7. CANBERRA SONGS AND EMPRESS TOILET GRAFFITI
That sounds like a good title for a Stereolab album.
Look, I stopped thinking about Disco Square for a while because I think the concept needed a break from being prodded, pulled… Huon played Sydney
last weekend and went extremely well with our 'rock set' - i.e. we did nothing even remotely disco and it felt good. However on the way back from
Canberra last Tuesday night/Wednesday morning I listened to the disco tapes constantly. Had a vague idea that maybe I could do more songs about
Canberra in disco but - just like the last time I wrote a song about Canberra ('Canberra' on Songs for Lord Tortoise) or, for that matter, the time
before ('Fuzzy at the Tip' on the Cannanes' Tiny Frown EP) my many ideas for Canberra songs all became collapsed into one song, and then I gave
those lyrics to Mia for a tune she wrote yesterday on the 4-track - one of the greatest tunes I've ever heard, so I'm certainly not worried, all I'm
saying is it's so great how ideas come and are gotten rid of. The lyrics I gave her (have nothing to do with disco but anyway they) go:
I could see what you could see
Mowed in the lawn
Concentric dark/light circles
Here's the place where you were born
A building site, some masonry
Shade that came from an office building
A stone bench a wiry tree
Cars and trucks peak hour
Someone nearly got run over
Trucks muscle to hit the highway
Bogans slumped inside their motors
I saw your way I did it my way
A billboard, a flock of parrots
A cyclist with a heavy pack
An archer with a bunch of arrows
Glance at your watch and it's time to go back
But later on I saw she'd changed them around a bit, luckily (she always improves things like that). Canberra has a lot of potential for songs. On Tuesday, I was riding a bike between the National Library and Watson and I just kept having terrific ideas - lines kept bombarding me - but it was hot and I was carrying a heavy bag and I just had no inclination to stop and write anything down. That's the trouble with writing lyrics in your head - everything makes such perfect sense you feel like it's as logical as a maths problem, all you have to do is recall the principle and the rest will fall into place. Oddly enough I've found even if I do recall the principle, for some reason the remembered words look dead on the page. If I write it all down then and there, it's always great.
That said, the following came to me in the toilets at the Empress last night, not actually a spontaneous creation more just stuff written on the walls there (the back toilets, not the ones near Nicholson street) - this is the graffiti I saw and which I was inspired to write down:
Actually, looking at those words now I have typed them out, I feel that perhaps they do have extraordinary potential. Well, perhaps the last two don't mean much. 'Maldoror'? It sounds like something out of Tolkien, or a suburb of Adelaide. 'Augie Fucken March' - I don't like that because I can't tell whether it's 'Yeah! Augie Fucken March! Wow!' or 'Oh christ. Augie Fucken March. Where's it going to end?' Augie March is a band with a singer who sounds like Jeff Buckley, or at least, sounds like he has a Jeff Buckley record. I have followed their career with interest because when I went to America with the Cannanes in 1996, a woman I knew in Tasmania told me that since I was going to go to Chicago I really should read Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and I secured a copy and read it all the way, and found it often entertaining and remarkable, but maybe not much of a reflection of the Chicago I saw, and then when I came back to Australia and ended up living in Melbourne again, there was this band with posters everywhere and they were called Augie March.
This same woman introduced me to the term 'Huon' as a slang description for a dyed-in-the-wool Tasmanian - a kind of snob hick - so I am grateful to her on this score, too.
In any case, to get back to the Empress graffiti, I think that there were other good reasons why I needed to copy these lines down, reasons that in fact extended beyond I want to CHANGE THE WAY I WRITE LYRICS, stop these idiotic in-jokes that only I understand, and submerge my weakness in harsh wit and insight, rather than these coy observations of the way sentences begin and end or references to those damn roses of loops! Actually, I can't resist them and probably never will be able to, but there has to be a happy medium.
So. I liked 'Lead the way you witless fuckhead' for its intriguing tone of resignation; it might be a comment unto the masses, a leftover remark addressed to Jeff Kennett, who knows? It might be something to do with Enrique Iglesias, I just don't know. Two men might have been having sex in the toilet there and writing graffiti as they went. And they had a certain wry contempt for each other… I always felt that the term 'fuckhead' was particularly ambiguous, is it a good or a bad thing? Well, of course it's meant to be a bad thing, it's a gross insult, but like a lot of uses of the word 'fuck', you do always end up wondering what the fuck it really means. Certainly the word 'fuck' has a liveliness to it that many other words wish they had.
I was attracted to 'Men must die Male chains' (I'm using that capital 'M' on 'Male' to indicate what I assume was meant to be a separate but related statement. For all I know the author meant it to run on as one sentence, but I can't come up with a meaning for that.) If I had read this sentence in a woman's toilet (or in a space in which both men and women might be expected to see it in relatively equal amounts), then I might not find it so enticing. But it was presumably written either by a man for men to read - that's what I hope - or by a transgressive woman for men to read, which is a little less interesting but still interesting. If a man wrote it, you have to wonder whether it was an ironic statement - surely - I mean surely most graffiti in the toilets at the Empress is ironic - apart from those Gregory Mackay caricatures, they're literal. But they're not there anymore anyway. So, a man who says men must die. And then: 'Male chains'. The males are in chains? The chains are male? (Possibly a pun - chain mail - but that's a protector of men, not a killer). It's a confusing and ultimately meaningless statement, but it's so rich with possibility, I am tempted here and now to try and work with it
Men must die
Mail chains
A chain around the world
Sinking into its centre
Um...
Mail chains
Men must die
Roads and trains
That's just silly, although there's another kind of chain - transport connectors - hmm... cable trams. Anyway, I can't write this song now, because you're watching, but I see it will probably happen.
'A shark shall fuck you' is also full of potential. I suppose this was written by someone trying to make anyone sitting on the toilet fear that a shark might come through the pipe and... surely not, I'm just showing too much of myself in that interpretation. I don't know how sharks fuck (if I could get on the net, which I can't at the moment, maybe I could check it out!) but I'll bet they have to be out flat, not standing up
(as they would have to be, if they were coming out of a toilet) to do it. So I guess 'a shark shall fuck you' must have some other meaning. I suppose it might be a punning parody version of some song I've never heard, or which doesn't spring to mind... once again you feel maybe you need more information, but also once again, you worry that maybe if you knew more of the writer's intent it might become plain that the meaning
is much duller than you imagined. I seem to remember that 'A shark shall fuck you' and 'Maldoror' were written by the same person, so perhaps there's a link via which the first part could be explained by the second. If I could get on the net I'd do a search on 'Maldoror', and maybe find links to Jaques Cousteau and Bilbo Baggins, who knows. At present the server I dial into is somehow out of action, and has been all day, which
isn't the end of the world, only slightly annoying, but prevents me I feel from taking this narrative any further at present.
February 28, 2000
Two months later, the album is a hair's breadth away from completion. One track has to be mixed again, and two have vocals that need to be redone. And then there we are. 28 minutes in total, only four songs a side, which does suggest that we've stretched ourselves properly in a disco fashion (the Lipps Inc album only had TWO songs a side. By the way, in researching something else recently I came across an article on the man
behind Lipps Inc - apparently he didn't like disco but hopped on the bandwagon BECAUSE HE COULD and tried to combine Kraftwerk and... I forget, Kraftwerk and something.)
The tracks are going to be 'Getrappel' in Greg's disco remix form, 'Disco Square', 'Lonely Experience',
'Tragedy'
which Stewart plays on and which will be the single (I mean, the hit single) , 'Highest Point' which we have been referring to by the obviously temporary title of 'Naff Gaff' which will never catch on, 'Hit the Jackpot' which is an amazing track Andrew put together and which Alison plays violin on and which features a few spokem lines from a crazy late 1950s record distributor's promo EP, 'You Wrote a Song' which I think is the
track I previously referred to as 'Piper' and the song which we are still calling 'the Ah Club Song', which I did a vocal for, lyrics about the Easybeats, which I am not happy about and which will get
changed.
Other things, like 'This Night is the Night' have just not sparked... yet. Won't make it onto the 10", anyway. At this point. And the 'Early 80s Cars' remix deserves not to be an album track but the b-side of a 12". Preferably a Fall 12". Maybe they'll have room on something upcoming.
Last night we mastered the 'Tragedy' single. The b-side is to contain three outrageously good songs, one of which, 'Town Ride', uses some of the Canberra lyrics. Mia plays all the instruments on that, and it's one of the greatest songs ever, and has a really phat drum sound, if phat means what I think it means. The other songs are OK too - 'Love-in' which has as its base a bass and drum machine track of mine, which Mia then played
guitar on and Ellen added keyboard (? Or is that a bass synth?) and finally after deciding it worked best as an instrumental I went crazy and put lyrics culled from an early 70s Perth newspaper - I really didn't make up the line 'Have your say on stains' though it sounds like something the Au Pairs would have sung. And a song called 'Get Washed' which is a rhythm of Andrew's and a keyboard line of Ellen's, with spontaneous lyrics
which take off on a fantasy tangent from that 'Merri Creek' song on Lord Tortoise. There really is a big tree trunk across Merri Creek which you can cross - it's up where the Northcote golf course is on the east side - I did it once - I think I was also thinking of a comic strip of Gregory Mackays' as much as I was thinking of anything when I wrote those words.
Mia is designing labels for both releases and so far they look amazing. Full colour disco squares. Also amazingly the Wogboy has just gone on general release and the TV coverage of it keeps showing a scene in homage to Travolta in SNF.
I am so glad I stopped this stupid diary of the record because it inhibited the construction process. The constant need to record what has been done and justify it was not conducice to creation of a valid and bouncy disco epic. Maybe it's just a case if you want to talk about it, forget it (to paraphrase the old anti-gay joke).
8 AND FINALLY....
On to the next thing.
11.This line is here because Mia, explaining her vocal melody to me, just came up with it: 'I/can see/what you/can see' Back
12.A quick description of a scene I saw on Tuesday. Back
13.Mia was not born in Canberra, actually, but she did live there as a young child after arriving in Australia from South America. Back
14.Further description of the scene from verse 1 Back
15.That someone was me, actually Back
16.Northbourne Ave, it branches off to both the Burton and the Federal Highways, to hit either Sydney or Melbourne. So it's full of big truckin' shits. Back
17.I can't believe how in Canberra all the women are like healthy New Zealanders and all the men are evil little bogans Back
18.Just bravado, not true. Back
19.To me, that's something of a curious juxtaposition, though I'm not sure it should be. The billboard was outside the ABC, where the local ABC station's call sign is 666. I should have put that in the song. Back
20.Me again Back
21.Cupid? Or some athletic type? Sorry, I don't understand this reference. Back
22.I was leaving the Can that night. Back
23.The words in 'Tragedy' come from a report in the Bulletin sometime in 1915 which purports to detail the decadent and desperate society of Berlin during WWI. All concepts straight from the article, including the news that Berliners had invented a sordid idea called 'night-clubs'. Back
24.Ended up as a song about 99, using lyrics based on an interview with Cameron Potts in Beat. Back
[Huon]