Much discussion has taken place since the advent of Wikileaks as to what a proportional and appropriate response would be on behalf of the US Gummint (who, to date, remains the primary target of the releases) towards Wikileaks and its slightly creepy crusading-journo/Bond-supervillain-wannabe leader Julian Assange. Options appear to range from killing him, to... erm... torturing his his children, then killing him. Admittedly it's mostly batshit loony politicians and the uber-right-wing Cletus Meedier in the US conducting the dialogue, so you tend to get that level of intellectual discourse when paddling around the shallow end of the gene pool.
Assange's stint in Hi-5 was a short one
Personally, whether you think Wikileaks is a Force for Awesome or something which needs to be shut the fuck down faster than Warnie's career as a variety show host, it seems clear to me that the response from Foggy Bottom needs to be measured, proportional and appropriate. So what I'm suggesting is that the US sets up a dot-org website to systematically release diplomatically awkward information about Julian Assange, which while essentially low-level and no-shit-Sherlock of nature, would nonetheless embarrass him on the world stage and cause him to have to apologise a shitload.
Such as:
He was a bedwetter.
He's never been able to form meaningful relationships.
His real name is Dave Brown but he changed it to sound more International Man Of Mystery.
He picks his nose.
And eats it.
He was the one who took the last Tim Tam from the Wikileaks office fridge. And lied about it. So much for being a crusader for truth.
He totally plagiarised all that Wikileaks stuff from other people's material. Diplomats mostly.
He cheats at Solitaire.
I think that would be an appropriate response. The only problem with it, as far as I can see, is coming up with a suitable name and URL. For some reason I'm not thinking assleaks.org is going to convey the appropriate tone.
So I'm doing this half-baked and half-arsed thing where you write a novel in a month. In a remarkably precient bit of titleage it's called National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo on Twunter). The aim is 50K words (the equivalent of 175 pages) inside a month. Piss-easy, yeah? *cough* At the start of the month I had no idea what to write about, no plot, no characters, no exposition, and above all, no time to write the fucking thing. As of Saturday morning I now have something that looks like all of the above, apart from that minor complete-absence-of-available-time thing. As of Sunday night I have the above plus about 8500 words, so I guess I'm all-in. Because it's not as though I have anything else on the horizon this month. Hmmm. Anyhoo. Might be quiet here for a bit but I'll endeavour for it not to be - also intending to keep up with the In The Worst Possible Taste updates - and will likely serialise the finished product across a couple of World of Bollocks posts for the edification of the non-paying public.
Nineteen sixty-eight Listen for sounds that resonate Everything new is out of date Coming down fast, I can't wait You're gonna be late You're gonna be late
Nineteen sixty-eight Nowhere on Earth now to escape Rock 'n' roll planet going ape Everyone's bent all out of shape You're gonna be late Now is it too late?
Nineteen sixty-eight Now is it too late? Now is it too late?
Nineteen sixty-nine Is looming in the mists of time Nineteen seventy Is gonna be the death of me
Nineteen sixty-eight Getting high from the smoke grenades Anarchists storm the barricades Paris in flames, all hope fades But is it too late? Ain't never too late.
Nineteen sixty-six We're turning on and turning tricks Nineteen sixty-five We're on the strip, getting swingers hip To the ride of their lives
Nineteen sixty-eight Motor City 5, Apollo 8 Rock 'n' roll planet going ape Coming down fast, I can't wait It's never too late It's never too late.
(Brad Shepherd/Dave Faulkner, 2009)
1968. Apart from being the best song on the Hoodoo Gurus most recent album (best thing the stellar Shepherd/Faulkner axis have produced since The Right Time) it was also, on paper at least, a pretty fucking year. We've explored previously the thesis that Your Correspondent was deposited on this fair globe just the 30 or so years too promptly, and thus missed out on the greatest eras of music, muscle cars and most importantly of all, South Sydney dominance of the NSWRL. Seems that 1968 was itself, perhaps, the azimuth of all human endeavour. We were mere months away from stepping on the moon. The airwaves were alive with Hendrix, Cream, the MC5, the Who and the Stones. Dougie Walters had just made his debut for Australia - with a century, of course. Holden were winning Bathurst with V8 Monaros which you could crank down the nation's highways at whatever clip you felt safe for the conditions. Souths smashed Manly to win the comp. AIDS, Starbucks and Kyle Sandilands hadn't been invented yet. In short, 1968 was made entirely of fucking awesome. Apart from that whole conscription-for-the-Vietnam-war thing which sounded a bit stink.
And apart from one other thing. This bucket of slop was the best beer in the world.
NZ's Dominion Breweries, these days owned by the Heineken empire, have been making a big retro-promo splash with their 50th anniversary bring-back of the original DB Export brew, which hasn't been available in the Shakies for many summers - largely replaced by the beige, milquetoast DB Export Gold (pretty much a rebranded Export), the drinkable-but-largely-ignored Export Dry and yet another fucking low-carb monstrosity in a world of the fucking things, Export 33. Novel as it must seem today to be in a world where 'dbexport' referred to a beer and not a programming command, DB Export has a mythology to it based around its origins - the response of Dominion Breweries to the 'Black Budget' of 1958, which taxed the living suffering fragmented fuck out of the imported beers which were apparently the NZ working man's preferred tipple. In an exercise in historical revisionism unseen since Johnny Howard tried rewriting the 'black armband' view of Australian history out of school textbooks, DB have painted the introduction of DB Export as some kind of exercise in sticking-it-to-the-man, and Waitemata Brewery owner/head brewer Morton Coutts as some sort of late-50s Robin Hood or Zack de la Rocha figure. When in reality the guy just wanted to make some damn coin, for fuck's sake. Fairly heavily overplayed 90 second TVC here , longer 'doco' version as follows:
It's an entertaining enough watch, but given that New Zealand Breweries (Lion Nathan to you, or Castlemaine Perkins if you live in Quoinslaaaand) have been making exactly the same claims about Steinlager having single-handedly saved NZ from the deprivations of Nordmeyer's Black Budget for most of the last 50 years, you can take DB's claims of historical vindication with the fistful of salt (and hops) they warrant.
So yeah, the punchline to the whole story is that 10 years after DB Export hit the pubs of NZ, it was declared Best Beer In The World. What it won, to be pedantic, was the International Brewing Awards' Championship Challenge Cup for 'Best Beer In The World In Any Class'.
And having sampled a longneck of the recently-released commemorative release of said beer, I can safely say it is profoundly indifferent bilge effluvia, a very testament to the white-bread mediocrity that New Zealand was mired in up until the 1980s, and a beer that would have compelled precisely no bastard whatsoever to abandon their imported Heineken et al in favour thereof, had it not been for Arnie Nordmeyer and his puritanical taxation predilections. DB Export's award winning status stands only to remind us that international brewing awards are handed out with the same discretion and selectivity as the favours of a $2 hooker. And ever more it was the case, but particularly in the late 1960s. 1968: a year of great music, great cars, but SHIT BEER.
Still, DB also own Monteiths, so they're not complete fucking writeoffs. Who's up for a Pilsner?
While we wait for the polar ice caps to melt or for Beeso to make up his mind which of his favourite bleep-bleep-blurp or bogans-rhyming-over-other-peoples-beats albums to put into his best albums evaaarrrr list, thought we should turn our attention to the trigger for this (apparently) - the release of the Definitive List (according to a bunch of grizzled old rock pigs one suspects) of the Top 100 Australian Albums of All Time. Complete with enormous fuck-off coffee table book and 5 CDs, just in time for Christmas. Since that's commercial as fuck, no real surprise this is too. Insert attribution link here. Full list as follows:
The 100 Best Australian albums 1. Midnight Oil – Diesel and Dust 2. AC/DC – Back in Black 3. Crowded House – Woodface 4. Cold Chisel – Circus Animals 5. The Triffids – Born Sandy Devotional 6. Easybeats – The Best Of 7. Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls – Gossip 8. You Am I – Hi Fi Way 9. Skyhooks – Living in the 70’s 10. Avalanches – Since I Left You 11. INXS – Kick 12. Go-Betweens – 16 Lovers Lane 13. Radio Birdman – Radios Appear 14. Daddy Cool – Daddy Who? Daddy Cool! 15. Richard Clapton – Goodbye Tiger 16. Bee Gees – Best of 17. The Birthday Party – Junkyard 18. Hunters & Collectors – Human Frailty 19. Sarah Blasko – As Day Follows Night 20. The Saints – I’m Stranded 21. Drones – Gala Mill 22. Split Enz – True Colours 23. Midnight Oil – 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 24. Slim Dusty – The Very Best of 25. Silverchair – Neon Ballroom 26. Nick Cave Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call 27. Regurgitator – Unit 28. Hoodoo Gurus – Stoneage Romeos 29. Empire of the Sun – Walking on a Dream 30. Gurrumul – Gurrumul 31. Kasey Chambers – Barricades & Brickwalls 32. Johnny O’Keefe – The Wild One 33. The Church – Starfish 34. The Reels – Quasimodo’s Dream 35. Master’s Apprentices – Master’s Apprentices 36. Savage Garden – Savage Garden 37. Sunnyboys – Sunnyboys 38. Kev Carmody & Various Artists – Cannot Buy My Soul 39. Something For Kate – Echolalia 40. Stephen Cummings – Lovetown 41. The Saints – Prehistoric Sounds 42. Australian Crawl – The Boys Light Up 43. Powderfinger – Odyssey No. 5 44. Mental as Anything – Cats & Dogs 45. Eddy Current Suppression Ring – Rush To Relax 46. Models – Pleasure of Your Company 47. Augie March – Moo, You Bloody Choir 48. The Missing Links – The Missing Links 49. Ed Kuepper – Honey Steel’s Gold 50. AC/DC – Highway to Hell 51. The Sports – Don’t Throw Stones 52. The Seekers – Greatest Hits 53. Cold Chisel – East 54. Underground Lovers – Leaves Me Blind 55. You Am I – Hourly, Daily 56. INXS – The Swing 57. The Living End – The Living End 58. Jimmy Barnes – For the Working Class Man 59. Russell Morris – Wings of an Eagle 60. Hoodoo Gurus – Mars Needs Guitars 61. The Presets – Apocalypso 62. The Dingoes – The Dingoes 63. The Cruel Sea – The Honeymoon is Over 64. The Angels – Face to Face 65. The Hummingbirds – loveBUZZ 66. Paul Kelly – Foggy Highway 67. Chain – Towards the Blues 68. Dragon – O Zambesi 69. Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs – Live at Sunbury 70. The Scientists – Blood Red River 71. Crowded House – Temple of Low Men 72. Died Pretty – Doughboy Hollow 73. Axiom – Fool’s Gold 74. Bob Evans – Suburban Songbook 75. Dirty 3 – Ocean Songs 76. Renee Geyer – Ready to Deal 77. The Church – The Blurred Crusade 78. The Vines – Highly Evolved 79. John Farnham – Whispering Jack 80. The Loved Ones – Magic Box 81. Sleepy Jackson – Lovers 82. Bliss N Eso – Flying Colours 83. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Tender Prey 84. Tex, Don + Charlie – Sad But True 85. Flowers – Icehouse 86. Missy Higgins – The Sound of White 87. Go-Betweens – Before Hollywood 88. Normie Rowe – Ain’t Necessarily So 89. Jet – Get Born 90. Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band – Smoke Dreams 91. Ben Lee – Awake is the New Sleep 92. Rose Tattoo – Rose Tattoo 93. I’m Talking – Bear Witness 94. X – X-Aspirations 95. Beaches – Beaches 96. Baby Animals – Baby Animals 97. Bernard Fanning – Tea & Sympathy 98. Kylie Minogue – Fever 99. Men at Work – Business As Usual 100. Morning of the Earth – Soundtrack
In broad terms, yeah, OK. Most of the cases where this lot have ranked a different album from a particular Australian artist (eg AC/DC or You Am I) higher than I would have I can accept as subjective difference, and have usually discussed in the previous post. And it's rock-and-pop biased because, bluntly, Australian music is, or at least has been across the timescope of this study. Country, dance and hip-hop aren't prevalent, because they haven't been prevalent, on balance, across the last 40-50 years this addresses. Don't really have a problem with that. In specifics, however, this list has serious fucking issues. Even the most mentally redundant arsehat knows you don't put best-ofs in a greatest albums list, because they're as much 'albums' as someone's fucking iTunes playlist is. Our stance on disqualifying live albums etc can be argued one way or another - there's a couple of live albums in here - but compilations are never, ever permissable. Absolute fucking muppets. And there's also some pretty spurious efforts in here from acts which have been out for all of 15 minutes and are clearly Critics Darlings Of The Minute - Eddy Current Suppression Ring? The 45th greatest Australian album of all time? Really?
Actually, the more I look at this, the more an exercise in blanket-based muppeteering this becomes. Neon Ballroom better than Frogstomp? Bob Evans better than anything Jebediah did? Savage Garden being on the list in the first fucking place?
It's just as well music is subjective. Because objectively, this list is clearly the work of a shower of hapless, concept-averse arseclowns.
At the other end of this year we were ranting about the death of the album, and the significance of the studio album as a band's definitive statement of art and intent in time and space at that particular moment of their journey (thanks very much John Mitchell, sorry about that whole getting-stabbed thing). Albums are a time capsule of a band's environment, influences and development which cherry-picking tracks off iTunes is never going to reflect to the same rich depth. And there's plenty of bands who've never managed to get their shit together to lay down that one coherent statement, despite writing great music and in many cases being great live acts - Hunters and Collectors, Black Sabbath, Foo Fighters and the Black Crowes are arguably all examples of bands whose potential never really validated into a great single album you can wave at hipsters as evidence music was never as good as it was long long before they bought their first pair of oversized white-rimmed sunnies.
So to that end the venerable Beeso and I set each other a challenge - list our top 50 studio albums of all time, with the following provisos: (1) No compilation albums - fairly self-explanatory (2) No live albums - quite a bit of to-and-fro on this, but in the end a live album has a stand-out advantage vs a studio album in that it's inherently a compilation of sorts (f'rinstance it'd be easy to argue there's three or four Led Zep live collections which are better albums than their best studio effort, simply because of greater depth of material available). In the end we've added an additional top 10 of live albums to follow on from the main list (3) Only one album per artist - otherwise Beeso would have put Def Leppard's back catalogue 1 through 10, obviously (4) Only pick from albums you own - not really a hard and fast rule but it's hard to argue an album is in your top 50 if you haven't ever actually shelled out to buy it for yourself.
OK then. My entirely subjective, intentionally argumentative, mostly wrong take on the Top 50 Studio Albums Of All Time starts nnnnnnow...
50. Jet - Shine On (2006) As mentioned previously (back when we reviewed it as a newbie) this is a more coherent album than The One With All The Hits On It. 49. Filter - Title Of Record (1999) 48. Deja Voodoo - Brown Sabbath (2004) You won't have heard of this, but it's possibly the first and greatest ever 'beer drinking concept album' (as described by its creators, Matt and Chris from awesomely awful NZ TV show Back of The Y) 47. Audioslave - Revelations (2006) 46. Hoodoo Gurus - Crank (1994) 45. Foo Fighters - There Is Nothing Left To Lose (1999) One of those bands you wish made better studio albums. Awesome live. 44. Veruca Salt - Eight Arms To Hold You (1997) 43. Metallica - Metallica (1991) Had to be here, by law. 42. The Cult - Sonic Temple (1989) 41. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991) A good example of the album as a statement in time and space. The same dudes tried to reform and record the same album a bunch of times since in the late '90s and '00s, and failed. 40. The White Stripes - Elephant (2003) 39. Judas Priest - British Steel (1980) 38. The Hives - Veni Vidi Vicious (2000) Most of which ended up in the more broadly familiar Your New Favourite Band (2001) - disqualified as technically it's a greatest hits compilation. 37. Guns 'N' Roses - Appetite For Destruction (1987) Again - had to be here. 36. The Fratellis - Costello Music (2006) 35. Pearl Jam - Vs. (1993) 34. TISM - Machiavelli And The Four Seasons (1995) Random factoid: this was the first actual CD I ever bought. 33. Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures (2009) 32. Nirvana - Nevermind (1991) 31. Spinal Tap - This Is Spinal Tap (1984) Technically this is a soundtrack, but it's not a compilation - actually a studio album from one (very talented) group of musicians, the actors/writers behind Spinal Tap themselves. 30. Regurgitator - Unit (1997) This was very, very close to being their Band In A Bubble album Mish Mash (2004), a remarkable effort considering how it was written and recorded, and an extreme example of that idea of a studio album being a statement by a band at a defined time and of a defined place (both physically and artistically.) 29. The Presidents of the United States of America - The Presidents of the United States of America (1995) 28. Spiderbait - Tonight Alright (2004) 27. Even - A Different High (2001) 26. Blues Explosion - Damage (2004) 25. Grinspoon - Easy (1999) 24. Powderfinger - Vulture Street (2003) Take this out of their catalogue and they're a singles band who never released a decent album. 23. Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine (1992) Back into '92. Still in a room without a view. 22. Airbourne - Runnin' Wild (2007) Yeah, it's a '70s pub rock pastiche. But it's a bloody good one. 21. You Am I - Convicts (2007) – not any of the great albums of the 90s? Maybe a bit of a surprise not to have any of the great Triple J albums of the early '90s - the ARIA number 1s like Hi Fi Way and #4 Record - but as a statement by an angry, discarded, melancholic rock frontman, Convicts is the most coherently argued album in YAI's catalogue. 20. The Stooges - Raw Power (1973) Christing bollocks, they didn't misname this one. Still holds the record for the loudest-mixed album in the world. 19. The D4 - 6Twenty (2001) Almost missed the start of Bathurst 2002 in order to head into Brisbane city on the Sunday morning after Livid to get this sucker (since the rest of Brisbane is shut on Sundays, thanks v. much Ghost of Joh.) That's dedication homes. 18. Frenzal Rhomb - A Man's Not A Camel (1999) Though 1997's Meet The Family is also pretty good. 17. The Black Keys - Thickfreakness (2003) 16. Wolfmother - Wolfmother (2006) Yeah, it's a '70s Zep-Purple-Sabbath pastiche. But it's a bloody good one. 15. Cream - Disraeli Gears (1967) 14. Electric Six - Fire (2003) 13. Reef - Glow (1997) Sight unseen, this may be the only album which is common between this list and Beeso's. 12. Shihad - The General Electric (1999) The 'Had have been touring this one as a whole album played live. That would be awesome. 11. The Donnas - Spend The Night (2002) Allison Robertson is still teh hotness. As the great Flange Gasket put it in their unreleased demo Sandra Sultry: 'Getting on a bit it's true, but Christ I would, and so would you' 10. Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975) Double album. Shades I, II, Random Runes et al on sheer force of content. 9. Deep Purple - Machine Head (1972) One of the few places you'll find Purple beating Zep in the Battle of the Great '70s British Heavy Metal Inventorers. But deservedly so. 8. The Monarchs - Make Yer Own Fun (2001) Why Brad Shepherd was the greatest Guru of them all. Sorry, Dave Faulkner. 7. Oasis - Definitely Maybe (1994) >>>>>>> that fucking annoying Morning Glory album that chicks liked. 6. The Stalkers - Rock N' Roll (2002) You could argue this is actually an EP, being only seven tracks. But JESUS what a seven tracks. Seriously high-octane garage punk supergroup. 5. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced? (1967) The man's a fricken genius. The new release Valleys Of Neptune is also brilliant, transcends the whole obvious-cash-in context behind it. 4. The Datsuns - The Datsuns (2002) This album grew on me. It began as a'ight, but not as listenable as some of the other 'new rock' acts of the same era. Nearly eight years later, as an album, it stands above the lot of them. 3. The Sex Pistols - Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols (1977) THE greatest punk album. In THE history. Of THE world. 2. Motorhead - Ace Of Spades (1980) The only card you need. Roight. 1. AC/DC - Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1976) Why not Back In Black? Or T.N.T.? Truth is, AC/DC made the same studio album 20 times - as they said themselves - it's just that one album happened to be one of the greatest albums every recorded. This is as much an award for the other great versions of that one album as Dirty Deeds, but the latter shades it for having (a) Bon (b) Jailbreak (c) Three or four songs written in 12 bar bloooze style (d) Bon (e) Big Balls (f) Bon and (g) The immortal line 'Get your fuckin jumbo jet orf my airport' delivered by (h) Bon.
You will notice, no Def Leppard. Unless you're quite unwell (*cough AJ cough*) you will understand it too.
Bonus Easter Egg - the top ten live albums of recorded history: 10. Rage Against The Machine - Live At The Grand Olympic Auditorium (2000) If you're going to fuck off, fuck off with a great statement. This was theirs. 9. Black Sabbath - Reunion (1997) Back when they got together the first time, and everyone still had their own teeth. Huge sound. 8. You Am I - The Convict Stain (2007, recorded 2003 LatW) This was a Triple J Live at the Wireless show from 2003, when You Am I had just been dumped by Sony-BMG in favour of taking on more Idol rejects. A whole bunch of their mates from bands like Tex Perkins, Kram, Adelita, Burnt Fanny from the Finger, Kev from the Jebs and even fucking NFa from Datsun 1200 Techniques chimed in to Add Value, and it contained Much Awesome. 7. Led Zeppelin - How The West Was Won (2004, recorded 1973) Triple album. Content wins. Plus this has a version of The Ocean so chumpy you can caaaarve it. Much hugerer than the anaemic studio version (separate argument - Houses Of The Holy, worst Zep studio album ever? Even worse than In Through The Out Door? Discuss.) 6. Frenzal Rhomb - Mongrel (1998) You'll never have heard of this nor seen it, probably - was an add-on to the deluxe version of Meet The Family - but it captures absolutely what Frenzal were as a live act. Loud, sharp, acerbic and funny as fuck. 5. Hoodoo Gurus - Doppelganger (1998) An awesome collection of cuts from Triple J Live At The Wireless sessions throughout the '80s and '90s, mostly covers and rareties. 4. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - BBC Sessions (1998, recorded 1967-69) The whole BBC Sessions series (technical controversy, compilations or live albums? Have decided on the latter) are brilliant - the Led Zep one's particularly good - but this is the best. 3. Shihad - Pacifier Live (2003) Don't get a Kiwi metal band angry. America did, by making them change their name, then ignoring them. This has just about the fucking hugest sound ever laid to tape. 2. Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes - Live At The Greek (1999) Better than any of the Led Zep live albums? Yessir. This was very, very good. 1. AC/DC - Live (1991) - heaps of great live albums As with their studio output, AC/DC live albums are many and plentiful, and most of them are awesome. If You Want Blood and Let There Be Rock - The Movie (Live In Paris) were both excellent late 70s efforts. But Live (1991) gets it for THAT guitar sound. And for turning me into an AC/DC fan in the first place.
Right, that's my lot. I'm not sure I agree with me, but drop me a line to discuss your point of view and I would be happy to explain why you're hopelessly, unutterably wrong.
Big ups to the English Premier League media wonks for yoinking Kasabian's 'Fire' as their theme for their world-feed matchday and highlights coverage for season 2010/11, a fair step up in sophistication and atmospherics from the fairly asinine guitar-pop anthem they've been running for the past couple of years, or the awful Champions League Lite hymn that preceded it. Now I'm not what the great Roy Slaven might refer to as a 'Kasabian freak-out type' but Fire is a damn catchy wee tune and fits the Prem very elegantly. As does the remixed bit used with the very cool club-crest morphing animation for the preview/review shows.
Which gets us to what more ambitious souls than I might term the point of today's dribble. Great sports TV themes... and how they're usually recycled, borrowed or thefted from somewhere else. Arguably the greatest of them all, the Channel 9 Wide World of Sports cricket theme (arguably because I'm arguing it here, now), actually first saw the light of day on Strayan TV as the theme to Bluey - the Lucky Grills fat sweaty copper show of the '70s, revoiced as Bargearse by the D-Gen during series 2 of the Late Show. Emerson, Lake and Palmer's hoary old standby Fanfare For The Common Man, here being performed in a suitably deserted Montreal Olympic stadium (for the record, Montreal have only very recently finished paying off the debt for those games - anyone really surprised NSW is still deep in financial shit?) is probably remembered by most Antipodeans primarily as being Channel 7's go-to anthem for all their sports coverage through much of the '90s, everything from AFL football to the Bathurst 1000. Although I'd argue that song found its finest and ultimate calling as the theme song to one of the greatest pieces of regional television ever made, Chris Conroy's World of Boats.
For those who didn't grow up within VHF range of the Gold Coast or Northern Rivers, Chris Conroy's World of Boats involved Chris Conroy, and a world of boats, which he borrowed from his mates' local marine dealerships and filmed flogging the Jesus out of up and down the channels, canals and broadwaters of the Goldie. Like a cross between Russell Coight and the first series of Top Gear Australia on SBS, except with even lower production values and unimaginable levels of unwatchability. '80s televisual gold, people.
Still, it could be worse. You could be watching Monday Night Football. Where Hank Williams Jr has been recycling the same cheese-in-a-can (with new, cheesier lyrics each week) since the late '80s, just without the same sense of ironic distance that makes you look back on the old cricket anthems with nostalgia. Still, Mr Williams has a point. Are you ready for some football??... Erm, yeah, sure. Just so long as the Poms handle the music. And the football.
The Doctor is OUT.
PS Chris Conroy lives!!! That's 23 years of self-produced televisual gold to you, buddy. Kudos.
It was kinda nice when it started. As I understand it, it started with Matty Hayden, Roy Symonds and a few others, striding out to bat a few summers ago with bright pink grips adorning the handles of their Grey-Nicolls bats, with some sort of understanding that runs scored would equal funds donated to the cause of breast cancer. A lovely gesture, with teammate Glenn McGrath having lost (or possibly at the time in the process of losing) a wife to cancer. That segued into the SCG Test of 2008/09, which saw the SCG turned a particularly virulent shade of pink in support of the McGrath Foundation - and if it all became a bit obvious and self-congratulatory on behalf of Channel 9 by the end, particularly when only a mildly disappointing $500K was scraped together, somehow it didn't really matter in light of just about the greatest ending in Test history where largely-hated South African captain Graeme Smith crawled out of the first aid tent and padded up at last drop to try and save his team from defeat, singlehandledly (literally - the other was quite comprehensively borked) - and almost won the day.
Since then we've had pink NRL refs, pink V8 Supercars, the Dragons in the Big Pink V, union's Western Farts playing a match in a colour best associated with the hindquarters of an aroused baboon, and entire pink-washed rounds of most of the major footy codes in Australia. And yeah, it's all nice. But at what point does this go from being heartwarming charity to cynical PR bandwagon-jumping? Particularly for men's professional sports leagues, which almost without exception have major PR dramas re Women's Issues - in particular endemic attitudinal and behavioural issues related to their players' interactions with women - and could use the halo effect of being associated with something that might stop the ladies from hating on their misogynist testosteronal arses, and (more to the point) start buying more of the Sponsors' Product.
Well, that point was reached whenever the Seppo NFL, a code with more Women's Issues than a AFL roster full of Milo-fuelled Spida Everetts, decided to make every player wear pink gloves and cleats, every sideline coach and bench-warmer wear pink-fringed caps, and basically swathe the entire field and personnel regiment with more pink frills than an explosion in Strawberry Shortcake's boudoir. I realise the Septics as a constitutionally-enshrined SOP genuinely believe that if something's worth doing it's worth overdoing, but seriously. That. Is. Crap. It's cynical, cretinous marketing-led tokeneering of the highest, lamest and most blatant order. Not just because the NFL, like most footy codes, is full of ego-inflated misogynist tossers who think sending PXTs of their dodger is an agreeable courting ritual. Not just because about as many US men are stricken by prostrate cancer as there are women who suffer breast cancer, and in terms of mortality, a much higher proportion of both sexes are killed by lung cancer (figures from Wiki) - so the Push for Pink looks more and more like a marketing decision rather than a genuine response to an unmet need in cancer awareness and surveillance. It's because of the gobsmacking hypocrisy by a league wanting to make a big show-and-dance about how much they care about women's health, while (until very recently) trying to deny or cover up the medical evidence, Big Tobacco style, that the high rate of concussions in their sport - caused by the repeated helmet-on-helmet and helmet-on-turf contacts quasi-legitimized by NFL football - were killing and psychologically maiming their players in later life.
Now I take Beeso's point (from Twunter) that when it comes to cash for cancer, all money is good money - with the caveat that as the husband of a cancer epidemiologist he was always going to say that! - and on reflection it's not necessarily a zero-sum game. And despite my own recent medical misadventures I'm not pushing the barrow for ball cancer - I don't want to know what they'd have on their jerseys instead of a pink ribbon. (Perhaps a phlegm-coloured ribbon for lung cancer awareness?) But the money is trivial, really, compared to the publicity. When you think about what it would cost a paying sponsor to get the same level of exposure from a league like the NFL (much more averse to slathering logos over jerseys and across fields than say the Australian NRL or AFL), the dollar value there in terms of publicity for the cause far far exceeds the actual dollar amounts donated to the charity through gate receipts, corporate donations or whatever. For the charities, this is always going to be much more about generating awareness rather than dollars. And while you could make some sort of case that targeting a national sport with heavy male-biased demography in order to broaden the awareness base of breast cancer beyond the gender who actually suffer from it, it's hard to convincingly argue this is going to be more effective in generating positive medical outcomes than a similarly heavy investment in, say, prostrate cancer - something that kills NFL fans and players, but something which (like ball cancer) seems to remain something to be embarrassed about, mainly because of the, erm, somewhat invasive surveillance regime.
And if it's not about generating positive medical outcomes what's it about? Surely not just cynically trying to appear sensitive to womens' needs and interests. Because that would be making commercial advantage out of cancer. And that would be an act of venal, unconscionable bastardry you might expect out of Big Pharma - not Big Football.
It's been fifteen years, and I still don't get Wonderwall. Not the lyrics, not the message - just what the fuck everyone else saw in the thing. Just about the biggest song of the 1990s, the calling card of one of the biggest bands of their generation... and I have to admit, I never actually liked the bastard. Not then and not now. Not because I don't like Oasis - though at the time I thought they were wankers - just because they had better songs. Most of which were on Definitely Maybe. Noel and his fruit platter once said of his pre-Oasis songwriting stockpile, all his A1 material went on Definitely Maybe, the next best on Morning Glory, and by the time they got to Be Here Now he was out of killer and down to filler. And also very, very off chops on Charlie. So yeah, Wonderwall... it's OK, but it's no Shakermaker. Or Cigarettes & Alcohol. Or Supersonic...
I'm like that with The Iconic Songs/Albums Of Our Generation, though. I either missed the point for years on end, or never got it to this day. Smells Like Teen Spirit... yeah, it's a'ight. Angsty bit of thrash-punk. Not much to it. It didn't speak to me as a teen because basically I had fuck all substantive to be angsty about. I discovered Nevermind as an album (and a pretty fucking decent one it is, to be fair) about ten years after the fact. The Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Majik I was a much earlier adopter of. Got into that one about four or five years after its actual release date. Definitely Maybe? About ten years late. And likewise for most of the milestone albums of the 1990s. Pearl Jam Vs - a good eight years after the fact; likewise U2's Achtung Baby or Metallica's black album. Blur? Never really got them but after watching their Hyde Park reunion gig flying Air NZ transtasman the other week, it might be time to go raid iTunes. Occasionally, like with Reef's Glow, the Dandy Warhols' Come Down or Shihad's The General Electric I somehow contrived to trip over The Next Big Thing at the azimuth of their cred and be momentarily Incredibly Hipster Cool without actually intending to. Then I'd go and buy AC/DC's Ballbreaker or the best of Motley Crue (apparently there was some) and my CD collection would go back to being a romantic liability.
Which is the real point, after all. As an unattached seeker of luuurrrve in the Nineties and Noughties, if your CD collection wasn't getting you roots, what the fuck was it there for? If you've ever had to reorganise the most cringeworthy items of your collection to the back of the cabinet - or even had to pretend to be into some shithouse act in order to appear shaggable to some particular intended of the moment - you'll know of which I speak. A quick glance at someone's CDs told you more about that person than a series of intimate dates at the cheapest restaurants in the inner west would ever tease out of them. That girl with Pete Murray's Feeler welded into the carousel of her CD player, with So Beautiful no longer able to be played due to having laser burns etched into it from overplaying... she may have baggage. Possible red flag there. Britney, Christina, Mandy Moore... still mentally 12 years old. Proceed at own risk. Tori Amos... either significantly damaged, or a post-op trannie. Caveat emptor. Thirsty Merc or Collective Soul... Christian. Probably better off with the trannie. The Donnas... drunk and promiscuous; as Al Davis might have put it, just win, baby.
Which throws the question over to you, dear reader - what is either (a) the album in your collection which has cost (or gained) you the most action, and/or (b) the most shameful, cringeworthy band or performer you've pretended to be into in the pursuit (futile or otherwise) of romantic success.
See, this is just awesome. I've probably already gone on about how much I love retro colourschemes and heritage jerseys and all that backwards-facing nonsense in sport. The domestic footy codes have captured the nostalgic longings of their fanbase very effectively with their Heritage Rounds - particularly the NRL, even though when you're a South Sydney supporter every bloody round is Heritage Round, the 1980s 'Minties' jersey they busted out this year was good times. Throwback jersey round doesn't work as well in the AFL, for the credit-worthy reason that most of the old-school clubs are still playing in recognisably old-school strips. Likewise, when the Kiwi and Aussie cricketers busted out the beige-'n'-brown and canary yellow respectively for the first evaaarrrr Twenty20 international five or so years ago, and topped off the whole package with an ensemble of afros and mos unprecedented since Lillee, Marsh and Chappell retired in 1984, there was no shortage of win. Particularly from the Aussies. Margin was a hundred runs or something. Back when we actually had a cricket team, of course.
However, much as we'd like to, my true chosen sport of motorsport can't do the retro thing like the ball sports can. Because colours are dictated by sponsors, and sponsors change. Apart from the odd perfect storm like NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt Jr turning out in a throwback Mountain Dew colour scheme akin to that which his late old man ran years before, only possible because of the shared sponsors, it just doesn't happen. Likewise, some of the sponsors who contributed to those iconic colours - the iridescent day-glo red of the Marlboro HDT Commodores, the glossy black JPS Lotus F1 cars - aren't allowed to sponsor shit any more.
This is defending Bathurst champions, today's Holden Racing Team, paying tribute to their origins 20 years ago - and their underdog win in the 1990 Tooheys 1000 at Bathurst - with a very cool retro colour scheme for next weekend's Bathurst 1000 classic. Short of the factory Fords trying to one-up them by turning up in XC Falcon Cobra stripes again, this is just a big bag of Win. Win Percy, in fact, the British touring car legend who teamed up with nuggety old folk hero Allan Grice to somehow snag the big cheese on offer back in the day. To explainify the story we need to go back, back in time.
1990. Time for the Guru. And not a particularly flash time for Australian motorsport. The premier touring car class was run to international Group A laws, which in theory meant cars related to stuff you could buy off the showroom floor, and in practice meant a palpable demonstration of how global car company resources could comfortably outstrip whatever local manufacturers like Holden could shambles together from fibreglass and big fuck-off intake manifolds. For the last couple of years everything winnable had been won by Ford of Europe's custom-built Sierra RS500, developed by Formula One gurus Cosworth with a turbocharger so large it had its own gravitational pull - which in a lightweight two-door hatchback with a boy-racer double-deck rear wing was probably just about enough to get the job done. Particularly given the prophensity of front-running Fordsters like Dick Johnson to simply dial up more turbo boost whenever the oppo got within a postcode of aforementioned whale-tail arse end. Both the championship and Bathurst, in both 1988 and 1989, had been won in Sierras - which, as a childhood Holden fan, I'd been probably lucky to miss. Bathurst fell during school holidays, which meant one typically found oneself several Bathurst 1000s from home in a bloody pop-top caravan just as the green flag dropped. Mired at the time in a caravan park somewhere in outback WA, I saw as much of the '89 Tooheys 1000 as I did of the legendary extra-time NSWRL grand final between Canberra and Balmain the week before: two fifths of three sixteenths of an eighth of fuck all. Which was probably just as well.
And it wasn't going to get any better. Nissan, who'd run turbo Bluebirds and Skylines in Group A with moderate success, decided to just go a bit stupid. Japanese HQ built a twin-turbo, four-wheel-drive, four-wheel-steer GT-R version of the R32 two-door Skyline which today is a hero car, because yesterday it was a destroyer. It was built to destroy Group A touring racing, and a few years hence, that's pretty much what it did. Wheels magazine nicknamed it Godzilla. It stuck. It had more power, more grip and less weight than anything. It debuted midway through the 1990 Australian Touring Car Championship and wasn't seen for dust. It was going to win Bathurst in 1990. The End. At which point the Sierra teams gritted their teeth and turned the boost on the Sierras up to 11. And the Holden teams... well...
The Holden teams, not to put too fine a point on it, were fucked. Things had been pretty grim in Lion Land for a solid few years, since Holden hero of decades standing Peter Brock had gone mad, started insisting on bolting boxes of crystals and wank to his HDT Commodores (the road cars which were required to form the basis of the Group A racecars) because it aligned their auras or some batshit new-age loony shite, cracked the shits when Holden said 'We can't actually sign off on the warranties on these cars any more you know' and defected, first to BMW, then to... Ford. Seriously, as misguidedly homophobic as one was as a clueless rural kid, I think I'd have been more comfortable if my dad had come out than when Brock started driving a Ford. It was The End Of The World. Add to that the new factory squad which Brit touring car guru Tom Walkinshaw had rapidly proven to be up to fuck all, given they were running an overweight, underpowered lump based on a Commodore several years out of production, and it was a good time not to be watching Bathurst.
Yet the old 'Walkinshaw' VL Group A Commodore - the 'Batmobile' as it was nicknamed, after the ludicrous wind-tunnel-developed aero package the nascent Holden Special Vehicles had developed for it - did have one small advantage over the field at Bathurst 1990. It went around corners like no fucker out there. That stupendous rear wing and the equally comical front splitter that made the thing look like it was SHOUTING AT EVERY BASTARD, somewhat appropriate given the bellow from its five-litre injected V8, worked around Mount Panorama. Particularly over the top, through the fast sweepers and down through the esses.
Still, noone gave them the remotest shot versus the endlessly-boostable Sierras and the fearsome might of Godzilla. Ancient crusty Allan Grice - the arch-privateer of all time, slightly bemused to have found himself as lead driver for the factory Holden team after spending 20 years pursuing and sledging Brock in the same position - snuck the big old bastard into the back of the Top Ten Shootout, but it was the turbo monsters who dominated qualifying. It wasn't close. And it wasn't going to be close tomorrow.
Except...
Except that wasn't how it worked out. The turbo Sierras fucked off and hid at the start, as per programme. But one by one, they started falling over. Dialling up several hundred horsepower from the hairdryers and sending it through the Sierras' narrow rears suddenly wasn't working as well as it'd done last year, and the year before. What it was doing was breaking driveshafts and blistering tyres. And while Godzilla was fast, it was a long way from sorted. It was getting harried and hassled and monstered over the back of the circuit, over the twisty stuff that sorted men from boys and well-sorted race cars from ones which could use another week or six on the test track. It was getting monstered by... the number 16 Holden Racing Team Commodore of Grice/Percy. Which more than once somehow managed to dive past into the Dipper, the plunging left just over the crest of the hill on the top of the mountain. It was by no means an overtaking place then and it's never been one since, but somehow HRT had managed to make the heavyweight Commodore almost nimble and light on its feet, like Ali in his great years. You couldn't believe that big lumping thing could do that on a racetrack. Yet it did. Just then. In front of you.
And it won the race. Godzilla devoured its own brakes, the Sierras never got over their latent desire for self-harm, and the final racing evolution of the 1986 model VL Commodore finished first, third and fifth in the 1990 Bathurst 1000. As an underdog, comeback sporting tale, it rates with any story you can come up with. It was a victory, to borrow a line from another underdog hero of the age, for the true believers. A victory which formed the basis for HRT's legacy in the past 20 years of six Bathurst wins and six ATCC/V8 Supercar championships in the 20 years that followed. In the immediate aftermath, two things happened: one, CAMS, the governing body of Australian motorsport, reacted to the public disinterest in Group A - and in watching cars race which they couldn't actually buy in shops unless they were in England or Japan - by announcing the 1993 debut of the V8 Supercar formula to replace it. And two, Brocky came back to Holden, where he stayed until he died.
For nostalgic race fans, or just peeps who want to see how it was done back in the day, I can't commend the below-embedded bit of YouTubery enough - Gricey talking Channel Seven's live TV audience around his last couple of laps of Bathurst in 1990, while still turning alarmingly quick 2m18 laps, running low on fuel, dodging oil slicks and being chased by Paul Radisich in Dick Johnson's second-string Sierra only some 15 seconds back - reminds us that not everything that's come with the twenty-year V8 Supercar revolution in Australian motorsport has been positive. Nowadays it's all professional and dour, networks wouldn't dream of bothering race drivers for in-car comment unless it was a yellow flag period (making it unlikely to hear the race leader ask chirplily of the broadcast host 'And how has YOUR afternoon been, Michael?") and the cars are unutterably clonal, deliberately so as to narrow competitive margins and create a closer contest. But the one great strength of Group A, that of competition between cars with different strengths - the corner-monstering downforce of the VL Group A, the rocketship fragility of the Sierras, the nimbleness of the BMW M3s - is lost and gone. Granted, it was killed stone dead and buried in a shallow grave by Godzilla, which was faster than the Sierras, more nimble than the M3s and (eventually) better handling than the Commodores, but that great standby of Australian motorsport, the battle between competing philosophies which went back to the days of lightweight XU1 Toranas battling Hemi Chargers and thundering 351ci GTHO Falcons on the mountain - and well before that even - is something that today's Bathurst certainly lacks. And more the pity.
Crank it up. Makes a lovely noise. And remember kids, only 11 more sleeps till Bathurst.
Right, GrogsGamut. Anonymous blogger and twunterer, said a bunch of pretty-much-on-the-money stuff about the recent election, including that News Ltd and the associated meeja scrum were up to fuck all and just there for the beer. In completely unrelated news he was outed as a public servant (including name, rank and serial number) by some B-grade hack from the Australian because unmasking his identity was apparently 'in the public interest'. This is patent bollocks, as the entire inter-google has concurred, apart from the odd other MSM journo who also finds Twunter and Bloggage equally terrifying ref. their own relevance and job prospects as Massola the blabby little git from Unky Rupert's Deathstar. It's such patent bollocks in fact that one finds oneself in disconcerting agreeance with the much and rightly maligned Catherine Deveny. I don't like Deveny. Hated her cretinous Anzac Day smearing of your grandad and mine as racist fucks who only enlisted in order to shoot Japs and Krauts. Even wrote her a pantomime villain cameo in ITWPT, hatin' on the stylez of our dishevelled drunken heroes. But this, her call on the GrogsGamut story, I can't really find fault with.
So yeah, take it as read that James Massola is a petty little gobsite and can fuck right off, and the Rupert-era MSM are a bunch of evil self-serving dog-whistling pricks with a very mistaken view of their own importance ref. gatekeeperdom of news and information in the 21st Century. Moving on. Why did arts bureaucrat Greg 'GrogsGamut' Jericho ever think he was going to get to stay anonymous, given that no bastard who ever plays the Anonymous Public Figure card ever gets to stay that way? There's the obvious, fatuous examples, like the Stig. And the Stig before him. And even crap Aussie Stig from the crap Aussie version. But seriously, you think back and come up with any significant 'anonymous' figure - from political writers to TV show test drivers - who hasn't been outed. Watergate's Deep Throat is probably the one who lasted the longest. It's a particular affliction of writers, particularly girl writers who like to write about a bit of the old rumpy - from the writer of infamous infidelity bible The Bride Stripped Bare to the postdoc researcher whose part-time PhD student job formed the basis of book and TV series Secret Life Of A Call Girl (and no, she wasn't as hot as Billie Piper.) Noone gets to stays anonymous. Market forces, and/or the egos of disgruntled stepped-upon tossers looking to square ledgers or cash in on someone else's notoriety, means there's significant net impetus behind unmasking your Stigs and your Brooke Magnantis. The dream of Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent style double-life untouchable anonymity - the ability to do as you please in your secret life and still carry on as per in your day job - is as much a cornerstone of the cliched superhero fantasy as the actual superpowers. Except the superpowers are probably more feasible in real life.
And yet most people on teh interwebz, in particular the Twuntoblogowankosphere, are still flying stealth missions, to a greater or lesser extent. For most, this is about trying to create distance between real and online lives, given the opinions expressed are not necessarily those of one's friends, families or employers. For some, it's probably an ego thing, all about craving the notoriety that comes with being the man in the faux-anonymous black hat. For me... I've learned that nothing you say on here, just like nothing you say in real life, comes without the risk of it bouncing back in your face in the form of a footlong shitlong sub sandwich to chow down on. Say nothing you wouldn't stand beside in person with a grin on your face and your work uniform on. For me, it's just easier to write from distance, from behind a character. The jokes are funnier. And the points you're making often get listened to more, as Stephen Colbert found in Washington recently. And writing personal stuff on here always felt self-indulgent - basically, Dr Yobbo was never meant to be the story of Dr Yobbo's World of Bollocks.
And certainly Dr Yobbo's bollocks were never meant to be the story of Dr Yobbo's World of Bollocks. Might have to make a minor exception though. As some of you will be aware I've been diagnosed with a case of the Lance Armstrongs and will shortly have to go in for some strategic lightening. Sort of like a Dr Yobbo Superleggera. On the plus side I'm a shoe-in for the Tour de France in a couple of years, if not running some form of dodgy Fourth Reich with a bunch of equally gonadally challenged cronies. Your Correspondent drops this casually into conversation not to be a sympathy whore, or to excuse some fucking terrible jokes (and there will be more, I pledge), but with one clear underlying point: lads, check your boys. NOW. Well, OK, wait until you get home, the number 412 bus to Toowong might not be the most appropriate location for self-examination... but soon. Cancer of the bollocks is a young man's disease. And it is stupidly survivable, something like 98% if you don't fuck about and make sure you get it sorted early, so there's no excuses. It really is trivial to sort, compared to serious fuck-off-scary Capital-Fucking-C Cancer that needs chemo and radiation and invasive surgery to deal with. So much so it's almost embarrassing to self-identify as a 'cancer sufferer' when superhuman types like Big Bad Al, Mayhem and my old mate Matt had to take the bastard on and kick it in the teeth (and in some cases are still required to put the boot in at press time.) Me, I'm stupidly healthy, I'm covered by health insurance I didn't have until I took my current job six months ago, excellent people have my back from family to friends to workmates, and I stand less chance of dying from this than by being crushed and electrocuted crash-tackling the TV trying to make Phil Phucking Gould shut the fuck up about the fucking Rooters on Nine's Grand Final coverage.
Much as I like 'em, I've still got the Dragons pencilled in for self-inflicted tracheal constriction, for the record. But just watch the Baby Bunnies go in the under 20s. Sidestepping everything except the irony of a minor premiership winning Souths team, precisely none of whom were born the last time the first-grade team did likewise.
The Doctor is OUT. (But is happy to hang around with his pseudo-dodgy-medical-hat on and field questions about ball cancer if anyone has. And remember, as the Fun Lovin' Criminals might have put it: Check 'em. Check 'em. Check 'em if you got 'em. If you ain't got 'em... then it's possibly a statement of limited relevance other than with respect to the males of significance in your life, in which case... check 'em.)
My team Souths missed the NRL finals this year. That's OK. Rabbitohs fans are generally pretty zen about that sort of stuff. Been through everything from winning more titles in history to Manly strip-mining all our players, and Rupert boning us from the comp. Not to mention Russell Crowe owning the team. We're still just happy to have a side. One which doesn't embarrass itself in public like the Bulldogs or the Sharks. The last Souths player to end up on the wrong end of a media scrum, about 150 years ago in NRL time, was the Poo In The Shoe Man, Julian O'Neill - who, after all, was born and bred a Brisbane Bronco, whose form in toilet-related embarrassments is well established.
Souths fans know that too much success makes you obnoxious and cretinous. The sports team or fan that expects success as a birthright learns and gains nothing from the challenge of the contest. If you are so bloated by winning that you throw a petulant tanty at the faintest whiff of sustained losses, good fucking luck dealing with reality outside football. There is one, for the record. Yet the Broncos miss the finals, eject toys from pram, and seek to fire their coach in a fit of pique; while the Rabbitohs miss the finals and there's a shrug, a faraway smile because we had a crack, and thoughts turn to next year, or to the young blokes in the under-20s who won the minor premiership and are still out there having a crack, or just rememberances of the good times of the season just past. Like the ludicrous 34-30 extra-time win over the semi-finalist Tigers in August, with a try in the last second of the last period of extra time to a kid from the youth side who was making his first grade debut, after both sides had missed eight field goal attempts in extra time. That try gave him a hat-trick on debut. Souths had been down 28-12 with half an hour to play, had lost half their regular first graders to injury, and were playing for their season. Which still should have been over after the game, having lost key playmaker John Sutton with a busted shoulder (in the act of scoring the try which locked up the scores). Somehow the Bunnies made it to the last week of the season still with a crack at the finals. Didn't come off. Got a bit of a touchup from our mates from St George. But they had a crack.
The rivalry with St George is an interesting one, because it's almost a friendship these days. In the 50s and 60s no teams hated each other more, as they decided almost every premiership between them. But neither side has won a premiership in 30 years, and like old rivals who've forgotten exactly what it was that started the feud in the first place, we've probably got more in common with them than in conflict. And even from the northern side of Botany Bay it's hard not to feel sorry for the Dragons and their long-suffering supporters. In the 30 years since their last comp win they've made the grand final five times, and lost every last fucking one of them. 1985 by a point to the Dogs. 1992 and '93, run over by the Queensland Origin team in their 'away' strip. 1996, rorted by Manly and some fucking dodgy decisions by ARL ref Charlie Manson. 1999, That Fucking Penalty Try. And you can even throw in 2005, when the media had already awarded them the comp, only for them to get mugged by Benji Marshall and the Tiges in the semi and never actually get a date to the big dance.
And here we go again. St George are minor premiers, smashed Manly flat in their opening finals fixture and are again being talked up as morals for the Big Cheese On Offer. I think I've seen this one before somewhere. As I said to a mate on Arsebook (who supports Manly, because it's one of the more socially acceptable forms of mental illness) - Saints have one hand on the trophy. Unfortunately their other hand is around their own throats, and as of right now it's evens as regards which hand is going to win the day.
I hope for good things for them. For my old mate Dr Craigos who's backed the Big Red V for as long as I can remember. For Yamba's own Nathan Brown, run out of town as the scapegoat for their 2005 semifinal capitulation (nowhere near as heinous as their collapse under Wayne Bennett last year.) For the players of those hapless '90s sides who were never quite good enough to win - for the Cough Drop, Mary Macgregor, the Man, the Two Dollar Coyte and Rod Wishart, who's probably still back on the bus where Roy and HG sent him in Origin '96.
Yeah, I hope for good things for them. But I've seen how this one turns out before.
I fly to Sydney on Monday. In an unfortunate subsequent development, I have to come home at some point. I love Sydney. It's mad, stupid and corrupt. It's loud and obnoxious and costs too much to get drunk in. It's not even a city, really. It's a thousand little villages with their own distinct cultures, languages, cuisines. It's fucking mental. And I love it. There are 4.5 million stories in the naked city of Sydney, and this is mine.
Sydney taught me to do all the important shit. Taught me to drink, for one. She took me on as a wet-behind-the very-wet-bit-behind-the-ears 17 year old first-year student, and sent me on my way with first class honours in pisshoundery (and some other stuff, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand.) Thursday nights at the Uni bar on $2.50 vodkas or Tooheys Pils. Friday drinks up at the Royal or the Coach and Horses, tipping back a few Reschs Smooths. Share house parties as messy and drunken as they came (handy hint: never trust punch made in a bin liner). Sydney taught me to drive, too. Not the boring, fundamental shit - mirror, signal, manoeuvre. I mean the proper stuff. The knowledge. Rat-running. Divebomb-merging. Traffic snarl avoidance. Parking by Braille. Knowing what lane to be in at any given moment on Cleveland St so as not to get pinned behind a parked car on the left or some gumby fucktard making a right turn for no apparent fucking reason. All those sixth sense predictive-awareness things that differentiate decent drivers from the peons and the sheep.
That was my Sydney - the inner east and west. No further west than Dulwich Hill, where the old man grew up; not much further south than Eastgardens; east to the beaches and north to the CBD (didn't meet the dress code for venturing further north than Bondi.) My Sydney: The dodgy Vietnamese bakery in Randwick that did the awesomest bread in history right up to the day the kitchen burned down. Chicken hero rolls and Powerades from the 24 hour servo at the bottom of our street, the venerable 'last round of drinks' en route home from the uni bar. Stinking hot summer afternoons punctuated by a mission over the hill to Coogee and a plunge into the Pacific, probably followed by beers. Fuck-off-cheap movies at the Ritz followed by fuck-off-awesome Thai or Arthur's Pizza washed down by longnecks of comeback-special Reschs DA from the local bottle-o. One-day cricket games on the box at the Coogee Bay or the Clovelly Hotel, or just at the Hovel over a $22 case or two of New - likewise Bathurst 1000s and Australia Day Hottest 100s as memorable as they are unable-to-be-remembered. Cocktail parties at that one wannabe-trendy thirty-something lecturer's place overlooking the beach on Arden Street. $5 student tickets to Sydney City Roosters games at the SFS - turn up and back whoever they're playing, it's only five bucks for fuck's sake. Honours graduation beers in that fucking cool Thai beer garden underneath the Bank Hotel in Newtown. Kmart Bondi Junction's annual clearance sale on expired-date AC Cola that somehow always resulted in pallets of the shite stacked in our kitchen.
That was my Sydney. Which I left, brusquely, like you'd ditch a cheating lover, in order to take up with the more laconic, rustic charms of Brisbane, the overgrown country town. Less stress. Less angst. Cheaper beer. It suited me better, cos I'm rural, ay. My Sydney became Homebake roadtrips and New Years missions. My old man's old neighbourhood in Dulwich Hill got gentrified, from tyre dumps and stolen cars in council parks to awesome street-corner cafes in what had been old abandoned corner shops - all for the better, IMHFO. Every time I go back to my Sydney, I can't shake that insistent feeling: I could live here. Really, I could. Proper coffee. Proper Italian food. Proper public transport. Bands playing. Cafes. Restaurants. Local sporting teams that aren't the fucking Highlanders. I could live here, seriously. And I could. Except for the whole having-a-family-hence-only-being-able-to-live-in-fucking-Blacktown part of the equation.
Anyway, I'm back next week. For a few days at least. Who's up for a beer?
Yup. Just like Iggy says. It's inevitable and it's inescapable. It just sucks more when it happens to the young. Which brings us to another needless teenage death: Homebake is goneski. Aged fifteen. Not even old enough to vote, root or buy a warm can of Uncle Ted from a festival beer tent. Sure, the Organisers Thereof have put out a florid little press release about how the cancellation for 2010 of Australasia's awesomest home-grown music festy is just a momentary blip and they'll be back shinier and awesomerer than ever after a year's sabbatical, but anyone with goldfish-plus memory banks will recall the same schtick propagated by the Livid organisers after their '03 show - almost word for word. For the record, Livid's year-long sabbatical now stands at six years and counting. It ain't coming back, and given the plethora of festies now smeared across the landscape, it's hard to see the 'Bake avoiding a similar fate; as WoB Rural Correspondent AJ put it on Arsebook, the chances of Homebake making a comeback are about the same as Splendour In The Arse making it back to Byron.
And that sucks balls. Because Homebake wasn't just another cattle-call mass-produced rock festival experience. It had something. More specifically, what it had was the greatest festy venue imaginable - the Domain in the centre of Sydney. Sure, the weather was either drizzling or wreathed in bushfire smoke, and soundbleed between the stages was something fucking horrendous given you could hit a nine-iron from one extremity of the compound to the other - but it was green, it was grassy, it was stupidly easy to get to, it nevaaarrrr sold out (not in those days anyhoo), and it wasn't fucking Gold Coast Parklands on a 38 degree summer day with the westerly blowing dog-track grit into your eyes. And there are still few grander places on earth than on a sunny afternoon in the first Saturday in December, on the C-stage up the back (the Dome) opposite the art gallery, in the shade amongst the fig trees, watching some up-and-coming band rip it up with gusto and aplomb on their first big shot at festival immortality. Which was the other thing about Homebake - it was locals only. You felt somehow a little closer to every one of those up-and-comers, compared to the Latest Next Big Things fresh off the bird from the US or UK at the Big Day Out.
Homebake's parochialism-by-design could well have been its downfall in the end - not just because of the Australian live music industry's well-publicised recent struggles, but also simply because its regular contributors, the Triple J bands of the 90s, progressively grew old and pulled stumps - Powderfinger being the most recent, most obvious example. Looking through the list of lineups, from the very first 'Mudbake' at Belongil Fields, Byron, you see the same names. That first embryonic lineup in 1996: Spiderbait, Tumbleweed, Silverchair, Regurgitator, The Mark Of Cain, You Am I, Sidewinder, Magic Dirt, Fur, Powderfinger, Hardware, Screamfeeder, and hometown heroes, inaugural Triple J Unearthed winners Grinspoon. Most of those acts dominated every Homebake set since, along with contemporaries like Jebediah, Frenzal Rhomb, Something For Kate, Superjesus, Eskimo Joe and later Jet, the Vines and the Hilltop Hoods. As Taco Bell demonstrates, there's only so many times you can produce a distinguishably different end-product from recombining the same constituent parts. That final (apparently) 2009 Homebake lineup: Powderfinger, Jet, Eskimo Joe, Hilltop Hoods, Tumbleweed...
Tumbleweed reformed specially for last year's Homebake, and that was one of the cool recurring features of Homebake - bringing back legendary bands. 2001 saw the Hoodoo Gurus make a return - which at the time was a big deal, they were properly retired at the time, though they've churned out a couple of albums since - and the years hence saw the likes of the Church, Radio Birdman, the Divinyls and Crowded House pulled out of retirement for another go-round. The irony is, most of Homebake's regulars - both the acts and the punters - are now at the stage where another headlining show would be more like a comeback special than a continuation.
As with Livid, official blame has been placed upon the difficulty of signing a strong enough stable of acts given the plethora of other festivals around at the moment - in its final years Livid went up against the big-dollar corporate-rock M1 festival, which pretty much did for it - as outlined in In The Worst Possible Taste. This seems a little ingenuous for Homebake though, considering at least some of those competing festivals are light-on to say the least for Australian talent. Go play a quick round of 'Spot the Australian' in the advertised lineup for the Soundwave festival and get back to me. (While you're at it, try finding anyone who's been even remotely relevant since the mid '90s. Third Eye Blind. Just sayin'.)
For the record, I hope they make it back, because the early-December Saturdays I spent in the Domain watching the best bands in Australia (plus a couple of choice invitees from across the ditch) with some of my best mates in the world were, without exception, fucking awesome. The larger story of me and rock festivals like Big Day Out, Livid and Splendour has played out on these pages before - not to mention their massive role in inspiring the writing of In The Worst Possible Taste - but the Saturdays of Homebake stand above the rest.
These were those Saturdays. Long may they live on.
Saturday, December 8th, 2001 Headliners: Hoodoo Gurus making their (first) big comeback; You Am I, Kate, Joe, Jebus, JBT, MGF, TISM and a cast of acronyms too numerous to mention at this or subsequent junctures. Crew: Dr Yobbo. The Famous Dawso. Captain Stupidity, recently retired from his crimefighting superhero career and having hung up the Purple Jocks Of Justice for good. Pretty sure Meltos The Gaymaker was there, having joined Yr Correspondent for the madness of Livid 2000. Melting goths. Awesome. Memorable for: First interstate festy mission, partnered by the Captain aboard the Brown Hornet. For two long-term Gurus fans the sales pitch wasn't a tricky one - being a long-term stoner (and we ain't talking Casey), the Captain was also amped at the prospect of catching Skunkhour's final ever show. Sound bleed between stages was ridiculous; Your Correspondent was rank with flu and it drizzled half the day, but even so it was All Good. Best in show went to the old bastards - TISM, You Am I, and above all the Gurus - but the biggest shout-out went to the organisers for getting Tooheys to do the beer, making it a VB free zone. Give that man a New. Or even an Old, which was novel. After the usual experience of XXXX Gold at the Gabba and shitbox Yatala-brewed CUB product at Livid, it can't be understated what a surprise-and-delight feature it was to have actually drinkable beer at a festival. And have a look at that fucking entry ticket price. FIFTY FIVE DOLLARS. Or about one beer ticket more than Moff and I paid for our half-price festival-eve tickets for Livid in October that year. Bargain. More money for Olds then.
Saturday, December 7th, 2002 Headliners: Alex Lloyd (actually he was also a festy-regular in this era like the others listed above, but gets ignored these days - serves him right for his great one-hit-wonder getting turned into a Ford Territory commercial), Radio Birdman (the second annual Homebake Old Bastard Band Reunion Show), Grinspoon, Kasey Chambers (no, I don't know why either), Jebediah, You Am I and some band listed as 'Pacifier (AKA Shihad)' - thank Christ that little experiment in Seppo-centric naming rights died in the arse soon enough. Regardless of the name, they were and remain a fucking epic live act. Crew: Comprised of myself, Dawso and the Captain. Meltos definitely joined us for at least one of the early Homebakes but not sure whether it was '01 or '02 - it was definitely one of the 'Captain's Knock' Homebakes though. I have a clear memory of the Captain haggling an E out of her for purely medicinal purposes (he claimed he'd overdone his daily dosage of prescription head-correctors and was merely equilibriating his neurochemistry to appropriate levels). Memorable for: The support acts, primarily. Being a new and fervent disciple of the Church of D4 (ever since Livid in October) I pestered the lads until they gave in and came to watch their set up at the Dome under the trees; the Captain recommended sticking around to see Rocket Science and I owe the gentleman a debt of gratitude for that, as they were in fine form and at the peak of their powers in that and subsequent years (at least until Roman Tucker banged his head and forgot who he was, let alone how to write decent tunes.) And of course, Homebake is often the festy where young, upcoming bands get their first big show. On cue, first act of the day on the back stage, an unknown Victorian band called Jet. Not that we saw them play of course - we were having a beer in town while the ludicrous entry queues fucked off. As you would.
Saturday, December 6th, 2003 Headliners: Nick Cave, The Vines, Something For Kate (hopefully Prozac as she's a gloomy whinging bitch), John Butler and his Trio, 1200 Techniques, Frenzals, the Notsosuperjesus (having lost two lead songwriter-guitarists in the space of a year) and the Church, sweatin' for the oldies. Crew: Mr and Mrs Moff co-helmed Elvis along with your correspondent for the road trip down (epic enough in itself), joined on the day by Dawso and Kurt, plus the infamous Grotboy, sibling to your correspondent. Memorable for: One seriously fucking hilarious road trip there and back from Brisvegas. Best summated by a bumper sticker seen on the back of a truck somewhere on the F3: 'if you can't stop, at least smile as you go under.' That was pretty much the established standard for the tone of conversation aboard Elvis for the duration, anyway. As for the festival itself - let's be charitable and call it Best Fest Ever. Probably as much for the crew as for the bands, but this was great entertainment from the get-go. From the Magna of Spod to the Trail of Heinekens, not to mention Yr Correspondent generously donating free career advice to the bus drivers of Sydney. It's a service we offer here at the World of Bollocks.
Best in show: the Casanovas - another case of Dr Yobbo getting obsessive about a new rock band (having seen them with Dr Craigos and the Challenger at the Waterloo in Brisbane, blowing headliners the Donnas off the stage by a score of 2 to 1 - Group Challen was the dissenting voter because he wanted to pound the drummer, who in a departure from SOP was not actually called Phil) and dragging everyone along to watch them kick arse, which they most kindly did for everyone's entertainment. Getting Actual Glassware from the beer tent adjoining the Dome stage was pretty awesome too. And even later in the night, with drizzle descending and the Vines droning through another hideous trainwreck of a set, and yours truly starting to Ask Serious Questions re the future of Strayan music (if shit like that could be misconstrued as a Good Live Show, as it clearly was being by the squealy girls up the front), one reluctantly wandered over the back to see if Frenzals were going to be as average as they'd been at Livid that year. Their first act was to publically apologise for talking so much bollocks at their Livid shows and not playing any songs; their second act was to promise to shut up and play some fucking punk rock, and their third and subsequent act was to do exactly that. Including but not limited to some of the coolest, obscurest shit that they never, ever play live that only a Rhomb tragic (*cough*) would appreciate. I appreciated, the Rhomb were rehabilitated, and everyone went home happy. To start drinking all over again next day. OHHhhhhh my fucking head.
Saturday, December 4th, 2004 Headliners: Jet, Spiderbait, Grinspoon, Regurgitator, Rocket Science, Missy Higgins, Eskimo Joe, former Reds reserve centre Peter Murray, the D4, End of Fashion, Kasey Chambers (again, still not sure why) and some lot called Wolfmother opening on the back stage, not that I got to see them because the security cunts only had two people on the gate and it took fucking ages to get in, fuck them all with a bent stick Crew: The Doctors Yobbo, and reprising their roles from Homebake Road Trip 2003, the Moffs. Flew down this time but. Kinda foreshortened the fun, but we had jobs to do. Growing up sucks. Memorable for: Not being quite as epic as the previous year. Probably because we had far too much to drink the previous night and were carrying it all through the next day - to the point where we couldn't be arsed staying for Jet's show-closing set as (a) we were fucked (b) we'd already seen them twice in the past year and (c) they never really were that good live anyway. Best in show - I'd go for the Gurge, who were out of their self-imposed Bubble and were cranking through the good stuff. The Band In The Bubble was a worthy experiment; pity it sent Jabba mad, but he got his shit together eventually. All the acts you'd expect to fucking rock, did so (the D4 et al); even Roman Tucker managed to figure out the Scientific plans for his Rocket, something of an achievement given he'd fallen down the stairs a few months earlier, banged his head and forgotten every track of the new album they'd just recorded. Just as well he liked the finished article when it was played back to him. And no matter what kind of day you've had at the 'Bake, whether you're firing on all cylinders or limping along Struggle Street, there's still very little that compares with a burnt-orange sunset over the city skyline of Sydney, sitting on the grass of the Domain with a beer in your hand, your ears ringing from an epic live set with the prospect of more to follow.
The end, and afterwards We kinda knew 2004 would be the last Homebake for us, because we knew we were offski. By December 2005, I was in New Zealand, pretending to be a grownup. Ironically, having formed the backbone of our Homebake missions throughout the years, most of Delta Team from that epic '03 Homebake were at my wedding, as my best man and groomsmen. Actually, not ironically. Unsurprisingly. My last festival: Big Day Out, January 2005. My last live show: Shihad, Carisbrook, March 2009. Though Dr Mrs Dr Yobbo has been to a bunch of Wiggles shows since then. Actually I'm wondering, given the ageing of Homebake's lineup and fanbase, whether a Toddlers Homebake would be in order. The Wiggles, Hi-5, the Hooley Dooleys, that Jurassic Joe dude who sings about dinosaurs, the Bananas in Pyjamas doing a DJ set in the doof tent, and the 1980s cast of Play School as the elderly-reunion special. Or Don Spencer doing 'Bob the Kelpie'...
Truth is, Homebake is the one festival I'd have come home for. Even looked at cheap (i.e. airpoints-fuelled) flights for the first Saturday in December this year, before the announcement of shitcannery came along. But shitcanneried (?) it is, for 2010 if not for all of time. Perhaps, like Livid - which grew out of the anti-establishment movement of late-80s Joh-era Queensland, and lasted the same 15 years Homebake has before losing its identity trying to become a BDO-style travelling supercircus - it's just outgrown its usefulness, had nothing more to say, nothing further to contribute. Maybe, But somehow, given the fairly grim state of live music in Australia, I don't think so. It seems to me like there's still a place for Homebake in the crowded festy schedule of 2011. And a job for it to do.
Assange's stint in Hi-5 was a short one
