The penultimate guest blog in the current series sees Michael Lynch return to the hot seat, which it literally is in Adelaide at this time of year. Enjoy!
First Word
This is my second guest spot sitting in the chair for WIS. I feel doubly honoured to be allowed the pen for a second time. Thank you, Alan. I was casting around for a theme and such are the times that I couldn’t get past themes of dementia, grief and loss.
“Ah, FFS!” I hear you all cry . . .
That’ll be a cheery playlist then. The COO of an institute that made the mistake of employing me many years ago once told me that when some issue upset her, she would write an email and print it out, then put it on her chair and sit on it. That was her way of getting past the issue. I have in the past had to write the email that I wanted to write, telling the powers that be what the real problems were, then bin it and once that was out of the way, write the email that wouldn’t get me sacked, would keep the mortgage payments flowing and more importantly, would keep my partner talking to me. So sometimes I have to deal with the issues that are uppermost, then get down to the proper bit. So Elvis Costello’s Veronica and Amy MacDonald’s Left That Body Long Ago will need to be put aside and wait for another occasion. What that occasion might be I’m not sure but, hey ho . . . .
So I wanted a theme. It has struck me that Alan’s excellent blog and resulting playlist reflect his own eclectic tastes and that some genres are under-represented – there is little electronic music for example – and I could redress that balance.
“Ah, FFS!” I hear you all cry . . .
I then reflected on the responsibility granted me in holding the pen and the possibility of laying a turd on the Persian (see previous guest blog) and decided that my hippy youth predilection for Tangerine Dream’s Stratosfear and Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene should also be printed out and then sat on.
So, what to do? It struck me that as a resident and citizen of Australia I am probably in a minority of two regular followers of WIS, so why not give it a particular perspective, an Australian flavour? Why don’t I pick a few songs that are relatively unknown beyond these shores?
“Ah, FFS!” I hear you all cry . . .
Well, for one, there’s probably an obvious reason the bands and their songs are not better known. WIS has had a fair dose of Nick Cave already, so even though he would be my first cab off the rank, I shall pass. I thought that maybe I could sneak Shivers by the Boys Next Door in as not really being by Nick Cave, but it is. It’s all Cave.
So, enough of what is not making the playlist. Let’s get down to business.
Beds Are Burning – Midnight Oil (1987)
Midnight Oil were a great Australian band, they grew out of a pumping Sydney pub scene to become a major presence in local music. They took very vocal stands for environmental causes and indigenous land rights and their 1987 album Diesel and Dust focussed on those issues. Beds Are Burning was the second single released from that album and pushes the indigenous cause: “It belongs to them, let’s give it back” According to Wikipedia it made number 6 in the UK charts, so maybe it’s not that unknown. It has that 1980s Australian production sound quality shared with bands such as INXS and Hunters and Collectors which maybe dates it, but it still sounds good turned up loud.
The band’s front man Peter Garrett even spent time in the government as Minister for stuff including the Environment. I can only assume he thought he could make a difference working on the inside. I don’t think it worked out all that well for him – if you swim with sharks, sooner or later somebody is going to take a bite out of your arse!
Talking of bites, there was one political soundbite concerning the song from the then Prime Minister John Howard that left a nation gobsmacked. When commenting on Peter Garrett, he professed a liking for the band’s music. When asked which songs in particular, he replied that he had always liked Beds Are Burning. Considering his government’s atrocious record on indigenous issues and refusal to offer an apology to indigenous people, a nation as one asked the TV: “Have you listened to the words?!?!”
Took The Children Away – Archie Roach (1990)
An apology was finally offered to the Stolen Generations by the Rudd government in 2008. The Stolen Generations refers to the practice of forcibly removing indigenous kids from their families to be raised by foster parents or in institutions and be assimilated. For decades the government abused kids and families by process and Archie Roach’s song comes from his personal experience of being taken from his family as a toddler. If you’re interested in his story, I recently heard a repeat of a podcast he did for the ABC’s Conversations series. Roach died in July 2022 which isn’t even close to relevant for WIS! Took The Children Away was included on his first album Charcoal Lane in 1990.
Not many jokes so far, folks – maybe I should have stuck with grief and loss, it might have been more cheerful??
Messin’ With The Kid – The Saints (1977)
The Saints were proto-punks. When they couldn’t get a record label interested in 1976 they formed their own label to release their single I’m Stranded. This might be familiar to some, as the band then signed a deal with EMI who released the single in the UK in late 1976 and the album of the same name in 1977. Again, the band emerged from a local pub music scene, but this was in Brisbane in Queensland. At the time, Queensland was being run as a virtual police state by then Premier Joh Bjelke-Pietersen. Gigs and parties were regularly broken up by the police and participants arrested for being degenerates. Eventually, in 1987 a Royal Commission took a look at what they had been up to. I am happy to record that the Queensland police chief at the time was sentenced to 24 years in jail for corruption. Joh himself avoided jail time for perjury thanks to a hung jury and a lack of appetite for a retrial. Many in Queensland still profess a fondness for Joh and all he did for Queensland. To quote Bill Bryson when writing about Queenslanders in his book Down Under, “mad as cut snakes”.
So I decided not to go with the obvious single, but with a song from that first album with sketchy 1970s production quality and a rawness to the guitar that I love. I was never a punk, I was too straight. In 1976 I was still in what I consider my ‘hippy youth’ so this song only came to my attention when I saw Gareth Liddiard of The Drones perform it with Adalita on Rockwiz. It is worth a look if you enjoy energetic electric guitar playing – fast forward to 3:40.
Lead singer of the Saints, Chris Bailey was a friend and collaborator with Nick Cave and they released a single Bring It On in about 2003. They were discussing how they could make their song a commercial success and they joked that they needed a video full of girls in bikinis. It worked – I saw it on the evening news.
Waiting For My Real Life To Begin – Colin Hay (2001)
You will probably know Colin Hay from his time as lead singer with the band Men at Work. They had a meteoric rise to international stardom with the 1981 album Business As Usual including singles Down Under and Who Can It Be Now. Colin Hay has performed as a much lower-key solo artist since the band broke up. He is an engaging storyteller between songs and a very funny man. This song is written as a conversation – I imagine that it is between him and his wife, as a man who once played to football stadium audiences of 130,000 and then to pub rooms of a few hundred. I have his tour tee shirt with this song title on the front as it speaks to me. I have worn it on Ausmusic t-shirt day but it seems to have shrunk in the wardrobe 😦
You probably didn’t know that he is originally from Saltcoats on the Ayrshire coast and emigrated to Aus with his parents as a young teen. I saw a documentary where he told a story about doing a gig back in Saltcoats and being interrupted on stage by a couple of wee wifeys who were upset by the cars parked around the gig. Someone in the crowd called out, “Welcome home, Colin”. It’s funnier when he tells it…
Passenger – Powderfinger (1999)
Powderfinger was another band out of Brisbane. Named after the Neil Young song, they came together in the early 90s and broke up in 2010 but I only came to know them with their third album Internationalist from 1998. I had a hard job deciding on which of their tracks to list when I can only have one, but I went with their 1999 single Passenger because I think that’s the song that first caught my attention – “So many places you’d prefer to be/ than framed by a picket fence and salary”. [Thought to self – we had just acquired our first mortgage in late 1999, hmmm . . . . ]
Their most popular song is My Happiness which is used for weddings and such and is not appropriate for weddings and such. They also had a couple of songs used on soundtracks, These Days and My Kind of Scene. They were great live and I remember at one gig, the lead singer, Bernard Fanning tried striking some hero guitar poses at the front of the stage on the speakers. His band mates just laughed and made fun of him immediately. You can’t even be a tall poppy in your own rock band.
Crash and Burn – Angus and Julia Stone (2014)
Only one song left. In an attempt to include something relatively recent, this was nearly Underwater by Rufus du Sol – and it would have put in an electronic track. But then the Persian rug came to mind and I moved on. So I’ve gone with Crash and Burn from brother and sister duo Angus and Julia Stone. Does 2014 count as recent for WIS? [How long have you read this blog?! AR].
As a long-time Pixies fan, with this playlist I’ve gone loud, quiet, loud, quiet, loud and then quiet again with this song. Well, it starts quietly then gets louder. It’s from their third album titled with some originality Angus and Julia Stone, in case you forget who we’re talking about. I don’t know much about the New South Welshmen siblings and I don’t think I’ve seen them live but I really like this song. It reminds me a lot of Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer (my favourite song by him and recently featured on the WIS 24Jan25 Mexico playlist) and I just love the plaintive pleading and the looping, almost cyclic guitar.
Last Word
Once I had settled on an Australian theme it was difficult to settle on only six tracks. There is no AC/DC, no INXS, no Kylie. There isn’t even any Go-Betweens, Triffids or Silverchair! They will have to wait for another day and another blog. This time round, I was aiming for something between Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America and Bill Bryson’s Down Under – all I lacked was the talent…
ML
So, that was Michael’s excellent choice of tunes – next week, Fraser Maxwell returns to the blog with his six picks. Don’t forget all the tunes from the last two years are on the Master Blog at the link below.
AR
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