May, 2018 - Notes from Pig City

How did the Great Barrier Reef Foundation “win lotto”?

Australian Politics, Environment / May 26, 2018 / 8 minutes of reading

It was a classic piece of public relations. A week before the budget, the federal government announced it was committing half a billion dollars to the ailing Great Barrier Reef, with the immediate aims of enhancing water quality, culling outbreaks of invasive crown-of-thorns starfish and boosting scientific research funds that might aid the reef’s “resilience”.

There was no mention of climate change. That should not be surprising. The Turnbull government remains at war with itself over climate and energy policy, with many of its own members openly derisive of climate science and questioning Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement to keep rises in global average temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius.

That cohort predictably includes former prime minister Tony Abbott and his backers.

Publicly, the government is still supportive of Adani’s Carmichael coal mine, and remains roiled over the future of AGL’s Liddell power station, with pro-coal MPs urging Malcolm Turnbull to change competition laws to force the company to sell the station.

Turnbull and his environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, are walking a tightrope: trying not to poke the bear on the party’s right flank by reassuring regional Queensland of its continuing support of coal, while confronting the dire state of the reef and the many more jobs, and seats, which may be in peril on the basis of current trends.… Read more..

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Response to Queensland Theatre’s Twelfth Night

Music / May 24, 2018 / 5 minutes of reading

“If music be the food of love, play on!”I remember the first time I heard those words. It wasn’t in high school or university, but in a song from 1987 called Eat The Rich, a song written by the British heavy metal band Motörhead specifically for the film of the same name.

The song was full of double entendres and cheap innuendo. “They say music is the food of love / Let’s see if you’re hungry enough!” were the opening lines, gargled by the late Lemmy Kilmister, whose lyrics deftly trod Spinal Tap’s famous fine line between clever and stupid.

I’m not sure how I have managed to almost entirely avoid Shakespeare, despite a life devoted to words and music. The sum total of my experience was a reading (not a performance) of Hamlet, in year 11. It is, frankly, an embarrassing gap for a writer.

When Queensland Theatre invited me to respond to their production of Twelfth Night, I was intimidated, and my instinctive response was ‘no’. Then I realised I was being offered a challenge and a belated opportunity to engage with something beautiful.

The other selling point was musical: Tim Finn, whose early work as a member of Split Enz had been forever imprinted on my brain, would supply the food of love for the play, composing music for Shakespeare’s old verses as well as a suite of original new songs.… Read more..

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Midnight Oil: 1984

Music / May 24, 2018 / 5 minutes of reading

For those old enough to remember it, 1984 was a year full of dread and apocalyptic overtones. It wasn’t just the paranoia of George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the same name: in some ways, the current age of mass corporate/state surveillance and black-is-white propaganda makes 1984 feel closer at hand today than it did at the time. What’s easily forgotten is a fear that has only recently been truly reawakened: of nuclear terror (or error) and mutually assured destruction. The cold war could have turned hot and melted us all at any moment.

The mid-80s was also an interesting time in pop and rock music: everybody wanted to either rule the world or save it. Midnight Oil were very much in the latter category and 1984, a documentary by Ray Argall, focuses on a pivotal year in the band’s career. Their fifth album, Red Sails In The Sunset, was a continuation of the Armageddon-themed 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1: the cover featured a drained and cratered Sydney Harbour after a nuclear strike (with the Harbour Bridge and Opera House remaining eerily intact).

The album was released in October and became the band’s first No.… Read more..

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Rock in hard places

Music / May 23, 2018 / 8 minutes of reading

It’s Good Friday in Brisbane and most of the city is dead quiet, with pubs and clubs not opening until midnight due to Easter trading laws. In the inner suburb of West End, however, something very noisy is stirring.

On a makeshift stage in a large room, a three-piece band called Hexmere is playing a raucous, raw brand of grindcore punk to a small crowd. There’s another gig planned for the following night, with many more people expected.

These all-ages shows are being sporadically staged by the Outer Space art collective, which won the Brisbane city council’s tender to operate this 300-capacity venue for two years, rent-free. The space needs work. But it represents an experiment, a gamble and a new hope for the city’s youth culture.

The fact that the city council chose to make the space available is important. Despite a rich history, live music in Brisbane, as in so many other cities around the world, struggles to survive against the pressures of gentrification, regulation and competition.

The music industry’s inextricable links to alcohol and bars has left a dearth of venues accessible to under-18s, raising concerns about how the complex ecosystem that sustains a vibrant local music scene – comprising everything from record shops to independent labels to public radio – will reproduce itself without engaging audiences from a young age.… Read more..

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Derek Smalls: “I wouldn’t call it jazz but I wouldn’t call it non-jazz”

Music / May 23, 2018 / 4 minutes of reading

In which I talk to the legendary bass player of one of Britain’s loudest bands, Spinal Tap, on the eve of the release of the now 75-year-old’s long-awaited first solo album, Smalls Change…

Derek! It’s good to talk to you.

It’s great to be talked to.

This is your first solo album under your own name. Did you feel creatively stifled by David and Nigel, the two visionaries in Spinal Tap?

I wouldn’t say I was stifled; I would say I was big-footed. When you’re around two people of that level of talent, there’s not that much oxygen to go around, really.

Back From The Dead, Tap’s last album, finally included the appearance of Jazz Oddyssey in three parts, but there’s no jazz on this record. It’s mostly heavy-duty rock & roll.

I wouldn’t call it jazz but I wouldn’t call it non-jazz. But I did do a follow-up to Jazz Oddyssey, which wasn’t right for this record. It’s called Jazz Iliad.

This album is a series of meditations on ageing. Let’s start with the song Memo To Willie. Do you have any trouble getting it up these days?

I do not sir, thank you for asking.

Camp Cope: How To Socialise & Make Friends

Music / May 23, 2018 / 3 minutes of reading

In his “mongrel memoir” How To Make Gravy, Paul Kelly has a chapter on circle songs – songs that are built on a chord progression that cycles in the same order from beginning to end. The melody may vary, but there’s no bridge or change in the chorus to break the circle. Wide Open Road, by the Triffids, is a circle song; so too Kelly’s Careless. A lot of folk music, Kelly observes, is like this: “We just pick it up and pass it on.”

The Opener, by Camp Cope, is another circle song. With it, and their defiant gesture at the Falls festival – calling out the organisers in front of a jam-packed tent for their lowly placement on the bill, in keeping with the song’s theme – the Melbourne three-piece instantly stamped themselves as the Australian band of the moment and the #MeToo generation. They resonate because they are so real.

Even if not for singer and guitarist Georgia “Maq” McDonald’s pedigree (she is the daughter of the late Hugh McDonald, formerly of Australian folk-rock band Redgum), Camp Cope’s second album How To Socialise & Make Friends would sound like a baton being passed to a new generation.… Read more..

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May 2018