s. Due to the small size of the “scene” it was a chaotic mix of Goths, punks (not too many) and indie kids still confused by the looming acid house invasion. The club was eventually over run by a dance music club, but back then the question was is it ok to like electronic and indie music? The biggest conundrum of the night was always the arrival of Peter Fonda from the 1966 film “The Wild Angels”.

Until the end of the sample, the crowd was always poised waiting to see if it would be Primal Scream’s “Loaded” or Mudhoney’s “In and out of grace”. Half the crown would invariably walk, whereas another half would come running, depending on your allegiance to the guitar. There are always traitors in the midst.

  

But I digress again. As well as Mudhoney or Primal Scream, you would more often than not find Sisters of Mercy playing for the Goth kids. “Temple of Love” was always the standout track for me, but on this trip I managed to pick up the 7” of “This Corrosion” for a paltry sum.



Listening to it now it seems remarkably pallid (sic) and really the smallest stone’s throw from some of the more miserable 80s synth pop on the radio, saved perhaps by the gothic overtones and the forever catchy chorus. Except for the slightly heavier finale, my memory has this song sounding much more menacing and less like a hungover Bowie singing over a Cure track with the Def Leppard guitarist soloing all on the set of Les Miserables staged in the Manhattan of Escape from New York. Memory will never erase the death walk though, a type of dance the Goths used to do to Sisters tracks, parading backwards and forwards with as little passionate expression of the body as possible, but with subtle twists to imply sexual ambiguity and, above all, a theatrical draping of the obligatory cape over the body as one goes down, presumably towards the grave.

One other Goth song that alternatively sounds better than I remember was The Cult's legendary “She sells sanctuary” which I also picked up on 7”.

The riff is still so good it could be holy, aided in particular by some great commercial-styled mixing that really brings the shimmer of the chords and the motoric rumble of the bass to the fore without cheapening them. While the lyrics are largely inane, there is always something uplifting and superhuman in Ian Astbury’s lamented cry “And the world drags me down” even if he is dressed a bit like Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow character in the video.

With a lovely etching of rapper skulls on the B-side was a little 7” version of “Bring the noise” by Public Enemy and Anthrax, is more like a work of art than just a musical toy. Along with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Ministry’s “Jesus Built my Hotrod” and “Thieves”  this was one of the all-time heavy tracks for the club.

Speaking of Ministry, I also managed to grab some music by the Revolting Cocks, one of Al Jourgensen’s other bands. While the “Big, Sexy, Land” album I nabbed for £8 had no previous place in my musical memory, the joy of finding the single for “Beers, steers and queers” was as great as the many happy moments it gave us all back in the Fruition Club. The fact that there was plenty of nice Industrial stuff like 12”s by Foetus, Cabaret Voltaire and Atari Teenage Riot on the cheap may suggest that someone dumped a collection or that there is not much interest in this sound these days. This is in contrast to techno where the last two years has seen a formidable rise in industrial sounds, from Adam X and Traversable Wormhole, to Ancient Methods, Stroboscopic Artefacts and more. The origin of this is probably an interesting thesis: is it just the success of Ostgut Ton and Berghain, a backlash against the “designer-as-god” ethos of minimal techno or a subconscious cry from those closer to the ground and the rising tide of unemployment?

I didn’t find this on my “trip”, but who remembers stuff like My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult these days? Another Al Jourgensen project, it’s hard to gauge where the Thrill Kill Kult stand these days, but surely WAX 140 from 1990 must be one of the greatest singles of the era, with hybrid rock-dance music on both sides, Lydia Lunch vocals and freaky drug references.

One last curio was a 7” of Queen’s main theme from the Flash Gordon movie, one of me and my sisters all-time favourite movies as a kid, despite its obvious racist overtones since the evil man was known as Emperor Ming (played excellently and excessively by Ingmar Bergman stalwart Max von Sydow in the 80s movie) from the planet Mongo, and clearly meant to symbolise some threat from the Chinese back then in the 30s when it was created. As a minor piece of trivia, apparently in Australia it was named “Speed Gordon” for the negative connotations of Flash. The censors were apparently no worried about a grid iron player exposing himself, but apparently the connotation of flash meaning “flashy” or untrustworthy, something like “bling” in modern speak. Who knows what connotations you might get from the name Speed Gordon nowadays?

While the A-side is well known and a great track, the less known B-side “Football fight” was quite startling in that it shares more than a passing resemblance to the retro-synth “hypnagogic pop" of the Not Not Fun label and guys like James Ferraro et al. I love the overlaid sample from the movie

“Are your men on the right pills? Maybe I should execute the trainer?”

Sounds like something Roman Abramovich might think?

So long and thank you for the music

It was with great sadness that I learned from a friend last week that demolition had already commenced on the Perth Entertainment Centre (PEC). Hardly a bastion of world music, but nonetheless, like all good venues, it played its role in delivering many epiphanal moments to many on the ground.

The building itself also commands a special place, having arisen from the barren flat city centre in the early 70s and gradually becoming iconic of both Perth’s second big boom (after the 19th century goldrush). Its distinctive sun bleached orange corrugated roof and circular structure were certainly evocative of the summer heat and the shadowless sun that bathes the city throughout its yearly, endless summer. It was the closest Perth had to the Opera House or a silhouette on a skyline, a skyline that back then only had the AMP building in it.

In the 90s the short lived arrival of the Perth Wildcats basketball team gave it a new lease of life, perfectly coinciding with Australia’s growing closeness to and infiltration by US culture. Their short lived tenure is probably testament enough to how that bubble burst, but it was only later in its career, when it really acquired its status. Long periods of sustained inactivity and indecision turned it into an eyesore that somehow encapsulated Perth’s Dullsville tag. Not even the Entertainment centre was entertaining anymore.

Now with the restructuring of the city centre to make it more open, attractive and interesting it must make way. In the end, there was not enough money and no clear ideas. Now it is no more. In its place, or where its carpark used to be, shall rise the Perth Arena.

My first musical experience was in the PEC at the ripe age of 3.5 years. My parents took my elder sister (10 months older) and I to one of the two concerts that ABBA played there on the 10th and 11th of March, 1977 as part of their Australian tour that saw ABBA-mania throughout the country and birthed a tour film called ABBA: the movie that features footage from the Perth show. My mother tells me that my father was not impressed at having to pay for the tickets, but we were adamant we had to go. My only recollection is of being somewhere near the back and that afterwards we were each bought a cap, mine with primary green and blue stripes and my sister’s with yellow and red with ABBA written across the forehead.

This song "Tiger", played here at the concert, is not one of my favourites, but it gives me one of my distinct early memories of listening to this song on my father’s reel-to-reel player and hiding from imaginary tigers behind the curtains in my parent’s bedroom with my sisters. It surprises me as well to find that there is even a bootleg album available of the concert which seems like a strange souvenir to have from a time that you can barely remember.

My second epiphany at the PEC was witnessing INXS at the height of their powers during the Kick/Calling All Nations tour. We saw the first night of three at the PEC, having got lucky with tickets through my friends mum who also came with us. The first two shows had sold out, but tickets for a third show, which was played first on November 6 1988, became available. It was a perfect moment: with your best friend at the end of the school year, days getting warmer, Kick was the best album ever and you have your first teenage rock experience. We were in the so-called “lounge” the pit in front of the stage, close enough to see into Michael Hutchence’s eyes. The band played two sets complete with costume changes and Hutchence and Kirk Pengiley finishing the first half alone on acoustic guitars with their “hippy song” (so said Michael at the time) “Shine like it does”. This was one of those concerts where you don’t want to shower afterwards to avoid washing the magic away.

"Don’t Change" was the last song they played that night and and will always bear that melancholy feeling of knowing that the show was all over even though you wanted more. The ticket stayed glued to the wall next to the bed for a long time. This version is from San Francisco around the same period.

My next concert there was exactly a year later on Friday 27 October 1989. We went to see Jimmy Barnes, that most particularly Australian rock icon on his Barnestorming tour. The Christmas before he had released the Barnestorming live album which my mum gave me on double cassette. The opening track “Driving wheels” was the sound of that summer. But Jimmy`s show was disappointing even to us amateurs back then. Something about the performance just wasn’t heart felt enough, like it was too heavy for Barnes to perform every night. You could see he wanted it, but he wasn’t touching the same level as his albums. He was getting older and had punished himself enough. After that show, his star in my mind began to fade, but a musical lesson was learned about how to approach your idols.

But this night is arguably more memorable not for Jimmy’s show, but for our escapade outside before the doors opened. I was with some school friends and the oldest looking one of us, probably me because I was tall, had bought a couple of UDLs (premix alcohol drinks) at the bottleo to drink before we went inside. Standing in the park we were approached by two men who began to talk to us, asked what we were doing, about the show and who we were meeting. My two friends D and J had their cans, whereas B and myself had already finished, even though we had another stuffed into our trousers for inside. As we talked an aboriginal man also joined us, carrying a blanket and asking the same sorts of questions. He left us for a moment to fish a silver 4 litre bag of goon (cheap wine) from under a tree. After drinking from the plastic tap he offered it to us. This is when the two men produced their police badges. One went to the side with the aboriginal man and the other stayed with us taking D and J’s details. Since B and I were not drinking at the time, we were let off with no fine. The business over, we scurried inside. B and I were still shitting ourselves since we had alcohol hidden on us, but had luckily not been caught. After entering we dashed off to the bathroom and quickly downed our bourbon and coke. Breath wreaking of booze, we entered the “lounge” knowing that Jimmy would be proud.

Perhaps the last time I ever went inside the PEC was January 13 1995 when REM opened their Monster world tour in Perth. MTV and all the media outlets were in town. Support was Grant Lee Buffalo and Died Pretty and guitarist Peter Buck had been married only days earlier in the Cottesloe Civic Centre where we had our school balls. Mike Mills the bass player fondly recalls playing golf at the Vines and getting disturbed by kangaroos. Expectation was high despite the disappointment of the Monster album, the first turkey REM had ever released. The follow up New Adventures in Hi Fi was a return to form, but also signalled the end of the participation of Bill Berry, the drummer retiring after suffering aneurisms. It was the end of the first and great era of REMs music. Since then I have been too timid to try and discover them again, being content with all the great albums up to this point. More poignant then. that we should see the opening night of the last world tour of the original band. Sadly it didn’t live up to the expectation, with even the band admitting at one stage it was a rough show. The next night was better, apparently, but by then, their star was also fading.

So long Perth Entertainment Centre, and thanks for all the music.