Music from back in my day

I recently purchased three new albums on CD…and I realised that for my kids, at least three elements of this may not make any sense by the time they are teenagers. I mean who the hell will still buy music?…and if they do why buy an album when there’s only one song that they really like? And CD’s? CD’s?! For Christ’s sake Dad, you’re embarrassing us and yourself.
So I wanted to write some timeless advice to my kids about how to enjoy music, no matter technology brings…and why they shouldn’t throw out my CD collection when they eventually put me in a home (although this can pretty much be summarised by ‘there’s a CD of the Dandy Warhol’s debut album signed by the whole band…you don’t want to know what Daddy did to get it…but it’s probably worth some money now’).

Albums

In the past bands have released the ‘best’/’most likely to move units’ song off their album…in the hope that you would purchase the whole album. That was basically the choice, if you wanted to buy a single song, you bought the single…if you wanted more than one you bought the album. But of course nowadays you can simply grab individual tracks from an album, and ignore the rest. This is CHEATING!
Look, I like chocolate, and I like eggs, and I’m willing to tolerate flour…as individual ingredients they range from tolerable to delicious…but all combined, they can make an amazing cake (or a horrifying breakfast). And that’s what the band wants you to eat (the cake that is…not the breakfast). They have structured the album to be enjoyed as a whole, not broken up into individual elements and digested in isolation. So even if you don’t like some of the songs on the first listen, you should always buy the whole album. If for no other reason than there will be songs that on the first couple of listens don’t do anything for you…but suddenly start to grow on you, until they are the songs you want to listen much more than the song you originally bought the album for.

Hi Fidelity

No doubt by the time you read this, you will have no problem streaming enormous audio files at full quality anywhere you want (unless the NBN got scrapped and you have an elaborate network of strings and cans), but in my day we had to make a choice between high quality sound that took a long time to arrive, and lower quality sound that was there whenever we wanted it. We thought about this for about 6 seconds, and decided that we wanted our music now, now, NOW! and so the mp3 was born.
Now I’m not one of these people who demands that you listen to everything on vinyl*, and on a stereo* that has valve powered amps* and was designed by some German artisan who died while making it…but I do beg that you at least listen to music at the highest quality setting you can get, and that you get yourself some decent headphones. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve listened to a song through decent headphones or speakers and heard a whole new parts of the song I’d never heard before.

The music you listen to from age 16 to 22 will be the best music ever

Now clearly this isn’t true, because everyone knows that the best music ever made was released from 1991- 1997 (which coincidentally was when I was 16 – 22), but I’m sure that you will believe something to the contrary. Because the music you listen to from 16 – 22 will be the soundtrack to your teen angst, your first love, the inevitable first break up, freedom, repression, sex, drugs and haircuts that you will regret for the rest of your life. But most importantly, you will have large amounts of time to totally immerse yourself in music. You will have time to listen to songs over and over again…and it’s this repetition that will hardwire the songs into your brain and inextricably link them with the incredible emotions you are feeling and give these songs a potency and resonance that words cannot describe.
Nonetheless I will tell it’s rubbish and demand you turn it down, and, if my worst fears are realised, will insist you listen to music from 1991 – 1997 so that ‘you can hear some real music’. I apologise in advance.

Go see live music

No doubt by the time you are reading this, you will be able to access any concert anywhere in the world, and listen to it in crystal clear audio and with HD vision. But this is not the same as being there. You won’t feel the entire audience being won over as Beth Gibbons lays her soul bare by singing one line in ‘Over’ with such passion and intensity that 10,000 people at Festival Hall think she is singing to them, you won’t feel the sheer power of Dana Colley playing two saxophones at once, you wont feel the euphoria as DJ Shadow drops the beat on Organ Donor and every person around you collectively loses their shit. You won’t feel it, because you weren’t there, you weren’t part of that moment.
So get out and see as much live music as you can. Because one day all of this will have past you by, and you’ll be writing blogs about music to your kids instead of going out and seeing a band.
If genetic selection is true, then you will hopefully have inherited my love of music and your mother’s musical talent and will be able to actually play music AND have a fantastic music collection. But even if you don’t, music should be one of the most important things in your life. So whether you stream it, or play it, or it is fed directly into your cerebral cortex via a chip, expose yourself to as much music as you can and remember if a music style exists, then there is someone out there who is doing it well enough for you to listen it…you just need to find them. And most importantly, if anyone other than Daft Punk tries to make music with a vocoder or autotune…you just ignore it…just ignore it.

* Just Google these and stop trying to make me feel older than I already do!

2 Degrees of Melbourne – Episode 2 : Mick Thomas

Given the number of times I’ve looked up on a stage and seen Mick Thomas singing or telling a story…it was a tad surreal to see him standing in my kitchen chatting about the real life person that Dickens’ ‘Fagin’ was based upon. But when you bite the bullet and decide to put some energy into being creative for a year…these sorts of things start to happen.

A bit of background

For those who don’t know, Mick Thomas is a Melbourne based singer songwriter. He is probably best known for his work with ‘Wedding’s, Parties Anything’, but has also released numerous albums as both a solo performer and with ‘Mick Thomas and the sure thing’…and has written soundtracks and theater productions.
While I had always been vaguely aware of ‘Weddings, Parties, Anything’ (it’s a memorable band name…and their constant touring meant I saw a lot of their posters around) it wasn’t until a friend of mine (Dave Walsh) brought a song of theirs in to play on my student radio show. The song was ‘A tale they won’t believe’ and basically tells the true story of a group of convicts escaping from a prison on Tasmania, and eventually resorting to cannibalism. As far as songs about cannibalism go, it was pretty awesome.
I bought a couple of albums and was hooked. Having been raised on a pretty strong diet of Irish folk music and occasional ‘Bushwackers’ dances…I recognised the sound and the energy of the music…but suddenly it had lyrics about Australian history, or the trials of being in a relationship and working different hours, or being mistaken for Jack Jones. Most importantly a lot of the songs were about life in Melbourne.
So when I came up with the idea of doing short videos on people who I thought were an integral part of Melbourne…Mick Thomas was one of my ‘must haves’.
Flushed with the success of the Andy White video (over 2,500 views on Vimeo!), I just decided to try my luck and simply sent Mick an email via his website explaining what I was looking to do…and in a rare display of poor judgement…he agreed to take part!

Preparing for the interview

I love listening to interviews by Mark Colvin and Jesse Thorn…if for no other reason, than that wonderful moment you can almost hear the guest think ‘Oh wow…this guy has really done his research’. There is a near-tangible change in the way the interviewee responds to the questions, because they realise that they aren’t going to be asked the same questions they’ve been asked before, by someone who is contractually obliged to talk to them….they are talking to someone who has put in some effort, has some great questions and the mental agility to respond to anything they say.
Clearly I wasn’t looking to achieve these lofty standards…but I wanted to be closer to them, than to Richard Wilkins on the red carpet asking ‘So who are you wearing?’
So I did as much internet research as I could…which proved to be a good idea, because one my questions was going to be about the brilliant lyrics in one song he sings…which research revealed to be a cover he does. Nothing makes a songwriter happier than having someone praise a song they sing that they didn’t write.

The interview

One thing I’ve learnt over the course of the two interviews is that when you’re by yourself and filming on one main camera, and filming on a second camera (my phone), and monitoring audio, and asking the questions, and actively listening to the responses and framing your next question, and doing your best to make sure your interviewee is comfortable…you tend to get to the end of the interview and think ‘Well that seemed to go well…but I’ve got no idea if it’s going to work as a five minute video?’
But I think it does…and so here is Mick Thomas

2 Degrees of Melbourne – Mick Thomas from 2 Degrees of Separation on Vimeo.

In conclusion

The music I wrote for Andy’s video just didn’t work with Mick’s…so I had to write something else (and by ‘write’ I clearly mean ‘stick together a series of samples in Garageband’). But I’m really glad I did. I also had to call an end to the interview a little earlier than I would have liked because the the camera was starting to overheat…and I ran out of memory on the card (shooting at 50fps is all well and good to get nice slow motion…but it chews through the memory!)…and editing in 1.5 hour blocks between putting the kids to bed and going to bed myself was less than ideal.
But I can live with all of these little issues, the one thing I’m still annoyed with myself about is that with Mick standing right there in my kitchen I didn’t have the guts to tell him that I think that he is one of the best singer/songwriters that Australia has ever produced…and certainly my favourite. And that Melbourne is so lucky to have someone to immortalise it in song. So I’ll just write it here instead, and pretend that this somehow makes up for it.
But if you’d like to make up for my inadequacy, then I heartily suggest that you all ‘do yourself a favour’ and go out and buy a ‘Weddings, Parties Anything’ album or a ‘Mick Thomas and the Sure Thing’ album, or head to Tassie and check out ‘Vandemonian Lags‘…or just visit Mick’s site and see when he’s performing next.
You won’t regret it.

The song that changed my life…kinda.

Rafael Epstein has a segment on his radio show on 774 ABC Melbourne where people talk about the song that changed their life, and every time I think about it, there is one song that really stands out: ‘Red 2‘ by Dave Clark. But it’s not because it heralded the onset of some amazing time in my life, more that it marked the end of one.

The rave scene in the early 90’s

If this were a news report or documentary, this is the part where you cut to the footage of people dancing with glow sticks in a massive club while a light show explodes around them. But in truth this is not where this story starts. In year 11 and 12 at school (1992-93) I started listening to techno music. Back then it was called ‘trance’ and it was still well and truly outside of the mainstream. DJ’s who would eventually play at parties for 10,000s of people like Will e Tell and Richie Rich were still playing the back room at Insanity at the Chevron to a transient group of about 20 punters.

Community radio was the only place to find it. There was one show that I listened to religiously called ‘Beat in the street‘ (that later became ‘Transmission’) on RRR-FM hosted by Kate Bathgate. I used to tape every show, and then listen to the tape on my walkman again, and again and again at school over the next week.
Going to a private all-boys school meant that listening to anything other than MMM or Fox-FM was basically like walking into a steakhouse and just ordering a salad, it simply wasn’t done. So listening to these tapes in the common room at school had a sort of forbidden pleasure element to it.
I started going to dance parties (or in the parlance of 1994 ‘raves’) regularly when I started Uni and it was a total revelation. The venues were usually shitty warehouses with one toilet. The sound systems were prone to blowing just as everyone was going apeshit (Thomas Heckman, I’m looking in your direction) and the people attending them were the offcuts from society. There were tall and lanky guys and short squat women. They had their own dresscode (highly coloured clothes, with very wide pants and very tight tops). They didn’t drink and there was none of the agro that hung over the club scene like a fog as soon as the clock hit 2am. And the music…well it was like nothing I had ever heard! There was the big 4/4 beat driving it along, but there were also floating basslines and awesome melody lines that I just loved. If you can imagine my music up until this point being basically nothing but guitars and the occasional hip-hop track… then suddenly hearing this or this you can get an idea of just how big a change it was.
It was a very friendly and welcoming scene, and like so many sub-cultures, part of the pleasure was sharing an experience with a whole lot of like minded people. I would head to these parties at about midnight and then dance until the early morning…then catch the first train home. Some how I managed to also accommodate my exhausting 8 contact hours a week of uni. I was living the dream.

Cometh the drugs, cometh the pretty people…endeth the party

By the mid 90’s the parties were getting bigger and better, with the Hardware and Every Picture Tells a Story parties attracting thousands of people…and with that I started to notice more and more people from clubland appearing at the raves. It started with a slow trickle of muscly men in white t-shirts and their blonde bombshells…and eventually became a monsoon of pretty people armed with whistles, glow sticks and talcum powder. But of course these people weren’t here for the music…they were there because someone had told them that it was cool to go to raves and do drugs.
Now of course drugs had always been a big part of the rave scene, but suddenly people were no longer going to listen to the music and maybe do some drugs…they were going to do some drugs and maybe listen to some music. So the music slowly began to morph away from the flowing melodies and soaring chords, towards something that said ‘look, you’ve spent a lot of money on those two pills and that gram of speed…let’s give you something that you can just grind your teeth to all night’. To me Red 2 was the tipping point. It was so sparse, so mechanical, and so minimal that I felt no connection with it…and as the crowds around me generally lost their shit to it…I realised that I had no real connection with them either. And suddenly the spell was broken. I could no longer see my future self still going the these parties when I was 40 (I had earnestly announced this to people in the past), I couldn’t even see myself going to these parties in 6 months time. The dance was over.
Like any naive person in a subculture, I wanted the mainstream to see how amazing this scene was and to experience what I was experiencing. I was convinced that if the mainstream could just attend these parties, then the world would be a better place…but when the mainstream decided to drop by, they were like a drunken gatecrasher. They turned up at my house, made a pass at my girlfriend then vomited on the cat. In short they pretty much ruined everything, and Red 2 was the soundtrack they did it to.

That was 20 years ago. All of the flyers I used to have stuck on my bedroom walls are gone, the recordings I listened to religiously are on redundant technology and it takes weeks weeks to organise someone to look after the kids if I was to go out on a Saturday night…and even then, I’d have to be home by 1am because otherwise I’d be too tired for the next day. But while writing this I jumped on YouTube and started listening to some of the tracks I used to love, and suddenly I was back in a warehouse in Footscray, at 4am, dancing my heart out with a room of people who were having the best night of their lives…and I’m so glad that I got to experience that.