After watching the music documentary Dig! I was checking out The Brian Jones Town Massacre. Wild front-man Anton Newcombe had called their 1996 release Thank God For Mental Illness and the title fascinated me. It was about the most audacious thing I’d ever seen. Who would dare celebrate mental illness in anyway? Mental illness was the thing of dreary pamphlets and scary people on buses, not critically acclaimed lo-fi albums from the American underground. Even if the title was being ironic, glib, sarcastic or otherwise, it genuinely encouraged me. My life was defined by psychological disorders and as a survivor, it’s something I wanted to wear as a badge of pride, not shame.

I’m annoyed by how little empathy there is toward mental illness. Despite a solid advertising campaign during the 90’s (Jimmy’s got depression, can I catch it?) and being told that 1 in 5 Australians suffer a mental disorder, we’re still happily recycling the issue in the too hard basket. This lack of awareness is reflected in parliament where there are frequent calls for the Government to allocate as much funding to mental health as it does physical. In 2008-2009, there were 12.3 million scripts written for antidepressants, an increase of 46% in 12 years. Yet based on my statistics, only 10% of these people talk about it freely. There is still big time stigma attached to even low-level disorders like anxiety. Mental illness = fail.

Mental illness is too easily associated with being a loser. How quickly we forget those who wrangled fragile minds to succeed as artists: Russell Brand, Kurt Cobain, Ray Davies, Stephen Fry, Bill Oddie, Sinead Oconnor, Axl Rose, (all bi-polar). Syd Barret, Daniel Johnston, Brian Wilson (schizophrenia). Woody Allen, Jim Carrey, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, J.K. Rowling, Sarah Silverman, Jeff Tweedy not to mention our own Andrew Hansen, Natalie Imbruglia and Heath Ledger (depression). One listing took me by complete surprise. As a teenager, how much better to be handed a pamphlet about depression with Beyonce on the front than a grim stock photo of a dude on a park bench. Mental illness needs better publicity and cooler public faces, even if they are obnoxious rock stars like Anton Newcombe.

I grew up watching my Mother suffer schizophrenia. While for a large part it was tragic and disturbing, when I think about what I’d ‘thank god’ for, I am reminded that Mum also possesses a madcap sense of humour and appreciation for the soft-hearted silliness of life. She once gave me a rare insight into her ‘voices.’ She was paranoid Mick Jagger was coming to get her and was communicating with Mozart to help, but he’d said he was too far back in time to be of any assistance. I found it delightful. Even the maddest of worlds has its own sense of logic. In the same way we respect the customs of other cultures, we too should respect the integrity of those who see our world through a fractured kaleidoscope.

Anyone talking to themselves on public transport (and not in possession of a hands free kit), usually becomes my favourite. I’ve always felt oddly comfortable around the mentally ill. Once you get over the instinctual fear of the unknown, you can appreciate the honesty of their features, childlike lack of self consciousness, and their captivating, often amusing quirks. I find those who have been broken by life pure and fearless, and there is a space in my heart that weeps for their opened minds. As the Jeffrey Lewis album title says It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through. I wonder if there is an element of the divine in their self-conversation.

“Will you follow me down?” Newcombe sings on Thank God For Mental Illness. We would all do well to follow our loved ones down the rabbit hole of psychological injury. We might appreciate that the line between creative genius and self-destruction is whisper thin. Once we overcome our fears through patience and understanding, we can celebrate this truly brave struggle against these common and treatable conditions.

BUDDY & ME (The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries, 2012)

In November 2010 I was booked by Melbourne Music to perform some shows on the 86 tram. This involved me straddling the gap between two seats, leaning against the back window for support while wearing a radio headset mic hooked up to a small amp. On two occasions I attempted to perform Songs From The 86 Tram in its entirety. The first time the tram set out from Docklands to Bundoora – the opposite direction to the album. It was suggested that I could have performed the songs backwards, (reverse order, not phonetically) which was a neat idea. On a blustery Thursday eve a medium coterie of fans turned out, scoring their weekly tickets well in advance. The 86 is a venue that doesn’t need a lot of people to look full.

I banged through the tunes, finding the subtler ones like Sudanese weren’t helped by the grumbling din. Tips for performing on a moving vehicle? Yoga really helps with your sense of balance and core strength when riding the bumps. By Bourke Street the tram was squashy from Friday night revellers, and feeling weird about the stares, I bailed on Trishine. Señor Tram Driver was still running the show, threatening to turn the thing around unless people cleared the backdoor. I tried to capture the moment by starting a sing-along along the lines of “please clear the backdoor” set to three chords. There’s nothing more vulnerable than walking off a tram you’ve just performed a hit and miss improvised song on while teenage punks diss you via the insta-parody “Please, get the fuck off the tram.”

For reasons unknown we had to alight at Brunswick St, cross the road and catch another tram back to Docklands. My headspace was incorrect at this juncture and I politely shutdown. This was guerrilla business. While we had some Melbourne Music staff with us, the plan was no more sophisticated than getting on a streetcar, finding a space between two seats and making a gig happen. For someone who is fussy about having a backstage and affording a sound check, this renegade experiment was like making up a bed in an elevator (at gunpoint.)

In a wonderfully crap freak accident of hilarity, I managed to get my puff-jacket zip caught on the high-E string of my guitar. The string had threaded itself within the teeth mechanism, so the two were completely entwined. There are moments in life when one searches for instructions on how to act; whether this be heavenwards from a maker, or deep within oneself – wisdom hidden like money inside books. This was one such moment. I stood there, head down, attached to my guitar, a friendly passenger working on the string, Melbourne Music staff waiting for me to begin my assigned duties, acutely aware that whence normally some form of instinct or instruction filled my consciousness, now there was only the soft hiss of a blipless radar. I wandered through my bewilderness to a point of submissively maniacal death-mirth. Tonight was offering me a half-cup of ingredients toward a breakdown.

What did I do? As coolsies watched on with half interest I made attempt number three to prize the awful metal fuselages apart. After telling my chest ‘I can’t handle this,’ I removed the offending string completely, which ate up a further five minutes of my life like a charcoal faced digital cherub. Ruing the bruises to my rep. I thrust into New Media, the muscle-strum cleaving through the banality like a passionate pendulum. Then came Northcote, In My Day and Old Man At End. For non guitar players, not having the high-E string is like not missing your little finger until it’s cut off. I went to do a scissor kick and hit my head on the handle.

When I look back on the jacket incident, all I want to know is the mathematical odds for accidentally cooking up the world’s worst circus trick. I can only assume it’s the kind of thing one could sit in a room for a month trying to repeat. Top that and you’d top yourself.

The pitter patter of applause was soft rain on my caravan. At the end of the performance, the staff asked if I wanted to share a taxi with them back to the city.
“Oh no,” I said, looking around. “I’ll just get the tram.” I doused my post-gig analytical brain with the milk of human kindness sourced from cute-eyed questions. For what it was, it was perfect – for something else, it was a bit shit – therein lies the flawed logic of comparison and the psyche’s hourly battle to evaluate the status of one’s life and determine whether one deserves any tangible relief from the childhood smear of self-loathing and emotional fallout from daily grievances. I’d given that tram a big ol’ sonic scrapheap and it had kept me safe like a silent robot.

Tramsformers – robots doing their day jobs.

* * *

The following Monday we organised for Yarra Trams to let us to make one continuous journey over the hour, removing the awkward stopover. Tonight I was primed and organised. There would be only rock star brilliance and world class comedian riding the line between genius and knob. None of that emo waffle. I locked in, buckled down, fired up and folked out. It was, as they say in the industry, all good mate.

Things got real as the tram began its violent left turn into Smith Street. I had just started Tram Inspector, puffing my chest up like a captain of intrigue, when a wry, (chicken) salt of the earth character rocked up in blue checked shirt and cap. Looking weathered and ready for most things, he plonked down in front of me with his back to the stage, effortlessly harbouring the spotlight. A few times he turned around to sum up my predicament, seeming reticent about the evening’s entertainment and my asexual advances, yet nursing a wild glint in his eye. As my boyish giggles rippled through my droll funk veneer, some in the crowd were also shaking, fingers over their mouths like flesh draw-bridges. This juxtaposition of skinny retrosexual and bogile unit was too much. During Tram Inspector’s outro, at my happiest, I declared “Old mate solo.”

Hardest thing about performing on a tram? Making eye contact with your audience, normally masked by the lights. My pupils roamed like ladybirds.

Next up was the spoken word of Man On A Tram. My new friend sprang to life, fishing his wallet from his pocket and showing me a Medicare card. Analysing my code of ethics, I was cautious to engage him. I fixed my gaze to the middle distance and finished the tune. Throwing caution to the air conditioning, I beamed.
“Hello sir just letting you know I’m doing some life-changing musical comedy for you tonight.”
He had his wallet out again. Holding up his I.D. as if I were a bouncer.
“That’s me name, Buddy.”
He’d picked up on my ‘old mate’ quip and was setting the record straight.
“Oh right, okay, Buddy. Do you have any requests?”
A bloke who’d been filming chipped in to ask him if he could sign a release form.
“Sure, as long as it’s not going on Crime Stoppers,” he grinned.
“Well, you’ll soon be wanted for stealing attention from this gig.” I returned, mock icy.

Who am I?

While some in the crowd (including my manager) were wary of the dynamic, (knowing my temper and the fact I can snap any man), my Bogar, developed from a life in Burnie confirmed the situation. Buddy was a good egg.

I continued on, suffering headset problems and subsequently throwing a tramtrum. I flung the infernal gadget onto the cushion and tried to belt out In My day a cappella, which is like trying to sing an opera through a didgeridoo. Precious micrograms of gig momentum escaping from the rupture in my mood, I whipped the headset back on and tried New Media, but sensing exhausted levels of commitment, I aborted the thing. At this moment two things occurred to me:
While I’d performed the album in order thus far, I’d forgotten to play Trishine.
Buddy was about to get off the tram.

“Buddy, I’ve got a song for you.”
“This is my stop mate.”
“You should miss a few stops. Stay to the end of the gig. It’ll be cool.”
“But the bottle shop’s back there!”
“Ah, well ok. Anyway, this is a love song.”

To my delight, Buddy sat back down, propped himself against the window and had his first real chuckle of the night.

Words can get fucked, they can’t explain my love for you / Feelings and shit and that and yeah nah and so forth / My heart’s been kicked out of bounds on the full.

As the ballad sailed over its namesake chorus, Buddy’s face changed from a smile to a wistful gaze, as he went somewhere deep in his mind. Unbeknownst to me, he reached his arm into his shirt and removed a piece of sticky white paper. It was his nicotine patch. As the song neared its finish, he stood up in a daze and headed toward the doors. I sped up, keen to preserve the poetic harmony of the moment. Buddy looked at me, his blue eyes swimming in the neon light, and like a tree in a hurry to grow, raised a hand to wave and stepped into the night.

I had finished my hour’s performance and stood, heart pounding. The cameraman came up to me for an interview and assured me that he had gotten the entire incident on video.

“That was him,” I told the camera, blood and time crawling “That was the Trishine guy!” In an interview I’d joked at the idea of the corresponding characters getting on the tram like a live film clip, but I couldn’t have foreseen anything so poignant. For those few minutes, art and life had combined, parody sitting comfortably next to tribute as the moons of satire and society slipping beneath each other, creating a humour eclipse more graceful than blinding. The 86 had sent a representative, on behalf of the people I had dwelled within for these past two years – a spirit guide with grey goatee and jeans – a solid father figure to acknowledge my daydream dedication.
“You’re all right mate.”

I felt more blessed than I did during ten years of religion.

Thus begins this profoundly off-beat and darkly quirky tale, as Harold bounces between his suffocating home life and the dazzling dimension Maude paints for him. While his flabbergasted Mother enlists him in the army and sets him up on ‘computer dates’, Maude has him smoking hookahs, stealing police bikes and rescuing trees from the sidewalk. It’s delightful to see Harold’s transformation, as his menacing aloofness dissolves to a wide eyed wonder at this women from another planet.

Harold and Maude is a cinematic blueprint that certainly influenced the likes of Wes Anderson. Visually, it’s a feast; chocked with strong colours and dynamic compositions. Scenes open with dramatic panoramic shots, while the 70’s browns, greens and blues are captured in warm sepia tone. Just as Life Aquatic featured the songs of David Bowie, (and an appearance by Bud Cort) Harold and Maude is soundtracked by Cat Stevens. The bursts of studio recordings inject a warm energy and lightness to the story. In one memorable scene Maude struts through a graveyard with a yellow umbrella, backed by Tea For The Tillerman.

The film’s success lies in the performance of Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort. It’s a testament to their skill and charisma that these two highly improbable characters burst from the screen with elegance and authenticity. Cort has an adorable and captivating face, both androidinal and cherubic, and conjures some joyfully unhinged expressions. Gordon powers the film, radiating charisma like a sassy sun. She brings to the role playfulness and vigour, but also a sensuality which is fascinatingly anti-stereotype.

The script is sharp and intelligent, mixing macabre physical comedy with snappy dialogue and some painfully optimistic philosophies. To off-set the wackiness, the film has an anti-war bent. Harold’s Uncle is a one armed Sergeant returned from Vietnam, pulling a drawstring to salute with his empty sleeve. To protest against this spiritual repression, Maude mentors Harold to be ‘impulsive and fanciful,’ and while some of her rants can grate, there’s some splendid exchanges.
Harold: Do you pray?
Maude: Pray? No, I communicate.
Harold: With God?
Maude: With Life.

On first viewing it’s easy to get caught up in the idiosyncratic humour and age politics. The film doesn’t shy away from this, and there’s a hilarious monologue from the priest warning Harold against ‘co-mingling with the withered flesh and flabby buttocks.’ Yet on second viewing the film reveals a deceptive emotional depth. In an easy to miss sequence, Maude uncovers a Jewish concentration camp tattoo. In this context, the pair singing If you want to sing out, sing out / If you want to be free be free passionately off-key, brought me close to tears.

Like all great films, Harold and Maude stops you in your tracks and reminds you that life is full of beauty that can’t be seen from inside a cage. Its anti-conformity theme will appeal to the misfits, while the love story is positively punk in its daring. Where the themes, humour and soundtrack have aged beautifully, the same cannot be said for the fashion.

THE CAR YARD AIR PUPPET DANCING MAN THING

The CYAPDMT goes by many names – Skydancer, Silent Salesman, Crowd Pleaser (sounds like a NAZI euphemism) and more commonly “inflatable dancing man.” They are deployed by auto dealerships to gain attention to their business and encourage foot traffic. The puppets are powered by twin fans and can inflate up to six metres tall. These balloonatics then flail and contort in a manner resembling Peter Garret doing the robot dance. The unsavoury sentinels are left to jive and jerk during business hours, sometimes emblazoned with SALE in angry red letters.

I am scared of inflatable dancing men for the same reason people are afraid of clowns and zombies. They display many human characteristics, yet fall disturbingly short of the important ones. Their bodies are clearly humanoid, yet their movements and face (or lack of one) is like something from the Twilight Zone – an alternate reality where homosapiens have only semi-evolved, caught in a speechless limbo, forced to play out their days crying for help through dance, employed by sinister used car salesman paying them in Aeros.

There is something in the tube dude’s movement that triggers my fear responses. Perhaps it is the jerky, discordant nature, similar to that of a panicked spider. The arms punch skywards, while the torso swerves dizzily from side to side, like a mentally unhinged person caught in self-rumpus. In the pastel flow of the nine to five, the inflatable man is a shock from the subconscious, an off-beat off-kilter oscillating ogre rearing up from the depths of some childhood nightmare to leer and squirm. A blind and deaf giant flickering like flames, dancing for no-one, lost within the void of itself.

The website doesn’t describe them like that. A quick perusal of Budget Inflatables will ensure you that A) “they work” and B) “We can supply this item in most colours and with any message that will fit on the front and back of the man.” It strikes me as odd. Cars aren’t the kind of thing you buy on impulse – are people really driving along when suddenly “Great Scott, what is that in the corner of my eye, why, a cavorting air ghoul! By golly, what’s that business behind it – a car yard!” In the same way supermarkets play depressing music to make you buy groceries, perhaps the agitated movements of the Silent Salesman rile you to buy a vehicle. Either that or they cause you to crash your car so you have to buy a new one.

Even if I were in a desperate hurry to score some wheels, I would clinically avoid any dealership that insisted on the cruel exploitation of cheap air puppet labour. Let us not forget that this balloonatic has replaced a perfectly able human being, heavy with sandwich board or dwelling within a large bird. Surely this is enough to catch the attention of the hapless customer, without haunting the streets with these helium demons. In the meantime, if I’m ever going to overcome my phobia, it will have to be though the therapeutic medium of dance. The best way to overcome your fear is to understand it, so next time I’m on the floor, I’ll be pulling out some Sky Dancer. Just stand, flail and sell!sell!sell!

Long before geek chic there was just geek. In high school I had a bowl cut and Napolean Dynamite wire frames with heavy glass lenses earning me the name Coke Bottles. Instead of being picked on, I was studied with awe and my ticket through school was letting the tough kids try on my specs. “Fuck they’re thick!” they’d exclaim, staggering about. “Oh man, it’s like I’m stoned!” In Grade Nine I upgraded to plastic lenses and while much lighter, I was dismayed that they’d grown even thicker. Throw in some poor posture and I was pretty much a young Professor Farnsworth from Futurama. I enjoyed three years without a skerrick of interest from the opposite sex.

Being a surf club nipper I had prescription goggles. These stuck out because of the magnification and my rivals called me Blowfly. Before that I just used to wear my glasses in the sea tied up with underpants elastic. I can remember games of football being paused while I pawed around in the mud looking for my grizzled frames. In Grade Ten I upgraded to contacts and enjoyed improved vision and handsomeness, but they brought with them a new set of teary problems. Drunken sleepovers would end with me sloshing kettle water over two bottle tops and footy games had to be called off altogether while my team crawled around on all fours. One of the pleasures of the Four Eyes United is bumping into a fellow myope and sharing such war stories.

These days trying to pick genuine bifocal folk is like Harrison Ford trying to pick the replicants in Blade Runner. Fauxhemians have gatecrashed the party, bringing an eyesore of obnoxiously oversized frames that are so fad based they don’t even bother with lenses. If only they were doing it out of empathy, like classmates who shave their heads for a cancer victim, but no, this is surely one of fashion’s most hollow attempts to cash in on a subculture who have endured years of obscurity to cultivate their own grass roots cool. Seriously hipsters – as chairman of the F.E.U. I’m sending a message:

NO TWO EYES ALLOWED!

Specs have always been part of the ‘hot librarian’ ensemble, but let us not forget they are also pieces of equipment worn by the visually impaired. How would fashion feel about getting ironic with other medical necessities. How about wearing designer orthopaedic shoes to your next warehouse party, or carrying a glow in the dark walking stick at music festivals. Braces bling? Vintage print sling? Fixed gear wheelchairs? Man, if Darwin Deez can make a brown skivvy and government issue frames cool then surely there’s no limit to the shallow appropriation of daggy doodads.

Some glasses make you look smarter, some glasses make you look like a paedophile -  The Beautiful People™ wear them for both these reasons. As a lifetime spectacles wearer, I’m offended at the idea of them being used ironically or aesthetically. When so much of my indie taste has already been commodified, must another of my ‘favourite bands’ sell-out? Listen up glassholes – you and your fashion cronies just back away from our optometric territory or feel the wrath of our cleaning spray in your face. There’s only one way to join the F.E.U. and that’s by taking an eye test. See how far you get down these letters:

F

A K

E    R    S

The theory of nostalgiabra has changed. Detective work is a much swifter affair with the advent of the pop-culture super computer. Instead of fishing for clues amongst ourselves we let The Net trawl the oceans for us. One of my obscurest memories is an Australian movie from the late 80’s called Frog Dreaming. All I remember is the title and a scene involving a mechanical monster in a swamp. After a minute on the keyboard I’d found the movie uploaded in eight parts to the ‘Tube. The most rated comment read: “Everyone has the SAME experience with this film, they all saw it around the late 80′s period, years pass and they can’t remember the title or anything else except a few brief moments. Then they eventually believe they dreamt or imagined those brief moments because nobody they talk to knows of a movie that fits the descriptions.”

It was true. Here was the modern, virtual equivalent of my Year 12 experience. For a moment I felt flush with acknowledgement – I was part of a community of fellow Gen-Y detectives, albeit online – but after clicking through to a site offering a burn of the film for thirty dollars I hit an emotional firewall. Where was the warmth? The heart. Where was the excitement of a friend putting the movie on at a party, or the vibrancy of a drunken chat with a stranger, rallying memories with high-fivin’ eyes? Like CD’s to vinyl, this experience was too clinical and efficient compared to the warmth of meandering conversations and video store scouring. The conundrum was that I didn’t really want to find the answers all at once. What kind of series would Sherlock Holmes have been if he’d solved the cases by the second page?

During high school, my favourite pastime was to head to the local second hand record store and search though the CD singles. My number one target was a copy of my favourite song Infinity by Guru Josh. I spent so much time scouring the ‘G’s’ that I’ve build up an autistic knowledge of 90’s ‘G’ bands: Garbage, Gang Starr, Ginuwine, Gin Blossoms, Gina G. After five years solid searching I never found the single. This is because it was only released on cassette and vinyl. Looking back, it didn’t matter. The rush of suspense that accompanied my police cleric flicking was worth it. These days, I would head to Ebay and locate a copy within seconds. While this would suit the time-poor me today, my teenage hunting by hand is the equivalent of kids being encouraged to ‘run around in the backyard’ instead of playing the computer.

As super-detectives, with our minds in the matrix and the answers at our fingertips, are we experiencing obscurity blues? Thanks to the Internet nothing is lost anymore, so can we take the same joy in discovering it? As the online bargain bin grows, perhaps our connection to art is becoming more depersonalised. As one of the 25, 000 Fans of 80’s claymation ‘Trapdoor’ I feel that nostalgia, like everything, has been commodified as another status symbol. It seems important to preserve my own relationship with the show, and distil the excitement from those faint technicolour memories. As a retro Poirot, perhaps I’ll take the long road, and wait until I stumble upon it on a dusty shelf. That’s StumbleUpon the old fashioned way.

As Video Hits aired its final episode last week, I asked myself – how will our children learn about sex? Primary school assemblies won’t be the same without a generation of tweens emulating Rhianna’s pelvic thrusts and singing Sex in the air I don’t care / I love the smell of it. How will young boys find black misogynists to aspire to, so they can learn about honeyz in the club and that it’s okay to wear sunglasses inside?

Advertising is about catching folks with their guard down, and every Saturday morning it was a massacre. The dowdy crowd, armed with pyjamas and cereal, were probed by strobes, sprayed with hot-synth and force fed Freudian imagery by a slick snake with a gold megaphone. Cameras spread the legs of feminism, milking an obsession with the female form – oiled like a lamb roll and tied up with bikini string.

I’d reminisce to 1989, a time when pop songs went for five minutes and singers like Madonna were decently dressed. One of my first sexual encounters is attributed to ‘Like A Prayer.’ For a ten year old, the song was like being allowed inside an adult dream. It was all so solemn and dramatic. There’s a sexual tension that permeates the track, from the suppressed gospel harmonies to the brooding organ. ‘Like a Prayer’ is the soundtrack for Catholics lost in their lust and little boys ready to add emotional layers like Lego.

Somewhere in my robust child psyche I processed the scenes of Madonna, wide of eye and heavy of bosom, kneeling before a wax black Christ. In between ‘Kokomo’ and ‘The Right Stuff,’ the song was a conceptual baptism, finding its power through sex as metaphor. The lyrics struck a duality between religious and sexual meaning, as one writer described it “a mix of the sacred and the profane.” Exploring a psycho-sexual relationship with a black Jesus figure strikes me as more outrageous than anything Madonna’s successors have done.

Two years later Prince would deliver ‘Cream.’ I was eleven at the time, an age where my friend would lie on top of me on my trampoline, and water damaged porn mags would turn up on bushwalks. As a music video, ‘Cream’ is European soft-core dinner theatre, at odds with today’s skittish editing and cold CGI backdrops. In what is typical of the era, the stage exhibits a live band seething with choreography. One of the most striking features is the use of guitar as phallus, Prince treating it as an extension of his body. In this diorama of the male Id, it’s a hedonists paradise where politics is dissolved in sweat. Skinny girls dance while a portly woman sings; men get on top as lasses go down; two Latino’s per Prince. In its defence, ‘Cream’ brings colour and life to eroticism, the carnal images in sync with the carnival guitar and parlour organ.

Girlfriends have said Prince used to terrify them. They couldn’t quite understand what he was. The chest hair, spidery legs and purple suits – for children he was a kind of fun scary clown; a beguiling villain, so charismatic you couldn’t help being drawn into his fluro orgy. Prince’s last number one would be lucky to survive today, the BPM’s too slow for radio or clubs. As a mood brushstroke it’s perfect – there’s a soft lensed shuffle that slinks into your subconscious like sensory sub-bass.

The same year, 1991, The Divinyls set Australia on fire with ‘I Touch Myself.’ I remember Hey Hey It’s Saturday banning the title, Molly Meldrum referring to it as “I touch…” In a bed of deceptively breezy soft-rock, Chrissie Amphlett slathered female masturbation in the nooks and crannies of the mainstream market. While Nick Cave may have topped her in shock value, he couldn’t match the feat of dragging such a controversial song to number one in conservative Australia. I remember mulling the song over in my head, imagining a woman’s fingers moving down to where a blank space was, like a section of a computer game not yet unlocked.

Recently my friend sent me a link to ‘Bombay’ by Spanish artist El Guincho. At the time I was freshly single and stable as a wet tissue. I watched the video, a cataclysmically evocative and sexually idiosyncratic tour de farce, depicting full frontal juxtapositions, psycho-sexual metaphors, porn-culture satires and a stylishly twisted summation of the sexual clichés media has punched into our subconscious.

A clean look at our dirty minds.

I remember high school games where you’d realise how easy it was to make things sexual. “I’m sucking my wet juice from this long, hard straw.” Porn talk comes so easily, it’s a currency that’s laced in our language like a magnetic strip. Beneath our defensively sophisticated façade we are carnally designed and lousy with hormones. This is something advertising exploits.

The fast food sign is red.
I am salivating.
I want to put things in my mouth.
A girl is near-naked.
Where I can buy the deodorant?

I watched ‘Bombay,’ groin buzzing and heart racing – anxious and titillated. The director had juxtaposed porn culture with the Indie aesthetic, dealing it a Michel Gondry / Wes Anderson dose of Pomo finesse. It was a bombastic mash. Porn, once VHS dodgy, had ridden the online wave to infiltrate our culture, happy to have its dark underbelly masked in ironic appreciation; while Indie, a crochet of gleamed nostalgia and cutesy aloofness, was yet to assert an overtly sexual side. ‘Bombay’ may have marked a retro-sexual revolution – half a century on and girls were once again ditching their vintage 50’s dresses for a 60’s mini.

While the results were stunning, I wasn’t able to enjoy it at the time. It just made me sad. I felt like the lame boy in the Pied Piper story, left behind as the gates closed on the magical kingdom. As an advertisement, ‘Bombay’ was flogging a hamburger to someone recovering from food poisoning. I was a relationship dropout, now being teased by an electro-relevant musician and his hipster-cool art clip, full of glamorous beauties that I couldn’t even speak to in fantasy French. A combination of Catholic guilt, rural prudishness, porn damage and over-sensitivity left me once again world-weary and defenceless, forced to absorb someone else’s idea about sex, out of context and alone.

There’s a Neil Hamburger joke:
Q. Why is Britney Spears so popular?
A. Because everybody’s horny and depressed.

During the zeroes, the commercial pop booty corps marched onwards, cocks and knockers at the ready, while Indie music retreated up into the clouds. Balladesses donned the flowing silks of British-folk, while Dylan-heads hid in flannies and beards, feisty as chamomile. The Indie genre can be defined by its apolitical lyricism, Pro Tools polish, pseudo-tribal obsession with animals and a regression to innocence via storybook nostalgia. Indie was a generational swing against the crassly anti-establishment 90’s and sexually provocative Alternatives like Hole, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Machine Gun Fellatio. Coupled with the post 9-11 climate being ‘too real,’ it seems logical for Gen-Y to escape to an idealised 80’s via 60’s dreamland. While commercial pop was a shotgun of fishing hooks, Indie was soft as river mud – dangerously low on visual or audio handholds.

This year there’s a been a run of provocative videos, suggesting that small-label songsters may be coming out of their closets. In Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ the camera pans up his bare body, intricately patterned with tribal paint. In Canadian band Stars ‘Changes’ a girl finds herself naked in an empty theatre, and after growing a tail, embarks on a feisty dance monologue. Amanda Palmer’s ferociously feminist ‘Map Of Tasmania’ dares girls not to shave their squished mittens, while JJJ Unearthed band San Cisco’s ‘Girls Do Cry’ is two minutes of lasses in lingerie nibbling Dinkum Dogs and wiggling their bums at the camera. (The footage doubles as an ad on the director’s lingerie company website.)

In 2010 Washington cut through the pack of Kate Bush-rangers to bring some ‘Madonna Monroe’ back to the Australian music video. In ‘Sunday Best’ she set hearts racing with a sassy appropriation of the iconic dance scene from Jean Luc Godard’s Bande’s A Part. In the French original, the routine is a metaphor for the dichotomy of youth, outwardly cool yet inwardly frenzied – each character fretting over what the other thinks of their body. Washington on the other hand is a model of extroversion, carrying herself (and being carried) with a confidence bordering on brash in the context of her peers.

I start shaking when you shake it / Holy shit, you sure can turn it on
Do you, do you, do you know / What’s in my head when I’m below you?
With lyrics as salacious as her video, Washington is part of a wave of artists defining a new sexuality – injecting it with a sense of style and playfulness. The legs are out, but they’re too busy dancing to be splayed around a pole. The performer is shown smiling – a friendly flag amidst the dazzle and grind. It’s a welcome reminder that looking hot can be fun; not just a self-important expression of power. The overblown starlets of Video Hits, just like the grimacing aggressors of porn, are rarely pictures of ease.

I once received a lap dance at a friends bucks night. It remains to this day one of the least sexy things I’ve done. As I sat there, frozen and bemused, watching the girl go through her paces, a familiarity came over me. I’d been in this situation before – on my couch at home eating pancakes, micro-seduced by a conveyer belt of divas. With the strip club addition of noxious perfume, I was reminded how far away from sex I really was.

Video Hits will leave behind a legacy of over compression. From the music, crushed into a hot, sharp nugget; to the lyrics, tightly packed with clichés, to the videos, shaved smooth and cold pressed of coarseness. The most compressed thing of all is the idea of sex – reduced to a series of thrusts and oral fixations – a lowest common denominator digested by adolescents. Between pop music, porn and religion they’re in for a cocktail of confusion it can take decades to sober from. Somewhere amidst the smoke and carnage of the raunch culture assault, we should, in the words of The Shamen, draw on Love Sex Intelligence, (coming on like a seventh sense) to remember we are authentically sensual beings, who shouldn’t have to suppress ourselves to off-set the corruption of others.

In 2002 I wrote a song called ‘Mcrock’ about the commercialisation of music. It included the lines:

Band names are brand names
Hit singles are radio jingles
Listen to my pitch
To scratch the advertising itch.

The rest is a list of sponsorship wordplays suggesting a reality where bands could be branded like sporting teams.

Limp Biscuit think Arnotts
Weezer Quit Australia
Lucksmiths think The Dicksmiths
Pink think Crayola

And so on. I’d just read The Sell In by Craig Matheson, a book about the commercial success of Australia’s alternate bands in the 90’s. It introduced me to the business side of music, and took some gloss off my idolised image of rock gods, painting them as real people, battling within an industry, existing long after the gig had finished.

I wrote ‘McRock’ to satisfy my clinical addiction to puns and as a response to the catchcry of bands Selling Out. It was a term born in the 90’s, with Gen-Xers revolting against the corporate glam of the 80’s. It most fittingly sums up the rags to riches story of Grunge, with Nirvana becoming so popular that designer boutiques were selling $300 flannel shirts. An irony so awkward it eventually proved fatal.

Since the 2000’s the term has become more ambiguous – disempowered through the parody of those who over-wielded it. This is coupled with a newfound empathy towards the hardships faced by the post-Napster musician. The criteria for selling out is an interesting sliding scale. While it’s most easily triggered when a band lease their music to a commercial or film, it can also mean accepting corporate gigs, signing to a major label or just playing any venue bigger than The Tote.

I remember an anecdote from the early 2000’s where David Bridie fans were outraged to hear one of his songs on an Australian TV commercial. In his defence he stated that the money he was paid allowed him to record an entire album. To his fans it was like letting the national flag touch the ground – he had sullied the sacredness and purity of his music, letting it be molested by the filthy paws of corporate enterprise.

There is always an assertion that music groups and companies are at opposite spectrums of the commercial world. Bands are denimed Gods while businesses are chinoed leeches. With ‘Mcrock’, I was suggesting that the line separating the two could be as thin as the money its printed on. In some ways, aren’t bands just small businesses with a trusted name and product to sell? I’m always bemused that the ABC aren’t allowed to promote corporate brands (or feature films), yet they can plug bands all they want.

At Uni my best mate Adam was a muso who despised the idea of ‘the business side of things.’ Just the idea of charging money for a gig gave him a headache. Most musicians start off writing songs in their bedrooms for spiritually organic reasons, but by the time you’re reading about them in the papers, they have usually crawled into bed with a subsidiary of the corporate world – the media machine. Everyone uses publicists, from Big Tobacco to Little Red.

In the mid 2000’s, Starbucks started Hear Music. It behaved like any other record label, but one with its own chain of coffeehouses to spin and stock their artists. This year Starbucks will release a Sonic Youth compilation, with tracks selected by celebrities such as Portia DeRossi and Michelle Williams. As Thurston Moore said in a Pitchfork interview “Starbucks is the new record store, right?” In 2008 Hear Music released Sia’s Some People Have Real Problems. Was this selling out or selling in? Perhaps Craig Mathieson should write a follow up about the rise of Indie, or should that be Die (Dependent music.)

It seems to me that Gen-Y are more comfortable with entrepreneurial musicians fraternising with the business world. A combination of social networking and reality TV has pulled back the curtains of the industry and made consumers less wary of the mechanisations. When Feist’s ‘1-2-3-4’ was featured in an Apple ad, the media seemed mostly excited for the positive flow-on for songwriter Sally Seltmann. Savvy advertisers have made the pill easier to swallow, enlisting designers to on-sell the Indie aesthetic so that the ads end up looking more like film-clips.

Compare Cabury’s original Favourites Ad from 1998 to the recent one featuring a soundtrack by Broken Social Scene.

VS

There seems to be more acknowledgement of musicians running a business and not necessarily sucking capitalist cock. This is coupled with a (worrying) acceptance of advertising culture, as if we’ve been bombarded for so long our brains have evolved (or devolved) to stop fighting it. Our current obsession is with ad craft, from Madmen to The Gruen Transfer. We’re not as cynical about being advertised to, but it had better be cool or funny.

As record labels tumble and bands learn to support themselves, income generated by commercials is not only a vital source of revenue but a valid form of airplay. We all know Jose Gonzales’ cover of The Knife’s ‘Heartbeat’ from the Bravia Bouncy Ball ad, but in Australia few have connected Melbourne band The Triangles’ ‘Applejack’ to The Jetstar Song. ‘Applejack’ has also been featured in a Spanish beer commercial, where it spent 14 weeks in the Spanish charts. Indie has been devoured by the corporate sector, with a vast array of ad soundtracks consisting of ukuleles, handclaps and Torrini-esque voices.

In the early zeroes, there was naivety about how much money musicians made. I remember being shocked to hear that while Sunset Studies had sold around 20, 000 units, most of the members of Augie March still had day jobs. I also heard that JJJ favourites Superheist were ridiculously in debt and Ammonia had quit the music business out of disgust for how poorly Eleventh Avenue had sold. As a sheltered suburban boy I couldn’t fathom it – didn’t being played on JJJ mean you were rolling in it?

I can safely say that this isn’t the case. After ten years of trying to live off what I do, I never fail to be amazed at how little money there is to be made in music. Last year I embarked on a 21-date national tour with a song on high rotation, national profile and highly regarded supports The Boat People. I sold out Brisbane, Melbourne and Hobart, had 200 payers in Sydney and Perth and still managed to lose several thousand dollars. Publicist, airfares, accommodation, van hire, petrol, posters, advertising, booking agents and Pad Thai’s added up like Greece’s economy. (And that’s not to mention Shock going bankrupt last year, erasing the royalties of 3000 single sales.) I should have stuck with social work.

Last year I was offered a suitcase full of Cash (rare Johnny Cash 7-inches) by Metlink to write and perform in an ad promoting their ‘online tools.’ My initial reaction was trepidation. My indie-cred was everything to me, and I’d made a career painting myself as an independent misfit with grandparents for a record company. I went ahead, largely due to my ethical approval of the company and the poetic symmetry of promoting a public transport based album. Playing irony as a get out of jail free card I wrote a parody of my own song, Northcote (So Hungover). It might have been more effective if the video hadn’t come out before the original. To quote Humphrey B Flaubert I was paid “fairly close to the amount that Radiohead spends on buying friends” and used it to fund the real Northcote video. Of the 41 YouTube comments for Metlink only two mention selling out. “Man, he sucks now, his old stuff was awesome. Sellout corporate whore” is countered with “starving for your art is so 1800s. Cut a hipster some slack. Fat doesn’t give away skinny jeans for free.”

As an independent (or signed artist) to be given a large sum of money that you don’t have to pay back is a gold chariot on struggle street. Mike Edwards, front man of 90’s band Jesus Jones, wrote an article on selling out for the Guardian. He says: “like other teens, when I was younger I formed a notion about the purity of art versus payment for art (this correlates inversely with the number of 15-year-olds paying mortgages) that made it an Offence In Rock to accept an honest month’s pay for an honest three minutes’ work. Even then there seemed to be some contradiction between punk ideology and the Great Rock’n’ Roll Swindle.”

Sometimes the problem is the fans themselves. In our secular society music is religion and musicians its deities. Bands are placed on sky-high pedestals and then cursed with an almost sexual fervour when they fall. The fan / musician bond can be as unhealthy as any one-sided relationship. The band is compacted into a status symbol and worn as a personality patch. Songs become hymns, holding a lifetime’s joy and pain in their peaks and valleys. When a band starts out the dynamic is like the movie Misery. The fan wants to keep one of their legs broken so they can have them all to themselves. When the band have the audacity to become successful and escape the fan becomes a cranky martyr, moping around like a cockney mother who’s children have abandoned her.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the security fence. Musicians must be living the dream, making lots of money, sleeping with groupies, running around fields in music videos that they don’t have to pay for, right? Under this idealised payload the band are entitled to zero exemptions. No crying poor. No gigoloing their songs out to commercials – punishable by street-cred death. While the mechanical ownership lies with the songwriter, the spiritual ownership is split between thousands of consumers, judgemental as anything and representing themselves in the court of hard knocks.

The offending band’s spiritual assets will be frozen, their airbrushed image forced to sit in a court of emotional law, copping a self-righteous spray from the prosecuting fan, a furious torrent of ash, beer, snacks and tears gushing like stormwater – years of daily frustrations projectile vomiting on the offending set of All-stars. A jumbled alphabet soup of pop culture fridge magnets expressing a shakespearean cocktail of lust, jealousy, class-hatred and self-loathing. Like a child yelling at a cheating Dad. I BELIEVED in you! I NEEDED this!

They are some of the most brutal lessons in life:

People are not gods.
Everything comes back to money.

As one frontman I spoke to said “Sell out? We wish.” If any publicity is good publicity then perhaps any airplay is good airplay. As we plug ourselves further into the sold-out Internet, the line between single and jingle, band and brand continues to blur. I foresee a future where bands list themselves on the stock market. Finally, fans can go full circle and stake financial shares in their acts. Gigs become general meetings where they can yell their criticisms directly to the tight-pants CEO.

To quote the closing lines of ‘McRock’:

PJ Harvey World Travel.
Taco Belle & Sebastion
Midnight Oil of Olay
And I couldn’t think of one for Eminem.

As opposed to being a prize, male virginity is usually seen as an affliction – something a boy should lose as soon as possible so he can get on with becoming a stud. If he holds onto it for too long then he becomes dorky and weird, like the 40 Year Old Virgin. A girl on the other hand should cherish hers for as long as possible to remain pure. So, who are guys supposed to be losing their virginity to? Their hands? A Natalie Portman beanbag? These double standards are hopelessly out of date; surely it’s time views were refreshed and boys were coaxed into the conversation.

I was 17 when I found my non-virginity. Thankfully, it was with someone I loved. After one too many sessions of dry humping, under the full moon of rampaging hormones I wrote a letter to my girlfriend suggesting we go all the way…to Hobart. We planned the trip south to see Silverchair and stay overnight in a hotel. I even asked her father’s permission to go. I was Christian at the time but happy to bend my own rules. It was thoughtfully planned and full of mutual respect and tenderness – valuable qualities to carry into intimacy.

The language around virginity has always been blatantly patriarchal. Even the word vagina has shifty origins – taken from the latin term meaning “sheath for a sword.” Woman is conquered by the man who claims her virginity as a trophy. This construct is archaic and spaz. The First Time is just as intimidating for both sexes. I know it scared the shit out of me.

Here’s an idea for a sex education class: Tactfully explain to boys how temperamental the penis is, and the irony of getting 101 unwanted erections on the bus, but not one when faced with your gorgeous girlfriend naked in a bed. Not to mention the rubber chicken tango with the condom and mental fire fight to stop yourself from coming. My first time was like showering in a raincoat while trying to assemble Ikea furniture. I suffered months of angst over my lack of control and developed a big ol’ man-failure complex (and an appreciation of Radiohead.)

The myth of a girl preferring a boy more sexually experienced and in control wasn’t the case with myself or those in my friendship group. It was a plunge taken together, hand-in-hand with our partners. I understand this isn’t always the case, and sex is sometimes entered into under dodgy conditions. The first impression is so vital, and botching it up can create all kinds of negative cycles. Surely the value of a boys V-Plates is in the education he receives on both the physical and emotional ramifications of sex and the responsibilities he must face. Most of this can be found in American Pie 3. Maybe one day Julia Gillard can tell men their virginity is a precious gift. After all, the combo of politicians and sex is the greatest contraceptive of all.

My first memory of music is listening to Popcorn by Hot Butter. I’m standing beside Nan and Pop’s ‘Stereo Sonic’ entertainment deck with black sponge headphones wrapped around my noggin. I load a cassette into the deck and press down on the chunky metallic button. The oceanic tape hiss fills with a sci-fi whine, followed by a warbly synth waddle of baroque alien ducks and the novelty combustion of a robotic, whistle-ready melody.

I sit mesmerised, staring at a yellow and brown swirl print cushion. These sounds are colour to a blind man. An aurora to a caveman. A Christmas and birthday imagination sandwich. Cerebral sorcery that fits like a tshirt and springs like a trampoline. Music was shaking hands and asking to be my friend.

The song continues, the pad chord bed hitting the profound F#m. The vibrations enter my ears like molten fireworks then vapourise, leaving puffs of awe. Popcorn, at once silly and profound, is a Moog minstrel with a weeping heart. The jaunty lead tickles my chin while the broody rhythm of the bridge places a steady hand on my chest. The song is trying to tell me something.

At 1:08, something incredible occurs. The carriage of the song slips off its rails and sails into the air, gliding on a glitteringly gorgeous magic carpet of harpsichord and arpeggiated minor chords. The chords are broken down to their base notes and knitted back together to form a musical spine which flexes and flickers, like the tail of an electric dragon. The sonic flux swings and snakes, mirroring the waves and mountain tops of a stereo equaliser. The luck dragon cycles its way through the dazzling axis of my mind. Lava coated flowers burn red, blue then yellow. My LCD creature zips and darts, spelling mathematical shapes before exploding into rainbows and lightning rods.

After this uplifting bridge the song breaks down into the tribal simplicity of tom drum and tambourine. An anxious two-note timer synth creeps in, adding a sense of urgency. Each layer of instrumentation is cleared, leaving only the ticking of a laser clock, soon blotted out by the squelch of Martian flatulence. It is at once comical and menacing. The sound of a spaceman being obliterated in a Commodore 64 game.

I take off the headphones and gaze at the rows of tapes and photo frames, my head slowly morphing back into shape like ear plug foam. What is this “music?” This kaleidoscope of sounds. I am caught hook, line and syncopation.

My second memory of music is listening to ‘I just called to say I love you’ by Stevie Wonder. For this six year old, the song is trumped by the micro-single which opens the tape. The ‘XDR Test Toneburst’ that sits at the beginning of cassette albums from the era. An audio distress flare sounding out the basic spectrum of tones from sub bass to high treble. An arpeggiated sonic treat for my brain to decode.

The song plays. I am drawn to the warmth of the synths, blending sweetly with the early 80’s compression and Wonders rich voice. Listening back, I detect lightly arpeggiated notes in the mix, adding a mystical, tinkling ambience – crystal rain on glass. The song has a lightweight of melancholy I am drawn to, and while my emotional palette is primitive, my synaesthesiac instincts associate the thick pad of the minor chords with a quiet internal warmth, as my heart increases the blood flow around my body, sending a rainstorm of thoughtfulness to my tummy.

Being a child of the 80’s, it’s little wonder my earliest memories of music are mostly synthesiser based. A glance at the children’s programming of the time shows cult classics such as Ulysses and Mysterious Cities of Gold using the kind of synth-heavy soundtracks that Gary Numan could take back to his laser pyramid. I recently rewatched Mysterious Cities of Gold and found to my delight that not only had the animation aged gracefully, but the soundtrack was a full bodied tremolo dreamscape.

One of my first cinema memories was the opening credits to The NeverEnding Story, featuring the title track playing while the camera tracked over dreamy clouds. While the single already contained brilliant melodic structure and a rousing chorus, my brain was excited by the arpeggiated bed, sublimely oscillating in the background like robo piano roll. Coupled with the epic adventure of the film, The NeverEnding Story made me want to melt from happiness and sadness all at once. Add the prettiness of the childlike empress, the savagery of the wolf and ARTAX! and you have an original sex and death soundtrack with training wheels.

A few years later, in 1990, I would accidentally bump into the greatest arpeggiated synth sequence of all time. The song was called Infinity by the UK artist Guru Josh. The song revolved around a melody played on saxophone utilising a stirring F-C-G chord sequence similar to that found in Manic Street Preachers ‘If You Tolerate This’, Live’s ‘Lightning Crashes’ and Scatman John’s ‘Scatman’.

Behind the sax are heavenly orchestral pad synths punctuated by a subtle oscillation of notes, brilliantly complimenting the chord sequence but not yet fanning all the hues to its peacock tail. It’s an ambitiously anthemic and acutely ambient opening, especially when listened to through earnest young ears.

The verses comprise of Guru Josh staking audacious claim to the entire decade “1990’s – time for the guru” backed by some industrial Terminator-esque effects and scattershot house beats. A looming three note bass line keeps the track in check while Guru Josh scats some ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ landing somewhere between Max Headroom, Kraftwerk and David Koresh.

At the two minute mark of the extended mix we are treated to a twenty second burst of what I have, for most of my life, accepted to be the greatest section of music ever recorded. The chorus chords are reprised with an arpeggiated lead running brightly over the top. The stirring ambience of angelic electro wash, flush with a dramatic major to minor chord change are punctuated with a constellation of digital train tracks whose rise and fall evoke the exotic quasars of my spatial awareness. It’s like a squadron of effervescent sprites line my kinetic pathways, waving brilliant sonic pom poms as I run a victory lap around my swirling fantasia – the music shining a neon blacklight on the dream bursts of my mind’s eye – a cross between the last rainbow level in Mario Kart, the time travel scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey and a Flaming Lips concert.

The reverb on the mix evokes an underwater dream – the audio equivalent of bubbles bursting as they rush to the surface. It is not dissimilar to Caribou’s ‘Sun’ at the 3:40 mark, from a house album he wanted to sound organically underwater. ‘Infinity’ creates a magic speedway inside my imagination where natural and synthetic are one. Circuits become veins and stars turn to pixels. I am the king of colours – flying through a psychedelic utopia, smelling the freshness and licking tears from my lips.

For a period of my teenage years, this song was my drug. I would slip on the earphones, press play on my walkman and escape. I lived for the arpeggiated section, and thankfully, after an astoundingly lengthy (2:05!) piano solo, ‘Infinity’ offers a sixty second outro of the enchanting sequence, spiralling skywards before dipping and dissipating into a mushroom cloud of ambience.

I was finding my own non-druggy relationship between electronic dance music and hallucinating. During car trips, I’d disappear into deep trances, triggering the stained glass screensaver of my mind. In Year Ten I fully explored this concept with a short film I wrote called ‘Infinity.’ The story revolved around a D.J. who believed that if you took the live speaker wires and inserted them directly into the brain, while high on a certain drug, you could physically transform and “become the song.” (It was not long after ‘Lawnmower Man’ where the protagonist became pure energy via virtual reality). In the final scene two investigators burst into the DJ’s compound (bed-sit) to find he has been successful with his experiment. On his bed burns the infinity symbol, rendered in blue flames.

What I was expressing was my deep desire to completely connect with electronic songs like Popcorn, The NeverEnding Story and Infinity. I wanted to trip as hard as I could, powered by my imagination and a box of Nerds. Like in the book Gillian Rubenstein’s ‘Space Demons’ where the characters are trapped inside a video game, I wanted to be sucked inside these songs – able to fly along the sonic dimension they existed within. I could hear and see music, I wanted to be able to touch, taste and smell it as well. I don’t think many other people my age wanted to smell anything to do with Guru Josh. He had a goatee and always looked sweaty. (I later discovered he fell out of favour after publicly supporting Thatcherism).

My love of arpeggiated synths continues to this day, and I’ve been drawn to it in recent alt-rock tracks such as Grandaddy’s ‘The Crystal Lake’, Wilco’s ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’ and the music of Ratatat. I’ve used it on one of my own songs ‘For The Love I Have For You’, to moderate success, but have resisted the urge to buy my own keyboard. I fear that once I find the arpeggiation settings and put on the cans, I’ll swim down a sonic wormhole of no return.

Illustrations by Leigh Rigozzi.

The first cut is the deepest, and Radiohead’s Creep cut me in a big way. It was one of my first experiences of a rock band. I watched the film clip, mesmerised. The picked tremolo notes rang like a macabre musical box while the chorus cut through like a chainsaw. Who were these pale, effeminate men, slinging and scrunching their way through such a pretty tune? In the stage lights Thom Yorke looked alien. His face contorted in ecstasy and angst. Johnny Greenwood hid behind a wall of noise and fringe, revving his guitar like a lawnmower.

When asked about Creep in 1993, Yorke said, “I have a real problem being a man in the ’90s. Any man with any sensitivity or conscience toward the opposite sex would have a problem. To actually assert yourself in a masculine way without looking like you’re in a hard-rock band is a very difficult thing to do.”

Until then my poster boy for masculinity had been Lenny Kravitz, strutting his way through 70’s pastiche glam. Radiohead sat brooding in the corner of the charts party, showing how vulnerable rock could be. No more Party Uncle, this was Arty Dad sitting me down with a bag of minor chords and telling me the birds and bees of sexual emotions. My world was ready for the juxtaposition of self-loathing in popular song. John Lennon had sung I’m a loser, Henry Rollins I’m a liar and Dennis Leary I’m an Asshole but they were all delivered behind a front-line of irony. Thom Yorke was compellingly exposed. An anti-hero who didn’t ask you to believe in him. His karaoke-slaying falsetto and crooked-eye weirdness gave the impression of a long suffering schoolboy – a life spent reading in shady rooms, sticky with illness, never getting enough sun.

Creep was a song for a generation of boys lusting clumsily through the schoolyard of life. Yorke said: “It is one of the things I’m always trying: To assert a sexual persona and on the other hand trying desperately to negate it.” Repressed sexuality was something that would define my school years. On one hand I was trying to be nice and Christian, and on the other I was feverish with hormones, keeping a diary of which girls had looked at me that day and taking too many baths.

Drying up in conversation, you will be the one who cannot talk
All your insides fall to pieces, you just sit there wishing you could still make love

When I first heard this lyric I nearly cried with embarrassment. Any closer to the bone and I’d have a heart attack. When asked what inspired the songs on The Bends Thom Yorke replied “Impotence.” While he was probably referring to a more general feeling of powerlessness, I clung to the word like a life raft. I’d just spent a bleak Australia Day home alone not having sex with my girlfriend. My Oasis poster wasn’t helping. I could hear Noel and Liam dissing me, back with another one of their cock-rocking bleats. The Bends was audio balm – gentle medicine for my collapsed soul. Someone felt as sad as I did.

* * *

Kid A is my favourite Radiohead album, and in my opinion the last musical masterpiece. I remember bringing it home in second year Uni – my flatmate Adam and I turned off all the lights and lay on the lounge-room floor, swimming in sound. A few days later I was home by myself listening to the vocal crescendo of ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack.’ The CD skipped, causing Thom Yorke to hold the note indefinitely. Perfectly.

I’ll see you in the next liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…

I stared at the stereo in disbelief. It was bizarre and beautiful. A moment created just for me.

I remember Triple J’s Morning Show first playing my favourite track The National Anthem.
“It’s a long way from Creep isn’t it?” Said Francis Leach, with a sense of respect and trepidation, as if he still wasn’t sure which camp he belonged to. The disc dropped like a buzz saw, cleaving the world in two like great art. There was no sort-of liking Kid A, you were either saluting their inventiveness or mourning the lack of guitar songs. On writing the album Thom Yorke said he’d “completely had it with melody” and just wanted rhythm. He liked the idea of his voice being used an instrument rather than having a leading role.

The National Anthem is menace and finesse. Ominous and tough. Haunted and defiant. Entrancingly simple and deftly layered. It’s strut-prog drone-funk that flutters the subconscious and churns the stomach like butter.

Death jazz.

At 0:01 we hear an electro glitch, the delay of a switch – the mother ship of malevolence warms her valves. The bass lays cables of dark fuzz, the stunningly primitive three note loop lurking down the scale. (Yorke wrote the riff when he was 16). The cymbal smashes in like white sun on ice, leading a galloping drum pattern, swinging and bowling like an eight legged kinetic road horse.

At 0:22 the cymbal is robbed on the first bar – delectable editing from Nigel Godrich. The percussion jumps a ravine before picking up on the fifth. It’s dropouts like these that add funk to the fury. At 0:54 there’s lashings of ride cymbal smacking. Beneath it synth lasers spiral and howl like remote space stations shooting digital comets into the lunar abyss. Snippets of ghostly brass warp and warble. The song paces back and forth like a horseman.

When I listen to The National Anthem on public transport, I feel tough and fucked up at the same time. It’s the soundtrack for my loner superiority. If I were a professional wrestler it would be my themesong. I’d be called The Ultimate Worrier. My signature move would be The Schitz. I’d wriggle my limbs uncontrollably, psyching out my opponent.

Synths and cymbals stop. Vocal begins.

Everyone (bassbassbassbass-bassbassbass)
Everyone around here (kickety-snarity-kickety-snarity)
Everyone is so (smasssshhhhhhhhhhh) near
and so alone.

Thom Yorke’s voice has a metallic echo on it – half robot / half ghost. We are treated to a Theremin trail and the wack-tableaux of a child’s la la la. It’s an eerie nod to the patronising monotony of city living. The lobotomy of misspent intelligence. The kid in the back seat of the car, young and free, poking his tongue out as your blood boils.

Everyone / Everyone is so near / Everyone is ? fear / It’s all a lie / It’s all a lie.

There is no song more audacious. From it’s very title it runs a dark claw beneath the stiff upper lip of modern day Britannia. It’s the Kraut-rock opera for a traffic jam, a pummelling hymn for those encased in the metal coffin of capitalism. The spiritually constipated. The Ok Commuters. It’s an unromanticised, unapologetic, undiluted musical army barnstorming the restrained recesses of popular music and turning over tables like Jesus in a temple. Charlatans! Hypocrites! It cries. Your pomposity and saccharinity has stagnated. Where’s the show don’t tell?

At 2:38 horns become weapons. Radiohead show us what blood and guts sounds like. The microscopic screech of a life half-lived. Amplified. Contorted. Mutated beyond human shape. Alarm wails for the professionally world-weary. Rails buckle under artificial heat. Trains of thought rattle and tip. Dreams lay crushed in stagnant ambulances. Unapproachable wounds. The blunt reality of our unpublishable selves.

Nick Drake sang I am the parasite of this town, while Trent Reznor wrote You could have it all / my empire of dirt. REM’s Everybody Hurts film clip features human traffic stepping out of their cars and moving on. The closing three minutes of The National Anthem is a furnace of sonic distress. A brassy black hole where sentiments melt down to their base elements and erupt with backlogged, unresolved emotion.

It’s all a lie.
It’s all a lie.

At 3:46 there is respite. The song stops to breathe, like a crazed man tired from self-rumpus. Voice and trumpet are one. Blood flows. Traffic moves. At 4:03 a string is tightened. Nerves pull taut. At 4:08, a death scene. A lone trumpet speeds out of control. A poisoned wind-nymph spiralling through death throes. It’s musically graphic. The sound paints a thousand pictures.

The horns are wonderfully ugly, like the creatures in Pan’s Labyrinth, there is a labour of love in their ghoulish design. They bleat like sheep, wail like children, harrumph like Roald Dahl characters, zigzag like autistic etch-a-sketch, compete like sperm, jostle like chimps and clog up the void like orchestral off-cuts. As with an audio Jackson Pollock, strips of colour have been thrown on the canvas with such precision of vision that the final mix, as messy as sin, convinces the audience it is as much and as little as it needs to be.

It’s busy.

Like life.

By 5:00 the song’s been going for dog days. No more ABAB. This is alphabet soup. I want to cry. Sympathy for the demons. The subconscious hits and conscious misses. A booklet of bruises. At 5:15 the song runs out of steam. In the studio Johnny Greenwood orders the players to choose a random note, waving his stick like a wizard. “Just blow. Just blow, just blow, just blow.” There are two such ghastly blasts. The sword is driven into the dragon. Swirls. A chilling vocal sample. Man caught in limbo. Falling awake.

Delay is sped up and sped down – the Godrich signature.

Finally, there is end.

The National Anthem is compelling, disturbing, offensive and exciting. An anthem that hammers the dimensions. Each play, a moment in history. A personal revolution.

* * *

To off-set their overblown presence, Radiohead are often met with a teenage aloofness. “I kind of stopped bothering with them.” They dwell in their own chamber – off the mainstream radar but alternatively popular beyond scale. I like to think of them as The Beatles of my time. Too often they are the round peg for my holy soul.

Illustrations by Leigh Rigozzi.

This took place in my home state of Tasmania, the birthplace of what is regarded by some historians as the first successful modern-day genocide of Indigenous people. After British colonisation in 1803, a combination of disease and violence wiped out the Palawa population of between 2 to 8,000, leaving the last remaining Aborigine, a woman named Truganini, in 1876. Debate continues to this day over who or what was responsible. In school we were told how the Tasmanian Aborigines had died out, but it was not explained how. We were familiar with Truganini and there was a street near my house named after her. Throughout my public schooling I was never offered any definitive teachings about Aboriginal people or their culture. This lay the foundations for a disconnected and bewildered relationship.

Sometime last year my brain began to trip on a conundrum that I couldn’t reconcile. Had I ever actually spoken to an Aboriginal person? I wasn’t counting the encounters outside Safeway in Collingwood, where hard-eyed women asked me for money. Once a chirpy, silver-bearded brother in a beanie enquired about the guitar I was carrying. My heart sped and I clumsily told him the brand before hurrying off, feeling awkward and suburban and lame with guilt.

Last year I watched Samson and Delilah. It crushed me with its quiet intensity. It was a good pain, the medium of film allowing me to grieve for the personal rather than the political. It felt better than the hotshots of confusion I get from news reports. A few days later I had an anxiety dream where two Aboriginal boys were chasing me down an alley, trying to steal my wallet. I woke up with a funny and awful feeling. Was my subconscious being racist?

In the ‘80s my hometown of Burnie in Tasmania was a cultural backwater with the token Chinese restaurant and one Asian student per school representing the rest of the world. There were certainly no Aboriginal people to be seen. Michael Mansell, a controversial Aboriginal activist in Tasmania, was always popping up on TV. While he looked white he claimed to be part Palawa on his mother’s side. My dear nan would shout him down every time. “Look at his blue eyes – he’s not even one bit Aboriginal.” My family didn’t seemed concerned about their requests for land rights. They were just being a nuisance.

Last year I went to Alice Springs for the first time. Alice Springs is a flat country town bordered by dramatic red dunes. Strolling out from my backpackers’, I was surprised to see a whole cluster of Indigenous youth hanging out at the bus stop. I was even more surprised by my own reaction. Fear. The town seemed heavily segregated, with white families going about their business while blackfellas sat silently on the fringes, laden with spirits. Perhaps the writer in me was filling in the gaps, but they seemed profoundly sad. At a grassy park an Aboriginal family was settling in and I studied their body language. The elders sat gracefully while their children buzzed about, awaiting instruction. Two police came clopping by on horses and I felt a twist in my chest. In some ways, we are a horrible country.

Later that night I was walking home from an exhibition and got lost. I began wandering the suburban backstreets in my flimsy singlet and Melbourne haircut. My friends’ warnings about Aboriginal gangs rang in my ears and I panicked. As each Jeep drove past I imagined it slowing and men with bats getting out. I began to lightly jog until I saw a group of Indigenous men yelling in the distance. I crossed the road and hoped I was close enough to the city to be considered safe. They passed me by and I was again left feeling sheepish and manipulated. I was just like the mainstream people I judge – media-schooled and defensive.

I was eating lunch recently in front of a story about Aborigines on the ABC. It made a point of how opposite their way of thinking is to the rest of the country. They are a community-focussed people, where food and possessions are shared and every action is for the good of the tribe. They are thoughtful and slow to talk, spending most of their time in reflective silence. They make very little eye contact, and consider it overly assertive. They have a blood-deep connection with the land and see themselves as guests who are obliged to care for it rather than own it. They are a sweet and gentle people with a playful sense of humour from whom we could learn so much, if only there were a space for it. It is a damaged friendship we have with the Indigenous people. We are unable to make peace with ourselves for the past, frozen in a limbo of frustrated guilt.

There was such promise when Kevin Rudd apologised but since then the conversation has stalled, like a couple after a bitter fight. My generation seems trapped in a muzzle of political correctness, assuming there’s nothing offensive about silence. I’ve been trying to lighten the mood in my recent comedy gigs by challenging myself and the audience to find some much needed humour in the situation. I compare Sorry Day to a sharehouse meeting. “I’m surprised we didn’t just write them a note, passive aggressive style, with a sky-writing bi-plane: SORRY WE DRANK ALL THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS!”

In this multicultural society, much of our attention seems focussed on welcoming refugees and a sense of ‘new beginnings’. Paul Kelly sang ‘from little things big things grow,’ yet our Indigenous population seem stuck in an interminable ‘middle’ unable to find a resolution or a glimmer of hope. It’s been 20 years since Yothu Yindi cracked the mainstream with “Treaty” and I watch the Rage conveyer belt, wishing they could return. It showed Aboriginal people standing tall and proud – at play, confident and youthful. This is how I want them to be seen, not always in bleak documentaries and reports. I still think of that girl in the yellow dress. If only she’d stayed in school long enough, who knows, perhaps we could have been friends.

I’m annoyed by how little empathy there is toward mental illness. Despite a solid advertising campaign during the 90’s (Jimmy’s got depression, can I catch it?) and being told that 1 in 5 Australians suffer a mental disorder, we’re still happily recycling the issue in the too hard basket. This lack of awareness is reflected in parliament where there are frequent calls for the Government to allocate as much funding to mental health as it does physical. In 2008-2009, there were 12.3 million scripts written for antidepressants, an increase of 46% in 12 years. Yet based on my statistics, only 10% of these people talk about it freely. There is still big time stigma attached to even low-level disorders like anxiety. Mental illness = fail.

Mental illness is too easily associated with being a loser. How quickly we forget those who wrangled fragile minds to succeed as artists: Russell Brand, Kurt Cobain, Ray Davies, Stephen Fry, Bill Oddie, Sinead Oconnor, Axl Rose, (all bi-polar). Syd Barret, Daniel Johnston, Brian Wilson (schizophrenia). Woody Allen, Jim Carrey, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, J.K. Rowling, Sarah Silverman, Jeff Tweedy not to mention our own Andrew Hansen, Natalie Imbruglia and Heath Ledger (depression). One listing took me by complete surprise. As a teenager, how much better to be handed a pamphlet about depression with Beyonce on the front than a grim stock photo of a dude on a park bench. Mental illness needs better publicity and cooler public faces, even if they are obnoxious rock stars like Anton Newcombe.

I grew up watching my Mother suffer schizophrenia. While for a large part it was tragic and disturbing, when I think about what I’d ‘thank god’ for, I am reminded that Mum also possesses a madcap sense of humour and appreciation for the soft-hearted silliness of life. She once gave me a rare insight into her ‘voices.’ She was paranoid Mick Jagger was coming to get her and was communicating with Mozart to help, but he’d said he was too far back in time to be of any assistance. I found it delightful. Even the maddest of worlds has its own sense of logic. In the same way we respect the customs of other cultures, we too should respect the integrity of those who see our world through a fractured kaleidoscope.

Anyone talking to themselves on public transport (and not in possession of a hands free kit), usually becomes my favourite. I’ve always felt oddly comfortable around the mentally ill. Once you get over the instinctual fear of the unknown, you can appreciate the honesty of their features, childlike lack of self consciousness, and their captivating, often amusing quirks. I find those who have been broken by life pure and fearless, and there is a space in my heart that weeps for their opened minds. As the Jeffrey Lewis album title says It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through. I wonder if there is an element of the divine in their self-conversation.

“Will you follow me down?” Newcombe sings on Thank God For Mental Illness. We would all do well to follow our loved ones down the rabbit hole of psychological injury. We might appreciate that the line between creative genius and self-destruction is whisper thin. Once we overcome our fears through patience and understanding, we can celebrate this truly brave struggle against these common and treatable conditions.

Australia has a love/hate relationship with comedians. In one sense we are genuinely impressed by those who dare walk beneath the scorching sun of judgement to elicit laughter from a shady audience. Too often though I cop a tone of resentment and disrespect. In December, a major festival booked Tom Gleeson as a headliner and wrote on their website: “Love him or hate him, you would have laughed at least once.” This for one of Australia’s most acclaimed comics. While we worship musicians for their ability to operate an instrument, a skill most people don’t possess, comic ability seems superfluous when everyone is funny around their friends. Watching the audience for Sam Simmons, I note a group of young boys yelling out nonsense in a bid to dissuade this new threat to their laugh pack. The culture of heckling has always perplexed me, as if trying to amuse a group of strangers isn’t difficult enough.

I’ve died a successful stage death a number of times. The hot lights drill me like interrogation beams. My mouth dries and the microphone feeds back like an alarm. Inside, trains of thought derail and nervous systems short-out. Worst of all is the wall of silence which has never been so deafening, as the faceless audience sit in protest against my punchlines. Nothing compares to the walk of shame for the bombed-out comedian. Backstage you stew in a fog of shit, everyone making a special effort not to talk to you lest they catch it. Your insides are awash with self-loathing, the sediment of adolescence brought painfully to the surface. Muso’s might be ignored and actors reviewed poorly, but nothing compares to the blunt stab of not being funny.

There’s a cliché that comedians are depressive off-stage, which bemuses people. It makes sense to me. To write stand-up you need a hyper-aware mind, constantly observing society and drawing parallels and juxtapositions. As most creatives will attest, this crafty brain is prone to backfire and turn inwards, launching scathing attacks on your self-esteem. Unlike other artists who have a sense of humour to fall back on, comedians can find theirs tapped dry. For someone who mines ones own life for material, it’s little wonder that a feeling of sheer emptiness takes over on darker days. A lack of humour means you start taking yourself too seriously and this is the bacteria from which depression breeds. Learning to build up a thick skin while replenishing your stocks of self is a trial and error period that lasts years and takes true grit.

Why would we do it? For the warm shot of endorphins and adrenalin that a roomful of laughter brings. No sooner does it subside than we work towards the next affirmation fix. It’s a jaunty meditation, the brain and mouth synchronised, tossing up the ball of an idea and slam-dunking the punchline. I see stand-up as binge communicating. A series of one-sided conversations you’ve had a chance to prepare earlier. It’s a liberating walk along the precipice between brilliance and disaster.

It is – Extreme Therapy.

As funny as it sounds, I don’t think we take comedians seriously enough. This attitude is reflected in the media, which struggles to critique it appropriately, making it difficult for artists to hone their skills. There are no comedy specific arts grants and apart from the Gala, it’s near impossible to find straight stand-up on TV anymore. I’d like to feel proud to be a comedian, but how can I be self-deprecating at the same time? I guess you can’t have your cream pie and wear it too.

Today, Cool is a homogenised pop culture buzzword used by the West to attribute social power. Humans are tribal by nature. In caveman times tribes became powerful by carrying the best clubs. Now, young people become powerful by attending the best clubs. Cool is a superficial class divide, based on popularity rather than material wealth. Instead of the upper and lower classes, there are the cool and the uncool. Ironically, while Cool appears to transcend money concerns, it is more often than not a direct descendent of economic status. Cool is a commodity.

When I was in High School the popular kids all had the same Air Jordan shoes and Billabong jackets. These items were expensive and carried with them social capital. In College, the hipper members of my group were skaters, graphic designers and musicians. They wore designer cargos, used high range computers and instruments (double garage rock) and took overseas trips. They were well groomed and relaxed, often due to the cannabis they could afford. Their carefree ‘bohemian’ attitude could be directly attributed to a financially sound home environment. Cultivating your own artistic profile takes time. Time is a luxury that money affords. Poorer kids tend to be too busy struggling with home stress and working to check in with the latest fashions and gadgets. (But who wants to peak at high school?)

In recent times, the Hipster movement has become the face of modern Cool, stirring up an unprecedented level of venom and reawakening class divides. For many, the images and attitudes portrayed in Vice Magazine of young thin people dressing ironically and making out in bathtubs pokes at old school wounds. Unlike the Punks, Indies and Emos that came before them, Hipsters have embraced irony as their chief political code. The worshipping of pop trash icons, coupled with a nihilistic celebration of porn culture is so pseudo-anti-faux that it cancels itself in. Their self-appointment at the top of social food chain is felt by many as an attack. In caveman times, such a threat to our territory would have had us bellowing war cries. Today, we type “douchebag” in capitals.

In the online feedback to my satire song ‘Northcote (So Hungover)’, the target was identified as “private school inner-eastern suburb white boy wankers who haven’t left home yet.” The common thread of resentment stemmed from an economic class debate, with the blue collar attacking the ‘trust fund’ art students, reflecting Australia’s working class roots and distrust of intellectualism. One commenter sent me an elaborate ‘Hipsters vs Bogans’ maths equation. It showed that while Hipsters make less money than their trade working counterparts ($25K vs $75K) they invest more of their income in gaining social capital (Fashion, music gear, socialising. 67% vs 33%). Bogans spend their money on cars, mortgages and families and are generally time-poorer than Hipsters, a concession they resent.

While Cool may have evolved organically from the black Jazz scene, it is now part of the Honda Jazz scene. It has for so long been exploited as a social currency; forcing youth to play off against each other, that it’s wise to take it with a grain of organic sea salt. Perhaps mankind’s desire for Cool has existed since caveman times, where an ignorance about the latest trends in cavewear prompted the saying ‘have you been living under a rock?’

Day 1 – We all know the law of being asked not to do something, suddenly it’s all your brain can muster. My first challenge came during a soundcheck with my band. Andy, my bass player mentioned a ‘hilarious’ band that opened at Meredith Music Festival. “How did they get booked? Have they had as much JJJ play as me?” I blurted out. “You’re not allowed to say anything negative,” I was reminded by Kat, the guitarist’s girlfriend. Andy then mentioned a song in the iTunes Top 50 called “Yeah x3.” I had a song called “C’mon x 5.” I closed my eyes.

Day 2 – I was asked what I thought of a particular comedian. “I’m not allowed to say anything negative.” I was happy with my new loophole answer. Inside, my blood boiled as I sliced their name to shreds. I hate most bands, most comedians, most plays, most shows, most things. The older I get, the worse it is. Cynicism? We’re beyond that. This is professional bitterness. It’s the amino acid for performers.

Day 3 – I am seeing a friends band that I don’t like. Why don’t I like them? I think their songs are dull. I don’t hate them, but I hate the idea of them doing better than me or being given more opportunities. I don’t normally like to bitch, as a rule. I once made up a saying “a bitcher taints a thousand words”. These days I’ve become economical. I look at my girlfriend and say “nuh”, and then turn and leave. At this age, I’ve bagged out so many acts that I know the dirty words are like throwing a party in your head. It’s fun at the time but hardly worth the cleanup the next moment.

Day 7 – I seek temporary exclusion from the challenge, stating emotional duress. I’m having one of my awful moods where I say a bunch of negative things to my girlfriend that I’ve been bottling up for too long. History tells us ‘if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’ This advice is bad in relationships. Fear of confrontation means you can’t tell someone things like you feel smothered and occasionally their breath smells weird. This is constructive criticism. Although you have to prize the words out of your head, at least it’s going to the right person. (Even if it makes their eyes water.)

Day 9 – It’s Christmas and I can be cheery. I’m in Sydney and eating Mexican on sunny King street, flicking through the Sydney Festival guide. These guides, like streetpress, often trigger my insecurities, acting like a phonebook of achievement. I rarely enjoy the successes of others, but rather take them as personal attacks. I am a child wondering why I haven’t been invited to the party. Eddie Perfect has a show. He is a great example of someone who is beyond my flaming sword of judgement. He is genuinely talented and a really nice guy. Annoying!

Day 9 – My girl is reading a blurb. She asks me what ‘post-rock’ is. I stare at the page of an impossibly cool American duo. “It’s rock that goes for too long”. I am being negative. I am failing this challenge. The bile rolls off my tongue like water off a duck’s metaphor.

Day 12 – Bitching brings people together. A close friend I’ve fallen out with and I have a rare phone chat and bond over our mutual dislike of a play. I’m aware I’m cheating on the challenge, but the joy of sharing a few laughs is too fantastic. Thank God something failed! It’s so much easier to take one point off everyone else, than to add one to yourself.

Day 13 – My challenge has been brutally thwarted by the fact I’m performing at several summer music festivals. As history goes, my only natural defence to a barrage of higher status acts, stinking weather and trendo bogans is an electric fence of barbs and quips. When I’m tired and anxious and about to perform, most people can get fucked. Woodford Folk Festival is one of the most positive environments known to man. It’s gonna rain for three days straight. God knows I’m trying. I am once again seeking temporary exemption on professional grounds. Taking away my right to gripe at a festival is like telling Bear Grills he can’t drink his own urine.

Day 14 – My girlfriend knows my moods. She says I’ve done well to remain quite chipper despite all the gig friggery and leaky tenting. At 9pm on the second day I snap. I’d just put on fresh socks and trod in the middle of the tent floor which was damp.

Day 15 – While this challenge has only made a minimal reduction to my criticisms, it has forced me to delve deep within to look at my motivations. On the drive into Falls I chat to a music publicist and a comedian. Both confirm that bitching is rife amongst their creative brethren. In comedy, the moment anyone gets a gig there is a pack of five, regardless of experience, bemoaning why they didn’t get it. In music, managers and publicists will readily discredit another band. It’s Australia, we conclude. It’s in our colonial blood. Stick your head out and we’ll punch it back in.

Day 18 – My manager and I are chatting about LCD Soundsystem. “I hated their album this year”. Whoops.

Day 18 – Someone mentions the first song on their album, how it has a massive volume jump three minutes in. I say I find it really annoying. “I don’t mind it” says my manager. I really want her to back me up. I bitched, and then I wanted to be validated. There’s nothing more relieving than when you bag out something and your friend agrees. It’s a little ego stroke, meaning you are ok and that other person or thing isn’t. Survival mechanisms. Gee, we’ve come so far from our tribal roots.

Day 25 – Honestly, I’d stop bitching if bands would stop being boring. Life is spent in a cocoon of loner superiority. You are above everything – never participating fully. Guarded – defensive  – sceptical. It’d be kind of cool if it made you happy. I had a dream last night that I got really angry at my best friend Josh Earl. I was shouting at him about all kinds of things. He’s a performer as well. I think I’ve managed to fail this challenge on a subconscious level. That makes me feel better.

Day 26 – The W.A. music festival failed to pick me up from the airport, gave us tents instead of hotel rooms and no rider. My attitude toward this was not positive. I tried to not say anything until I was charged $4.50 for a small latte at the chai tent. I elbowed an indie kid in the dick, with my eyes.  Once again, I am seeking exemption from the challenge stating emotional and professional duress.

Day 27 – Showbiz has turned me into a frustrated, conceited, jealous, ego-blown, self obsessed black hole. I’m okay though, because I’m also pretty nice and to survive as an artist you’ve got to develop a thick skin, and you can’t fear the by-products of that which is predominantly fuelled by a healthy sense of competitiveness. My primary school teacher once wrote: “Justin does well but he tends to rush.” I was trying to kick Rhett Beaumont’s arse at mathletics. Me me me. Win win win.

Day 28 – I’ve performed to a couple of thousand people, many who have sung along to the chorus of one of my songs. As the afternoon sun crests over the distant green hills, and a joyful wave of adrenalin pumps through my heart, I feel a sense of calm. I have worked hard and am extremely lucky to be doing what I do. I walk off stage and see the face of my stunning girl waiting for me.

“Could you tell my guitar was out of tune?”