Boring Like A Drill.

I have a record player in working order. As a consequence, friends unload their old, unwanted vinyl onto me – in copious quantitites – assuaging their guilt over chucking their once-beloved Bros LP on the pretence that it is now going to ‘a good home’. I’m too soft a touch to say no to them, so it all gets shelved away regardless of quality.

It is a poorly-kept secret that nerdboys like me typically regard their record collections as extensions of their (for want of a better word) personality, and just as men are conditioned to repress their emotions, so do they conceal or expunge records which they deem unflattering or embarrassing. Sorry if all this has been said before in High Fidelity or something, a book-movie tie-in from which I have been spared thus far, and to which I do not wish to expose myself on the grounds that Nick Hornby is – and I’m drifting off my intended topic here so I’ll boil things down a bit – a cunt.

Years of making myself an empty vessel into which the musical tastes of others may be poured has enabled me to disassociate from the more dubious platters on display: ex-girlfriend’s Cat Stevens albums? Mine! Somebody’s housemate’s friend’s Shelleyan Orphan debut? Welcome aboard! Dire Straits? Actually, they’re mine but my dad nicked the ‘good’ ones, which shdv’e wised me up earlier. The collection is now large enough to have reached critical mass, which means that a copy of Rumours spontaneously appears one day without explanation.

The little gem of this motley assortment of orphans is a 7-inch single my friend Kaz found in a Bendigo op-shop.

There’s no record company named on the record label, or even a copyright notice anywhere on the record or sleeve. The back cover, however, has a small notice in the corner saying it was manufactured and distrubuted by EMI. The catalogue number, JD 2602, suggests Julie Dawn put out the record herself, and that it’s not her first. It was recorded in Canberra in 1990, after CDs had begun their inexorable takeover of the pop market.

It’s a double-A side single, where you can hear your choice of Julie Dawn’s tentative, wonky voice singing her self-penned anthem in either English or poorly-enunciated German. The German translation is literal, with no attempt to rhyme or scan, and seems to be unidiomatic (does “die Welt am deine Füße” really mean the same as “the world at your feet” in German?) The sleeve notes give special thanks to the Austrian Club of Canberra, so you’d think they’d know their German.

All my efforts to find out anything at all about Julie Dawn and her record have drawn a blank. I did find something about Peter Coleman and Marcus Holden, who produced and played on this record, on a website about Canberran musicians. Here’s a pic of them on the left, playing in their band The Slick Neatos back in 1978.

I’ve become obsessed with this little record, playing it over and over. It poses so many questions to me. Who are these people? Where are they now? Why does this record exist? Was it cashing in on a large Austrian community in Canberra? Why was someone in Canberra inspired to make a record about Austria? What is an Austrian Flame? According to Google it’s either a lamp, a type of wood finish or a Warcraft clan. Is the photo of Julie Dawn on the cover superimposed on the background, or was she photographed in front of one of those wallpaper murals you used to see in dentists’ waiting rooms*?

As a special service, for one week only at the Boring Like A Drill Hit Parade, you can hear for yourself this magnificent tune in your choice of language.

* Closer inspection suggests it’s the former, unless she’s resting her arms on thin air or she’s 800 metres tall. One step closer to enlightenment.

Jesus, if it’s not Peter Phelps it’s Johnny Farnham thrashing about in his tiny, inflatable wading pool of insular celebrity in the misbegotten belief that you can endear yourself to the world by acting like an egomaniacal tool.

A week ago the prime minister of New Zealand suggested that an ageing pop singer warbling “Sadie the Cleaning Lady” (or even “Pressure Down”) might not be the most appropriate way to commemorate the slaughter of ANZACs at Gallipoli this year. Not only did Johnny F. take it personally, but he’s still whingeing about it:

I won’t say she is a real dog. I wouldn’t say that about my mother-in-law … and she is.

Charming bloke; fragile sense of self-worth. I suppose we shd be grateful he didn’t call her a dopey, hairy-backed sheila. Or at least grateful if we weren’t at his gig on the weekend, judging by the playlist (posted after the article above). “Hold On I’m Coming”? “It’s A Long Way To The Top”? Brrrr!

Now to show how topical and up-to-date I am here’s a photie of Michael Moore or somebody from last year’s Oscar ceremony.

Experimental + interstate music: With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it often takes religion presents…

Thusday [sic] 24th Feb 8pm – 12am

impromptu lons – hi god people – barrage – meatwave – scraps – grey skulls -night crash – das butcher – rory brown / dennis rappoport – old timey dj -an unknown film – plus guests from queensland

Sweatshop Warehouse, 140 Barkly St (off Sydney Rd.) Brunswick

(near the Brotherhood of St Lawrence)

Donation for entry (money please)

This is in Melbourne, don’t go to your nearest Brunswick expecting to find it if you are in another city. I don’t write this stuff myself, it’s all dictated by higher beings.

I’m plugging this because I’m playing that night as a “guest” (even though I’m not from Queensland – brr!). Expect to find me lurking in the background messing with some bits of balky electronic gear with one hand, nursing a beer with the other and clumsily propositioning girls.

It must be dead because an ageing manchild complains that even air guitar isn’t as cool as it once was, even in that stanky pen of rockpigdom, Hawthorn:

One conclusion was inescapable: the imaginary guitar is in grave danger of vanishing into thin air. As I see it, it’s part of a long and insidious plot to take rock’s power out of the hands of the common man and woman and towards the whims of corporatised music fashion. My own story is perhaps typical…

Next week: a scorching exposé of how they’ve changed the formula of Fanta. It’s so sickly sweet these days, what they hell were they thinking?

Incidentally, if you google for “Helen Clark” and “John Farnham” you get results that are more informative than the New Zealand prime minister’s jaw-dropping revelation that she’s never heard of Australia’s richest leagues club singer:

… Among the 1000 or so guests was New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark.”. … saw an ad for the “Greatest One Hit Wonders” that featured John Farnham’s “You’re the …

… SOUNDSCAPE PJ Harvey, John Farnham … It must only be a matter of time before Helen Clark and Paul Swain make it compulsory for the Government to install hidden …

… hairy dwarf from The Lord of the Rings), New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark (ditto the … I don’t want to sound like a snob but John Farnham’s Your the Voice? …

… DELTA Goodrem has done it again, surpassing John Farnham’s record for the longest …NEW Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark was frisked for explosives by security …

… Prime Minister Helen Clark says cannabis … John Farnham’s record label is giving thes11.org web site until 5pm Thursday the 24th of August to remove a …

… Most Spectacular Musical Event Described by Prime Minister Helen Clark as an … In-Earmonitoring engineer) and John Henderson (John Farnham’s monitor engineer …

… of red last night didn’t help and being dragged to a John Farnham concert neither. …Does Helen Clark have furry toes to go with her pointy ears and bad teeth? …

… Yeni Zelanda Başbakanı Helen Clark, ulusal radyo kanalına yaptığı açıklamada …Kidman’dan sonra listede şarkıcı John Farnham, AC/DC grubunun eski …

UPDATE: Best Prime Ministerial Press Statement Ever. NZ Government spokesman Ian Kennedy said “I’m authorised to say New Zealand’s Prime Minister has never heard of Johnny Farnham”.

Dr David Thorpe at Something Awful does a beautiful job describing the joy I find in listening to crap music.

As far as I’m concerned, claiming to like a song ironically is a cop-out. Whether you’re spinning “Rump Shaker” by Wreckx-N-Effect with the intent to smile wryly or with the intent to actually zoom-a-zoom-zoom and a boom boom, it matters not; you’re still spinning “Rump Shaker.”

Amen to that, and exactly why I’m listening to “The Al Wood Orchestra plays the Hits of Rod Stewart” while typing this and grinning like an idiot. You can’t like something ironically any more than like it sarcastically.

Also, this succicntly explains my irony-free, ever-expanding collection of crappy old LPs:

Why is it that a snob like me will joyfully listen to crap from the past while violently eschewing crap from the present? Let’s put it this way: the war against shit like Maroon 5 is still claiming lives. However, the war against Bobby Brown was won over a decade ago… in ten or fifteen years, the songs you hate today will probably be hilarious instead of annoying.

You’ll be driving your kid to school in your hoverbubble with the radio tuned to “00’s Retro Breakfast,” and a smile will creep across your face as Hoobastank’s “The Reason” comes up. “I remember this song,” you’ll tell your pasty and unpopular son. “This song used to be crap!” And you’ll love every minute of it.

This invaluable public service provided courtesy of TMFTML. To which I would add The Smiths’ “William, It Was Really Nothing”, Black Flag’s “Fix Me”, and Yoko Ono’s “Toilet Piece/Unknown”. Please note that, like Pele in his TV ads for Viagra, I used the word “would” in the previous sentence.

Having gone off on that brief frolic about Sorabji the other day, and while thinking about middle-aged guys fretting in public about who listens to classical music, I remembered a recent review by David Hurwitz at Classics Today about a CD of music by Havergal Brian. Brian was a self-taught composer from a working-class background who was never fully recognised by his peers, let alone an audience, during his lifetime but has since attracted a small but (overly?) enthusiastic following. It was some of these fans Hurwitz encountered when queuing at the cash register fifteen years ago, waiting to buy the first CD release of Brian’s monumental “Gothic” Symphony:

Standing in line before me was the New York chapter of the Havergal Brian Society. There were about 10 of them, average age about 70, men with bald scalps and lanky shoulder-length white hair hanging limply in the latest Benjamin Franklin style. All wore thick glasses, and a few had conditions that I thought had been cured by the turn of the last century: goiters, a harelip or two, and various poxes and skin diseases. None had credit cards, or a majority of their teeth, but most had, to put in kindly, olfactorily obvious personal hygiene issues.

He left the shop and bought it by mail-order. If you’re interested, you can get it for about 18 bucks at JB or “you can order on line and never be seen with it in public.”

Coming up this week. BLAD dives willy-nilly into the issue exercising minds all over western civilisation: the fate of classical music. A genre which has died almost as many deaths over the last five hundred years as hip-hop has in the last five. There will be tears, recriminations, baseless pontificating, and a sigh of relief.

To tide you over, Kyle Gann plays coroner…

Nobody here had anything to do with classical music getting waxed. It was a suicide… Tried to starve itself to death. A tiny, self-imposed diet of the same German and Russian food over and over. Cholesterol in the high 600s. Didn’t want to grow. Refused to eat anything new. Kept trying to pretend the 20th century never happened. Severe personality disorder. It never established any roots here anyway — still obsessed with the old country, and acted so hoity-toity to cover up its insecurity. Suicide was the only way it could save face.

In my extensive research of that last posting I had to look up ‘Farsi’, to make sure I wasn’t confusing it with ‘Parsi‘. On the way I found the wonderful site farsijoke.com, for all the Farsi jokes your funnybone can handle. WARNING: looking at this site may break your monitor, or your brain.

I only remembered Parsi because it was the religion of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988)*, the loony British* composer of the notorious Opus Clavicembalisticum – a four-and-half hour long work for piano of ridiculous difficulty – and other works of similar dimension and complexity. Many passages of his keyboard music (for two hands) require the performer to read and play four, five or even, in one case, seven staves at a time.

In the 1930s he withdrew his music from publication, dismayed by musicians’ inability to play it accurately, and guaranteeing his obscurity, albeit with a growing cult following. He resented people making superficial inquiries about himself or his music, regarding them as intrusions on his work. He would also get very cross if you called him Leon Dudley**. On the other hand it is unlikely he would deign to meet you, given that he seldom left his castle in Dorset, with its sign on the gate:

Visitors Unwelcome.
Roman Catholic Nuns in Full Habit May Enter Without An Appointment.

* “TO THOSE WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, IF ANY, AND OTHERS WHO MIND ANYBODY’S BUSINESS BUT THEIR OWN. Dates and places of birth relating to myself given in various works of reference are invariably false.”

** “Certain lexographical canaille, one egregious and notorious specimen particularly, enraged at my complete success in defeating and frustrating their impudent impertinent and presumptuous nosings and pryings into what doesn’t concern them, and actuated, no doubt, by the mean malice of the base-born for their betters, have thought, as they would say, to take it out of me by suggesting that my name isn’t really my name.”

It’s summer, so I haven’t been going anywhere or doing anything. It’s too hot. At least I expect it’s too hot, because since new year I’ve been hiding in the dark under the bed with some 1.5 litre bottles of Kirov and a pallet of Tiny Teddy biscuits, waiting until it’s finally March. But I did find a power point for my laptop, which means I cd fritter away my downtime tinkering with the layout of the site. So in the meantime you can…

It’s partly because I’ve already mentioned Dimebag Darrell getting shot onstage, and partly because rather than write my own stuff I’d prefer to swipe it from No Rock&Roll Fun, or any website that updates daily. How on earth do they manage it? Do they all have servans? What with all the hours I have to spend staring into the bottom of bottles and testing the patience of phone sex operators I have barely enough time to brush my teeth once or twice a week, let alone write rubbish for this stupid site. Anyway, here’s the quote.

The BBC has reported that a 12 year old boy has discovered five mistakes in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Just eat lots and lots of Happy Meals! Next time you rock up to CERES with a gob full of french fries you can look your feral friends in the eye and tell them you’re sticking it to The Man because Maccas loses money on every one sold. Of course if they do go out of business, where is there left where you can still score a good old brown paper bag?

These and eight other reasons to stop worrying and love the Ron at AK13.

It’s only just February and they’ve published their third column for the year about how Melburnians are obsessed with coffee.

Tell them the best film award can be determined by a formula. Download the spreadsheet. Hand out printouts of the spreadsheet to your coworkers. Explain the calculations to them. Mark the important parts with a highlighter pen. Show no interest in telling them what’s actually going to win this year.

Now for no reason at all I’m going to post a picture of an angry baby and then I’m done. Enjoy.

* Does not contain actual fun.

Why didn’t anyone tell me* that Marc Almond was in a coma last year? I know, you’ll just say “Because, Ben.H, we know you don’t give a shit about Soft Cell, let alone Mr Almond’s solo career,” but that doesn’t mean I’d have laughed dismissively at the news of his terrible motorcycle accident. Thankfully, he’s getting better. Anyway, I’m only mentioning it now becuase of his miraculous parrot-assisted recovery, as reported at No Rock & Roll Fun:

The range of benefits of keeping a pet bird have expanded by one, with Marc Almond revealing that he was roused from his coma by someone playing him the CD that he usually played to his parrot. We’re not entirely sure why he made a specific compilation for his parrot, and we don’t know what was on it – Chicks on Speed, we suppose. We’re also not sure who had the idea of playing Marc the parrot’s CD – we like to think it was maybe the parrot – but it worked.

Athough he’s recovering, Almond has got a way to go – in addition to the physical injuries, he’s discovered his childhood stammer has returned, and his hair has, Leland Palmer** style, turned grey overnight.

* Yes, Australian celebrity babe ASCII art.

** Or maybe Leland Palmer.

Greg Sandow muses on the simultaneous obituaries for poet Jackson Mac Low and ex-Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell. After playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon for a few paragraphs he describes his admiration for Mac Low’s (and John Cage’s) work in a way I can agree with but have never explained so well:

One feeling I’ve long gotten from work like Cage’s or Mac Low’s is peace. But not just any kind of peace — not, for instance, a warm and fuzzy peace, full of love, hope, and goodwill. It’s more profound than that; the peace that comes from lack of need or striving.

And from there he looks for, and finds, the common thread which made him react to both deaths.

More about Jackson Mac Low, including some of his poems, interviews and sound recordings.

On the one hand, Delta Goodrem is leaving Australia to live in the U.S., from where hopefully she can devote less time to perpetually saturating every Australian media outlet* while simultaneously bleating about how the media shd respect her privacy. Having now stiffed in the U.K. and exhausted the goodwill of her compatriots, she thinks she can still evade the Pepsi Curse.

On the other hand, Leo Sayer is still threatening to move to Australia next year to relaunch his music career. For those who haven’t heard this choice quote:

In Australia they still want heroes. They are looking to me to teach their kids knowledge and wisdom.

Still, better him than Delta, I guess. And you have to admit “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” is pretty catchy.

You people can count yourselves lucky. For a while there I had shut down the Rob Roy Hotel without even realising it. Apparently they couldn’t make enough money out of having live bands play there. I attribute this to me not going there even once all year on the pretext of hearing some music but really ending up getting blind on $2 black sambucca shots, trying to rehang the op-shop art on the walls and then groping some poor girl while she’s trying to talk to her boyfriend. So naturally their bottom line suffered when I took my talent for making my own fun elsewhere, and I was saddened but not surprised to hear of the venue’s demise.

Of course it could all be part of the continuing fallout from Lion Nathan’s plan a few years back to pay ridiculously large sums of money for inner city pubs in a vain attempt to get people to drink Tooheys.

Walking past the corner of Brunswick and Gertrude with the pub dark and quiet was like a return to an older Fitzroy that most resisdents pretend to have known and loved. The effect was set off nicely by a large-waisted, short-legged man in track pants across the street who had straddled the fence around Atherton Gardens and was complaining loudly about the effect this posture was having on his balls.

I had high hopes that we might see a return of the ‘exotic dancers’ to the back bar of the Rob Roy, but there’s been a change of heart by the management and the bands are back just as abruptly as they left, so the gentrification process of Gertrude Street has taken a decisive step sideways. In fact, City City City are playing there tonight and I totally intend going to see them, except I’ve just realised they’re probably on right now as I type this. Besides, a friend’s just given me a Target shopping bag full of Wesley Snipes videos so I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere for a while.