Chinese New Year Shanghai

Amazing sound and light show from Chinese New Year in Shanghai this year. gongxi facai!!!

Nunbait

Back in early 1990s I spent many a night taking in this band around the finer underground dives of inner city Sydney. This is The Hub by Nunbait (1990 - Lansdowne Hotel)....rock on.


Shot by unknown persons at the Tatts Hotel, Lismore, Nth NSW on 24/06/92. Nunbait were touring up to Queensland, having previously played in the area with Fugazi at the Byron Bay Arts Factory.

Leh-Manali

I hitchhiked this route in 1996. Two hundred and twenty four kilometres and it took a week. We had a few days in Keylong staying with a sadhu.



A large part of it was in the back of one of these trucks, driven by Kashmiris.

Nostalia 101: What Happened in 1989?

I just discovered Rembrandt Pussyhorse by the Butthole Surfers on Spotify. Listening to it now takes me back in a big way. While it was Hairway to Steven (1988) that got me into the Surfers, anything before the somewhat lackluster PIOUHGD from 1991 is gold, even today as I age and wither.


The Butthole Surfers, before the whole Nirvana, Lollapalooza and the its-so-cool-to-be-aphasic thing was launched on the world, were the real deal. They did not make sense. The music was offensive and the lyrics worse. I still have a T-shirt from their 1991 tour and it makes my son embarrassed just to look at it (Mr Pee Pee the sailor and the sick clown in the raincoat). To like the Surfers was to be the kid that was avoided on the bus. University was made up of those that spoke to teachers, those that did work, those that walked tall and proud and us few Surfers fans (like about 12 people on a campus of thousands in 1989 in rural Australia). We felt different on the inside.

Butthole Surfers - Florida

We knew little about the Surfers in 1989. We made up stories, like they toured Mexico in a bus for a year. The dancer really had scales:





Double Live was a revelation. A housemate had it and played it non-stop for weeks. At the beginning of 1989 I was so disturbed by the record I banged on the wall begging him to stop. By the end of 1989 I owned a copy of it myself. A lot changed in 1989 for me.


The Butthole Surfers-Hey

Hosted by eSnips

Cheerub. Driving an allnighter (bullfighter, lamplighter moonlighter highlighter) to Sydney from Toowoomba. A thousand ks in the dull rain. Cups and wrappers and butts litter the dash. Windscreen wipers chug over cracked glass. Towns with unpronounceable names slide by our frosted glass and the Surfers cough out the sounds of what we wanted when we arrived in the metropolis at sunrise. Coming in over the bridge as Newtown breakfasts beckon.



In March 1991 I and my then-girlfriend and two friends hatched a fiendish plan in Brisbane. We borrowed a friend's car, a Datsun 120Y, saying we needed it for the weekend to move furniture (in a 120Y??). We fueled it up and split for Sydney. It is 1000kms. the car was painted orange but our friend had painted huge multicolored flowers and butterflies all over it. In Tamworth we stopped for fuel and the people at the garage said in a thick drawl "Yous aint from round here are ya?" "Nah we aint." We arrived in Sydney and spent a week around the dives and pubs of Newtown. We went to a party above shops on King Street. Hung out at the Sandringham Hotel. And on my 22nd birthday I saw the Surfers play.



While we were having fun in the big city the owner of the car and her boyfriend had become a bit concerned. They tried to find us and failed. Working out what we had done hey reported the car stolen. We drove the now-hot-car back to Brisbane and left it in their yard at 4am. Running from the scene of our crime.


Yup, we weren't allowed to say their name on the air back then! Aired 12-23-85.

My dog was named Gibby after the singer of the Surfers. Best dog a man could ask for. On our way to see the Surfers play at St George's Hall in Newtown, some of our company, not having tickets, tried to sneak in the back way to get in. At the door was none other than Gibby, singer with the Surfers. From a distance I saw him push the intruders out the door, saying the words savagely "I win. You lose."

(Spelling mistakes are intentional in reference to the fanzines that sustained so much street and minority culture in the 1980s and 90s)

The Road of a Thin Man

I am moving house. Me alone. Feels good in a nervous way. I am only listening to Dylan as my CDs are all packed.

A different version from Bob Dylan's "Eat the Document" This was an extra that wasn't actually in the movie.

8.08.08 Celebrational Ritual at the Loveland Godfarm

A tenth anniversary celebration of the founding of Bruce Damer's piece of heaven, the Ancient Oak's Loveland Godfarm.. Join us for a celebration of new beginnings and long term friendships.

I have spent some time in the company of Bruce and Galen these last few days and what a pleasure it has been...

Mr Moon

It was summer 1993-94. I inhabited the cafes and bars around Newtown, Glebe, Marrickville, St Peters, Erskinville, Stanmore, Camperdown, and Petersham in Sydney Australia. It was a hot summer. I had a green Volkswagen kombi van, a dog and all the time in the world. Experimentation and poetry were the order of the day. And many strange days they were. I remember one of the houses I lived in (Corunna Road, Stanmore) had a Headless Chickens album in the collective record collection. This song was a gem among them. I thought of it the other day and realized..it must be on YouTube.

The Magic Roundabout

I recently blogged about being exposed to the Kenny Everet Video Show as a teenager and it playing a role in my, shall we say, mental state today. Well, before that as a small child I watched a lot of The Magic Roundabout, and it was so cool. I detect a pattern emerging here.
As Dylan the rabbit said..."Pay...like pay..pay...oh no man...why pay?"

Tender is the Prey

TENDER PREY
In the hot summer of 1988-89 I was spending my holidays from university working as an assistant nurse in the local mental hospital. Large parts of Baillie Henderson Hospital or the Toowoomba Lunatic Asylum were built in 1890, long verandas framed two or three stories red brick buildings with heavy doors and barred windows. Some of the older patients still referred to me as ‘Warden’. There had once been 3000 patients living at Baillie Henderson, with a farm, dairy, book bindery, bakery and stable. Now it was a huge complex of active wards, abandoned buildings, grassy lawns and giant trees. Around 700 people called it home.
I was working in a locked ward in Ridley House where 4 beds were bolted to the floor and I sat watching from a chair and table, also bolted to the floor. I was doing night shift from 11pm till 7 am with an agitated schizophrenic. He was going through opiate and alcohol withdrawal. He had been judged a suicide risk so I had to sit with him through the night and make sure he made it to breakfast. One wall of the constant surveillance room was inch thick clear plastic reaching from floor to ceiling. In the middle of the wall was a door and it led to an exercise area just outside that was framed by a 10 meter high fence. We sat, he and I, through the night and it was the first time I heard the album Tender Prey by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

It began when they come took me from my home
And put me in Dead Row,
Of which I am nearly wholly innocent, you know.
And I'll say it again
I..am..not..afraid..to..die.

He had many problems. He lived with his mother and loved heroin being two of the main ones. He cut himself, burnt his flesh with cigarettes and often passed out, waking up in strange places and situations. Once he had awoken in bed with a man he did not recognise, both of them naked. This event was constructed as significant in his chart history, but he did not remember a thing. As the shadows of the huge bunya pines outside played against the whitewash 4 meter high walls we listened to Nick Cave croon and scream of Deanna.

We will eat out of their pantries
And their parlours
Ashy leaving in their beds
And we'll unload into their heads
On this mean season
This little angel that I squeezin'
She ain't been mean to me

He cried sometimes. We listened to Tender Prey all night, over and over again, he did not sleep and I was not allowed to. He smoked hand rolled cigarettes constantly and turned the tape over with fingers stained yellow with broken nails. We talked about books and films, music and the underworld. He knew Rimbaud and the others. He dreamed in colours. Wrote poems too and would I like to hear some. So while the masses fled to the City of Refuge he gave me psychic horse whispers from his tattered note book.

You stand before your maker
In a state of shame
Because your robes are covered in mud
While your kneel at the feet
Of a woman of the street
The gutters will run with blood
They will run with blood!

Home made tattoos slipped out blue from beneath the frayed cuffs and collar of his arrangement. Strange insects and scripts seeking the light. His watery eyes held me for a few seconds at a time. Never one to hold a glance his thin voice blew over me like a cold breeze from the swamp that had once been at the bottom of the hill, but had been drained by the settlers after they had killed all the blacks. We raged on until morning. Every 25 minutes I had to make a physical estimation of his condition, including what he was doing at the time, his mood and behaviour. Often he was just lying on the bed talking about how fucked everything was. Occasionally he was crying as he mumbled about how he needed some Hammer and would do anything to get it. Or it was how disappointed his mother was in him. All made worse by the lack of sedatives and lack of attention his medicinal need was receiving from the staff. My shift finished as porridge of Government Issue was brought in to him. He was not hungry and as I left the room the final sounds came from Tender Prey which I would buy later that week.

One morn I awakened
A new sun was shining
The sky was a Kingdom
All covered in blood
The moon and the stars
Where the troops that
lay conquered
Like fruit left to wither
Poor spiritual food.

The sun rose over the hoop pines of the car park as I pulled out from the hospital. For over a hundred years the bad apples of my home town were kept at Baillie Henderson. It came to the slow phasing out of the seclusion for the delusional. I would later come to share bar space with him in the outside world as he bled his legend around town. Falling over and getting up again. He would come to use the toilets in my father’s tiny bookshop to shoot up in. I wonder where he is today……

I got the Key to the Highway

This morning I listened to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. When I was 15 years old a local sharecropper (who was also a Scottish fisherman from Dundee) gave me a harmonica and some photocopied pages about Terry and McGee. I started hitchhiking at about the same time, between the small towns that my school friends (and a girlfriend) lived in. It was the beginning of a life of travel. I got the key to the highway, a harp some good shoes and a pack with some bread in it.......